Greg Palast

25 years of investigations. Millions of voters erased. A system built to decide elections before you ever touch a ballot. Vigilantes Inc. exposes the real-life hunt for ‘illegal voters’ — and the shocking truth behind who’s actually being targeted. Last month, Vigilantes Inc. was screened as part of the Teaneck International Film Festival, a prestigious human rights event. The sold out screening, held on November 9 at the Puffin Cultural Forum, featured a Q&A with filmmaker Greg Palast. Anthony Johnson of ABC News hosted the discussion — the perfect choice given that as a young man he worked for voting and civil rights icon John Lewis. “I spoke to him six months before he passed away,” Johnson told Palast, as they introduced themselves to the audience after the film. “One things he said to me was that ‘they’re gonna try to take us back, but we’re not gonna let them.’ And by giving us the information that you shared in [this film], there’s more reason to believe more optimistically, as sad as this is, that that will not happen.”  Johnson’s first question for Palast: How did it all begin? “I started 25 years ago, when I was a reporter for The Guardian and BBC television,” replied Palast. “It’s the 2000 election, and I’m watching all these Black people come before the BBC TV cameras, one after another, saying I couldn’t vote in Florida.” Palast was a conspiracy expert for the US Justice Dept and began questioning the purge of 58,000 Black men from the voter rolls. It was the beginning of an investigation that would uncover a political machine capable of deciding elections long before a single ballot was cast. And, after 25 years of digging, that investigation became the award-winning film, Vigilantes Inc. During the Q&A, the audience got a rare look behind the curtain: how a “conspiracy theory” turned out to be a very real conspiracy. What the Q&A made clear is this: It’s not about Democrats or Republicans. It’s not about partisanship. It’s about rights. It’s not about left or right, but right and wrong. And it’s about the unseen tools used to erase voters — often without their knowledge — while the public is told to “trust the process.” Palast shared many of the heartbreaking stories highlighted in his film: a military veteran purged because he was assigned to duty out of state… a 92-year-old civil rights icon showing up to vote for her 50th straight year, only to find her name erased… and entire communities losing access to ballot drop boxes overnight. Palast also talked about the math — a part of the story almost no one hears. The investigation found that for every illegal voter caught, around one million legal voters were wrongly targeted and removed from voter rolls. This isn’t speculation; it’s data reviewed name-by-name by experts who usually work for Amazon and Microsoft on mailing list hygiene to prevent delivery mistakes. The bottom line? Vote suppression is not an accident. It’s a system. And Vigilantes Inc. exposes the system: the strategists who designed it, the politicians who enable it, the billionaires who fund it — and the communities fighting to overcome it. If you’ve ever wondered how elections flip in ways that defy demographics… why millions of provisional ballots never get counted… or how “election integrity” became a euphemism for mass disenfranchisement — this film’s for you. And if you’ve ever felt like your vote doesn’t matter, this Q&A makes one thing painfully clear: Someone out there is working very hard to make sure you believe that your vote isn’t valuable.  Because your vote is valuable — valuable enough to steal.   Vigilantes Inc. is more than a documentary. It’s a warning, a wake-up call, and a blueprint for fighting back. Stream it for FREE on Youtube and share it with everyone you know: https://youtu.be/P_XdtAQXnGE Host a community screening: https://www.gregpalast.com/vigilantes-inc-the-movie/ Learn more about how to protect your vote by subscribing to our Substack: https://gregpalastinvestigates.substack.com/ And don't forget to CHECK YOUR REGISTRATION: http://vote.org  

