Victoria Chamberlin | Vox

Should women be in combat?

2025-06-04T13:45:35-04:00

Army Capt. Kristen Griest participates in training at the US Army Ranger School at Fort Benning, Georgia, on April 20, 2015. | Scott Brooks/US Army via Getty Images

Women weren’t allowed to officially serve in direct ground combat jobs when Emelie Vanasse started her ROTC program at George Washington University. Instead, she studied biology — but it still bothered Vanasse to be shut out of something just because she was a woman.

“I always felt like, who really has the audacity to tell me that I can’t be in combat arms? I’m resilient, I am tough, I can make decisions in stressful environments,” Vanasse said.

By 2015, the Obama administration opened all combat jobs to women, despite a plea from senior leaders in the Marine Corps to keep certain frontline units male only. Then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter told reporters that, “We cannot afford to cut ourselves off from half the country’s talents and skills.”

The policy change meant that women could become Army Rangers, the elite special operations infantry unit. The training school for the Rangers officially opened to women three months earlier. When Capt. Kristen Griest and 1st Lt. Shaye Haver became the first women to graduate from the school in 2015, Vanasse taped their photos to her desk and swore she would be next, no matter what it took. She went on to become one of the first women to serve as an Army infantry officer and graduated from Ranger School in 2017.

After the Pentagon integrated women into combat jobs, the services developed specific fitness standards for jobs like infantry and armor with equal standards for men and women. Special operations and other highly specialized units require additional qualification courses that are also gender-neutral. To continue past the first day of Ranger School, candidates must pass the Ranger Physical Fitness test, for which there is only one standard. Only the semiannual fitness tests that service members take, which vary by branch, are scaled for age and gender.

Despite that, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has continued to insist that the standards were lowered for combat roles. In a podcast interview in November, Hegseth said, “We’ve changed the standards in putting [women in combat], which means you’ve changed the capability of that unit.” (Despite Hegseth’s remark, many women worked alongside male infantry units in Iraq and Afghanistan, facing the same dangerous conditions.)

In the same interview, Hegseth said that he didn’t believe women should serve in combat roles.

In March, Hegseth ordered the military services to make the basic fitness standards for all combat jobs gender-neutral. The Army is the first service to comply: Beginning June 1, most combat specialties will require women to meet the male standard for basic physical fitness, something most women serving in active-duty combat roles are already able to do.

Vanasse told Noel King on Today, Explained what it was like to attend Ranger School at a time when some men didn’t want to see a woman in the ranks.

What is Ranger School?

I went to Ranger School on January 1, 2017. I woke up at 3 am that day in Fort Benning, Georgia, shaved my head — a quarter-inch all the way around — just like the men. Took my last hot shower, choked down some French toast, and then I drove to Camp Rogers, and I remember being very acutely aware of the pain that the school would inflict, both physically and mentally. I was also very aware that there was kind of half of this population of objective graders that just kind of hated my guts for even showing up.

They hated you for showing up because you’re a woman?

Back in 2016 and 2017, it was so new to have women in Ranger School. I used to think, I don’t have to just be good, I have to be lucky. I have to get a grader who is willing to let a woman pass.

I had dark times at that school. I tasted real failure. I sat under a poncho in torrential rain and I shivered so hard my whole body cramped. I put on a ruck that weighed 130 pounds and I crawled up a mountain on my hands and knees. I hallucinated a donut shop in the middle of the Appalachian Mountains and I cried one morning when someone told me I had to get out of my sleeping bag.

But I think all of those experiences are quintessential Ranger School experiences. They’re what everyone goes through there. And I think the point of the school is that failure, that suffering, it’s not inherently bad, right? In a way, I like to think Ranger School was the most simplistic form of gender integration that ever could have happened because if I was contributing to the team, there was no individual out there that really had the luxury of disliking or excluding me.

When you wanted to give up, what did you tell yourself? What was going through your head?

I don’t think I ever considered quitting Ranger School. I just knew that it was something that I could get through and had the confidence to continue. I had a thought going in of, What could be so bad that would make me quit? and the answer that I found throughout the school was, Nothing.

