Foxbot Martha McCallum opened last night’s first Republican primary debate with a reference to a new country music hit, Rich Men North of Richmond. In a question addressed to Ron DeSantis, she said: “It is by a singer from Farmville, Virginia, named Oliver Anthony — his lyrics speak of alienation, of deep frustration with the state of government and of this country. So, Governor DeSantis, why is this song striking such a nerve in this country right now?”

This opening softball gave DeSantis an opportunity to spew stale Republican pablum about gummint spending, blaming Congress and “trillions and trillions of dollars” and “those rich men north of Richmond” who “ have put us in this situation.”

He did not, of course, take the moment to ask McCallum why oligarch Rupert Murdoch’s mega-messaging machine, always in service to corporate profits and vulture capitalists, is promoting a so-called working class anthem. Has the desiccated Aussie turned Woody Guthrie in his dotage?

Virginia-based country singer Oliver Anthony wrote "Rich Men North of Richmond" and released it as a music video on Youtube two weeks ago. Anthony, born Christopher Anthony Lunsford, affects a mountain man look, with a bushy red-beard and t-shirt and in the video he delivers a folksy song in a simple musical style, strumming a resonator acoustic guitar. He claims to “sit pretty dead center down the aisle on politics” (a position that, it must be said, in today’s America always suggests an inclination to the right).

The song racked up 36 million views in a few weeks, amplified and enabled by Fox anchor Laura Ingraham, Matt Walsh, and other rightist influencers. They have described the song, per the New York Times, as “an authentic expression of working-class struggle.”

The spectacle of a corporatist messaging leviathan like Fox promoting a song about working class struggle is risible enough. But let’s look at this piece of all-American music for a moment.

Start with the title: "Rich Men North of Richmond." Most analyses of the song have taken this to refer to Washington, DC, and its tax-grabbin’ crypto-socialists. I’ll buy that. But what is Richmond in this context? Richmond is the former capital of the Confederacy. Anthony could have titled his tune "Rich Men North of Farmville," where he lives. Or he could, more accurately have titled it without geographical borders, including wherever the one percent lives and works, from Palo Alto to Dallas to New York City.

But no, he did not. That’s because “rich men” up “north” whistles to the tune of the Lost Cause and its racist argument that the Civil War wasn’t fought over sadistic enslavement of Black humans but was an economic struggle between moral, agrarian southerners and northern bankers and industrialists.

Now, take a look at the lyrics: “If you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds/Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds.” And: “I wish politicians would look out for miners,” Mr. Anthony sings, “and not just minors on an island somewhere. Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat, and the obese milkin’ welfare.”

The obese, fudge-eating welfare queen, “milkin’” the system was first introduced into American politics by the modern GOP’s godfather Ronald Reagan, whose presidency marked the dividing line between an America with a strong middle class and unionized labor, and an increasingly dystopic era marked by wealth inequality and related class resentment.

It is a fact that Reagan destroyed the labor movement when he fired the air traffic controllers. He also unleashed deregulated vulture capitalists, and cut taxes - tax cuts which he sold to the public with the white identity politics poster girl of the welfare queen.

Who are the “rich men north of Richmond” of whom Mr. Anthony sings? Foxbots and the eight people on the debate stage last night apparently believe - and I have to assume they are right - that Mr. Anthony’s northern rich men are led by President Biden, the man who tried to forgive student loan debt, releasing young Americans from indentured servitude for the first thirty years of their post-college lives.

The true “rich men north of Richmond” are of course men like right wing corporate tool Leonard Leo, “the most powerful man in Washington,” per the Washington Post. Leo was recently bequeathed $1.6 billion by another rich man north of Richmond, Chicago electronics magnate Barre Seid — the largest single tranche of dark money ever passed from a private citizen to a political operative in American history.

