Rewriting Slavery, the GOP's Whitewash Campaign
The Lies, the Players, and the Plan to Erase Racism from History
Author of Your Primary Power: How Extremism Captured American Politics and Why Strategic Voting is the Way Out
In the past few weeks, the far right has been on a coordinated blitz to rewrite the history of slavery in America. It’s the same white supremacist revisionism they’ve been peddling for decades, but now it’s dressed up with viral memes, cherry-picked numbers, and fringe conspiracy theories.
What’s new is the breadth of the campaign. It’s not just anonymous accounts in the dark corners of the internet — it’s being repeated by public figures like Jillian Michaels, pseudo-intellectuals like Jeffrey Mead, and a swarm of MAGA activists on social media. And they’re not only minimizing slavery; they’re adding antisemitic falsehoods, deflecting blame onto modern-day Democrats, and trying to link legitimate labor policy to the horrors of chattel slavery.
This isn’t accidental. It’s part of a broader project: to whitewash American history so thoroughly that the crimes of white supremacy are minimized, excused, or rebranded as someone else’s fault. It’s happening online, in political speeches, and now — thanks to direct orders from the Trump White House — inside the nation’s museums.
The “2%” Lie
At the center of this campaign is a familiar talking point: “Only 2% of Americans owned slaves before the Civil War.” This line is being pushed as if it proves slavery was some rare, marginal institution — an ugly little footnote to the otherwise noble American story.
It’s statistical fraud. The number is calculated by dividing the total number of legal slaveholders by the entire white population of the United States — including Northerners, women, children, and enslaved people themselves, none of whom could legally own slaves. It’s like claiming only a tiny percentage of people own homes if you include every child in America in your math.
The correct measure is households in slaveholding states. By that measure, 25–33% of white Southern households owned slaves — and in some states, like Mississippi and South Carolina, nearly half did. That’s not an aberration. That’s a core institution.
The “Slavery Was Everywhere” Deflection
Another common dodge is to point out that slavery existed in many parts of the world for thousands of years — as if that excuses or minimizes America’s version. It’s true that many societies practiced slavery, but the form it took in the United States was uniquely dehumanizing.
In much of the ancient world, slavery wasn’t always tied to race, wasn’t always lifelong, and in some cases enslaved people could eventually earn or buy their freedom. By contrast, in the American South, slavery became chattel slavery: it was permanent, inherited through the family line, and defined explicitly by race. Children were born into bondage.
On top of that, enslaved Black Americans were legally forbidden from learning to read or write. That wasn’t just about control in the moment — it deliberately crippled whole generations. When emancipation came, millions of people had been denied the most basic tools to succeed in a society built on literacy and education. They were “freed,” but essentially told to sink or swim without ever having been taught how to swim.
This damage didn’t vanish after a single generation. If your parents and grandparents couldn’t read, you didn’t have the kind of household support that most kids take for granted when struggling in school. For many families, the cycle of poverty and exclusion became self-reinforcing. And instead of a true national reckoning or investment to repair that harm, the response was largely: you’re free now, figure it out on your own.
That history still echoes today. Public education should have been one of the tools to help close that gap, but modern politics often heads in the opposite direction — slashing school funding and privileging tax cuts for the wealthy. That hurts everyone, but it especially entrenches the disadvantage of communities that were denied opportunity from the very beginning.
That’s why pointing to other countries’ slavery is no excuse. America’s version was harsher, more systematically racialized, and designed to ensure that even freedom didn’t bring equality. And until there is a true reckoning with that legacy, the cycle of disadvantage doesn’t just disappear with time.
The “Black Slave Owners” Distraction
Alongside the 2% lie, white supremacists are dusting off an old distortion: that free Black Americans owned slaves, as if that somehow evens the moral scales.
Yes, roughly 3,000 free Black individuals are recorded as owning slaves in the 1860 census. The part they leave out is that the overwhelming majority were purchasing spouses, children, or parents to protect them from sale, and the law often required that those individuals remain in “technical ownership” to prevent re-enslavement. Were there rare cases of exploitation? A few. Were they in any way central to the maintenance of slavery as a political, social, or economic system? Absolutely not.
This is not an attempt at nuance — it’s a propaganda tactic. They strip away context so they can weaponize the fact as an equivalence: “See? Both sides did it.” It’s lazy, dishonest, and historically bankrupt.
