December 12, 2024: A Day That Will Live in Infamy?
by John Kendall Hawkins
Greg Palast is known for his investigative reports for the Guardian and bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Palast has just released his film about the latest attacks on the right to vote. It's called, Vigilantes Inc: America's New Vote Suppression Hitmen, narrated by Rosario Dawson and produced by Martin Sheen. Leonardo DiCaprio just released the film for free streaming on his site, SAVE YOUR VOTE DOT ORG. [SaveYourVote.org]
I spoke with Palast by Zoom on October 3, 2024. What follows is an edited transcript.
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Hawkins: Why the title Vigilantes Incorporated? Surely that's a little unnecessarily provocative. a**holes Incorporated? Maybe. Yes, but vigilantes, Greg?
Palast: Well, I didn't come up with the title. The Ku Klux Klan did. Their plan to win was taking some old Jim Crow laws, which we have in the United States, in which any individual can say, Don't let this person vote because I know that they're not a legal voter. And in '46, the Klan said, We'll use that provision to knock off every Black voter in the state. And they did amass challenges. So they actually did eliminate almost all the black voters of Georgia. The Klan created a corporation to cover their tracks called Vigilantes, Inc. In 1946, the Klan elected Eugene Talmadge as governor of Georgia by eliminating black voters.
He was about to be arrested though. The FBI had an indictment. He was about to be arrested, [tried], and thrown in prison for removing Black voters from the voter rolls. But he had a collision with a bottle of bourbon and died just before they were going to arrest him. What's interesting is, that was 1946. Since then, America has [passed] new laws like the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. And yet, the Klan plan is now the Trump plan. So that's why we called the film Vigilantes, Inc.: America's New Vote Suppression Hitmen.
Hawkins: How does the challenge work? Do you go up to a desk and file an actual challenge?
Palast: That's what they did in '46. The Ku Klux Klan, under the cover of Vigilantes, Inc., actually filled out these forms that said, Don't let Joe Black vote because he didn't pay his poll tax. Or, Joe Black doesn't live here in Georgia. This time the Klan has gone into cyberspace. What they've done is, instead of filling out forms they send to the county boards, and say, Don't let Joe Black vote, they send in spreadsheets.
And you'll see, in my film, I confront one woman. She has already challenged over 32,000 people. You can only challenge people in your county. So, these are literally her neighbors, 32,000 neighbors.
Well, she didn't just tell me to get out of her house. If you watch the film, you'll see when we walk in, there's stacks of ammo to the ceiling. There's automatic weapons all over the place. And she made it clear it was a loaded AR 15 semi-automatic right next to her front door. She is what others call trailer trash. But this woman lived in this Gone with the Wind mansion, with the columns. Wealthy, elegant. She's in a red dress with high heels. The whole Nancy Reagan Republican outfit. She's running for vice chairwoman of the Republican Party in Georgia. I showed her a photo of one of her neighbors, this young black woman named Tamara Horne. And I said, have you ever met Miss Horne? No. Have you ever spoken to her? No I haven't. Have you ever gone over to her house? No. I said, but you did challenge her right to vote without ever contacting her, without ever checking the facts.
She suddenly got testy. She says, Ha, I can't call 32,000 people. Yeah, you can't, but you did challenge their right to vote -- all 32,000 voters.
By the way, if her challenges had gone through, Donald Trump would be our president right now. She made a threat to me. She starts calling me names that would have made a sailor blush. My local Atlantic camera crew ran for their lives. I don't blame them. They didn't sign up to be shot. And we got out of there.
Hawkins: You took a shot at DJ Trump in the film, saying he was responsible for putting out that intellectually-challenged film, 2000 Mules. I myself thought it might have been produced by Idiocracy, Incorporated, but aren't you being rather harsh on the ex-president?
Palast: Well, 2000 Mules is, as Donald Trump has said correctly, the most influential documentary of our time. Over 10 million people have seen the film. People working with Trump launched the film from Mar a Lago. In the film, they're accusing 2000 black men (mules) of stuffing ballot drop boxes in America. Most states have these drop boxes, which look like mailboxes, and you stick your ballot in, and you can do that before election day. The thing is, every single one of these drop boxes in America has a video camera trained on it, so they can check it and see who's going to the ballot box. Every ballot in America has a barcode on it that identifies individual voters. And what happens is the [Trump people] said all these Black men forged hundreds of thousands of ballots and stuffed them in the ballot box -- right on camera. And these vigilantes catch them right on camera, stuffing the ballot boxes illegally, they say. Felons, all Black men, and supposedly paid. Are you ready for this? They're [supposedly] paid $10 a ballot by George Soros and Mark Zuckerberg.
Now, here's the interesting thing: Mark Zuckerberg is a Republican and a Jewish billionaire. So, basically, 2000 Mules is saying Jewish billionaires are paying Black men $10 a ballot to stuff in ballot boxes.