Since the secret gift was revealed, researchers have been trying to figure out how Mr. Leo plans to spend this treasure. He appears to be spreading it around to organization that work to block or reverse every modest gain progressives win for the working people of America. He is also apparently under investigation for mishandling $100 million of it, in circular payments to himself and cronies. Even before he cashed the windfall, Leo was one of corporate America’s best friends in Washington. Better known for his crazed opposition to abortion, he was also packing the federal judiciary with men and women whose rulings are never in favor of the working class and who are shaping, via the courts, America into a high-tech Dickensian hell.

The truth is the US of the 1950s, the real days of American Greatness, the yore that MAGAs long to revive, were the heyday of unionized labor and high taxes. In 2016, as MAGA was rising, the Berkeley Economic Review published an essay called “Back When America Was Socialist.” It is full of facts and figures and graphs providing ample evidence that the days of American greatness were more like Denmark today. (I recommend everyone download and read it, in case you come across a MAGA-curious relative or friend who can still be reasoned with.)

In the 1950s and 1960s, the highest tax rate was 91 percent. Today, the top tax rate is 37 percent but the top one percent pay only 26.8 percent income tax on average, a grotesque re-ordering of power and a Biblical scale money-grab from the top, almost all of it engineered by Republican leaders.

And the working men whose dismal days Mr. Anthony sings of? He blames their plight on the rich men of Washington, instead of the party whose hero smashed the unions that once gave blue collar workers a level of dignity and security.

From Berkeley Economic Review:

Blue collar work that had once been unviable for a family lifestyle became sustainable throughout the 1950s and 60s. Manufacturing jobs allowed for a middle class income. Productivity abounded for such manufacturing. Mild business cycles meant more sustained income and greater satisfaction among laborers.
Because of strong labor unions and high tax rates on corporations and high income earners, the income generated by these productivity increases was broadly shared among business owners and their workers. Because labor unions were strong, they were able to negotiate wage increases that allowed workers to reap the benefits of the technology they were using which ensured more equitable distribution of income throughout corporations. Today, it is largely the shareholders and business owners that reap any benefits borne from increased productivity.

"Rich Men North of Richmond" is the second recent hit country hit/dog whistle of the summer. In “Try That in a Small Town,” Jason Aldean wink-winks at the sundown towns where Blacks had to be out before dark or be killed. What makes the song even more abhorrent is that Aldean was singing on stage in Las Vegas when a gunman who had exercised his 2A right to legally create a personal arsenal of machine guns, killed 58 and wounding almost 500 people - the worst mass shooting in America.

In "Small Town," Aldean celebrates the power of his inherited grampa’s gun to set things right if anyone (protestors, BLM, antifa?) drops by his small town to “cuss out a cop, spit in his face, stomp on the flag and light it up.”

Got a gun that my granddad gave me
They say one day they're gonna round up
Well, that shit might fly in the city, good luck

These are the lyrics set to the tunes that will soon score Trump’s second coronation by the Republican Party.

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Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer, and publisher ofAmerican Political Freakshow, a Substack on politics. Her journalism has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Airmail, and New York. She is the author of seven books including most recently Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic and an adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Nineteen accused: Trump, Giuliani, Eastman, Meadows, Chesebro, Clark, Ellis, Smith, Cheeley, Roman, Shafer, Still, Lee, Floyd, Kutti, Powell, Latham, Hall, Hampton.

Thirty more unnamed, un-indicted co-conspirators .

Forty-one counts, starting with the mobster one -- RICO. The Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization charge.

Typically, racketeering involves thugs with nicknames like Joey Bananas, Willie Icepick, Scarface, and crimes like narcotics, human trafficking, or money laundering. This RICO case has been filed against 15 men and four women with power, money, influence, law degrees, and law licenses, many of them duly sworn to serve the American public.

Whatever happens, the indictment strips these people of their veneer of respectability. Trump’s gang are alleged to have committed a variety of dirty state crimes in the furtherance of their corrupt organization’s coup scheme: forgery or false documents and statements, soliciting or impersonating public officers, racketeering, perjury, computer tampering.

Nineteen people. The number is a surprise. We didn’t expect it. But we could also ask: Only 19?

