On July 15, comedian Josh Androsky tweeted a video of a Proud Boy, a member of the alt-right men’s group started by Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes, claiming that the Irish were enslaved.
“Irish people were slaves just like the fucking black people,” said the young man in a MAGA hat.
The statement, while probably jarring to most, is derived from a common alt-right myth and is yet another instance of fringe conservatives molding history into white supremacist propaganda. What makes this myth particular interesting is its own peculiar history: It was one of the first right-wing memes to be spread on the early internet.
One of the Oldest Memes on the Internet
Liam Hogan is a historian and researcher who has spent the past five years studying and debunking the Irish slavery myth. According to him, one of the seminal figures propagating the theory is Michael A. Hoffman II, who first spread his ideas on internet newsgroups in the 1990s. Hoffman’s perhaps most well known for his 1993 book They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America, a self-published title that was harshly criticized by academics, and like many alt-right mythologies, is still available on Amazon today.