Did you ever feel like they had lowered the standards for you compared to the men who were alongside you?

No. Never. I did the same thing that the men did. I did the same Ranger Physical Fitness test that all the men took. I ran five miles in 40 minutes. I did 49 push-ups, 59 sit-ups, six pull-ups. I rucked 12 miles in three hours with a 45-pound ruck. I climbed the same mountains. I carried the same stuff. I carried the same exact packing list they did, plus 250 tampons for some reason. At no point were the standards lowered for me.

Whose idea was it for you to carry 250 tampons?

It was not mine! It was a misguided effort to have everyone very prepared for the first women coming through Ranger School.

In Ranger School, there’s only one standard for the fitness test. Everybody has to meet it, and that allows you to get out of Ranger School and say, “Look, fellas, I took the same test as the men and I passed.”

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is saying that Army combat jobs should only have one standard of fitness for both men and women. And there’s part of me that thinks: Doesn’t that allow the women who meet the standards to be like, look, We met the same standards as the men. Nothing suspicious here, guys.

I think gender-neutral standards for combat arms are very important. It should not be discounted how important physical fitness is for combat arms. I think there’s nuance in determining what is a standard that is useful for combat arms, right? But it’s an important thing. And there have been gender-neutral standards for combat arms.

In things like Infantry Basic Officer Leader Course, which is the initial basic training for officers going into the infantry, there are gender-neutral standards that you have to meet: You have to run five miles in 40 minutes, you have to do a 12-mile ruck. All of those standards have remained the same. Pete Hegseth is specifically referring to the Army Combat Physical Fitness test, and to a certain extent I agree, it should be gender-neutral for combat arms. But I think there’s nuance in determining what exactly combat arms entails physically.

Secretary Hegseth has a lot to say about women, and sometimes he says it directly and sometimes he alludes to it. What he often does is he talks about lethality as something that is critically important for the military. He says the Army in particular needs more of it, but he never really defines what he means by lethality. What is the definition as you understand it?

There’s a component of lethality that is physical fitness and it should not be discounted. But lethality extends far beyond that, right? It’s tactical skills, it’s decision-making, it’s leadership, it’s grit, it’s the ability to build trust and instill purpose and a group of people. It’s how quick a fire team in my platoon can react to contact. How well my SAW [Squad Automatic Weapon] gunner can shoot, how quickly I can employ and integrate combat assets, how fast I can maneuver a squad. All of those things take physical fitness, but they certainly take more than just physical fitness. There’s more to lethality than just how fast you can run and how many pushups you can do.

To an average civilian like myself, I hear lethality and I think of the dictionary definition, the ability to kill. Does this definition of lethality involve the ability, physically and emotionally and psychologically, to kill another person?

Absolutely.

And so when Secretary Hegseth casts doubt on the ability of women to be as lethal as men, do you think there’s some stuff baked in there that maybe gets to his idea of what women are willing and able to do?

Yes, possibly. I think the [secretary’s] message is pretty clear. According to him, the women in combat arms achieved success because the standards were lowered for them. We were never accommodated and the standards were never lowered.

What’s your response, then, to hearing the secretary of defense say women don’t belong in combat?

It makes me irate, to be honest. Like, it’s just a complete discounting of all of the accomplishments of the women that came before us.

Do you think that if Secretary Hegseth could take a look at what you did in Ranger School, and he could hear from you that there were no second chances, there were no excuses, there was no babying, the men didn’t treat you nicer just because you were a woman, do you think he’d change his mind about women serving in combat?

I’d like to think he would, but I’ve met plenty of people whose minds couldn’t be changed by reality. I’d love it if he went to Ranger School. He has a lot of opinions about Ranger School for someone who does not have his Ranger tab.

What is a Ranger tab, for civilians?

A Ranger tab is what you receive upon graduating Ranger School, which means you have passed all three phases and you are now Ranger-qualified in the military.

You have that. And the secretary of defense doesn’t.

He does not, though he has a lot of opinions about Ranger School.

Clarification, June 2, 2 pm ET: This story was updated to include more details about the Ranger School policy change.

