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  • FILM REVIEW: Greg Palast's "Vigilantes Inc.: America's New Vote Suppression Hitmen"

    Sep 13, 2024

    I'm speechless really.

    Greg Palast has released his latest film, "Vigilantes Inc.: America's New Vote Suppression Hitmen," which warns of the killer effect of this latest incarnation of the KKK across the country, reactionary Republicans who are determined to keep Blacks from voting [Democratic] especially come Election 2024, by any and every means possible and "necessary." Today 40,000 Vigilantes work in 43 states. By August of this year, 851,000 votes had been challenged. Palast's film is a voyage through several swing states-- Arizona, Texas, Wisconsin, and Michigan-- but centered in Georgia, epicenter of the Old South and election corruption, to which the filmmaker/author continually returns.

    [You can stream the film for free by visiting www.gregpalast.com and downloading it from there]

    A scene in Georgia of a militia in training on a grassy plain, complete with gunfire, in full Civil War regalia appears soon after the film begins. Jocular Palast approaches one Vigilante and finds out that the war never ended and will be won: The South will rise again--helped by the new "necessary" state actions that will block Blacks' registration and voting in every conceivable way. "When? Next Thursday?" he asks as the combatant chortles. 

    Necessary to violate the fundamental right of every Black and other BIPOC American over 18 in this country, with Georgia as radius since 2016? Young people are another chief target as likely Democratic voters. 

    And speaking of Georgia, the only passage in the original Declaration of Independence censored out was Thomas Jefferson's* paragraph on the evils of the slave trade. Who censored it? The Continental Congress at the demand of the GEORGIA delegation. Jefferson penned this draft in the home of a friend, James Habersham, first governor of Georgia, who transformed agriculture by importing the first shiploads of Black slaves from Africa. 

    "Vigilantes Inc." traces Habersham's lineage to the present governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, the latest kingpin of voter suppression. And Palast pinpoints Georgia as the linchpin of a massacre of BIPOC (Black/Indigenous/People of color), especially Black, voting rights, throughout Georgia's and American history, in stunning detail. The depth of research is in itself monumental and the details devastating. Trump threatens to expunge such truths from history books as a "merciless campaign to erase our history!" 

    Palast's genealogy of Black oppression intricately involves Kemp's forebears-- Kemp who when he first campaigned for political office claimed to have originated humbly. The "humble" cabin foregrounded was actually his residence on his father's sprawling estate. When he graduated from college, he already owned a construction company. Today he owns $2 mn worth of wooded acreage that supplies pulp for toilet paper manufactured by the Koch brothers. Along with multiple other holdings. 

    In addition to Habersham, another Kemp ancestor spearheaded the largest auction of humans [slaves] in world history. Slaveowner and purveyor Roswell Kent presided over what the Blacks call "Weeping Time." 

    It is weeping time for all of us, who become "conspiracy experts" [Palast's answer to the derogatory "conspiracy theorists"] as we review the heinous violence against Blacks as they sought to vote again and again. In 1918 Mary Turner, a Black woman nine months pregnant, was lynched-- burned and mutilated, her womb punctured and the fetus's head crushed into the ground, a day after her husband had been lynched and she dared to speak out against it. The plaque commemorating her was riddled with bullet holes so many times it had to be taken down. 

    Right after the Civil War, the KKK**, a wing of the Democratic Party, formed to suppress Black votes, often violently or threatening violence. Jump to1876 when a compromise deal violating the voters' presidential choice, Samuel Tilden, gutted the Reconstruction reforms and protections against racism, such as they were. And from there jump to 1946, when KKK strategist Eugene Talmadge, nemesis of FDR and the FBI, a governor drunk "2/3 of the time," warned Blacks away from registration and going to the polls, threatening and implementing violence via his henchmen, named Vigilantes Inc. as the latest incarnation of the KKK, and formed specifically to eliminate every Black from the voter rolls. Blacks resumed registration the minute he succumbed to his addiction. 

    The "Civil War Part 2," or "Jim Crow 2.0," saw daylight in 2016, when Kemp was elected as secretary of state of Georgia, part of which entails control of elections. Palast was drawn into Kemp's racist activism as Kemp collaborated with the notorious Kansas SoS Kris ("KKK") Kobach (now attorney general of Kansas) to cross-check voter rolls from multiple states to eliminate "double voters-- "those with common names like James Brown and Jose Garcia who appear in the hundreds. Their middle initials may have varied, but who cared? They were kept from voting. Caught trying to vote while Black or Latino. In 2018 Kemp's new hitlist removed half a million voters who had supposedly moved from their listed addresses. Via Amazon and Google databases, Palast's investigators found that 340,000 had not left the addresses they had registered under. 

