Federal law prohibits states from any mass purge of voters within 3 months of an election. But in 1946, Jim Crow laws allowed groups to challenge other citizens’ right to vote on Election Day itself. The KKK incorporated “Vigilantes Inc.” to industrialize the ethnic purge. We just unearthed FBI files disclosing that, “The entire list of Negro voters was challenged.” While the Klan elected their man Talmadge as Governor, he only escaped arrest by the FBI by drinking himself to death.
But the Klan Plan is backTo our investigators’ horror, we found that, in 2021, after Trump’s fit over losing Georgia, the state passed a law returning the right of individuals (i.e. vigilantes) to challenge an “
unlimited” number of other voters’ right to a ballot right up through Election Day!
One Republican County Chairman, literally dressed as Vigilante Doc Holliday, with
loaded 6-guns, challenged Black soldiers based at Fort Benning, Georgia. One, whom you’ll meet in our film, MAJ. Gamaliel Turner, had to fly thousands of miles and bring in a Washington lawyer to have his 2022 ballot counted. Unfortunately, 4,000 other Black victims of “Doc Holliday”
lost their vote.
Luckily, our short film about the Georgia vigilante law, shown in churches and theaters throughout Georgia by the NAACP, student groups and ministers beat back almost every one of the 180,000 challenges filed by 80 GOP operatives. And working with Black Voters Matter and Rosario Dawson, we re-registered tens of thousands more and brought legal action in alliance with RainbowPUSH and the NAACP. The Senate election was saved.
Unfortunately, courts are allowing right-wing groups to mount these new mass attacks in dozens of other swing states—and again in Georgia.While most of the press is busy blathering about whether another Trump conviction will affect the vote, literally a million voters are
losing their ballots with hardly a peep in the press. Major Turner’s voting rights lawyer, Mark Elias, is losing his mind over the failure of the press to see the #1 threat to democracy in 2024: hundreds of thousands of vigilante challenges taken from lists created from uber-Right-wing groups led by True the Vote, the group that produced film
2,000 Mules, seen by millions, which purports to prove that literally hundreds of thousands of Black men were paid $10 each to stuff ballots into drop boxes.
Donald Trump called
2,000 Mules, “the most impactful documentary of our time.” And this time, he’s right! And that's why we have to fight it.
Since its release at Mar-al-Lago,
2,000 Mules has been supremely effective at getting states to all but eliminate dropbox voting in Black districts which has dropped by way over one million since the film came out.
That’s why we’re including this campaign against this important method of voting by minorities in our new national film.
While the distributor of
2,000 Mules, the “fraudulent voter" witch-hunt film, appropriately named Salem Media, apologized to one Black man they called a criminal “mule” allegedly casting fraudulent ballots, its KKK-created line still has led to laws and court rulings in swing states that shutter ballot boxes and allow “mules” to be challenged. (Alleged ‘ballot stuffing’ by Black men was the excuse for creating the Klan’s 1946 Vigilantes Inc. operation—and now the new vigilante laws.)
Our answer to 2,000 Mules is
Vigilantes Inc.: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen 
We take apart
2,000 Mules frame by frame. And then we’ll take you to places where
2,000 Mules has not only changed the law, suppressed the vote but has literally led to armed showdowns.
We go to Houston where a vigilante literally put a loaded gun to the head of a driver supposedly carrying “fraudulent” ballots; to the Arizona ballot drop boxes where armed vigilantes challenge Hispanic voters’ citizenship; to the most dangerous vigilantes of all…the nice GOP official dressed in Nancy-Reagan-red heels with thumb-drives filled with the names of Black neighbors whose votes she would block.
WATCH THIS 90-SECOND CLIP
No comments:
Post a Comment