The Confederate Sympathy Gambit
Jeffrey Mead’s version of this argument goes even further, portraying Confederate deaths as some sort of tragic, noble sacrifice — noting that most of those who died didn’t personally own slaves.
This is moral camouflage. Whether a soldier held title to another human being is irrelevant when they voluntarily took up arms for a government whose very founding documents declared slavery its “cornerstone.” Dying in large numbers for a cause does not make that cause just. By Mead’s logic, we should mourn for Nazi soldiers as victims of circumstance rather than agents of genocide.
The Republican Party Flip — and the Lie They Tell About It
Another favorite deflection: that the Republican Party freed the slaves while Democrats were the party of the Confederacy. This is historically true — in the 1860s. It is also politically meaningless in 2025.
The parties realigned in the mid-20th century, as the Democratic Party embraced civil rights and Southern segregationists fled to the GOP. This “Southern Strategy” turned the Republican Party into the political home of the very states that seceded to protect slavery. Today, those states are the GOP’s electoral backbone. Different century, same ideology, same base.
The Joe Biden Ancestor Distraction
They’ve even found a way to drag Joe Biden into it, waving around a 2021 Hill article noting that some of his distant ancestors owned enslaved people — as though that makes Biden personally responsible for slavery, or proves that modern Democrats are to blame for it.
It’s absurd on its face. Biden himself has championed civil rights legislation for decades. This line of attack isn’t about holding anyone accountable — it’s about deflecting blame from the modern Republican Party by pointing at irrelevancies in the past. The logic is as hollow as saying that because some modern Germans are descended from Nazis, they must secretly support fascism.
The Immigration = Slavery Smear
The latest evolution of this propaganda is the claim that Democrats support “modern slavery” because they advocate for immigrant labor in agriculture. The grown-up solution to labor shortages is simple: create legal work permits, pay fair wages, ensure labor protections, and collect taxes. That’s what Democrats propose.
The real conditions that resemble modern slavery — underpayment, exploitation, lack of rights — exist precisely because Republicans block legal pathways, keeping migrant laborers vulnerable while demonizing them from the rally stage. It’s not just hypocrisy; it’s deliberate.
The Antisemitic Twist
As if all this weren’t enough, white supremacists are now layering in antisemitic conspiracy theories. One viral graphic falsely claims that “78% of slave owners were Jewish.” This number is pure fabrication, originating from discredited Nation of Islam propaganda and cherry-picked ship registries. In reality, Jews made up about 1.25% of Southern slave owners, proportionate to their small population, and had no outsized role in establishing or sustaining slavery. This lie serves one purpose: to merge antisemitism with white nationalist revisionism into one toxic, mutually reinforcing package.
The In-Group Validators: The Pawn Pieces of White Nationalist Discourse
White supremacists have a special fondness for a particular type of ally: someone from the very community they are working to oppress who is willing to parrot their talking points. It’s not just useful — it’s invaluable. It allows them to point to the messenger and say, “See? Even they agree with us.”
Candace Owens and Jeffrey Mead are textbook examples. Owens has built an entire career out of dismissing systemic racism, reframing American slavery as just one chapter in a global history of bondage, and belittling any attempt to connect the past to present inequalities. Mead recycles the “only 2% owned slaves” talking point, strips context from the “Black slave owners” statistic, and frames Confederate casualties as sympathetic.
They’re not alone. Brandon “The Officer” Tatum, co-founder of Blexit and a YouTube figure with millions of followers, pushes the same themes. Paris Dennard, a former RNC spokesman and White House staffer, lends establishment credibility to them. Jesse Lee Peterson has built a career on rhetoric that often sounds indistinguishable from white nationalist talking points.
The through-line is the same: these narratives give white supremacists the ammunition they need to recast slavery as marginal, morally ambiguous, or ancient history — anything but the defining atrocity of the American South. And the people delivering these narratives aren’t doing it for free. The money rolls in, the media bookings pile up, the notoriety grows.
There’s nothing racists prize more than a willing mouthpiece from the very community they target — someone who will legitimize their narrative by delivering it. It shields them from accusations of bias while advancing the same whitewashing agenda. They know it, and so do Owens, Mead, and their counterparts. And while the motivations can vary — financial reward, social privilege, proximity to power — the effect is always the same: the oppressed lending legitimacy to their oppressors. Harriet Beecher Stowe had a name for people like this.
