The article explores the distortions and self-serving fictions which America’s memory industries have developed around Frederick Douglass. The sinister processes of valorization and matyrological fetishisation which have been used to disguise and efface American’s slave inheritance via a superscription of white patriarchal triumphalism jump out of this text as the lurid monstrosities they are. The demonstrates how an equal and opposite semiotics of distortion has also been catastrophically laid upon the cultural construction of Frederick Douglass. Douglass is dragged out of the virtual filth which threatens to turn him into slavery’s most tragic ‘oreo’.