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.
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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’.
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Catch up with previous episodes of DISARMED:
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!
