Hotep Jesus (1 October 1980-), born Bryan Sharpe, is an African-American media personality and a leader of the Hotep movement. He was known for his fringe conspiracy theories (which he claimed came mostly from his own "common sense") that the Atlantic slave trade was a myth and was financially unfeasible, that the vast majority of African-Americans were the original Native Americans, that the famed Carthaginian general Hannibal was a black African, that the Roman Empire was a rudimentary civilization which depended on Africa for food, and other controversial views.
Biography[]
Bryan Sharpe was born in Brooklyn, New York City, New York on 1 October 1980, and he became a marketer, performance artist, and author. He began his career on Twitter, where he aimed to publish viral tweets; he went on to work as a marketer for 50 Cent's energy drink, and it was during his involvement in the hip-hop industry that he experienced his "spiritual awakening". When a heckler on Twitter asked him if he was "some kind of Hotep Jesus," Sharpe adopted this as his new name. In 2019, appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast to share his views on black history.
Views[]
On his interview with Joe Rogan, he claimed that African-Americans were raised to have a "fetus mentality" of seeing white people as oppressors and having a "slave mentality", and he believed that the way to uplift the community would be to educate them on pre-slavery black history such as "Queen Angola", the Songhai Empire, the Mali Empire, Mansa Musa, and other older topics. He also promoted the "before we were slaves, we were Kings", and he said that identifying the black community with past kings was better than identifying them with slaves such as Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Hotep Jesus also claimed that the Carthaginian general Hannibal was black, and that black children in America should study his victories over Rome.
He also claimed that black people were natives of America and were not brought over on slave ships, claiming that Africans from the Malian Empire had migrated along the ocean current to South America and North America during the 13th and 14th centuries. He also asked why schools did not teach students about black slaveowners (claiming that Native Americans were actually blacks); he also argued that it was not economically sound to argue that the majority of African-Americans were descended from slaves, believing that the majority of blacks were already in the Americas. He also said that he did not believe that Africans were brought over on slave ships, believing that the native (black) peoples on the Americas were slowly conquered from coast to coast and were gradually wiped out. Hotep Jesus also claimed that ancestry websites were inaccurate, as he refused to be classified by a European name such as "Angolan" or "Kenyan". He also claimed that saying that white people brought African slaves to America connoted that Africans could not have discovered America themselves and built their own boats; he believed that accepting the Atlantic slave trade meant erasing black achievement. While Rogan accepted that the Olmecs had African physical features, he questioned Hotep Jesus's logic in claiming that Africans made up the vast majority of native peoples.
Hotep Jesus then claimed that Rome was dependent on Africa for food, that the African Moors brought etiquette and running water to Europe (and told the native Spanish not to sleep in the barns with their animals), saved the white race from the Black Plague, and thus claimed that the Africans were superior enough to travel the globe as the source of food. He also insulted the Roman Empire as a "rudimentary" civilization and claimed that the Greek world looked up to Ancient Egypt as superior. He also claimed that, if Ancient Egypt had boats "before Europe was literate", they could have come to America and "set up shop"; he also used the Olmec heads to show the possibility that the Africans settled the Americas, believed that the serpent mound and the supposedly Egyptian artifacts found in Ohio and the discovery of Egyptian gold in the Grand Canyon signified Egyptian settlement there.
Apart from his views on early black civilizations, he was also a frequent critic of leftist politics, claiming that leftists often impersonated right-wingers on the internet to discredit the movement; he and Rogan both criticized the shutdown of the sub-Reddit forum for Trump supporters. He claimed that ABC, NBC, and CNN controlled the media in a way that reminded him of Ingsoc, and that big companies were trying to control public opinion through monopolies.
Hotep Jesus claimed to have contacted the coronavirus after attending the Consumer Electronics Show conference in Las Vegas from 7 to 10 January 2020, blaming it on the presence of "masses" of thousands of Chinese people. He also went to Starbucks stores to share information on stores he believed were racist, and he bullied the store into giving him free coffee so that they would not come off as racist. This viral confrontation earned him an appearance on Fox News, and he started his own online movement, Hotep Nation, which was supportive of Donald Trump and critical of liberalism and progressivism.