As the Trump presidency digs its claws into the country – winner take all! – I look on in terrified amazement as he begins arrogantly instituting what can only be called his plan to devolve America back to the good old days: back to the era of Jim Crow certainty and whatever that might mean.

We’re white, we’re Christian and we’re the best! Just ask Pete Hegseth.

This is the “Gulf of America”! It’s not Trump’s smugly renamed Gulf of Mexico; it’s the hole in the country’s collective consciousness, which Mr. President is hellbent on expanding. His plan is to make America safe for what it used to be and allow our old, beloved prejudices to return. Deport the illegals! Kill wokeness! Kill understanding and awareness!

All of which leaves a few glaring questions hovering over the daily news: How the hell did this guy win a majority of votes? Is he really aligned with the nation’s primary beliefs? And if he isn’t . . . uh, what happened last November? Was the election rigged? Was it stolen? And if so, how? Do we live in a publicly proclaimed – yet fake – democracy?

This is a fascinatingly awkward question to ask, considering what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. A portion of the MAGA base – spurred on by their leader, who instantly proclaimed “fraud!” – stormed the capital, busted its windows, tasered the police, clomped through the halls, left a gift of excrement on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk, and politely asked that Vice President Mike Pence be hanged.

This time around, the Democrats had tea with the guy who beat them. They respected the transfer of power. They upheld our alleged democracy. But let’s be clear: There are questions that must be asked. Our system of government has serious flaws – it always has! And let’s be clear: When you’re in power – and want to stay in power – democracy, “the will of he people,” can be an enormous inconvenience.

All of which leads me to the amazing work of Greg Palast, who has been investigating the electoral process – tracking its flaws and lies – ever since the George W. Bush era. This time around, the essence of his analysis is this:

“Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the presidency with 286 electoral votes.

“And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass ‘vigilante’ challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.”

This wasn’t done with the simple snap of a powerful finger. Palast outlines numerous efforts over the years, at numerous governmental levels (in particular, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia), to play games with the electoral process and interfere with – and outright eliminate – certain voters’ right to vote. These efforts include such tactics as rejecting mail-in ballots without valid reason; failing to enter newly registered voters in the voting rolls in time for them to vote in the presidential election, failing to count “provisional” ballots, and allowing registered voters to be challenged by ordinary citizens for extremely spurious reasons (e.g., their names match other names, such as a name in an obituary).

And who are these “certain voters” who are targeted? In essence, they’re voters of color: black, Hispanic, Muslim or whatever, often identifiable as such by their names. And powerful Republicans target them because they’re statistically likely to vote Democratic.

And this brings up Palast’s recently released documentary: Vigilantes Inc.: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen, which is available for view online. The term “vigilante,” with all its violent, KKK-esque implications, refers to those ordinary (white) citizens who have volunteered to be Republican name-checkers, looking for any and all possible reasons to challenge . . . oh, let us say, people with names such as Jose Garcia or James Brown. Challenge them bureaucratically, so their legitimacy as voters may be rescinded.

What I found utterly compelling about Vigilantes Inc. is the race-based – and historical – context in which the vigilantism is carried out. This documentary is about far more than the 2024 election. America’s present-moment racism is put under the harsh, glaring light of its own past – its post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow-era past, when efforts to “get around the 15th Amendment” included not only poll taxes (for blacks only) and spurious questions (“how many jellybeans in the jar?”) to outright intimidation and vicious violence.

In the documentary, Palast interviews black voters who were “disappeared” from the voting rolls, intimidated, threatened, arrested – and enwraps such actions in the country’s past. For instance, the story is told of ten black women who were elected to the school board in Quitman, Ga., in the early 2000s, shortly after Brian Kemp became Georgia’s secretary of state. He accused them of stuffing tampered ballots into mailboxes. The women faced multi-year prison sentences. The were ultimately acquitted but one of the women had considered suicide and another, who suffered from lupus, died in the midst of the ordeal.

The hell the women endured brought up memories for people in the area of the horrific lynching of 13 blacks in southern Georgia nearly a century earlier. One of them was a woman, Mary Turner, who happened to be in her eighth month of pregnancy. A mob surrounded her, hung her from a tree – upside down – by her ankles, then cut open her abdomen, while she was still alive. The unborn child fell to the ground, where the mobbed killed it.

This documentary opens our souls. Oh my God, the past is still alive, but the film’s primary vision is transcendent. This is not a film of us vs. them, but of love and extraordinary courage: the courage – of so many people – to create the democracy the country has not yet become,

As the film ends, the narrator says: “But spirits drowned will rise. America is a haunted house and our ruling dynasties have gone to war with our ghosts – the ghosts of our history. Until America hears those spirits, neither they, not we, will be set free.”

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His newly released album of recorded poetry and art work, Soul Fragments, is available here: https://linktr.ee/bobkoehler