DISARMED

As Americans head to the midterms, the people running our elections are preparing for more than ballots and vote counts. They’re also confronting falsehoods that confuse voters, undermine trust, and put election workers at risk, all while the federal government has dismantled key defenses against foreign interference and coordinated manipulation.

In the final episode of DISARMED, Anne Applebaum joins me to explore where we are vulnerable, what to watch for next, and what rebuilding would require. Plus, we catch up with Michael Moore and Tonya Wichman, election administrators in Arizona and Ohio, who explain what they’re ready for and what they wish voters understood as Election Day dawns.

If you’ve enjoyed DISARMED, I have an ask of you: please help us spread the word!

The sad reality is the deck is stacked against us. In combination with algorithms that don’t want to inform people about disinformation, the folks who have lied about important work to combat it have built a movement to amplify their falsehoods. Meanwhile, because of the years-long pressure campaign against us, many of the folks on Team Truth are still scared to share their work or their colleagues’.

A few ways you can help:

👍 like new episodes and leave comments right here on Substack

🌟 rate the podcast on Apple or Spotify

📨 send DISARMED to friends and family

💵 become a paid supporter of The Wayfinder so we have the resources to make more episodes.

Thanks for listening and watching—we do this for you. 🙏

Catch up with previous episodes of DISARMED:

* Episode 1: The Diplomats Who Fought Foreign Propaganda

* Episode 2: The People Who Make Voting Safe

* Episode 3: The People Who Tell the Story of Democracy

* Episode 4: The People Who Sound the Alarm

Episode 105: The 2026 Midterm Elections | Show Notes

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the SNF Agora Institute.

She was a Washington Post columnist for more than fifteen years and a member of the editorial board. She has also worked as the Foreign and Deputy Editor of the Spectator magazine in London, and as a columnist at Slate as well as the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs.

Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine was published in October 2017. It received the Lionel Gelber Prize as well as the Duff Cooper prize in 2018.

Her previous book, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, described the imposition of Soviet totalitarianism in Central Europe after the Second World War. Iron Curtain won the 2012 Cundill Prize for Historical Literature and the Duke of Westminster Medal, and was a National Book Award finalist.

She is also the author of Gulag: A History, which narrates the history of the Soviet concentration camps system and describes daily life in the camps, making extensive use of recently opened Russian archives as well as memoirs and interviews. Gulag won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 2004 and was also a National Book Award finalist.

Iron Curtain, Gulag: A History and Red Famine have all appeared in more than two dozen translations, including all major European languages.

Anne Applebaum is also the co-author of a cookbook, From a Polish Country House Kitchen, and a recently re-published travelogue, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, which describes a journey across Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine made in 1991, just before the break-up of the Soviet Union.

Over the years, her writing has also appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune, Foreign Affairs, The New Criterion, The Weekly Standard, the New Republic, The National Review, The New Statesman, The Independent, The Guardian, Prospect, Commentaire, Die Welt, Cicero, Gazeta Wyborcza and The Times Literary Supplement, as well as in several anthologies.

She has lectured at Yale, Harvard, Stanford and Columbia Universities, as well as Oxford, Cambridge, London, Heidelberg, Maastricht, Zurich, Humboldt, Texas A&M, Houston and many others. In 2012-13 she held the Phillipe Roman Chair of History and International Relations at the London School of Economics. She received honorary doctorates from the Georgetown School of Foreign Service and Kyiv-Mohyla University.

Read more about election administrators Michael Moore and Tonya Wichman in their previous DISARMED appearances.

DISARMED is hosted by Nina Jankowicz and produced by Emily Malina. Our theme song is by Steve Lakawicz. Thanks our facility manager, production, and post production crew who dedicated their time and energy to this project, as well as the anonymous donor whose generosity took it to the next level. DISARMED wouldn’t have been possible without all of them!

