The singer behind this summer’s surprise hit, “Rich Men North of Richmond,” says he is swearing off politics after lamenting the “weaponization” of his everyman anthem by politicians of all stripes looking to score points with their base.

Virginia farmer Oliver Anthony, in a social media post, said he will no longer be commenting on political issues after his video was played at the outset of last week’s Republican presidential debate and used as a prompt for the candidates’ criticism of President Biden. He said the press is inaccurately trying to portray him as a Biden supporter after he said the GOP candidates on the stage that night are as culpable as anyone for the state of the nation.

“Rich men north of Richmond is about corporate owned DC politicians on both sides,” Mr. Anthony said. “Though Biden’s most certainly a problem, the lyrics aren’t exclusively knocking Biden. It’s bigger and broader than that. It’s knocking the system collectively. Including the corporate-owned politicians that were on stage that night.”

In the song, Mr. Anthony sings about “rich men” in Washington, D.C. — which is about 100 miles north of Richmond, Virginia — trying to control working-class Americans and taxing them to prop up a welfare state and wage foreign wars. “Young men are puttin’ themselves six feet in the ground ‘cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin’ them down,” Mr. Anthony sings in a video of the song.

After the song went viral, conservatives embraced Mr. Anthony as one of their own, but he disabused them of that notion in a video released after the debate in which he chided them for assuming the song was an attack on the Democratic party. He said he sits “pretty dead center” in the middle of the political spectrum.

“The one thing that has bothered me is seeing people wrap politics up into this,” Mr. Anthony said in the video, in which he is pictured sitting in the cab of a pickup truck. “It’s aggravating seeing people on conservative news try to identify with me, like I’m one of them. It’s aggravating seeing certain musicians and politicians act like we’re buddies and act like we’re fighting the same struggle here, like that we’re trying to present the same message.”

Had hardcore conservatives been paying attention instead of using the song to tar their opponents, they would have seen Mr. Anthony’s centrist leanings coming long ago. In an interview that aired on Fox News shortly after the song blew up, the former factory worker, whose real name is Christopher Anthony Lunsford, celebrated America’s diverse population and warned that the farther we stray from our ideals the worse off the country is.

“I don’t see our country lasting more than another generation the way we are headed. We have to go back to the roots of what made this country great in the first place, which was our sense of community,” he told a Fox News interviewer following a performance in North Carolina. “We are the melting pot of the world. And that’s what makes us strong, our diversity. And we need to learn to harness that and appreciate it and not use it as a political tool to keep everyone separate from it.”

For daring to buck the right-wing orthodoxy, Mr. Anthony was pilloried by those on the more extreme fringes of online discourse as part of some sort of antisemitic conspiracy to push anti-white messaging via song. They went so far as to claim his southern accent is fake, and labeled him a “conservafraud.”