Trying to force a protégé to sleep with him is the least of Larry Summers sins. I’ve been hunting this toxic asset for three decades, and his victims number in the millions. No kidding. The current charge that finally brought Summers down was the revelation that he was asking Jeffrey Epstein for advice on how to seduce a young mentee, using his position as one of the world’s most powerful economists to get her pants off. Yuck. But I’m not writing to tell you about Larry the Lecher. Rather, I want to let you in on the secret known by a couple Nobel Prize winning acquaintances of mine who would agree that Larry Summers may just be the most dangerous, destructive economist on Earth. (And that’s saying a lot because I was a protégé of another killer economist: Milton Friedman, the mouthpiece for the phony “free market” horrors that have bedeviled the planet for decades.) What set me on Summers was a whole stack of confidential documents I obtained via the brilliant investigator Mary Bottari of the Center for Media and Democracy. She’d gotten her hands on hundreds of secret documents of the World Bank where Summers had been Chief Economist. But the killer doc was a highly confidential note written in 1997 from Summer’s flunky, Timothy Geithner, who was then Ambassador to the World Trade Organization when Summers was Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton. Clinton would soon give Summers the top job as Treasury Secretary when Robert Rubin went off to Chair Citibank (for a $126 million paycheck), a financial monolith created by banking “deregulation” as promoted by Rubin, Geithner and Summers. The Summers plan for de-regulation allowed banks to gamble our savings accounts in the new derivatives markets. It didn’t take long for the crash. In 2008, Summers’ suckers — that’s you and me, the public — ponied up some $4 TRILLION dollars to bail out Citibank, Goldman Sachs (once chaired by Rubin). America went bust while Summers, Rubin and Geithner cashed in big time. Get the full story, read: Larry Summers, Epstein and the “End Game” Memo https://gregpalastinvestigates.substack.com/p/larry-summers-epstein-and-the-end    For more from Palast, subscribe to his Substack:  https://gregpalastinvestigates.substack.com/    Support independent journalism, buy Greg a coffee: https://buy.stripe.com/14kdRh1QhgDi34s4gh    

Investigative journalist Greg Palast joins The Rick Smith Show to tear open the newly uncovered emails between Harvard’s Larry Summers and Jeffrey Epstein — emails in which the very-married Summers leans on the convicted predator as his “wingman,” seeking tips on how to seduce a young economist he was mentoring. Palast lays out how Summers — Clinton’s Treasury Secretary and Obama’s National Economic Council Director — helped engineer the global deregulation spree that detonated economies from Wall Street to Latin America. And he returns to the infamous secret “End-Game” memo he first exposed in VICE: a blueprint showing how U.S. Treasury insiders quietly colluded with a cabal of banking titans to bulldoze financial protections worldwide. Will this Epstein scandal finally push Democrats to cut loose the high priest of neoliberalism? Is this the long-overdue Summers reckoning? Learn more: Read Larry Summers and the Secret "End-Game" Memo: https://www.gregpalast.com/larry-summers-and-the-secret-end-game-memo/ For more from Palast, subscribe to his Substack: https://gregpalastinvestigates.substack.com Support independent journalism, buy Greg a coffee: https://buy.stripe.com/14kdRh1QhgDi34s4gh  

LBC's Matt Frei talks to Greg Palast about the latest madness in MAGA-land in this interview first broadcast on Nov 15, 2025.   For more from Palast, subscribe to his Substack: gregpalastinvestigates.substack.com Support independent journalism, buy Greg a coffee: https://buy.stripe.com/14kdRh1QhgDi34s4gh  

In this edition of the Election Crimes Bulletin, first broadcast on Nov 6, 2025, investigative journalist Greg Palast and Flashpoints host Dennis J. Bernstein unpack the results from Tuesday’s election. Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral election by 181,000 votes. The early vote in New York was a record-breaking 735,000. That's where Mamdani’s margin came in. When you let people vote, they vote progressive. That’s why Trump has gone after mail-in voting and early voting, because that is how minorities vote these days. In a democracy, the voters are supposed to pick the politicians. But now we have politicians picking the voters. Around 22 states have made it more difficult to vote by mail or use dropboxes. They cut the number of voting stations and dropboxes in low income, student and minority areas to engineer long lines, while the people in the white suburbs have zero wait to vote. These states are also “caging” voters, using the euphemism “voter-roll hygiene” to remove mostly poor, young, and minority voters from the rolls. Onerous ID laws, heavy restrictions on early and mail-in voting, gerrymandering, laws that allow mass challenges — it's a soft coup. It's not troops in the street grabbing ballot boxes. It's seizing control of the procedure to make it impossible or difficult for people of color, students, and low income voters to vote. To stay informed, and to learn how to save your vote, subscribe to our newsletter (GregPalast.com/subscribe) or Substack (Substack.com/@GregPalastInvestigates).

