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.
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