Get full access to The Wayfinder at www.thewayfinder.net/subscribe

In this episode of DISARMED, Nina Jankowicz speaks with longtime Voice of America journalist Steve Herman about the stories he covered, the audiences VOA serves, and what happened when the administration he covered turned against him and his newsroom. From Washington to audiences around the world, this episode explores what America loses when its international broadcasters go silent, and why protecting access to reliable information also means protecting the journalists who report it.

Want to help make this podcast a success? We can’t do it without your help! Share DISARMED with a friend, become a paid subscriber to The Wayfinder, buy us a coffee, leave a review on your favorite podcast app, and like or comment here on Substack or YouTube to show it to more people!

Catch up with DISARMED:

* Episode 1: The Diplomats Who Fought Foreign Propaganda

* Episode 2: The People Who Make Voting Safe

Episode 103: The People Who Tell the Story of Democracy | Show Notes

Steve Herman is a veteran news correspondent, whose positions included White House bureau chief and chief national correspondent of the Voice of America. He is a senior fellow at the University of Mississippi Center for Information Advantage and Effectiveness, an assistant professor of practice in the School of Journalism & New Media and was the executive director of the Jordan Center for Journalism Advocacy and Innovation.

Steve spent more than a quarter of a century in Asia, including years of reporting from Tokyo and subsequently as a VOA correspondent and bureau chief in India, South Korea and Thailand. Steve also served in 2016 as VOA’s senior diplomatic correspondent, based at the State Department, traveling internationally with Secretary of State John Kerry. He has covered in the field the past three consecutive U.S. presidential elections.

Nora Benavidez is a civil rights and free speech attorney. She works at the intersection of law, tech, and democracy, elevating interdisciplinary solutions to complex threats facing our society. In all her work, Benavidez fights to eliminate barriers that may diminish the ability for communities to engage in democracy and with each other.

Benavidez serves as Senior Counsel and Director, Digital Justice & Civil Rights at Free Press. She leads the organization’s democracy, free speech and tech initiatives, including policy, legal, advocacy, and corporate engagement portfolio. Her team fights for winning reform solutions that blunt disinformation, hate, and other manipulation online while protecting digital civil rights, privacy, and equitable speech. Benavidez has appeared before the the White House, U.S. Congress, the Federal Trade Commission, Canadian House of Commons, and other regulatory bodies.

Benavidez has authored several original research reports to shape the fields of democracy and tech. Most recently, she was the lead author of Free Press research reports CHOKEHOLD: Donald Trump’s War on Free Speech & the Need for Systemic Resistance (2025), examining the Trump administration’s hostile treatment of the First Amendment and attempts to muzzle dissent; Big Tech Backslide (2023), examining how tech companies’ retreat from platform integrity harms democracy as well as Empty Promises (2022), analyzing the role social media platform policies play in elections.

Links:

* Voice of America’s first broadcast

* Trump’s tantrum against VOA Correspondent Patsy Widakuswara

DISARMED is hosted by Nina Jankowicz and produced by Emily Malina. Our theme song is by Steve Lakawicz. Thanks our facility manager, production, and post production crew who dedicated their time and energy to this project, as well as the anonymous donor whose generosity took it to the next level. DISARMED wouldn’t have been possible without all of them!

Get full access to The Wayfinder at www.thewayfinder.net/subscribe

In this episode, we look at the ways the Trump administration has systematically dismantled the bipartisan federal infrastructure that kept American elections safe from foreign interference and cyber intrusions. We speak to Geoff Hale, who led election security work at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and was pushed out from that critical mission early in the second Trump administration. But Geoff—and Tonya Wichman, Director of Elections in Defiance County, Ohio—both give us plenty of reasons to feel confident about our vote.

Want to help make this podcast a success? Share it with a friend, become a paid subscriber to The Wayfinder, buy us a coffee, leave a review on your favorite podcast app, and like or comment here on Substack or YouTube to show it to more people!

Did you miss episode 1? Catch up here.