Correction, June 4, 1:45 pm ET: A previous version of this story misstated Emelie Vanasse’s ROTC commission. She commissioned as an infantry officer.

Should I get on an airplane?

2025-02-27T14:59:11-05:00

Since Christmas Day, four commercial jets have crashed, killing nearly 300 people and injuring many others. Harrowing images — of the explosion over the Potomac after a Black Hawk helicopter collided with a plane, and of a Delta flight upside-down on the runway in Toronto — have people spooked about their next trip. The US National Transportation Safety Board’s report of over a hundred accidents so far in 2025 is not helping.

But despite it all, experts maintain that yes, it is still safe to fly.

Statistically, it’s safer to fly now than at any point since the 1960s thanks to advances in aircraft manufacturing, more sophisticated weather imaging, and tighter safety regulations. You could fly twice a day for roughly 2,500 years before you run even a small risk of getting into a fatal aviation accident.

Though driving provides the illusion of control, taking a road trip is much more dangerous than flying. “Your chance of getting into a fatal car crash at some point in your life is a little bit less than 1 in 100. It’s about a 1 percent chance,” said Darryl Campbell, aviation reporter for The Verge.

Campbell told Sean Rameswaram on Today, Explained that the number of high-profile aviation accidents right now, combined with depictions of plane crashes on TV and in movies, make the situation seem worse than the data proves.

“When you’re in the back of an airplane, you’re not in charge,” Campell said. “You’re in the middle of this complex system that maybe you don’t understand. You’ve seen all of these horrible things that make you fear the worst whenever you feel the slightest bump.” That doesn’t mean the worst is likely to happen.

But that’s not to say the system is flawless.

John Cox has been flying planes for 55 years and now serves as an aviation safety consultant. Cox joined Sean Rameswaram on Today, Explained to talk about how recent firings at the Federal Aviation Administration might impact aviation safety.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

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Just as Americans are feeling nervous about getting on a plane, DOGE has gone and eliminated something like 400 jobs from this agency. Can you help us understand some of the jobs that got the axe?

They reduced the number of maintainers of radio and radar equipment. Our system is an older system, and it requires a good bit of maintenance. So, the biggest concern in the near term is that we’re going to have radios or things that fail, and that will limit the air traffic controller in being able to accept more flights. The problems are going to show up. It may not be today or tomorrow, but the maintenance staff for our older radar and radio facilities throughout the country are going to be impacted.

Our Transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, has said that none of these jobs eliminated at FAA were terribly critical to safety. And it sounds like you’re agreeing with him.

Well, there is a definition for safety-critical jobs. Pilots, flight attendants, aircraft maintenance technicians, flight dispatchers — those are all designated as safety-critical jobs, and none of those were reduced. Air traffic controller is a safety-critical job. None of those were reduced.

It’s true that the maintenance of the equipment that air traffic control uses — that was not considered to be a safety-critical position. And if you take it to the extreme, the capacity cutbacks could mean fewer flights that people have choices from and potentially even higher pricing, but the reliability factor is more on the capacity side than the safety side.

We have been hearing for years that air traffic control towers have struggled with staffing, that we’re around 2,000 air traffic controllers short, according to the FAA. Why is that?

I think recruiting and getting the right candidates has been a real challenge because about 50 percent of the candidates don’t make it through training. Being an air traffic controller is a very intense, highly trained position. And to get through the training process and to become a full performance-level controller takes years.

Most air traffic controllers right now, or many of them, are working six days a week, and if they put in for vacation time, they may or may not get it. And this doesn’t happen once, it happens frequently. So getting the highest-qualified people, when you have that sort of work-life balance issue, becomes more difficult and part of it has been funding.

The issue with FAA funding goes back many decades. If we could take the political considerations out of it and provide a steady funding source saying that this is a critical function, many of the FAA’s problems would go away slowly. We would be able to get and recruit air traffic controllers. We can update the equipment. All of this is going to take time. The root of this is steady congressional funding for the FAA.