    True the Vote, a racist vote-snatching organization begun in 2009 in Texas, the "true danger to democracy in 2024," released a modern-day equivalent of the bigoted 1915 film "Birth of a Nation," which showed a Black voter sneaking an extra vote into a ballot box. In a videotaped clip repeated throughout, "2,000 Mules" (2022) documented a Black man depositing multiple mail-in votes into a ballot box, even though a Peachtree State law encourages voters to bring their families' ballots in this fashion, presumably to avoid unnecessary crowding. The filmmakers claimed to have 27 different videotapes of similar "voter fraud" incidents, but where were they? This "most impactful film of our time" [according to Trump], claiming massive voter fraud in Election 2020, enjoyed considerable success "for a political documentary," though later its credibility was debunked. 

    The day after the Georgia miracle that created a Democratic majority in the Senate, with the simultaneous victories of a Black man (Rafael Warnock) and a Jewish man (Jon Ossoff), January 5, 2021, came the Trump-incited Capitol Riot, a heinous reply. Another swift reply was Georgia's SB 202, a lengthy law that works in every way possible to disenfranchise Black voters, eliminating voting on the Sunday before Election Day, when throughout the country the Souls to the Polls program buses Blacks to voting places after church services--where this particular Sunday hasn't been eliminated as an early voting day. SB 202 also initiates the right of anyone to challenge as many voters as possible, marking them on registration rolls as ineligible to vote unless they prove otherwise by documentation that they live at the addresses listed. SB 202 also makes it a felony to bring water or food to voters forced to stand in line for hours on end, typically Blacks since polls in White neighborhoods tend to run far more smoothly. And there is more repression, hundreds of pages more. 

    A case in point of vote challenging is in Vigilantes Inc.'s first clip, a scene of Palast interviewing red-clad Republican operative Pamela Reardon, who challenged 32,379 Georgia voters, as newly allowed by SB 202. After acknowledging that she doesn't know any of her victims, nor details of the law, she ends up throwing him out with the invective "a**hole!" as he asks her if she still resides at her address, in case anyone might challenge her. Her well-appointed upscale home features a rifle next to the front door and bullet rounds on the mantlepiece-- certain incentive for Palast's obliging exit. A tragicomic cameo to draw us into the steady stream of racist outrages that keep us riveted throughout the film, incredulous. 

    Following the Reardon scenario are the stories of Major Gamaliel Turner, temporarily stationed in California, whose vote is challenged two or three days before Election Day, and Christine Jordan, a civil rights activist and cousin of MLK, 92 years old, who hasn't missed an election in her life and voted at the same location for 50 years, also turned away from the polls. Turner's father, Joe Turner, helped found the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, working side by side with MLK and Ralph Abernathy. And so there are Black pedigrees in counterpoint to Kemp's lily-white ones, one of many bladed dualities that pervade the film where white is evil and Black is martyrdom, reversing the traditional stereotype. 

    Voter fraud en masse, the reactionaries call it. Actual documented cases of voter fraud, "voting more than once in an election," are rarer than hens' teeth. Palast's example involves three convicted Republicans. 

    *****

    These are but few of the many anecdotes, incredible but true, hugely tragic but some with a wry edge of humor--Palast's trademark that in the retelling just as quickly draws horrified amazement: to what depths can human nature descend? "Vigilantes Inc." begins with a gun bookmarking a Bible, a Christian nationalist trope, and ends with vigorous optimism backgrounded by the Negro spiritual "Wade in the Water" with relevant updated verses. "There's a new South rising"; "We are a new generation," exclaim young Blacks. Maj. Turner has lived through passage of the Voting Rights Act as well as the rank repression and violence pinpointed repeatedly in "Vigilantes Inc." "There are those that resent all this," he says. 

    "As a nation, we are stronger and better than all of that."

    --------------- 

     

    *Jefferson was no angel. Another paragraph he penned, calling the American Indians "savages," wasn't censored. He himself owned slaves and fathered any number of hybrid Black/white descendants. His will freed his slaves, however. 

    **Ironically, the "KKK Act" passed by Congress in 1871, outlawed voter intimidation as a criminal offense.

     

     

     

    "Vigilantes Inc." debuted in theaters in Hollywood this week and will travel to Oakland on September 25. As of this Friday, September 13, in anticipation of National Voter Registration Day on September 17, it will be released for nationwide distribution free of charge in coordination with Rainbow/PUSH, NAACP, Black Voters Matter, and ACLU SoCal.

     

  • Greg Palast, "Vigilante: Georgia's Vote Suppression Hitman"

    Oct 21, 2022

    (Note to readers: This is a review; the previous blog entry was a preview.--Ed.)

    One aspect of Greg Palast's latest harrowing investigation, as executive producer Martin Sheen says, is horror. This is a horror movie, replete with unfathomable corruption and the ghosts of hideous violence.

