Foreign Tourists Are Paying Money to Watch the Collapse of Our Democracy This Election

In a fun dystopian twist, a company is offering to give foreign tourists an up-close look at the U.S. election system—during some of the most crucial elections in recent history.

The midterm elections are already highly contentious, with President Joe Biden warning repeatedly that “democracy is on the ballot.” Democrats are fighting to hold their razor-thin control of Congress, while Republicans are priming voters to reject tight liberal victories. Billions of dollars have been poured into the races in an effort to influence the outcome.

“Folks, US ‘democracy’ has become such a clown show that English and Australian tourists are booking specialized election experience tours & disrupting canvasses,” writer Gwen Snyder warned on Twitter Monday.

Citing a friend of hers who works with Get Out The Vote in Philadelphia, a typically blue haven in an otherwise red state, Snyder said that “far right disruptors” were showing up to GOTV events and pelting organizers with an endless stream of strange, highly detailed questions. All of them seemed to be British or Australian.

“Turns out, these were tourists that had PAID A COMPANY to deliver them a front seat at the US election zoo,” Snyder explained in her Twitter thread. “Anyway, it’s election eve and everyone on the ground is now scrambling to figure out how to protect their canvasses from weird intrusive election tourists in this, one of the most critical turn out areas in the country.”

The group, Political Tours, seems to turn a profit by taking tourists to some of the most contentious elections around the world. The company website says most clients come from New Zealand, Australia, and the U.S., as well as England and Europe.

The six-day U.S. tour costs £3,950, about $4,500, and includes a visit to polling stations on Election Day. The website mentions visiting Virginia and Pennsylvania, both of which will witness toss-up races for Congress.

Many voters and organizers across the country are already on edge, with reports of armed watchers turning up to ballot boxes and intimidating would-be voters. Any disruptions at the voting booth could cause delays, which could be seized upon by Republicans as a reason to blame Democrats for rigging the election.

The last thing the country needs is tourists at the voting booth.

Elon Musk’s Twitter has thus far been historic. Thousands of workers have lost their jobs. Users are being banned with no warning. And a platform used by over 400 million people has already seen a rise in hate and misinformation. Legacies being made.

It’s hard to do much about Musk’s whims right now—and that should be the key takeaway for all tech workers. If Twitter employees were unionized, things would have looked much different.

Last week, Musk fired half of Twitter staff, with little notice and in violation of federal and California state law.

Some workers filed a lawsuit against Twitter, but Thomas Kochan, professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, says that’s not enough. Musk, the world’s richest man, can always find a legal team to give him just enough cover to avoid actual consequence.

Instead, Kochan says, workers—those laid off and those who remain at the company—need to act in concert.

“They’re all asking themselves, ‘Am I next? Or am I at risk’? So they have a common cause,” Kochan said. “It would be good for the workforce and a good signal to arrogant CEOs that you just can’t do that.”

Unionizing isn’t the only way workers can act on this cause, of course. Petition-filing, going public with concerns, staging walk-outs and protests—these are all protected acts. And they can serve to lobby the public in workers’ favor, which consequently pressures investors and advertisers, notes Kochan. A strategy like that is certainly relevant to Twitter, a company reeling from advertiser retreat.

Still, a union would have done the basics and prevented such mass layoffs to begin with.

This should be a lesson as tech companies are entering a sudden slowdown. Lyft, Netflix, Spotify, Peloton, and Coinbase have all laid off thousands of employees this year. Apple and Amazon have enacted hiring freezes. Meta is preparing for large-scale layoffs. And this is just a sampling of the chaos across the industry.

The formula of Musk’s acquisition is a familiar one. Billionaire owner acquires a new company, then haphazardly fires people in the name of cutting costs. Challenging this predictable, ruinous cycle requires worker solidarity.

It requires nothing less than a union.

Steven Crowder thinks that a peaceful transfer of power is overrated.

The right-wing media figure made the remark on the eve of the first national elections to follow the January 6 riots attempting to overturn the 2020 election.

“The idea that the peaceful transfer of power is inherently our most valued tradition—it’s not. Our original tradition is rebellion, violent rebellion,” Crowder said on his show.

“I’m not suggesting any kind of violent upheaval over the election, that’s not what I’m suggesting,” Crowder hedged, before proceeding to describe rebellion as uniquely America’s “original tradition.” Canada and other countries  had a “slavery basis” that America apparently didn’t have after its valiant freedom-bringing revolution, according to Crowder.