As a nation, we have witnessed in real time, in our time, public debasement and individual cowardice on an epic if not epochal scale. Isn’t the entire Republican Party, and their powerful messaging cronies at Fox, implicated in this racket and at least morally culpable? The leaders, McConnell, McCarthy, Ronna McDaniel, their bloated millionaire amplifiers, Murdoch, Hannity, Carlson, and the hundreds of senators and representatives in Washington and thousands of minions around the states —- all in lockstep with the scheme. Look what they did to their own courageous few. Kinzinger, Cheney, banished. Raffensberger, living with death threats.

The party’s collective failure of ethical leadership when confronted with Trump’s venality and corruption is so profound, so archetypal, that it requires a modern day Shakespeare or Sophocles to effectively engrave it into literary history.

“Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Trump said to the acting attorney general, according to the indictment.

The collusion implied in that remark, the failure of leadership, the collective cravenness in the face of this avatar of amorality, was evident from the very first GOP presidential primary debate, in fall 2015.

He had such star power. Television loved his nicknames and quips and Sinatra croon and vulgarity. It is a measure of our debased era that almost no one one really bothered with the substance of who he was, how little he cared for the country or the office he was seeking, how little respect he had for its people.

Trump bragged at that first debate about how cleverly he had abandoned Atlantic City when his casino business crashed. "I had the good sense, and I've gotten a lot of credit in the financial pages — seven years ago, I left Atlantic City before it totally cratered," he boasted. "And I made a lot of money in Atlantic City, and I'm very proud of it."

Take the money and run. Those riches did not trickle down. At that point, 39,000 people lived in the town he called “a disaster.” Unemployment was 13.8 percent, the 10th highest in the nation. The mortgage foreclosure rate was America's highest.

I went down to Atlantic City a few weeks after that debate to see for myself what the “crater” looked like. An historic East Coast summer destination, now a bit shabby, sacrificed to Mammon when the New Jersey legislature legalized gambling in the hope of pulling a little money into the public till for roads and schools. Everyone worked in or for the casino business, or the restaurants, which were mostly empty.

Keith Harris, an administrative assistant at the Asbury United Methodist Church's community center, which fed Atlantic City's poor, told me “lots of people do feel he jumped ship and left a lot of us high and dry." Other people told me small vendors who had supplied things like pianos or carpets had been forced into bankruptcy themselves. The contractors that survived understood Trump never paid the final installment on his contracts.

Shafting vendors was just another “smart” move.

The Republican Party’s example of failed leadership, its obeisance to a conman at best, at worst a Prince of Lies, in exchange for power, will be taught to schoolchildren, if this country survives. Which —- thanks to the hard work of people like Fani Willis, the courage of way too few Republicans like Raffensberger, and the decent citizens of the grand juries who gave their time sitting in chairs in public buildings in Atlanta when they could have been fishing or golfing or going to their own jobs, concentrating on the complicated details of an audacious scheme, an octopus of illegality, for no reward, just because it was their civic duty —- it may well do.

Please consider subscribing to American Political Freakshow, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer, and publisher ofAmerican Political Freakshow, a Substack on politics. Her journalism has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Airmail, and New York. She is the author of seven books including most recently Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic and an adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

By now everyone’s seen it. A shirtless white dude in shorts attacks a Black man in some kind of uniform, soon joined by several other white men and a woman, who pound and pummel the Black man onto a dock. Then, Black men and women run to the dock and start pummeling the whites. Cops arrive and disperse, arrest, charge a few of the instigators. Video goes viral.

Welcome to summer in America!

Videos like “Alabama dock brawl” are archetypal imagery of the USA, enraging us, and meeting the expectations of the rest of the world. Often viewed out of context, without any understanding of what happened just before the iPhone started to record, or what happened after, they raise righteous rage, provoke online swarms, and often enough, result in job losses or even arrests for the perps (if civilians; if cops, maybe not).