I'll tell you why it's influential when they're saying all these Black men have been stuffing ballots into ballot boxes, committing a felony crime on camera. [At balloting stations], white people just walk in and vote. [Black people often face long lines.] And you're thinking, wait, what is this? Is this South African apartheid? Yes, is the answer. And, [a film like 2000 Mules] is very effective in stopping or massively reducing the number of drop boxes, which is devastating to the urban communities. In Georgia, they have forced the cities of Savannah and Atlanta, two major African American-controlled cities, to reduce the number of ballot boxes by 75%. There's only one box for over 100,000 voters in each of those cities.
But in the white counties the Republican-controlled legislature required white counties to increase the number of ballot boxes that they have out. This is real serious stuff and could change the outcome of the presidential election and the senatorial elections. So that's why we take 2000 Mules apart in our film.
Hawkins: Very good. All right, you called it last time, in 2020, about how Trump would try to overcome a ballot loss by diddling with the Electoral College vote by working on a technicality in the 12th amendment. Now his VP is hinting that he might not accept the outcome if he loses. Gosh, what other shenanigans can we expect this time around from Trump and his minions?
Palast: Here's why we did this film right now. The answer is that in 2020, there were 88 vigilante voter challenges fielded by this Trump group. True the Vote, they called themselves. There were 88 challengers in 2020, and now 40,000 voter vigilantes have signed up with True the Vote -- 40,000. And as of six weeks ago, as Martin Sheen will tell you in the introduction to our film, they had already challenged 851,000 voters. Let me repeat that: 851,000 voters as of now. They're way over a million vote challenges. And remember, Biden won by only 44,000 votes out of 180 million. If these vigilante challenges go through, I just don't see how we have a democratically elected president. So, that's why we did the film: to warn people.
Hawkins: No worries. Uh, I interviewed Frederick Joseph, an African American poet, a few weeks back about his poetry, and he felt that Kamala Harris beating Trump could lead to a racial meltdown. Uh, and some pundits argue that the politics of project 2025 could be the nail in the coffin of democracy. Uh, what do you see happening? Depending on who wins?
Palast: Everyone is familiar with the January 6th attack on the Capitol Building, which was set off because Donald Trump ordered his Vice President, Mike Pence, to not accept the electoral votes that were submitted to him from the states and from the National Archives. But there's no provision in the Constitution for Mike Pence to say he's throwing out electoral votes.
His job under the Constitution is literally to read off the electoral vote count. So, he would not go along [with Trump's misreading of the Constitution]. He's a very conservative cat. He would not go along with pretending to not certify the election. However, the Trumpites have gotten more sophisticated. They've reread the Constitution. Here's the problem: It's December 11th.
They couldn't get Mike Pence to stop it at the federal level. But they can stop it at the state level. If they can stop states from certifying the election on December 11th, our democracy is over, because what happens is it then goes under the US Constitution. If you have a state like Georgia or Arizona or Michigan or Wisconsin, not certify their vote, then there's not enough electoral votes. It goes to a totally different voting system in America. It's a wacky thing where each individual state gets one vote for president. That means that California, with 39 million citizens, gets one vote, and South Dakota with a half million citizens like 2% of the California population, they get one vote. And the result is that all these small Republican states will elect the president, despite the popular vote, despite the electoral vote. And what I'm worried about is that one way they're going to try to stop certification on December 11th is that there's going to be riots in North Carolina, in Atlanta, in Michigan, in Arizona. In Nevada, I would be very concerned about really violent riots to make sure that Trump is going to be elected.
Hawkins: So if Kamala wins; if it's a repeat of her winning the popular vote but losing the Electoral College to him, what do you think would be the result?
Palast: What I'm worried about is that she could win both the popular vote and the Electoral College, [and still be kept out of the White House]. We've had this once before. In 1876, the Democrat, a guy named Tilden, won the popular vote, and he won the Electoral College. Why wasn't he made president? Because the Republicans cut a deal. The northern industrial Republicans cut a deal with the Ku Klux Klan, which controlled the Democratic votes of the South. They agreed to put in this guy Rutherford B Hayes. And what the Ku Klux Klan got in return for making a Republican president, even though he lost both the popular vote and the electoral vote, was to end Reconstruction. What that meant is: federal troops had to leave the South. Their main purpose for being in the South was so that black people could vote without being terrorized. So once the northern troops left, no one protected the Black vote. The Ku Klux Klan came back into power. And that was the end of the ability of Black people in America to vote for 100 years.
Hawkins: Vigilantes Inc. begins with a reenactment of a Civil War battle. You spoke with a Rebel actor from Georgia, who went on about how the South was going to rise again, and he's got that hee-haw Good Ol' Boy voice and sunglasses. Funny, but when you think about it: scary, because you know they actually believe some of the stuff they say.
