Whenever the power of the Internet is measured, Oliver Anthony will rank high as an example of the speed of success. This thirty-year-old worker, who went through problems with alcohol and drugs, started singing country songs a few years ago and posting them on his YouTube channel. In terms of technology, he only had an iPhone, if we don't count the acoustic country guitar. Then on August 8 of this year, he released a song Rich people north of Richmond (Rich man north of Richmond), the first recorded with a real microphone, with a clear allusion to the political elite in Washington and there was a "nuclear detonation".
Anthony's song reached number one on the Billboard charts in ten days, out of nowhere. There have been cases of novelty taking the lead, but never with an artist with no previous history and no publisher, just a YouTube post. It turned out that the song was liked by some people who spread it further, then it was liked by influential conservatives on the Internet, so they spread it influentially and we came to a real miracle. And proof of the social power of the Internet. For it is now said that Anthony's poem is the cry of the American working man who feels desperate in today's world (see verse living in the new world, with an old soul), but those analyzes are for other occasions.
The song is political and immediately politicized. The right presented it almost as a new anthem, the left criticizes it because the song is not in favor of "new values", on the contrary. They played it to the candidates on the Republican TV debate on Fox television, and Anthony later said that he was confused by their comments because the song is about those types, the rich people of Washington, that is, the politicians who want to rule, not the country but us.
At the same time as the aforementioned debate on the Internet, another political event was taking place, bigger than the debate, and similar to Anthony in terms of the nuclear attack. Journalist Tucker Carlson, recently fired from Fox, began reaching out to audiences online instead of looking for a new TV channel. His primary account is on Twitter, where he invited Donald Trump as a guest on the appointed day. Trump previously refused to participate in the debate because he has a huge advantage over his opponents, but he was happy to respond to his good friend Tucker. The conversation was soft, nothing dramatic was said, they didn't even let Anthony go, but they were more watched on Twitter and X than the debate on Fox. At one point twenty million people followed them; however, these data are not official and are only estimates.
Nevertheless, the possibility of such an alternative raised the American public, above all the liberal one. Claims that the interview was seen by between 150 and 260 million users were immediately questioned by emphasizing that it was the number of views of the tweet itself, not the views of the interview (video). But even the biggest critics of Carlson and Trump admit that it was not seen by less than 13 million people, which is an enviable rating for television, especially when you add YouTube and other channels where several million more views were added.
As if that wasn't enough for one week, it wasn't until Friday that Trump returned to Twitter with his first post since January 2020. He posted a picture of himself, a police portrait from his arrest in Atlanta, where he will stand trial over claims that the election he lost was rigged. stolen. And that tweet was seen by almost 250 million people, and the image of an outraged Trump became a symbol of Trump's America, which could be an alternative to the Democratic one, that is, Biden's, in next year's elections.
We have the soundtrack, we have the media space, let the electoral battle begin.
