Greg Palast - Here's What We Do Now [View all]

[milestogo]

November 6, 2024

Being right never felt so horrid. Before the election, I wrote, “How Trump Won.” And on Election night I waited for the returns to make a fool of me. Instead, the returns made the fool a President. And so, my vacation’s cancelled. My life’s cancelled; that is, a life of anything but sleuthing and exposing the details of the heist of our democracy. What’s at stake? No way around it, this is one frightening moment. Decades of progress created with sweat and determination face destruction. Within the next six months, we may see the Voting Rights Act repealed — and civil rights set back 50 years; the entirety of our environmental protection laws burnt in a coal pit; police cruelty will be made our urban policy; the Education Department closed to give billionaires a tax holiday; and howling anti-Semites will be appointed White House counselors.

But the horror we face is countered by this one hard question the US media will ignore, but I can’t: Did Donald Trump actually win this election? If so, was it really a landslide? Here’s something you won’t read elsewhere: In the last Presidential, according to the official count of the federal Elections Assistance Commission, 2.7 million provisional ballots were rejected.

Whose ballots? If you’re Black, Hispanic or Asian-American, the chance you were shunted to one of these provisional ballots is 300% higher than if you’re white. How many Black ballots were thrown in the electoral dumpster? As a former professor of statistics, I know there’s still a lot of sleuthing in the numbers I have to do, but I can tell you this: The number of rejected provisional ballots, the number of voters wrongly purged from the rolls, the number of ballots “spoiled” and not counted, has unquestionably skyrocketed. The result: This is the most “Jim Crow,” racially bent election I’ve covered in 25 years of reporting.

Did that make the difference? Don’t ask our “see-no-evil” media. While, before the election, The New York Times (never forget to capitalize the “The”) and MSNBC will run some stories on vote suppression trickery, from crazy ID requirements to rejecting student registrations to suspect purges of voters. However, the establishment outlets will NEVER, EVER say that these ugly, racist electoral swindles changed the outcome of the election. They will wave the flag and tell us that American democracy prevailed again. That’s just horseshit. Excuse my French, but when are we going to face the fact that Jim Crow has returned — this time as Dr. James Crow, systems analyst.

Read more: https://www.gregpalast.com/heres-what-we-do-now/