Standing next to her hastily packed suitcase in Michigan’s Macomb County Wednesday night, Tyra Muldrow had a bad feeling in her gut.
“I have this eerie feeling that I need to get the hell up out of there,” says Muldrow, a 20-year-old Black woman from Florida. She was in Michigan as a door knocker, hired by a subcontractor for Elon Musk’s America PAC operation to turn out the vote for Donald Trump in the heavily contested working-class suburbs of Detroit.
Muldrow and the rest of her canvassing group of roughly a dozen people had just been fired en masse, after WIRED reported that they had been tricked and threatened as part of Musk’s get-out-the-vote effort. Speaking publicly for the first time about her ordeal, Muldrow says that the canvassers in her group were fired with little explanation beyond a complaint that someone had spoken with the press. Many, including her, were still owed money. Muldrow had to find her own way home; others are still stranded in Michigan.
A representative for Musk and America PAC did not return a request for comment.
I want to feel bad for them, but they obviously haven’t looked more into who they’re working for and his history of screwing people over.