How Americans came to hate each other

2025-09-11T13:49:40-04:00

A Trump supporter yells at counter-protesters outside of the US Supreme Court during the Million MAGA March in Washington on November 14, 2020. | Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

With just days until the 2024 election, it can feel like Americans are more divided than ever. Former President Donald Trump and his supporters have attacked opponents in increasingly vicious terms. There have already been incidents of political violence — including multiple alleged arsons targeting ballot boxes and a terrorism arrest in Arizona after the windows were repeatedly shot out of a Democratic Party office — and polling suggests voters are worried about more post-election violence.

There are serious stakes to the election, including democracy issues and abortion rights — but the intense, vitriolic polarization we’re experiencing now is largely based on our perceptions about each other, according to research from Johns Hopkins University professor Lilliana Mason.

Mason, a professor of political science at the university’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation’s Agora Institute, says this type of division, which she calls affective polarization, doesn’t require us to have wildly different policy disagreements to hate each other. Instead, she told Vox, “it’s based on feelings,” as well as misunderstandings about which groups, and what kind of people, are on the other side.

Through a series of surveys and experiments over four years, Mason and Nathan Kalmoe, a political communication professor at Louisiana State University, studied the origins of extreme partisanship among ordinary Americans for the 2022 book, Radical American Partisanship. Mason and Kalmoe found that around 40 percent of Americans surveyed were willing to use dehumanizing language about the other party — a metric she says can be a precursor to even more serious political violence.

Today, Explained host Noel King spoke with Mason to understand how the American electorate got to this point and how we can get back to a more civil politics.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Noel King

You’ve written two books that seem relevant here. Tell me the names of your books.

Lilliana Mason

The first book is Uncivil Agreement How Politics Became Our Identity. And the second book is Radical American Partisanship.

Noel King

Two main parties in the United States, Democrats and Republicans; as a researcher, what do you know about what we think about the other group that is incorrect?

Lilliana Mason

Everything! We all overestimate the extent to which people in the other party are extreme in terms of the policies. We also overestimate the degree to which the party is made up of groups that we kind of think of as like the stereotypical groups associated with the party. So, Republicans think that the Democratic Party is majority Black. It’s not. Democrats think that the Republican Party is majority wealthy people who make over $250,000 a year. It’s actually like 2 percent. And so we tend to assume that the stereotypical group that we think of when we think of that party, we tend to assume that that makes up the whole party and we’re all wrong.

And in fact, political scientists and sociologists have done experiments where we correct people’s misperceptions and it actually makes them hate the other party less because they hadn’t realized that the party wasn’t made up of maybe people they didn’t like or wasn’t made up of people who are really extreme in their policy preferences. We are overestimating the extent to which the other party is made up of people that we assume we would really dislike.

Noel King

How do you define partisanship?

Lilliana Mason

The classic understanding of partisanship is just which party you vote for based on your assessments of politics. But more recently, we’re starting to think of partisanship as a social identity, meaning it’s a psychological connection to the other people that are in the party and feeling like what happens to our party impacts our own sense of self-esteem and self-worth. The traditional view is thinking of choosing who to vote for like a banker chooses an investment. And really what we’re doing today is more like sports fans cheering on our team.

Noel King

That’s partisanship. What is polarization?

Lilliana Mason

So polarization can also be two things. It can be more than that, actually. But the classic understanding of polarization was that we are disagreeing about issues. So Democrats are really liberal and Republicans are really conservative on all of these different issues. But increasingly, what we’re finding now is that our polarization is partly about that, but it’s also about how we feel about each other. So Democrats and Republicans really don’t like one another, and we call that affective polarization. So it’s based on feelings.

And really the important thing about understanding the effect of polarization is that it doesn’t require us to disagree in order to hate each other. We use theories from social psychology about why any groups don’t like each other to explain why Democrats and Republicans don’t like each other, and it doesn’t necessarily require that they disagree on, you know, marginal tax rates.

Noel King

Does the data really say that people of different parties dislike or even hate each other?

Lilliana Mason

Yeah. In fact, in my first book, I asked people how would they feel if their child married somebody from the other party or how would they feel if someone from the other party moved in next door to them. And those types of questions — people really don’t like the idea of their child marrying somebody from the other party. They don’t really want to have social contact with people from the other party. And that type of feeling isn’t entirely rooted in disagreement. So people who have really moderate policy preferences can still really dislike people from the other party.