Episode 102: The People Who Make Voting Safe | Show Notes

Geoff Hale is a Visiting Fellow for Election Security at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), where he brings deep expertise in safeguarding election infrastructure against evolving digital threats. In this role, Geoff focuses on strengthening the integrity, resilience, and public trust of U.S. elections by advancing pragmatic, evidence-based, technically grounded solutions toward defending critical systems and infrastructure.

Prior to CDT, Geoff spent ten years at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), where he played a central role in the agency’s election security mission. Over the course of his tenure, he led strategic initiatives to grow cybersecurity capacity, build information sharing networks, and disrupt targeting of U.S. election systems and processes.

A practitioner deeply versed in the intersection of technology, national security, cybersecurity, and government, Geoff has contributed to policy design that bridges technical risk frameworks with real-world implementation. His work spanned analytic strategy, cross-agency coordination, and development of operational tools used by federal, state, and local partners to anticipate and mitigate emerging threats.

Geoff is an active contributor to the broader cybersecurity community, engaging in public discussions, workshops, and convenings on defending elections in the digital age. He holds relevant professional certifications and has pursued advanced study in risk management and systems analysis to inform robust, scalable solutions for complex security challenges.

* You can find Geoff’s “Fractured Shield” publication here.

Tonya Wichman is an election administration leader with more than a decade of experience strengthening, modernizing, and securing elections in Defiance County. Wichman led major initiatives including implementation of new voting equipment, the transition to electronic poll books, and significant expansions in cyber and physical security.

She is especially proud of building a high-performing team of election specialists, voting location managers, and poll workers who consistently deliver smooth, trusted elections. Wichman is a certified Ohio Registered Elections Official and a Certified Election Registration Administrator, and holds a Master’s Certificate in High Performance Leadership. Her work includes serving on state and national committees, mentoring other counties, and contributing to innovation through the ASU AI and Democracy Lab and the Election Center board. Wichman is also deeply engaged in advocacy to protect election officials, strengthen legislative outreach, and secure sustainable election funding. Community connections are central to her work.

She enjoys partnering with local schools, nursing homes, and organizations to build civic understanding, and co-founded the Election Ambassadors Scholarship Program to support and inspire future leaders in Defiance County.

DISARMED is hosted by Nina Jankowicz and produced by Emily Malina. Our theme song is by Steve Lakawicz. Thanks our facility manager, production, and post production crew who dedicated their time and energy to this project, as well as the anonymous donor whose generosity took it to the next level. DISARMED wouldn’t have been possible without all of them!

Get full access to The Wayfinder at www.thewayfinder.net/subscribe

Friends, today I’m thrilled to share with you a project I’ve been quietly working on for the last several months.

Welcome to DISARMED: How the United States Gave Up the Fight Against Falsehoods, a new podcast series that I’m hosting right here on The Wayfinder.

This series begins by telling the stories of the dedicated public servants who, for years, oversaw the United States’ information defenses across the federal government: at the State Department, DHS, the White House, the intelligence community, and international broadcasters like Voice of America.

Through in-depth interviews with the people who worked to expose foreign influence operations, protect elections, inform the public, and strengthen national resilience, DISARMED examines how America’s defenses against disinformation became political targets. Ahead of the consequential 2026 midterm elections, it also explores what we lose when those defenses disappear.

If you’re a longtime reader of The Wayfinder, you know we’ve heard far less from the people who actually did this work than from the loudmouths who gleefully dismantled it. DISARMED gives the patriots who have been smeared the space to tell their story and explain what they were protecting, what it cost them, and what’s at stake for all of us now.

DISARMED has been a labor of love for me. Since I became the manifestation of right-wing ire against the counter-disinformation community, I have mentioned at every opportunity that my experience is not unique. Across the U.S. government and civil society, dozens of other researchers have gone through similar ordeals. They have been the subjects of lies and harassment for simply doing their jobs, and doing them well.

