Making Slavery Great Again
It's less outlandish than it sounds.
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American slavery was not so bad. It was even beneficial to slaves and their descendants.
Donald Trump, his MAGA allies, and conservative talking heads continue to peddle this insulting, ahistorical, and unapologetically racist narrative. Without irony or shame — and to absolve their followers of any guilt or responsibility — Trump wants to whitewash America’s original sin.
“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future,” Trump posted on Truth Social last week.
Trump is not the first conservative to promote revisionist slavery narratives. In 2021, Ty Smith — brother of conservative firebrand Candace Owens — told Fox News host Martha MacCallum that “slavery was never about race.” Two years later, Gov. Ron DeSantis approved teaching Florida middle schoolers that slavery was actually good because it “developed skills [in slaves] which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit."
When then-Vice President Kamala Harris criticized Florida’s curriculum change, Fox News’s Jesse Watters defended it, claiming teaching slave history that way "actually speaks to the resistance and the aptitude of the enslaved African Americans who were at the time able to better themselves and able to improve their situation despite brutal, brutal conditions.”
Elsewhere, social media (especially X) is filled with Trumpers trying to minimize the horrors of US slave history. They chirp that slavery existed in Africa before the trans-Atlantic trade began, or that only a small percentage of Americans actually owned slaves. While superficially true, the former fact hardly excuses slavery’s expansion to the Americas, and the latter was largely the result of so few whites able to afford slaves — not their moral objections to the systemic terrorizing and labor exploitation of African Americans.
But elections have consequences, and Trump and running mate JD Vance won last year. They and their Fox-y friends deserve a chance to implement their ideas and agenda. They want fewer immigrants working to make jobs available to “real” Americans. They want to deploy state national guard units and the US military to build a greater America. And they clearly want to revise the history of slavery.
They can accomplish all of these goals by enacting a new, plantation-based slavery regime. In three simple steps, here’s how it would work:
Step 1: Recruit identification
Able-bodied and under-employed men are vital to serve on slave farms, but where to find them? This first step is actually the easiest because none other than Vance, Trump’s cherubic sidekick, provided the solution.
In his 2016 best-seller “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance identified an untapped wellspring of laborers who might benefit most from slavery’s heretofore unheralded benefits: lazy, rural, young men.
“You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness,” he wrote.
That 30 percent equates to millions of young, rural, white men perfectly suited for the slave camps because they are not only lazy, but unaware of their laziness. They may as well be walking around their hometowns with “I need a strong work ethic” signs hanging from their necks. (And, yes, men from the small, rural “whites only” communities like the one developing in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas will be eligible!)
The Trump White House has already made clear they’re enthusiastic about the idea of Americans replacing the labor of farm workers the administration is deporting. Alluding to the work requirements in the Republican reconciliation bill, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins claimed this summer that the administration is moving toward “100 percent American participation” in the farm labor force and “with 34 million able-bodied on Medicaid we should be able to do fairly quickly."
Step 2: Round-up and relocation
Next, new slaves must be rounded up, transported, housed, and surveilled at plantation work camps. But where? The obvious choice is California’s Central Valley.
Informally known as the “breadbasket to the world,” the Central Valley alone produces one-quarter of America’s food, including 40 percent of fruits, nuts, and other table foods. Launching this program cannot come too soon: The price of vegetables—economists are calling it “veggie-flation” — soared by nearly 39 percent last month thanks to farm labor shortages caused by Trump’s raid-and-deport policies.
Those worried about how to conduct this relocation process — or what it might cost — also underestimate the MAGA movement’s wisdom.
Gov. Gavin Newsom — whose social media posts confirm his Trumpian genius — would surely approve a White House request to dispatch California’s National Guard units across the nation to gather up the able-bodied, lazy rural masses and relocate them to Central Valley slave farms.
Should California need help, our under-used US military — remember: Trump has ended seven wars in just seven months — can provide additional support. As Kentucky Rep. James Comer trenchantly observed, “we spend a lot on our military” which “has been in many countries around the world for the past two decades” and it’s time “to focus on the big cities in America now.”
Comer wants to redeploy those troops at home to fight crime, but surely a few under-utilized battalions could be assigned to build and maintain slave camps.
Step 3: Orientation and operation
Upon arrival, slaves will construct camp barracks, food halls, latrines, and chapels. Work hours will be sun up to sundown, six days per week, with Sundays off for religious observance. Slaves will be provided bunk bed housing in cramped, non-air conditioned barracks, plus three meals daily.
Food, of course, is plentiful and quite literally at their feet. But veggies and fruits lack protein, and nuts alone are insufficient. To supplement slave diets while paying homage to America’s wildly successful Slavery 1.0 experiment, nearby ranches will supply protein-rich intestines, ears, feet, and other animal remainders to re-create savory, 19th-century plantation menus. (The Smithsonian can update its exhibits to reflect this historical revival.)
For their involuntary servitude — sorry, that’s devilishly woke jargon; let’s stick with “slavery” — slaves shall receive no pay during their 10-year tenure. Instead, their compensation is the intrinsic, lifetime value gained from hard work, skillset development, sense of accomplishment, and a newfound work ethic. Fox’s Watters can deliver inspirational lectures to slaves about the incalculable value they are providing to Trump’s new America.
To summarize, the American Slavery 2.0 project is a brilliant conceit precisely because it dovetails so many MAGA governing principles into a single, big and beautiful policy:
Deporting job-stealing immigrants allows the most enviable, back-breaking, Tucker “college-is-a-waste-of-time” Carlson-approved jobs to be re-allocated to the “real” Americans who deserve them — and nobody is more “real” than the white men who made America great in the first place.
Although not compensated directly, slaves benefit far more in the long run because their 10-year experience will inculcate the valuable skills and solid work ethic JD Vance told us young, rural men sorely lack.
Because our national guard units and US military are under-utilized at home, as Comer bemoaned, deploying our proud men and women in uniform to capture, relocate, and surveil plantation slaves is an inspired way to spend taxpayer dollars.
Best of all, unpaid slaves eliminate plantation farmers’ largest production cost — labor itself. There’s no wage more minimal than no wage at all! “Veggieflation” will disappear almost overnight, restoring prices that millions of grateful American families pay for fresh fruits and vegetables to levels at if not below what they were during the insidious, immigrant farm labor era.
The Trump administration, MAGA, and the conservative media deserve all the credit, too. They alone courageously identified slavery’s underrated merits.
So get ready, patriots, to Make Americans Slaves Again! The new, MASA-inspired golden age of 21st century slavery has arrived.
That’s it for this week
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Thank you, Mr. Schiller. I wish this essay was satire.
I'm not sure that Trump and the MAGA movement have the strategic level thinking ability to come up with something so complicated. But Schaller is quite right - they'd feel no moral bar about doing something like this and would even say it was morally good and character improving.