Greg Palast

This Election is Going to be a Vote Suppression Bacchanalia

Let's stop counting Biden's brain cells, and start counting vigilantes. This election is going to be a Vote Suppression Bacchanalia — I’ve never seen anything like it. Mark Elias, who's considered the number one voting rights attorney these days, has said it’s is a virus coming out of Georgia. And it is.
Before the last election we found that under a little-noticed provision of Georgia’s 2021 voting restriction law, SB202, 88 GOP operatives had filed challenges to block a breathtaking 180,000 voters from having their ballots counted. One woman alone had challenged a staggering 32,379 voters in Cobb County.
This new Georgia law circumvented restrictions on states removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of an election, by allowing individuals to challenge an unlimited number of voters. And now this vigilante vote challenge tactic is spreading to other swing states.
The organization that created the challenge lists is a group out of Texas called True the Vote. In Georgia in 2022, when they first launched this vigilante game, they had 88 vigilante vote challengers, now they have an army of 44,000 operating in battleground states across the US.
 
But understand where this vigilante voter challenge scheme comes from. The Ku Klux Klan created this system in 1946 when they incorporated themselves as Vigilantes Inc. According to the FBI, the Klan challenged every single black voter in many counties in Georgia. And it worked. The Klan got their chief strategist, Eugene Talmadge, elected governor. 
Here's the strange thing... In 1946 — before the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act — Harry Truman's FBI was about to arrest Talmadge for leading this mass attack on Black voters, but days before they were going to arrest him, Talmadge drank himself to death. So, it was illegal in 1946, and now we have the Voting Rights Act, the National Voter Registration Act, and the Civil Rights Act, and somehow mass challenges of voters of color are perfectly fine with our federal courts?!?
The NAACP and Reverend Jesse Jackson, of Rainbow PUSH, have begged Biden to sign an executive order to stop these vigilante vote challenges. They're a clear violation of federal law, even without the Voting Rights Act. They're also a violation of our Constitution. And that's what the FBI under Harry Truman thought — so why isn't the FBI saying the same thing today? It was illegal in 1946, and it ought to be illegal now. 
 
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Election Crimes Bulletin: Trump Plan for 2024 Taken from KKK Plan of 1946

The Election Crimes Bulletin is back for the 2024 Election season.
In this week's episode we reveal how the Trump plan for 2024 — to use an army of vigilantes to challenge Black voters — is the exact same plan the Klan successfully used to elect Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge  in 1946.
Learn more at: GregPalast.com
 

Surreal News: Don’t Buy Exxon’s Fable Of The Drunken Captain

35 years after the Exxon Valdez ran aground, causing America’s greatest environmental disaster, investigative journalist Greg Palast explains why you shouldn't buy big oil's fable of the drunken captain. Get the full story at: https://www.gregpalast.com/dont-buy-exxons-fable-of-the-drunken-captain-2/

Elise Paschen reads Wi’-gi-e, the inspiration for Killers of the Flower Moon

Before Scorsese’s film, before Grann’s book, there was a poem... Osage poet Elise Paschen reads “Wi’-gi-e”, the poem which inspired the title of the book and film, Killers of the Flower Moon.
We filmed her special reading of the poem, which she dedicates to Lily Gladstone, who portrays Osage Native Mollie Burkhart in the film. If there is any justice in this world, Gladstone will win the Oscar for Best Actress.
It was Elise, co-founder of Poetry in Motion, whose poem is spoken in the voice of Mollie Burkhart, who first brought Mollie’s story to wider attention. (In the film, Mollie’s husband, Ernest Burkhart, is portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio.) 
After you hear Elise, make sure you catch the trailer for our documentary, Long Knife, produced by George DiCaprio and Greg Palast, which brings the story of the Osage up to date, focusing on the Osage Nation’s fight against the thievery of the Brothers Koch.This video was filmed by Battiste Fenwick on the Osage Reservation and edited by Esther Shubinski | @manytrailsproduction.
Elise Paschen 's poem “Wi’-gi-e” is published in Bestiary (Red Hen Press, 2009).
#KillersOfTheFlowerMoon #ElisePaschen #LilyGladstone #MartinScorsese #LeonardoDiCaprio #AcademyAwards #AcademyAwards2024 #Oscars #Oscars2024

