As the countdown to election day winds down, the presidential race is reportedly close, and both candidates on the Republican ticket will not publicly pledge to accept the election results if they don’t win. Given Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” disinformation campaign that culminated in a riot at the U.S. Capitol, and J.D. Vance’s refusal to admit that Trump lost the 2020 contest, along with his public statement that, had he been Vice President on January 6, 2021, unlike Mike Pence, he would not have certified the Electoral College tally, Americans are on high alert as to how the MAGA adherents might try to thwart the peaceful transfer of power again.
In his new documentary, Vigilantes Inc.: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen, investigative reporter Greg Palast exposes what he contends is a conspiracy to suppress the votes of hundreds of thousands of Democratic leaning citizens. Directed by David Ambrose and written and presented by a fedora-wearing Palast, Vigilantes Inc. zooms in on Georgia, which was so hotly contested in 2020 that, in a taped phone call, Trump infamously beseeched or possibly threatened Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him the votes he needed to win the state. Palast frames Georgia as ground zero for the grand conspiracy to subvert the 2024 presidential election for the Trump-Vance ticket.
According to Palast, 44,000 pro-MAGA “vigilantes” are currently poised to challenge voters in Georgia and other swing states. Palast contends that as of August, the voting rights of 851,000 citizens have already been challenged in Georgia and other swing states. He points a damning finger at the Peach State’s Senate Bill 202, which Governor Brian Kemp signed into law in March 2021. The bill is already notorious for prohibiting people from giving food or water to voters waiting in long lines at the polls.
But Palast points out that Section 15(a) of SB 202 also insidiously states: “Any elector of a county or municipality may challenge the qualifications of any person applying to register to vote in the county or municipality and may challenge the qualifications of any elector of the county or municipality whose name appears on the list of electors. Such challenges shall be in writing and shall specify distinctly the grounds of the challenge. There shall not be a limit on the number of persons whose qualifications such elector may challenge.” (Emphasis is in the original)
In the film, Palast crisscrossed Georgia to reveal an alleged plot to deliver the state to Trump and Vance. Palast confronts some of these challengers—all of whom are, unsurprisingly, Republican and white. One is Pam Reardon, whom Palast says is a GOP operative and is currently running for a seat on the county board. Palast contends Reardon challenged 32,000 mostly Black voters simply by delivering the list of contested voters electronically to state officials. When Palast confronts her about this accusation, she throws him and his camera crew out of her home.
Vigilantes Inc.
Pam Reardon and Greg Palast in "Vigilantes Inc.: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen."
Another challenger is Alton Russell, a Georgia Republican Party vice-chair who appears on camera dressed as Georgia-born O.K. Corral gunslinger Doc Holliday, wearing a cowboy hat and carrying a loaded revolver in his holster. Russell challenged the rights of 4,000 people to vote, according to the film.
But Palast goes even further, doing what the blithe challengers never did—he actually tracks down some of the Georgians who have been purged from the voter rolls by their accusers, including retired Major Gamaliel Turner, a Navy veteran whose vote was challenged while he was serving in California. Turner lives in the Atlanta home where the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and the Reverend Ralph Abernathy clandestinely met to strategize during the Civil Rights Movement. King’s ninety-two-year-old cousin, Christine Jordan, was also blocked from casting a ballot by election officials.
Palast, who has reported for the BBC, Rolling Stone, Democracy Now!, among others, is steeped in this investigative work, which includes reporting on the 2000 election in Florida. In 2001, Palast reported that Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s Secretary of State, Katherine Harris (who denounced Palast as “twisted and maniacally partisan”), purged thousands of Black people from the voter rolls in order to throw the election in favor of the Governor’s brother, George W. Bush.
Palast also documented what he called “Jim Crow in Cyberspace” in his 2002 New York Times bestseller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and in a similarly titled 2004 documentary film. With his strong sense of historical context, Palast charges that the current alleged conspiracy in Georgia is inspired by a 1946 plot by the Ku Klux Klan to block African American voter registration in Mississippi, which was called “Vigilantes Inc.”
Hence this documentary’s title, Vigilantes Inc.: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen. The seventy-eight-minute documentary was supported by the Hollywood Left, with narration by Rosario Dawson, who depicted United Farm Workers (UFW) leader Dolores Huerta in the 2014 biopic Cesar Chavez.
In a recent interview with The Hill, actor Martin Sheen, who executive produced the film, and also recorded a promotional spot for it, said, “We can’t trust them. They can’t trust themselves. So we have to be vigilant. And that’s part of what being involved in politics these days is being vigilant, and watch what’s going on and listen to what they say. But more importantly, watch what they do.”
To learn about what Sheen calls “a very real threat to the 2024 election,” you can attend one of the many nationwide presentations of this must-see film in Madison, Wisconsin, at an event sponsored by The Progressive. Palast will be in attendance and take questions after the screening. If you cannot make a live event, you can also watch the film for free through January 1, 2025 at: https://watch.showandtell.film/preview/vigilantesinc.