Read the full transcript of Chris Lunsford, known as Oliver Anthony’s talk at The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) 2025 conference on Feb 19, 2025.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
CHRIS LUNSFORD, KNOWN AS OLIVER ANTHONY: I appreciate the opportunity for your time. I’ve only got a few minutes here.
So I’ve written some things down so you don’t have to listen to me ramble, but there is an evil I have seen under the sun. The sort of error that arises from a ruler. Fools are put in many high positions while the rich occupy low ones. I have seen slaves on horseback while princes go on foot like slaves.
The Hidden Suffering
Since August of 2023, I have received a flood of messages, social media, email, handwritten letters.
I’ve had, I don’t know how many conversations with people face to face, probably thousands at this point. And I realize now that we don’t have any clue to how many around us are really broken. How many are silently suffering and barely hanging on more often than not. They start the message with, “Hey, I’m a nobody,” followed by horrors of addiction, mental illness, financial and household struggles, oftentimes incredibly complicated stories that I suspect they may have never told anyone before, but they still have hopes of a hopeful future and they don’t want to give up no matter what.
And it kills me because these people, they aren’t nobodies as they describe themselves. Our modern society is convenient, comfortable, fragile, little existence is oftentimes carried on the backs of these self-declared nobodies and forgive my generalization, but in the modern world, we are so busy idolizing the genuine nothings of society, the self-centered celebrities, spineless politicians, click bait, social media influencers.
It seems from my perspective that oftentimes these people live comfortable little lives while many of our real heroes are drug through the mud and never once given a genuine thank you for it.
But it’s not just them that are hurting.
We all are. I mean, that’s why you’re here at this conference, right? That’s why people have traveled from all over the world to gather here. You all realize that it’s time to do something.
So to set the record straight, I’m not here as an intellectual or a psychologist or a politician or even a respected member of society, all things considered. I’m a high school dropout who lives in a log cabin in the woods in Virginia. I myself am just a 32-year-old nobody.
So I’m just here today as the messenger. I believe that many of the problems identified at this conference are quite possibly symptoms of a bigger problem.
The Digital Age and Its Impact
We currently exist in an age of rapid digital immersion. The current average American teenager will have spent something like 30,000 hours by the time they are 30 on social media. The average American spends six to nine hours a day staring at devices.
And whether it’s a city sidewalk, a family dinner table, the receptionist at an office, even people driving their damn cars down the roadway, I constantly see the struggle between maintaining conscious attention in the real world and the overwhelming pull we feel towards the digital one.
And in my unprofessional opinion, neuroplasticity has made us increasingly digitally proficient, but at a cost of being digitally dependent.
And if being hired on as a London cab driver can change your brain on an MRI scan, and if life experiences like PTSD can alter the DNA in sperm, what irreversible alterations will 30,000 hours of staring into algorithmically fed state of hypnosis do to the human mind or to their offspring?
And in this short breath of time, we live in a state of existence that quite possibly no one else in world history has. We have both access to instant global connectivity, infinite information, and consumer-level access to artificial intelligence, but we are the last few humans in world history who remember what life was like before it. We are the last living people in history to have experienced life before the digital age.
And I fear that it may become nearly impossible for younger generations to even differentiate the digital world from the real one before the end of my lifetime. There is nothing inherently wrong with technology, there is nothing wrong with instant connection, and there is nothing intrinsically bad about access to abundant information.
But what is bad is the lack of control and agency we have over these systems, and without realizing it, we are being programmed and our culture is becoming commodified. Therefore, the more time we spend on these digital information systems, the more we revert to the mean of one of a fixed set of broad internet cohorts. In other words, the more time we spend online, the more commoditized our culture, the more tribal our psychology, and the more vulnerable we become.
The Power of Ordinary People
When the floods first came to Western North Carolina last year where I used to live, there were tens of thousands of people who showed up to help from all over the country. No one asked them, no one paid them, and most of the world has no idea they were ever even there. I was there the same day that the governor of North Carolina came for his little photo op. He made a public announcement that day saying that the current statewide death toll with the floods, oh I’m sorry, he made a public announcement that day with the current statewide death toll of the floods.
But that same morning alone, volunteer veterans with cadaver dogs that I had met with had pulled 15 bodies out of a single pile of debris near the KOA campground in Swannanoa. The statewide count at that point had to have been well into the hundreds. I believe the number the governor used that day was 28. In fact, there was a reefer truck that sat for two days full of bodies because the morgues were overflowing.
And while FEMA was hoarding donated generators and denying people on their applications, it was the nobodies of the world that were driving ATVs and Jeeps with chainsaws up mountain roads rescuing people. There was two guys we met that hot wired a bulldozer from a quarry to cut a navigable path through a washed out road in two days that the state said would take months, allowing supplies to people who hadn’t had contact with anyone in over a week.
Volunteers were working 16 hours a day taking supplies on everything from horses to helicopters. It was humanity there in front of my very eyes. And it was in that seven days in North Carolina that changed everything for me. It was people saving people.
Even with lack of leadership, failed protocols, and overwhelming inefficiency from the state, the nobodies took up the slack. And so I’m just here to remind you that we don’t need our false idols. We should no longer rely on politicians who bow down to money to manage our city or our states. We need to find the real leaders everywhere and empower them.
Western North Carolina was proof to me that there is an army of good people left in this world who want to do good things. We just have to give them places to gather and give them the ability to act.
Closing Remarks
And so I’ll close with this. Do not fret because of those who are evil or be envious of those who do wrong, for like the grass they will soon wither, like green plants they will soon die away. Trust in the Lord and do good.
Dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture. Take delight in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. And so I’ll see you on April the 5th in Spruce Pine, North Carolina for the first official gathering. It is now my life’s mission to revive rural America one town at a time.
