Slay the Dragon

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After the 2008 election, REDMAP, a secretive, well-funded GOP initiative poured money into state legislative races in key swing states to gain control of their redistricting processes and used high-tech analytics to dramatically skew voting maps based on demographic data, mining the vast amounts of personal information now available. The result is one of the greatest electoral manipulations in U.S. history, one that poses a fundamental threat to our democracy and intensifies an already polarized state of politics in Congress and state houses across the country.

Chris Durrance and Barak Goodman’s Slay the Dragon, called the most important political film of the year, investigates this 2010 Republican strategy, deployed nationwide, to lock in electoral officials indefinitely and effectively end their accountability to voters. The consequences were immediate: The Flint water crisis was traced directly to the gerrymandering of Michigan district maps, and strict Voter ID laws were introduced in many states to limit minority voting. Outraged and determined to make their votes count, grassroots movements sprung up across the country to put the decision-making power back in the hands of the people. The filmmakers follow Katie Fahey, a young political outsider, who used social media to collect hundreds of thousands of signatures and put an anti-gerrymandering initiative on the ballot in Michigan - and won.

On Thursday, March 5, join New America NYC at Betaworks Studios for a special preview screening of Slay the Dragon and a conversation that looks at redistricting, voting rights, and elections and asks: how do we fix a broken system?

Slay the Dragon opens in theaters March 13.

Follow the conversation online using #SlaytheDragon and following @slaythedragon and @NewAmericaNYC.

PARTICIPANTS

Chris Durrance, @cdurrance1
Co-Director, Slay the Dragon

Katie Fahey, @KTeaFahey
Executive Director, The People

Barak Goodman, @GoodmanBarak
Co-Director, Slay the Dragon

Michael Li, @mcpli
Senior Counsel, Democracy Program, Brennan Center for Justice

Sam Levine, @srl (Moderator)
Voting Rights Reporter, The Guardian