In the second book, we started to ask more extreme questions. So we asked, “Do you think people on the other party are not just wrong for politics, they’re downright evil?” Or even, “Do they deserve to be treated like humans because they behave like animals?” So a dehumanization question, which is kind of the most extreme of the questions, and we are finding that about 50 percent of partisans are willing to say that their partisan opponents are evil, and between 20 to 40 percent are even willing to dehumanize people in the other party.

We started asking this question in 2017. The reason we asked the question is because this is the type of thing that we measure in other countries, if there’s a mass violence event. This type of attitude exists beforehand. It doesn’t always lead to violence, but whenever there is mass violence, you have to have these dehumanizing and vilifying attitudes present beforehand, because otherwise it’s really hard to harm another human being and still feel like a morally good person. And really, the only way to do that is to think that they are a threat to you, that they’re evil and that they’re subhuman. And so when we see genocide in other places, for example, these attitudes exist before before the violence occurs. And what we wanted to know was, did these attitudes exist in the American electorate? And no one had really asked that question before.

Noel King

Tell me about what kind of polarization we’re seeing these days.

Lilliana Mason

So what we’re seeing is mostly affective polarization. So it’s basically the type of polarization that means that we don’t like one another. And if you think about human groups throughout all of human history, there are plenty of reasons that two human groups don’t like one another. Humans hate one another for all kinds of reasons. And it’s very much that type of visceral dislike and distrust that any two social groups can have against each other that we’re observing in the Democratic and Republican parties right now.

Noel King

Disagreeing on policy seems to me quite normal; thinking that a person in the other party is evil seems a bit less normal to me. What is this rooted in, this affective polarization? Where did this come from?

Lilliana Mason

A lot of this animosity between Democrats and Republicans has come out of a trend over the last many decades of not only our partisan identities being the thing that we fight over during elections, but also all of these other identities. And since the 1960s, our racial identities, our religious identities, all other cultural, even geographic identities have moved into alignment with our party identities. So what happens is that when we’re thinking about politics and who wins and who loses, we’re not just thinking my party wins or my party loses. We’re thinking, “If my party wins, then my racial group wins and my religious group wins.” And all of these other parts of my identity are winners and it feels really good and vice versa. “If my party loses, all these different parts of my identity are also losing,” and that feels really, really terrible. So the stakes get a lot higher when we think about our electoral choices and who is in control of our government as reflective of who we are as a human being.

Noel King

I would like to not live in this version of America. There’s an election to cover. How do we, in all seriousness, fix this problem?

Lilliana Mason

We’ve tried a number of interventions in our surveys, so we’ll embed an experiment in the survey to try to see if we can make people less violent or less approving of violence. And one thing that we found that basically always works is to have them read a quote from a leader. So in our experiments, we use Biden or Trump, a quote that just says something like, “violence is never acceptable. That’s just not how we do things here.” And people who read that quote are less likely to approve of political violence than those who’ve read nothing in a control condition. So simply reading a sentence from a leader can get people to kind of step back from this aggressive stance. We need to get something back.

One of the things I think that the last few years have done — and I think Trump as a candidate in particular — is really break the norms of what’s acceptable behavior in American politics and in American society. The idea that we can use racist and misogynistic language against our fellow citizens, the idea that we can tell lies and not be punished for it; you know, a lot of the things that our politics is characterized by right now are things that 20 years ago would not have ever been allowed on the political stage. And there are plenty of Democrats and Republicans that just remember a different time. And what worries me is that young people don’t. So we’re increasingly in this world where young people don’t know that it was nicer, more diplomatic, and so I hope that we can pay attention to the norms that have been broken because the only way to enforce a norm is for people around you, when you break the norm, to tell you to stop it. Laws are enforced with law enforcement. Norms are enforced with us, with people.

And the reason that shame is such a powerful emotion, is because it’s the way that we enforce norms. To the extent that together as a community, if we see somebody behaving in a way that we think of as unacceptable, that we as a community can say to them, “That’s beyond the pale, that’s that you just crossed the line. I’m not accepting that kind of behavior.” And we haven’t been doing that to each other in many years, I think. But to the extent that we can kind of remember what it’s like to be normal people and treat each other like we’re part of a community together and that we’re part of the same society, that’s something that we all can do on our own.