The Smithsonian Whitewash
And while these lies are spreading online, the Trump White House is working to rewrite the public record offline. Just this week, the administration ordered the Smithsonian to review and “correct” exhibits to emphasize “unity” and remove “divisive” content — a euphemism for scrubbing slavery and systemic racism from the nation’s historical memory.
With the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence approaching in 2026, the goal is clear: replace truth with a patriotic pageant that flatters white nationalism. It’s a state-sponsored rewrite of history, timed perfectly to cement their preferred narrative.
The Bigger Picture: The GOP Is the New Klan
Let’s stop pretending this is just fringe rhetoric. The modern Republican Party is a white Christian nationalist movement — the ideological descendant of the Ku Klux Klan, the Oath Keepers, the One Percenters, and every other hate group that cloaks racial supremacy in a political cause. They’ve traded hoods for red MAGA hats, but the beliefs are the same. Donald Trump is their de facto grand wizard, and his base cheers for it.
They’ve captured the party from the top down. And because Republicans have the Supreme Court, a majority in key state legislatures, and outsized power in Congress thanks to gerrymandering and the Senate’s structural bias, they’ve effectively extended that control into all three branches of government.
If you vote Republican today, this is what you’re endorsing: a white Christian nationalist movement determined to rewrite history, undermine democracy, and protect its own power at the expense of everyone else. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Where We Go From Here
If you want to go deeper into how we got here — and how we can get out — I’ve written Your Primary Power: How Extremism Captured American Politics and Why Strategic Voting is the Way Out. It details how white Christian nationalist extremists methodically took over the Republican Party, using primaries to purge moderates, normalize the politics of hate, and consolidate control from the statehouse to the Supreme Court.
This isn’t just a fight over history — it’s a fight for the country’s political future. The lies about slavery, the whitewashing of racism, and the weaponization of identity are all part of the same machine, and it thrives on keeping Americans divided, misinformed, and disengaged. My book outlines a clear, data-driven strategy for turning that machine against itself — by using the very primary systems extremists rely on to cement their power. Strategic voting can shift the balance, weaken the grip of the most radical factions, and open the door to restoring constitutional governance and national sanity.◆
Notes & Sources
On the “2% owned slaves” talking point and actual slaveholding rates:
Louis Jacobson, “No, only 2% of Americans didn’t own slaves — here’s the real number,” PolitiFact, Aug. 25, 2022. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/aug/25/instagram-posts/no-only-2-americans-didnt-own-slaves-heres-real-num/
Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Did Black People Own Slaves?” The Root / PBS, Jan. 20, 2014. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/did-black-people-own-slaves/ — Gates’s historical analysis is directly cited in Jacobson’s fact-check and clarifies both the household ownership rates and the context around Black slaveholders.
On the “Black slave owners” statistic and context:
Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Did Black People Own Slaves?” The Root / PBS, Jan. 20, 2014.
Larry Koger, Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790–1860. University of South Carolina Press, 1985. — The most detailed scholarly work on the subject, frequently cited by historians for the context you reference.
On Confederate soldiers and the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy:
Alexander H. Stephens, “Cornerstone Speech,” Savannah, Georgia, March 21, 1861. Transcript: University of Georgia.
James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford University Press, 1988.
On the mid-20th century party realignment (“Southern Strategy”):
Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974. W.W. Norton, 2019.
Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. Scribner, 2008.
On Biden’s distant ancestors owning enslaved people:
Brett Samuels, “Some of Biden’s ancestors owned enslaved people: reports,” The Hill, July 8, 2021.
On migrant labor, “modern slavery” claims, and labor policy:
U.S. Department of Labor, “H-2A Temporary Agricultural Workers Program.”
Philip Martin, “Immigration and Farm Labor: Policy Options and Consequences,” Choices, Agricultural & Applied Economics Association, 2017.
On antisemitic conspiracy theories about slavery and Jewish people:
Eli Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight. NYU Press, 2000.
Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
On Smithsonian “corrections” and political pressure:
Sarah Kaplan, “Trump officials sought to change museum exhibits on race and slavery,” The Washington Post, July 28, 2025.