By Stacy M. Brown
Black Press USA Senior National Correspondent
In Donald Trump’s America, they are no longer whispering their love for slavery; they are preaching it from the pulpit. Far-right Christian nationalist Joshua Haymes, a self-anointed prophet of white supremacy, declared in a recent video that slavery “is not inherently evil,” demanding that every Christian “affirm and defend” the right to own another human being. His words vividly remind many of the crack of the overseer’s whip, the theology of the lash, and the perverted gospel that baptized centuries of Black pain in the name of God. Haymes, who hosts a podcast with Pastor Brooks Potteiger of Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship near Nashville, is no internet outcast shouting into the void. The church aligns with Douglas Wilson, the father of modern Christian nationalism, and counts Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth among its members. This isn’t fringe, it’s the foundation of a rising white Christian theocracy that sees slavery as “biblically justified” and domination as divine will.
In his rant, Haymes insisted, “The institution of slavery is not inherently evil. It is not inherently evil to own another human being.” He demanded that “every Christian affirm what I just said,” claiming America’s Founding Fathers weren’t “living in grave sin” for enslaving people. He called it “chronological snobbery” to condemn them. That is how far they have sunk, defending the whip as righteousness, calling the chains holy. This ideology is not confined to Tennessee pews or online podcasts. It has a home in Washington, in the halls of power, where Trump and his disciples are rewriting history—literally—by government order. As previously reported, the Trump administration has directed the National Park Service and the Smithsonian Institution to remove exhibits that “disparage” America’s founders by mentioning slavery. They’ve ordered the deletion of a photo of a man’s scourged back. Yes, the scarred flesh of a freed Black man who endured the lash, because it made America “look bad.”
At Fort Pulaski in Georgia, the order came down to strip away the image that defined the brutality of the Civil War era. The image that showed what the Confederacy did to the human body has now been banned by the new Confederates in suits. Trump called the Smithsonian “OUT OF CONTROL” for “talking about how horrible slavery was,” and promised to send lawyers to “go through the museums” and cleanse the content. “This country cannot be WOKE,” he declared. Translation: America cannot be honest. At historic sites like the President’s House in Philadelphia, where George Washington enslaved nine men and women and rotated them out of state to avoid Pennsylvania’s gradual emancipation law, Trump’s order has demanded that panels describing those crimes be “reviewed” or removed. A panel describing Washington’s actions as “profoundly disturbing” has been flagged for revision. Another that said slavery “mocked the nation’s pretense to liberty” is on the chopping block. They want to make the father of the country look clean again by erasing the blood on his hands. “This is truth; it’s American history,” said retired Philadelphia attorney Michelle Flamer, who helped create the original exhibit. “There’s good and there’s bad, and it’s just like life itself.”
But Trump’s America wants only the “good.” A fantasy built on denial. The administration’s censorship is a campaign of amnesia, designed to blind a generation to the crimes that built this nation. Historian Michael Coard, who helped lead the effort to memorialize the enslaved at the President’s House, said, “If George Washington got all that attention, then we need to get some attention now.” Trump’s order calls this honesty “unpatriotic.” His followers call it “anti-American.” What it really turns out to be is fear. Fear of the truth, fear of the record, fear of the descendants of the enslaved demanding to be seen and heard. And this is not happening in isolation. Across the far-right ecosystem, white Christian nationalists are rising to defend the indefensible. Haymes and his co-conspirators are not simply talking about theology; they are providing moral cover for tyranny. They are laying the groundwork for a new Confederacy, one that cloaks its racism in scripture and its hatred in hymns. Even as the administration censors history, young Republicans in private Telegram chats have been caught calling Black people “monkeys” and “watermelon people,” joking about gas chambers, and celebrating rape and torture as political tactics. The Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair used the N-word repeatedly. Leaders of the New York State Young Republicans laughed about “epic rape” and fantasized about “physiological torture.” This is not political discourse; it is the language of fascism.
When the President of the United States orders museums to stop teaching the truth, when his followers call slavery “biblical,” and when young white conservatives talk about gas chambers like punchlines, it is not a coincidence. It is a movement, a coordinated, cultural counterrevolution against truth, equality, and the very notion of freedom for Black people. The evidence is clear that this government is engaged in historical sterilization. It is erasing the crimes of slavery, suppressing the truth of genocide, and criminalizing those who dare to remember. This is the same spirit that banned books in the Jim Crow South, that burned Black schools in the Reconstruction era, and that murdered truth-tellers from Mississippi to Minnesota.They want to make America forget so they can do it again. But history has a way of fighting back. The scars remain. The names remain. Oney Judge, Hercules, and the countless others who refused to stay in chains, even when the first president of this country was their master. Their stories are our inheritance, our resistance, our unbreakable testament. If Trump and his prophets of whiteness believe they can sanitize the past, they underestimate the people who live its consequences. They forget that truth has a pulse, and that it beats strongest in the descendants of the enslaved. As Alan Spears of the National Parks Conservation Association said, “We can handle the truth.” And most believe America will. Because the truth is not Trump and his new Confederacy to rewrite. It was written in blood, and it will be remembered in fire.