Palast: Well, here's the other part of that story. So, the film opens up like you're in the middle of the Civil War, with soldiers in their outfits and guns going off and cannons booming. And it's a reenactment of the only battle that the South ever won in Georgia against the Union troops. So, they're celebrating their big victory over the North, which lasted about 11 minutes before Sherman burned Atlanta to the ground. And, I'm talking to these guys wearing Confederate gear and all that stuff, these bikers, you know, and I'm asking them about the South rising again. And I say, What, you guys can't accept defeat after 150 years? They said, Never. But then one thing I didn't have in the film, mainly because their drawls were so thick, I would have had to use subtitles, because most Americans would not understand what they were saying. But they were saying, Look, we've already picked out our places on top of the buildings on Peachtree Street in Atlanta. In other words, they were ready to go up to those building tops and start shooting. They were ready to do that. This is no joke in America. This is no joke. They were talking about using AR 15s.
Hawkins: A while back, you were producing a film that told a different side of the Osage country oil exploitation story that's depicted in Killers of the Flower Moon. How's that coming along?
Palast: George DiCaprio was the producer of Vigilantes, Inc. His son, Leonardo, starred in Killers of the Flower Moon. It's about how the Osage Nation became the richest people in America [per capita] because they sat on top of the biggest oil field in America. And what happened was that the US government said, We can't have a bunch of millionaire Indians. We gotta do something about this. So they required, by federal law, that each tribal member who owned oil would have to have a guardian to take care of their finances for them. Guardians systematically killed their wards; killed up to between 100 and 200 Native Americans. I'm not kidding. They just killed them, ran them off roads, poisoned them, shot them in the back of the head. Often they would marry them. And right after the wedding, shoot them in the head or something. That was a common practice.
But that film's narrative ends in 1924. But there's been another hundred years of exploitation. And so I'm doing the next 100 years from 1924 to 2024. And here the core of the story is that the Osage Nation and its oil are the source of the Koch brothers first billion dollars. They stole oil from the Osage Nation. After they were caught by the FBI, they created the Koch network, which basically bought their way out of prison. It was that simple. Charles Koch would be in prison today if he didn't use a chunk of his billion to basically buy the US Senate and buy the US judiciary. So that story is in a film I'm making now, titled Long Knife.
The two films go together, thematically and politically. You can't steal people's oil, and you can't steal people's freedom unless you take away their vote. The American native tribes are truly under attack by the GOP. For example, in Arizona, a swing state in this election, removed every early voting station, every single one from the Yaqui Pascua reservation.
So, if you're a part of the Yaqui Pascua Tribe, you might have to drive 100 miles round trip to cast a vote at a polling station. And the only way that Biden won Arizona by just a few thousand votes out of a couple million, is that members of the Osage Nation of Oklahoma went down to Arizona and they organized a whole mail-in campaign so people wouldn't have to drive 100 miles round trip. If it weren't for the activism of American Natives, Biden would have lost Arizona and the presidency. So you're going to get these stories in the film.
Hawkins: We talked a couple of years ago about the invasion of Ukraine. What do you have to say about how it's going?
Palast: Well, obviously, the last thing we want is nations invading our country and murdering hundreds of thousands of people. This is just old fashioned imperialism. It's Putin trying to recreate not the Soviet Union, but the Russian Empire. On my site, I have an article called "Putin's Mein Kampf." He wrote an article in June of 2022, before the invasion, saying that Ukraine is not a nation. Remember that Putin is a violent, anti-communist. He says the problems with Ukraine are the fault of the Bolsheviks for falsely claiming that Ukraine is a separate country. But here's the problem. I'm just talking to you about that. Just as Black people in Georgia should be allowed to vote and people should determine their own fate, why doesn't that apply to Ukraine? Why shouldn't the Ukrainians decide who should be running their government? Why shouldn't Ukrainians have a vote? So, Putin's decided to vote for everyone in Ukraine. And if they don't agree with him, he's going to kill them. I have too many journalist friends who are right now in prison in Russia for simply calling the invasion an invasion. Hopefully we'll have the opportunity to see him in prison with Donald Trump.
Hawkins: Netanyahu.
Palast: Well, the Biden administration made a big mistake. Netanyahu is not the head of government. He's not the president. They have a president. And the head of state of America should not be recognizing the leadership of a political faction. Our president should only be talking to the head of state of Israel, instead of these right wing fruitcakes who have now decided that they're not satisfied with one war, but need two. Now it's true. There's no question it was Hamas that invaded Israel. Israel did not invade Gaza. And so let's remember that. But the reaction has been horrific, and extending the war, no matter how horrific and bloodthirsty Hezbollah is, is a very dangerous thing to do. I'm not an expert in foreign policy or conduct of war, but I do think that the president of the United States should only deal with the president of Israel, and not with some political right wing fruitcake who is dangerous to his own people.
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Vigilantes, Inc. can be streamed at gregpalast.com for free.
How Trumps Stole the 2020 Election can be downloaded for free at his site as well.