We know exactly what happened on the dock thanks to a precise account delivered by the Montgomery police chief. The brawlers tied their pontoon to a dock berth reserved for a commercial pleasure boat carrying some 200 people on a dinner cruise. When the captain of the cruise asked them by bullhorn to move, they responded with “obscene gestures and curses.” After 45 minutes, the commercial captain sent his second in command, the Black man in uniform, to shore, where he untied the party pontoon himself.

Violence ensued.

The Alabama dock brawl happened during the same week that The New Republic published a terrific investigative essay about an association of white men who form the braintrust of America’s fascist movement. Hundreds of millions of eyeballs have landed on the viral video, but a minuscule fraction of that number have read Katherine Stewart’s article about the Claremont Institute.

And that’s too bad because the video and the article belong together.

The Claremont Institute is not affiliated with the Claremont Colleges or the city of Claremont, California, where it is based. It is financed by big rightwing donor cash, one of many rightist think tanks polluting our national politics with lawsuits and normalizing and amplifying extremist influence. While their brethren in the right-wing brain trust business like Heritage and Cato at least nominally toe the democracy line, Claremont is out-of-the-closet fascist. It is run by and offers a platform to white men Stewart calls “pseudo-classicists” for their reverence for the mores of ancient Rome and the Bronze Age, when might made right, dictators ran the world, and the weak or conquered were enslaved.

Claremont’s intellects wouldn’t dirty their hands punching a man on an Alabama dock, but they do openly advocate for the rights of the racist boaters who would. The essence of the Claremont philosophy is that America is a free country -- free for white men. White men’s freedom is hampered by regulations administered by the “bug men” of “the administrative state” which represents women and minorities and which must be smashed so that white men can again dock their pontoons wherever the hell they want. If a Black man in a uniform tells them to move it, they can and even must resort to violence, punch him in the face, because the only people in uniform that they should respect are white and male.

Claremont’s men don’t walk around in flip-flops and shorts and guzzle beer on cheap pontoons. They wear suits and ties, travel on billionaire dime and probably jet, and write briefs and books and manifestos against racial equality, against democracy, against feminism, and for military dictatorship.

They scorn our multi-cultural, multi-gender, multi-colored society, they celebrate misogyny, they have bizarre ideas about manhood. They are the Josh Hawleys of the American intelligentsia. (“Run Josh Run” is a Claremont hero.) One of their board members, lawyer John Eastman, was a chief Big Lie coup plotter, and is now an unnamed co-conspirator in the January 6 federal case against Trump.

Please read Stewart’s brilliant article, which besides revealing shocking and odious views, names the billionaire donors behind these human tools. Reading it, one begins to understand just how a modern nation like Argentina got around to kidnapping and shoving dissidents off helicopters into the ocean. Meet the men creating the legal and ethical framework for turning America into exactly that.

A few choice passages:

On violence

The Claremont Institute’s seeming embrace of political violence against the government of the United States is not limited to Eastman’s efforts to whip up the mob that gathered at the Ellipse in preparation for the assault on the Capitol, nor can it be excused as mere metaphorical excess in the war of ideas. “Given the promise of tyranny, conservative intellectuals must openly ally with the AR-15 crowd,” argues author Kevin Slack, a professor at Hillsdale College, in a lengthy book excerpt published in Claremont’s online magazine, The American Mind. “Able-bodied men, no longer isolated, are returning to republican manliness in a culture of physical fitness and responsible weaponry. They are buying AR-15s and Glock 17s and training with their friends, not FBI-infiltrated militias or online strangers but trustworthy lifelong friends to build a community alongside.”

On Women

Boise State University political philosophy professor named Scott Yenor [delivered] a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida, in which he characterized women with professional aspirations as “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.” Yenor’s views could hardly have been news to Claremont. Six months previously, the institute had invited him to deliver a keynote on “Feminism and the American Future.” Yenor seized the opportunity to inveigh against women’s pursuit of economic security and a satisfactory sex life. He maligned the “pernicious trajectory of feminism” and argued that it is “fatal to family life and fatal to the country.” … Claremont hired Yenor to be the think tank’s inaugural senior director of state coalitions for its new center in Tallahassee, Florida.