    It is a dire tragedy--opening on the heels of Stacey Abrams' failed lawsuit to prove the lawless corruption of many electoral practices in Georgia, including the scrubbing of registration rolls that handed the 2018 gubernatorial race to Brian Kemp.

    Another aspect of Vigilante is heartbreak: of the senseless repression of hundreds of thousands of innocent voters caught attempting to vote while black. Individual victims are interviewed crying over the abuse of their rights, including a first cousin of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., 96-year-old Christine Jordan, and Major Gamaliel Turner, this country's leading expert on warfare of the future. While he was stationed in California serving this country, he applied for an absentee ballot. When he didn't receive it, he contacted the registrar's office and was told that his vote had been challenged. He had to make the inquiry. No one told him. Once a Georgia vote is challenged, subjects must prove their qualifications, often residency, even if they've lived and voted in the same place for years. Turner was able to regain his rights. But the same thing is happening to countless others in Georgia who won't be told unless they ask about it. They must be warned. They stand to lose their votes--250,000 of them have already been challenged. To find out if you've been challenged, go to SaveMyVote2022.org.

    Georgia history is a leitmotif in Vigilante. In one example, an armed Georgian militia in Civil War regalia is showcased early in the film. They proudly wave Confederate flags and their new solid white "secession" flag with a large red star in the center--red the color of Republicans or blood or both?

    And red is the bright color of the dress sported by another corrupt interviewee, Pamela Reardon, her comfy home protected at the front door with an assault weapon. This ambitious GOP operative is convinced that election 2020 in her Peachtree state was stolen from Trump. Nonresident votes kept him from winning, she says. She alone has challenged more than thirty-three thousand voters, though she claims only to have sent out "letters" (caging postcards?) requesting proof of address. Challenged herself on this point, she loudly throws Palast out, swearing as he leaves, most unbecoming to a southern lady. He thanks her.

    But the star of the film, if not the oppressed victims of repression time and again, If not Palast, is the vigilante, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who campaigned initially on his humble background and professed wish to integrate school--both lies. Palast traces his lineage back to the first importers of African slaves into Georgia before the Revolution. Get this: slavery was against the law in Georgia even then. Farmers objected to this atrocity in vain.

    More recently, Kemp is the scion of a thriving construction corporation, owners of myriad acres of wooded land now a source of toilet paper pulp for Koch Industries among others.

    We are treated to a brief tour of one of the plantation manor homes of Kemp's forebears. They'd smile with pride, though challenging voters originated with Gene Talmadge, a Ku Klux Klanner elected as governor of Georgia in 1945. 

    Kemp revived this practice with the passage of SB202 in the immediate wake of the Georgia Miracle in January 2020 that swept a black minister and Jewish filmmaker into the Senate, giving the majority to Democrats.

    Kemp's SB202 not only allows any Georgian to challenge an unlimited number of voters--48,000 have been challenged in Cobb County alone, one of the few Democratic strongholds in this swing state. It also criminalizes the donation of water and/or food to voters stuck in long lines at the polls"a felony, an act of "civil disobedience."

    Palast delves into more Georgia history, including the lynchings whose ghosts cry out for justice. An interview with the Georgia Historical Society ends when the subject of the Hayes-Tilden 1876 electoral impasse comes up; the fear is that the board of directors, all moguls appointed by Kemp, would be offended.

    Parallels are drawn with D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, which defends the KKK's denial of voting rights to blacks"portrayed by white actors in blackface.

    The "KKK Act" of 1871 actually forbade the intimidation of voters.

    "The South Will Rise Again"? Yes, the film concludes, not with reactionary fantasies but MLK's dream: "This too [the corruption] will pass. We're stronger and better!" "Spirits crying out for justice will rise from their graves."

    Defending his own ghosts, Kemp is battling the ghosts of oppression--a horror story indeed. 

    Lasting an hour, Vigilante is narrated by Rosario Dawson, directed by David Ambrose, and produced by the Academy award winner Maria Florio. To find live presentations, go to Click Here. To order the dvd, go to Click Here

    Don't miss this warning of an already-metastatic cancer. It's about the future of democracy. It will anger you and provoke the activism and actions crucial to preserving it.


  • Palast's Latest Investigation, "Vigilante: Georgia's Vote Suppression Hitman," Out October 4

    Aug 23, 2022

    DVD cover of
    DVD cover of 'Vigilante'
    (Image by Greg Palast)       Details   DMCA

    It's heartbreaking. Today on the weekly online edition of the Green Grassroots Election Protection Coalition, the well-known and hugely accomplished investigative reporter, author, and filmmaker Greg Palast discussed his forthcoming documentary Vigilante: Georgia's Vote Suppression Hitman.

