Have you ever had a smoke detector go off because the toast got a little too dark? It’s loud and obnoxious, and in the moment it feels like the thing is overreacting to nothing. Some people deal with that by pulling the battery out, which works great right up until there’s an actual fire.
Nina Jankowicz has a new podcast about what happens when a country pulls the battery. “Disarmed” premieres Wednesday, October 21, on The Wayfinder, her independent Substack publication. The series follows how the United States has backed away from countering foreign influence operations and election falsehoods since 2020, and it tells that story through the people who were minding the smoke detectors when somebody started pulling batteries.
Why Jankowicz Is Telling This Story
Jankowicz has been on the receiving end of this fight personally. In 2022, she was named executive director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board, which DHS said would focus on disinformation from foreign states like Russia, China, and Iran. Within about three weeks, a wave of attacks from right-wing media and Republican lawmakers mischaracterized both the board and her qualifications to run it, and she was buried in harassment and death threats. DHS paused the board, and she resigned. She told NPR at the time that the whole episode showed exactly how disinformation campaigns work.
Most of the guests for the “Disarmed” episodes did the work themselves. Daniel Kimmage was acting director of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, and Geoff Hale ran the Election Security Initiative at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Steve Herman covered the White House for Voice of America as its bureau chief. Caitlin Durkovich was a deputy homeland security advisor on the National Security Council, and Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic sits down for a full interview as well. The series also brings in Tonya Wichman, director of elections for Defiance County, Ohio, along with Michael Moore, the CISO for the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office, free-speech attorney Nora Benavidez, and former diplomat Orna Blum.
In the announcement, Jankowicz points out that the public has heard far more from the people who dismantled these programs than from the people who ran them. “Disarmed” gives the people who ran them room to explain what they were protecting and what it cost them personally, with long conversations about what drew each guest into public service and how they dealt with the political pressure.
How the Defenses Came Down
The Global Engagement Center was created by executive order in 2016 to counter foreign propaganda from countries like Russia and China. Congress let its mandate lapse in December 2024, and what was left became a smaller office called R/FIMI. Secretary of State Marco Rubio shut that office down in April 2025, claiming it cost taxpayers more than $50 million a year and had been used to censor Americans. James Rubin, who led the center until December 2024, has said its mission was focused exclusively on foreign disinformation. Meanwhile, the administration also moved to dismantle Voice of America.
CISA got the same treatment. The agency shut down its small office focused on election security and integrity, and then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told lawmakers the point was to get CISA back to its core mission. It’s hard to square that with an agency whose mission includes protecting election infrastructure.
The censorship label has been remarkably effective at tearing these programs down, and it gets the whole thing backward. Exposing a Russian influence operation doesn’t silence anyone. It tells Americans who is actually behind the message they’re seeing, and they’re free to decide what to do with that. Calling that a threat to free speech is a bit like calling the smoke detector a threat to cooking.
Two Weeks Before the Midterms
The midterm elections are November 3, so the first episodes land with Election Day about two weeks out. Nextgov reported that CISA put much of its election disinformation staff on leave last year and that the White House budget proposal for fiscal 2027 would eliminate the agency’s election security program entirely. At a House hearing in April, Larry Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice cited a survey in which 75% of state and local election officials said their governments hadn’t given them enough resources to cover what CISA used to provide.
The guests I’m most interested in hearing from are the ones running elections at the local level. A county election director in Ohio and the security chief for Arizona’s top election office don’t get a vote on what happens in Washington, but they’re the ones left holding the bag on Election Day with whatever resources they have.
I haven’t heard any episodes yet, but the lineup is a strong one. These are people who have mostly been talked about for the past few years, usually by the folks who took their jobs apart, and “Disarmed” finally hands them the microphone right as the country heads into an election without much of the protection they used to provide.
New episodes drop weekly. Audio is available through The Wayfinder, Apple Podcasts and Spotify, with full video episodes on The Wayfinder’s YouTube channel.
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