On race and a master race

In an interview with Jack Murphy, who was a Lincoln Fellow at Claremont, REN has this to say about the Black Lives Matter protesters of 2020: “All of these people look the same. I mean, they are hideously ugly, malformed people.” REN’s publisher, as it happens, is Antelope Hill Publishing, otherwise known for its Nazi and white nationalist titles, such as Michael, a novel written by the young—I kid you not—Joseph Goebbels (“Antelope Hill Publishing is proud to present a new English edition….”).

Please consider subscribing to American Political Freakshow, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer, and publisher ofAmerican Political Freakshow, a Substack on politics. Her journalism has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Airmail, and New York. She is the author of seven books including most recently Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic and an adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

This week, your freakshow will not go down to the dirty tent but uphill, to a carbon fiber cage designed on the principles of Japanese minimalism. Here, female ushers, mute and sleek, pad around in black bearing trays of sushi. The creature on display in the corner is a little shy, very rich, and extremely dangerous in the litigious sense. So we’ll just stand at the door and try not to disturb him too much, while he concentrates on ways to use his money to transform America into a 21st Century model of medieval autocracy.

Peter Thiel, billionaire venture capitalist and co-founder of PayPal, is one of the more politically active members of the so-called Pay pal Mafia, the dozen or so men who got filthy rich off some of the major apps. Now he’s using some of his pelf to help American women adjust to their new handmaiden status.

In the publishing world, Thiel is regarded as particularly terrifying for having destroyed an entire media company in a fit of spite because it outed him as gay. He covertly financed a lawsuit (not his own) that bankrupted Gawker Media.

Thiel is now fully out of the closet, having proclaimed his sexual orientation to the MAGA rabble at Trump’s Cleveland nominating convention in 2016, to, it must be said, tepid applause. He is married to a man with whom he shares some children.

One fascinating facet of his freakishness is the disconnect between his private life and his support for the political movement that just engineered the legalization of discrimination against gay people. Of course, unlike most gay Americans, Thiel’s fortune ensures he has a legion of minions to pick up takeout from enterprises that now can legally refuse to serve him.

Thiel was born in Germany in 1967, to conservative Evangelical Christian parents (according to his biographer - he has denied their political leanings). He first came to the United States as an infant, then, like fellow PayPal mafioso Elon Musk, lived in South Africa, where his dad developed a uranium mine. The family moved back to California in the 1980s, where Thiel went to high school and college. At Stanford, he distinguished himself advocating what at the time looked like insanely out of step political philosophy, especially regarding women. In 2009, Thiel wrote that the extension of the vote to women in the 1920s “rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ an oxymoron.”

Now that philosophy has leaked into the mainstream. Even if it hadn’t, Thiel has enough money and power to ensure we don’t laugh at nutty regressive ideas anymore.

As American women endure forced pregnancies under the Dobbs ruling - achieved arguably thanks to financiers like him who put Trump in power - Thiel is now dabbling in women’s “health care” and women’s media.

He runs three hedge funds, a giant crypto-surveillance enterprise that works with the Defense Department, and has poured seed money into a variety of ventures including a weird medical enterprise experimenting with juvenile blood plasma to reverse aging. But now he has poured $200 million into Recharge Capital, a fund that seeks “investment and roll-up opportunities in the women’s fertility value chain across Southeast Asia, Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East” with a focus on international fertility tourism and “menstrual wellness.”

These clinics will not, of course, replace Planned Parenthood, which for decades provided legal abortions and desperately needed low-cost contraception to millions of women. Planned Parenthood is gutted by Dobbs and before that years of right wing assaults - both physical and financial. PP clinics are increasingly replaced in major American cities across the country with weird “pregnancy centers” that at best push junk science about the dangers of hormonal birth control and at worst, endanger women whose problem pregnancies can kill them.