    Produced by Martin Sheen and Maria Florio, Vigilante exposes the new voter law In Georgia (the "Election Integrity Act of 2021," Senate Bill 202) that allows any Georgia voter to challenge any other Georgia voter. So far, one GOP operative has challenged 4,000, another 32,000, and altogether hundreds of thousands have come under this lethal fire. The voting year is crucial of course: there are both gubernatorial and Senate races pitting Democrat Stacey Abrams against Republican Brian Kemp [again*] and Democrat Raphael Warnock against Republican Herschel Walker and Libertarian Chase Oliver.

    In this context, Palast's not-for-profit Investigative Fund is nonpartisan; the bottom line is to make sure that the candidate that voters choose takes office. In 2018, among other investigations, he targeted the 2018 match between Abrams and Kemp, which awarded Kemp the victory by 50,000 votes, by exposing and litigating over the hundreds of thousands of other voters purged from the registration rolls who would have put Abrams over the top (see Click Here ).

    In Vigilante, says Palast, "I concentrate on Georgia because that is where the vigilante hitmen are most desperate" and where the ultra-right takes its ballot box trickery for a test drive."

    "If you can't win elections, arrest the people who are going to vote against you," is how Harvey Wasserman, co-convener of Green Grassroots Election Protection Coalition (a coalition of activists, journalists, and others concerned with free and fair elections), summed up the GOP strategy in Georgia.

    There has been absolutely no national press about Georgia's SB 202, which also makes absentee and dropbox voting highly problematic; it is also a felony now to hand drinks or food to people standing in line to vote, even for hours under the hot Georgia sun.

    Contrast the silence about SB 202 with the wide circulation of the film 2,000 Mules, produced by True the Vote, a GOP-empowered organization that militates against true election integrity even as it has coopted this term for its own purposes. 2,000 Mules has been viewed by millions all over the country. The focus is mainly on black male voters supposedly committing voter fraud by stuffing ballot boxes and being paid $10 per ballot. Palast compared this film to D. W. Griffiths's Birth of a Nation, which Palast called the "Elders of Zion of Black voting." Vigilante is meant to be an antidote to 2,000 Mules.

    Vigilante also exposes lineage Kemp has labored to hide. A "scion of dynasties," he is descended from the families who first brought African slaves to Georgia and earned prodigious wealth descendants continue to enjoy. The text of SB 202 that Kemp signed contained a picture of a plantation. Kemp's family, owners of massive forests in Georgia, does business with Georgia Pacific, a Koch brothers company. Others are stepping into GOP activism as the Kochs withdraw: Paul "the Vulture" Singer, who has been a featured billionaire predator in Palast's previous publications,** and the Bradley Foundation, which has contributed $2 billion to fight against voting rights in Georgia and Florida, among other states. The idea of challenging voters originated with a KKK governor of Georgia, Gene Talmadge, who escaped the FBI by dying before they could indict him.

    Kemp also signed a bill outlawing the teaching of critical race theory--against teaching history, as Palast specified. He has lots to hide. A cousin in Virginia openly acknowledges the family's past and is working on reparations.

    How does the process of voter challenge work? Voters are supposed to receive a postcard, designed to look like junk mail (remember voter caging?), but they often don't receive one or mistakenly discard it, and hence don't find out until too late that they've been challenged--too late means that they simply cannot vote. And consider this: a voter may be challenged on Election Day. But if you know you've been challenged, you go to a county office, in person only, to prove at a hearing that you are you and reside where you claim to.

    What is being done to fight back against this blatant discrimination? Are the Democrats challenging Republicans? Palast dismissed this possibility as worse than ridiculous. Activist organizations will litigate, and educate and otherwise reach out to targeted groups. In 2020, Palast credits attorney and activist Barbara Arnwine with having worked with colleagues to drive challenged voters to county office hearings, enough to have handed over Georgia's hugely contested presidential vote total to Joe Biden. Register and reregister, said Palast, who himself had to reregister when he found himself dropped from the rolls in Los Angeles.

    Vigilante offers far more to a public that must be informed accurately about the machinations that so threaten democracy. What else can be done? Activism and support of organizations fighting back: Black Voters Matter, NAACP, SCLC, and others, including of course the Palast Investigative Fund. The film will be shown first in New York City on October 4 and subsequently in Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Order your copy and donate at Click Here.

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    *Kemp was, by the way, secretary of state, that is, in charge of state elections, in 2018.

    **And speaking of Palast's "horror role," another prominent figure from his previous investigations, Kris Kobach, of crosscheck infamy, is back in circulation running for attorney general of Kansas, after having lost gubernatorial and Senate races in his state. Less power to him!

    ---------------

    (originally published 8/22/22 at OpEdNews.com, https://www.opednews.com/articles/Palast-s-Latest-Investigat-Georgia-Election_Georgia-Governor-Race_Georgia-Politics_Investigation-220822-850.html)