Historical revisionism aside, Crowder’s remarks are part of a continual effort by the right to not only excuse the January 6 rioters, but justify and glorify them. On the eve of the midterm elections, it can also be seen as priming voters to reject Democratic victories by violent means if necessary.

“We actually, as a nation, became a nation because we pulled off the completely unpeaceful transfer of power,” Crowder glowed about the American Revolution.

While Crowder may throw in a line saying that he’s not calling for violence, his larger dialogue connects violent rebellion to nation-creation—at a time when the right-wing perennially focuses on “making America great again” or “bringing America back.”

Crowder’s project is certainly no secret. His show has faced numerous suspensions from YouTube, the latest involving a two-week suspension that prevents Crowder from posting more content until after the midterm elections. Crowder’s channel had been suspended and demonetized in the past for pushing forth false claims about the 2020 presidential election and for using racist and homophobic slurs.

As if Mondays weren’t bad enough, Elon Musk shared a photo of a Nazi soldier and then encouraged “independent-minded voters” to follow his lead and vote Republican in the midterm elections.

The Tesla founder posted a photo of a Nazi soldier with a crate of carrier pigeons on his back, with an unread notifications badge photoshopped onto the cage.

If Musk was looking for a photo of carrier pigeons to make a point about his new role as CEO as Twitter, he didn’t have to pick one of a Nazi soldier.

Less than an hour later, he tweeted a message to “independent-minded voters”:

Despite promising that Twitter would not become a “free-for-all hellscape” under his rule, the platform is already devolving into chaos, with Musk seemingly leading the charge.

Musk is entering his third week of ownership, and already, Twitter has been awash with hate speech. The social media research group National Contagion Research Institute said that in the 12 hours since Musk bought Twitter, use of the n-word increased almost 500 percent.

The self-described “free speech absolutist”—except, apparently, when it comes to jokes at his expense—has promised to roll back content moderation on Twitter. He has shared conspiracy theories about the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband and allowed election deniers back on the platform.

His decisions have led advertisers to leave Twitter in droves. Musk complained they were being pressured by activists, but his claim was community fact-checked as Twitter users said it lacked context.

“I will say that if you’re trying to assuage the fears of the advertisers fleeing the platform you just [spent] billions on, you might want to have someone on your payroll spend five seconds looking at whether a meme you’re about to post has any link to the Nazis,” tweeted writer and QAnon expert Mike Rothschild. “But that’s just me.”

Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley thinks that America should deport Senator Raphael Warnock. It’s not clear where exactly she wants to deport him to, given that he was born in Savannah, Georgia.

Haley called for the deportation of Georgia’s first Black senator at a rally in Hiram, Georgia on Sunday, as she stumped for Warnock’s Republican challenger, Herschel Walker.

“Legal immigrants are more patriotic than the leftists these days,” she said. “They worked to come into America and they love America. They want the laws followed in America. So the only person we need to make sure we deport is Warnock.”

Haley and Republicans have used Walker’s candidacy against Warnock as proof that the GOP is not marred by racism. They’ve argued that suggestions of American racism are actually what is hurting America, rather than the racism itself.

“The biggest threat we have is happening inside our country: all of these people who are saying America is bad, and America is racist, and America is oppressed,” Haley said at the rally. “If America was racist, I wouldn’t have been elected the first female minority governor in the country.”

Figures like Haley and Walker serve as tokens to both excuse America’s racism and further reinforce it. A race between two Black men is still absolutely a race about race when one candidate is openly concerned about racial inequality, and the other is deployed by a party apparatus to fictionalize that it doesn’t exist.

Last month, Lindsey Graham described perfectly what Walker does for Republicans. “He changes the entire narrative of the left: we’re a party of racists,” Graham said. “Well, what happens when the Republican party elects and nominates Herschel Walker, an African American, Black Heisman trophy winner? …It destroys the whole narrative.”

Haley herself is no stranger to oscillating between the purveyor and object of the Republicans’ race-blind strategy.

Haley, born Nimrata Randhawa, is the daughter of Indian immigrants, but she registered herself as “white” on her 2001 voter registration card.  She invoked her Indian roots to back Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential bid, claiming “America is not a racist country,” in the same breath that she recounted discrimination her family has faced upon immigrating to America.

It’s a shame how long Haley has played the game—and how long she’s allowed herself to be played too.