These are stories that have been told in individual pieces, spread across publications, across the internet, and behind paywalls. To my knowledge, this is the first time this picture is being presented for free, and in totality. That was really important to me, because this story isn’t an abstract debate about government bureaucracy. After Trump took a sledgehammer to our information defenses, DISARMED is a critical look at whether Americans have the everything they need to make decisions about their lives and their votes.

Throughout this series, you’ll hear from:

* Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, historian, and staff writer at The Atlantic.

* Daniel Kimmage, former Acting Director of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center.

* Geoff Hale, former Director of the Election Security Initiative at the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

* Steve Herman, former White House Bureau Chief at Voice of America.

* Caitlin Durkovich, former Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Homeland Security Advisor for Resilience and Response at the National Security Council.

Additional voices include Tonya Wichman, Director of Elections for Defiance County, Ohio; Michael Moore, Chief Information Security Officer for the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office; Nora Benavidez, civil rights and free speech attorney; and Orna Blum, former senior U.S. diplomat.

I’m so grateful to these colleagues for sharing their stories—and their expertise—with me and all of you.

I’m also indebted to Emily Malina, my friend and intrepid producer, who took this podcast from “I’m going to interview some friends on Zoom” to a high-quality, compelling visual and audio production with kickass visuals and a sick theme song (props to the wonderful Steve Lakawicz for that wonderful track!).

We’ll be dropping a total of five episodes of DISARMED between now and Election Day, with more to come after, including lives with disinformation researchers and deep dives on new books in the space.

Beyond listening and watching, here are two things you can do if you want to make DISARMED a success:

* Share it with a friend. We aren’t paying Big Tech to amplify our work, so we need your help. Do you have a concerned citizen in your life who doesn’t know how exposed America’s information environment is? A podcast junkie who will enjoy a series like this? Make sure they hear these stories. Episodes will be available through right here on Substack, The Wayfinder’s YouTube channel, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify (it may take a few hours for the pod to populate there, so if they’re your preferred platforms, be patient!).

* Become a paid subscriber to The Wayfinder, or buy us a coffee. Making this podcast at a professional level was only possible thanks to a generous supporter, and keeping it up will take more funds! Every dollar goes right back into producing public service, pro-democracy analysis and reporting.

Most of all, thank you for being here. Amid the endless doomscroll, it’s nice to know we’ve got a community that is still fighting for a shared reality. This podcast is for you.

I hope you enjoy it—please let me know what you think in the comments. 🧭

Episode 101: The Diplomats who Fought Foreign Propaganda | Show Notes

Our guest today is Daniel Kimmage, the first acting coordinator of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, and later the organization’s principal deputy coordinator. He oversaw the Center’s flagship operations to expose and disrupt information operations by Russia, China, Iran and terrorist organizations, as well as a global network of partnerships. He also served in the Office of Policy Planning, where his portfolio included public diplomacy, counterterrorism, intelligence and cyber issues.

Kimmage is the author of It’s Worse Than You Think: How AI Is Undermining Democracy and National Security for New America, where he is a Future Security Fellow, and well as Befuddled: How American Can Get Its Voice Back in The Washington Quarterly. His analysis has been featured by The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, among others. He is a graduate of Binghamton University, Cornell University, and National Defense University. He writes a Substack called Bad Influences about manipulation, deception, and geopolitical competition in the age of AI. He is currently the President of Kensington Global, a boutique consultancy specializing in narrative intelligence.

Publications we mention in this episode:

* Daniel Kimmage’s Op-Ed in The Hill, “We need accountability for federal employee purges made on false pretenses.”

* The Global Engagement' Center’s Special Report on “Russia’s Pillars of Disinformation and Propaganda”

DISARMED is hosted by Nina Jankowicz and produced by Emily Malina. Our theme song is by Steve Lakawicz. Thanks our facility manager, production, and post production crew who dedicated their time and energy to this project, as well as the anonymous donor whose generosity took it to the next level. DISARMED wouldn’t have been possible without all of them!

Get full access to The Wayfinder at www.thewayfinder.net/subscribe