Court Approves Vigilante Mass Voter Challenges; Devastating Threat to 2024 Election

A federal court in Georgia has just ruled that a challenge to 360,000 Georgians’ right to vote—suspiciously targeting Black voters—does not violate the Voting Rights Act. This decision poses a devastating threat to the 2024 election.
Judge Steve C. Jones slapped aside the suit brought by Stacy Abrams’ Fair Fight against Texas group True the Vote, which had created the hit list of voters. The judge cited “lack of evidentiary support”—but he refused to hear our evidence, which is featured in our film Vigilante.
And because the ruling came down from a federal court, True the Vote has a green light to expand its mass challenge of voters to other states including, according to the triumphant group itself, Arizona, Texas and several other swing states.
One disastrous decision by the court helped sink Fair Fight’s case. 
Fair Fight needed to show that the 80 vigilante challengers relied on True the Votes’ target list. The incriminating evidence was caught on camera and included in our film Vigilante: Georgia’s Vote Suppression Hitman. 
Republican Party official Pam Reardon personally challenged a breathtaking 32,379 voters. Reardon told me, cameras rolling, that she didn’t bother to check any of the info on these voters because she simply took the list from True the Vote. 
GOP official Reardon said, “I can’t go through 32,000 people. I was handed the list by True the Vote.”
Case closed…except the judge would not let Fair Fight put our film into evidence.
To match the expansion of True the Votes’ vigilante  vote challenge tactics, we're expanding our exposé. 
Support our new film, Vigilantes Inc. (out Fall 2024), and help us stop these mass voter challenges.➡️ Donate and get a screen credit: https://palastinvestigativefund.org/vigilantes-2024/

Court Rules only Voting Rights Criminals Can Sue Voting Rights Criminals—No Kidding!?!

Set your hair on fire right now, because a recent ruling by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals virtually repeals the last living section of the Voting Rights Act. This ruling, at the moment, applies to Arkansas, Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Missouri. But it's going to go to the US Supreme Court, then look out. Because if the SCOTUS judges go along with this ruling, the whole of the United States will be Jim Crow’d.
► For more on this go to: https://www.gregpalast.com/court-says-only-voting-rights-violators-may-sue/

Lawyers Guild Show: Palast Reports from the Frontlines of Democracy

If the new vote suppression tactics first used by Brian Kemp in Georgia — and exposed in investigative reporter Greg Palast’s new film Vigilante — are allowed to spread across the United States, then vote suppression, not the voters, will pick the next president. In this episode of the KPFK Lawyers Guild Show, hosts Jim Lafferty and Maria Hall talk to Palast about the new existential threats to our democracy.

Will Venue-Shopping Help Trump Evade Conviction in Georgia?

Will Georgia DA Fani Willis secure a conviction in her case against Donald Trump? Or will venue-shopping help Trump secure a more amenable jury pool to help him evade conviction?

Trump indicted under RICO statutes

Donald Trump and 18 others have been indicted by Fulton County District Attorney, Fani Willis, under RICO organized crime statues for trying to fix the 2020 presidential elections. Greg Palast reports from Oklahoma on the RICO indictment and on the planned right-wing high-jacking of the Native American vote in 2024.
“The RICO statutes are designed to find the spider in the middle of the web, and there's one spider, an orange spider, in the middle of this web.”
Learn more at GregPalast.com
 

Georgia scrubs voter rolls — again — removes 191,473 voters

Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, has just announced he’s removing 191,473 voters from the Georgia voter rolls. In the press release, Raffensperger boasts that Georgia has the “Cleanest voter lists in America” — of course, they've bleached them whiter than white.
Meanwhile, as reported by Meidas Touch host Fred Wellman, a right wing data miner has filed an Open Records request for “Copies of the signature cards used in the election process” — for ALL 7 million Georgia voters — including “the voter's name, address, and signature.” This is very dangerous. I presume it’s for the purpose of mass vigilante challenges to ballots.
And it's not just about Georgia. The Peach State is the GOP's test kitchen for vote suppression trickery, which they then roll out nationwide.
Vote suppression is class war by other means. It's about power and resources. They're not stealing votes to steal elections. They're stealing votes to steal the money.
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