It’s no exaggeration to point out that political extremism has shoved American women, medically, back into the Stone Age. Now, in that vacuum of decent women’s health care, Thiel and his ilk see financial opportunity.

Thiel is also bankrolling other efforts to, what I would call pink up American women, get ‘em back in line with lollipops, cheerleader skirts, and ponytails, including an online magazine aimed at cuteservative women called Evie, that pushes junk science about contraception, along with tips for how women can embrace their biological differences from men -- which apparently include rejecting employment, self reliance, and taking advantage of technology and medical advances that enable reproductive choice.

Thiel is also financing the 28 app, a period tracking application.The magazine encourages women to manipulate their periods and control fertility through exercise, diet, and tracking.

Now, all this begs a question: Why does a gay man care about how and when women use birth control? Thiel's regressive notions about women belong to a larger trend on the upswing in our society that is as old as the patriarchy itself: the enduring obsession with the procreative power of women and the need to control it.

Real women are supposed to know their place in the patriarchy, including trusting nature over technology when it comes to their bodies.

Right-wing women often repeat the lie that feminists hate themselves or hate men, and that feminism forced women to deny their maternal instincts. In fact, feminism merely suggested that women have a choice. That choice, of course, has been ripped out at the root by Dobbs and any vestige of it eradicated if hormonal birth control can be discouraged or, incredible as it may seem, outlawed by extremist judges.

Thiel’s interest in women’s health care also belongs to a movement in Silicon Valley sometimes called Pronatalism. This Cult of Breeding glorifies traditional gender roles and is practically Mormon in effect: De facto practitioner Elon Musk, for example, has spawned ten children with three different women and he’s barely 50.

At its creepy core, pronatalism aims to breed more "master race" babies from the sperm of the supposed geniuses who happened to be standing nearby with math degrees when Steve Jobs invented the iPhone.

Pronatalism and its insistence on women’s position way down the hierarchy is part of an intellectual movement related to Catholic extremism, toward hierarchy and autocracy being seriously promoted within certain intellectual circles.

The “common good” constitutional law theory proposes a return to something like monarchy and it isn’t a notion emanating from the kooks at Claremont, but from legal scholar Cornelius Adrian Comstock Vermeule at Harvard’s “Center for Human Flourishing.” The center is financed by the right-wing Templeton Foundation.

Like Vermeule, most of the thinkers in this space either advance or admire medieval Catholic extremist positions. Some of these “tradCaths” not only support autocratic leadership but also advocate physical punishment of women who dare to try to control their own destinies. If you want to burn out your eyeballs on Opus Dei doctrine, check out platforms like the Josias Blog and Notre Dame’s blog.

Be warned: These guys love Latin.

Thiel is also involved with, and possibly financing a pair of fascist-adjacent female podcasters. The droll, downtown hipster girls on Red Scare giggle over racist memes, and worship and often quote Thiel’s political philosopher Curtis Yarvin (google his nom de guerre Mencius Moldbug if you want to know more about this freak).

The girls (one of whom identifies as a “tradcath”) recently suggested on one episode that menstruating women be barred from going to work during their periods. They are not alone in advancing the notion that women get back in the kitchen and bedroom. The hard right now seriously advocates that women shouldn’t work at all. “Women are at the vanguard of perverting the medical profession by advocating the teaching of woke ideologies in medical schools, placing these ideologies on an equal footing with medical education,” influencer Dennis Prager opined in a column headlined “Women are Disproportionately Hurting Our Country.”

This truly bizarre, antediluvian, anti-feminist ideology has a hold on 21st Century America. Why? It is part of the extreme backlash against women’s gains achieved over the last generation. The invention of the hormonal birth control pill (and newer better versions in the form of implants) broke down the biological prison walls in which our foremothers existed since the species evolved.

You don’t get away that easily, women.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer, and publisher ofAmerican Political Freakshow, a Substack on politics. Her journalism has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Airmail, and New York. She is the author of seven books including most recently Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic and an adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Please consider subscribing to American Political Freakshow, from which this is reprinted with permission.