Investigative journalist #Greg Palast# has a new film out in time for the 2024 American presidential election, Vigilantes, Inc. The main thrust of the documentary is to show how criminal elements of the #Republican Party# have plans to disenfranchise select voters at the polls next month by challenging the right to vote of targeted populations, mostly #African Americans#. Palast argues in the film that these challenges amount to #vigilantism and go back to the 1940s. He explains the film’s title: «Before the 1946 election, the #Klu Klux Klan# incorporated itself, calling itself Vigilantes, Inc. These are the new vigilantes, and they call themselves vigilantes.»
Greg Palast, who has spent more than two decades trailing the lowlifes and political operatives on the right who seek to undermine the electoral process in America, has a new startling prediction: The US presidential election will see serious violence erupt from Trump’s supporters. Palast claims that «40,000 self-proclaimed vigilante vote-fraud hunters have already challenged the rights of 851,000 voters of colour.» Whites suppressing Blacks in the Deep South is not new; it dates back to the post-Civil War years but is still reprehensible, especially in the 21st century, after the Constitution has been amended a couple of times to address the criminality of disenfranchisement.
Echoes of the past
«These are not government officials,» says Palast. «These are individuals, self-appointed vote fraud hunters. And these vote fraud hunters start challenging other voters. It goes back to the Klu Klux Klan of 1946, which incorporated itself as Vigilantes, Inc. for the sole purpose of knocking off black voters from the voter rolls.»
While he doesn’t harp on it, Palast reminds the viewer that the KKK was established by the Southern Democrats, who pledged to reverse #Reconstruction and who were violently opposed to the Republican-led government, especially under #Abraham Lincoln#. Palast cleverly, if subliminally, reenacts this tension in the film’s battle scenes and in the yuck-yuck conversations he has with some Good Ol’ Boys from Georgia.
The Civil War reenactment scene also draws attention to the popular understanding of the point of the war: Ending #slavery in America. But there were complexities and contradictions. For instance, the North engaged in battles with southern slave states who wanted to secede from the union of American states. President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, which exempted the border states from emancipation (four slave states loyal to the Union). And Lincoln feared that if the South seceded their revenues would be lost to the federal government at a time when Westward expansion had commenced. It was a precarious situation that required the institution of the nation’s first military draft for the North to find enough soldiers for the battles. These tensions persist today, and, for some, the slogan Make America Great Again, means returning to times when Blacks had fewer rights, including the right to vote.
Palast shows how Donald Trump has embraced Kemp’s henchman approach to the polls and how he backs «voter fraud» actions. It also may help explain why Trump felt entitled during the 2020 election to call Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to «find 11,780 votes» and overturn the state’s election results. Way down south in Dixie, some votes get lynched—strange fruit democracy.
The film especially blasts Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, noting how he comes from a slave-owner heritage (Vigilantes, Inc. begins with a Civil War reenactment battle). Palast implies that Kemp is part of a still-unreconstructed South (for some) that longs for a return to Jim Crowism. Palast notes how Kemp stole his own election in 2018 when he was secretary of state in charge of the Board of Elections while running for governor at the same time – beating African American Democrat Stacey Abrams in a hotly contested race. Palast claims Kemp purged about 500,000 votes in that election (17).
These tensions persist today, and, for some, the slogan Make America Great Again, means returning to times when Blacks had fewer rights, including the right to vote.
Disenfranchisement tactics
Palast also takes aim at the propagandists who produced and released the film 2000 Mules (2022). The film «was launched by #Donald Trump# at Mar a Lago,» says Palast. The film argues that Black people vote more than once and, indeed, stuff the ballot with multiple votes. It even attempts to qualify a closed-circuit camera looking down on a Black person placing votes in a drop-off box as an example of voter fraud. Palast derides the notion, pointing out that only one example is shown in the film, and that example seems to depict a person dropping off the votes of his family, a legal activity. In the film, Palast confronts one of the vigilantes, Pam Reardon, and demands to know the basis for her challenge of 32,000 votes. She admits that she was provided a list by Republican operatives, and she went with that.
Palast demonstrated how Republican «hitmen» helped Donald J. Trump get to the White House in his book, How Trump Stole the 2020 Election. Hundreds of thousands of purged ballots, mostly of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and even university students. Most of the votes purged were «provisional» votes, meaning they were open to further «scrutiny» by voter registration officials under the supervision of Republican secretaries of state, who determine what a valid vote is. In the book, Palast explains how «no less than 5,872,857 ballots were cast and never counted” (177) in 2016.
Palast was also way ahead of the curve on the events of 6 January, when #MAGA delusionals stormed the palace and stole House Speaker Nancy Pelossi’s podium. He knew that Trump and his handlers would go after the electoral college process and, at least, try to stall the vote past a deadline, which, when reached, would have allowed Trump to remain in office by the technicality of the 12th Amendment no one had considered before in more than a hundred years.
The Battle for Democracy in Georgia
One apparent shortcoming of the film is that it is largely based in #Georgia, so some critics wonder if this doesn’t limit its spectrum of deceit. But Palast is seemingly ready for the question, and he quotes Mark Elias, a lawyer, who describes the vote challenge as «a virus.” He adds, «We asked the head of the #NAACP, the president who’s on camera, Gerald Griggs, why is it always Georgia, and he said this is the Deep South; Georgia is always the testing ground for voter suppression techniques.»
Palast has followed the election shenanigans for years for Rolling Stone, BBC, and the Guardian. In 2004, his book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, was published. The vote thieves are back with a vengeance and a mission: Get the MAGA dawg, Donald J. Trump, back in the White House. He was impeached twice as president (the one and only so done), his role in the ‘insurrection’ of 6 January 2021, in Washington, DC, whose purported aim was to delegitimise the #electoral college# vote in the House, keeping him in office. He has been under a legal dark cloud since leaving office and runs as a convicted felon, which ironically would prevent him from voting in many states. And he has had two assassination attempts on his life during the 2024 campaign. MAGA might mean Mad King George’s Revenge: The Rise of Crazy.
Palast is currently offering free viewings of Vigilantes, Inc. on his website.
