The Contending’s Megan McLachlan talks to writer/producer/investigator Greg Palast and director David Ambrose about their Martin Sheen-produced documentary Vigilantes Inc, which tackles racial voter suppression in the United States.
Politics is a polarizing topic, and no one knows that better than Greg Palast, who’s been covering racial voter suppression for 25 years for the likes of BBC Television, Rolling Stone, and The Guardian.
“My reports are at the top of the nightly news in England, Europe, South America, Australia—all over,” says Palast, “except it wasn’t in my own country. I decided I was going to have to go around the mainstream media because they don’t like to talk about this uncomfortable subject that we eliminated a lot of Black people from their voting rights.”
So Palast decided to make a film — Vigilantes Inc. — premiering digitally September 13 on the Show&Tell documentary platform as well as SaveYourVote.org. For the film, he worked with director David Ambrose, who also worked with him on his book Vultures Picnic and the film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (“This is a guy I knew could make people cry in 90 seconds”).
“Greg had started an investigation into Georgia in 2014,” says Ambrose, “and some of our footage [in Vigilantes Inc.] goes back to when he originally began this film. It’s been 8 years and 20 trips to Georgia and a year cumulatively spent there. We met some wonderful people and some not-so-wonderful people as you’ll see in the film. This is the completion of an eight-year investigation.”
Palast says one of the reasons American news is reluctant to feature his investigations is because he goes undercover — think The Daily Show‘s Jordan Klepper, but serious.
“We create fronts, and it’s an elaborate process to in effect get the bad guys in front of our cameras. And we’ll do whatever it takes to do that.”
In my conversation with Palast and Ambrose, we talk about the history of the film’s title (it comes from the Ku Klux Klan), being thrown out of Republican official Pamela Reardon’s when she had weapons all over her home, and how voter suppression tropes stem from the most controversial American film ever made — The Birth of a Nation.
Vigilantes Inc premieres digitally September 13 on the Show&Tell documentary platform, as well as SaveYourVote.org.