For years, I was BBC Television’s correspondent covering Venezuela and US attempts to overthrow their elected government. Trump invented nothing. This is at least the fourth US-backed attempt at overthrow and assassination of a Venezuelan president. To understand why Trump has ordered a covert operation to overthrow their government, you need to understand three things about Venezuela... Get the full story, read my Substack report: I met Chávez and Maduro. I know drugs are not the reason Trump wants war with Venezuela: https://gregpalastinvestigates.substack.com/p/i-met-chavez-and-maduro-i-know-drugs Watch the film of my BBC reports, The Assassination of Hugo Chavez, produced with Oscar-nominated cinematographer Richard Rowley, on YouTube: https://youtu.be/syExbfVPDnU Get the DVD: https://donorbox.org/palast-the-assassination-of-hugo-chavez-dvd Or download it: https://donorbox.org/palast-the-assassination-of-hugo-chavez-download Support our work with a tax-deductible donation: https://donorbox.org/palast-fund  

"When cowards are ordering around heroes, there could not be anything more dangerous for America." — Greg Palast Greg Palast's full speech from the #NoKings rally in Waterfront Park, San Diego on Saturday, October 18, 2025.   For more from Greg Palast, subscribe to his Substack: https://gregpalastinvestigates.substack.com/ Support independent journalism, buy Greg a coffee: https://buy.stripe.com/14kdRh1QhgDi34s4gh

Thom Hartmann’s new book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party and a World on the Brink, is one giant fact check on the Whopper-in-Chief, and much more — a disturbing dive into the roiling miasma of self-aggrandizing, self-deluding, psychologically shattered, wailing man-child who is Commander-in-Chief. Don’t read Hartmann’s book twice, as I have. It’s not just the nightmares it induces; it’s the fact that you’ll wake up to the nightmare that is our new reality. “Democracy,” Hartmann concludes, “doesn’t announce its departure with trumpets. It slips away in silence, one institution at a time.”   But we do have Hartmann’s bugle blast. Hopefully, it’s a wake-up reveille and not Taps for this fragile experiment called America. * * * * *    Thom Hartmann and Greg Palast will be speaking in San Diego on Friday, October 17 and in Los Angeles on Saturday, October 18 at fundraisers for the Pacifica Radio Network. Follow the links for more info: https://www.gregpalast.com/the-last-american-president/ Get a copy of Hartmann’s Last American President signed by the author for a tax-deductible donation to the Palast Investigative Fund. Only 5 signed copies available: https://donorbox.org/the-last-american-president-a-broken-man-a-corrupt-party-and-a-world-on-the-brink

Trump and Hegseth's gathering of the generals wasn’t patriotism — it was theater for authoritarianism. When you tell the military that America's “inner cities” are "a big part of war now” you’re not defending America — you’re declaring war on it.  The question now is stark: when the illegal order comes — to turn U.S. troops with live ammunition on the American people — will these generals follow it? And are they more or less likely to after this gathering? Learn more and stay updated, subscribe to our Substack: https://gregpalastinvestigates.substack.com/ Support independent journalism, buy Greg a coffee: https://buy.stripe.com/14kdRh1QhgDi34s4gh

On Tuesday, Pete Hegseth told our military’s top brass that they must restore the “male warrior spirit” to the armed forces. “Male” spirit, Pete? My Mom would’ve kicked your a** Get the full story on Substack. https://gregpalastinvestigates.substack.com/p/mom-wouldve-kicked-pete-hegseths Support independent journalism, buy Greg a coffee. https://buy.stripe.com/14kdRh1QhgDi34s4gh