How the UK’s far right used a local tragedy to spur chaos

2024-08-08T12:47:08-04:00

Riot police hold back protesters near a burning police vehicle after disorder broke out on July 30, 2024, in Southport, England. | Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Riots and violence have erupted in the UK following the killing of three young girls in the quiet seaside town of Southport in northern England. Last week, while learning dance moves to their favorite Taylor Swift songs, a 17-year-old boy entered their classroom and went on a stabbing rampage that left three dead and critically wounded several others.

Following the attack, a UK law prohibiting the public naming of suspects under the age of 18 created an information vacuum, and within hours, rumors about the suspect in custody, including an incorrect name, were circulating around the far-right media ecosystem. Police in Merseyside, the county that includes Southport, quickly confirmed the suspect was born in the UK, but misinformation on social media claimed he was an immigrant.

Nigel Farage, a British broadcaster, leader of the right-wing Reform UK party and member of Parliament, added to the chaos when he released a video statement casting doubt on the official information released by Merseyside police. “I just wonder whether the truth is being withheld from us. I don’t know the answer to that, but I think it is a fair and legitimate question,” Farage said.

Three days after the attack, a judge agreed to allow the name of the suspect to be released but the damage had been done. While the town of Southport was still in mourning, far-right protesters took to the streets, chanting “We want our country back,” attacked a local mosque, and injured more than 50 police officers.

That riot, the day after the stabbing attack, was just the first of many violent demonstrations that flared up across Great Britain and in Northern Ireland’s capital, Belfast. On Sunday, around 750 people surrounded a hotel housing asylum seekers in northern England. According to police, rioters smashed windows in an attempt to gain access to hotel residents and lit a large trash bin on fire.

Robyn Vinter, a correspondent for the Guardian covering the north of England, has been covering the protests across the UK and shared her experience with Noel King on an episode of Today, Explained. Their conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

Robyn Vinter

[The Southport attack] had happened on a Tuesday night, and by the Friday, there was a list of places where demonstrations were going to be held. They were described as protests. Fliers were going around social media that said things like, “A protest is going to be held outside this mosque.” And then we saw large-scale pockets of far-right riots: a lot of violence in a lot of towns and cities across the UK.

A hotel in Rotherham that was housing asylum seekers was on the list. That one got out of hand very quickly, partly because it was under-policed: there’d been another protest organized in a city nearby, and they perhaps underestimated how many people would attend. In total, there were about 750 rioters. They were physically attacking police, smashing windows, burning things.

They managed to set fire, briefly, to the hotel with about 240 asylum seekers inside, which was obviously terrifying. The windows were smashed and the asylum seekers were appearing at the windows. They were all fairly young. The ones I saw — teenagers, early 20s — all looked very scared, very worried. I shouted through the window, “Are you okay?” and I was holding a thumbs up. A lot of them were replying, “Okay, okay.” A lot of them don’t have good English. And then one man shouted down, “I am not okay.”

The police were wearing fireproof gear and helmets and had big riot shields, so they were safe from the fireworks. But there were quite a lot of times when I saw the police that had been relieved from their shifts on the front line of this battle against the rioters. They would go around the corner or down a side street, and they would just be sitting with their heads in their hands because it had been such a draining and exhausting day. A few police officers said to me that it had been by far the biggest riot that they’d ever [responded to].

Over time, it calmed down. As the evening went on, it tended to be younger rioters who clearly were teenagers. I spoke to a 16-year-old girl who was there, and she said she recognized a lot of them from school, and that some of them were even younger than she was.

And that was only one riot that happened. While I was in Rotherham, a colleague of mine was in Middlesbrough on the opposite English coast. It was different scenes in Middlesbrough because there was not really a specific target. The far right were running riot through the town. There weren’t enough police. Journalists were being targeted, because there’s a huge mistrust among the rioters and the general public of journalists. A number of journalists and photographers have been hurt or had equipment stolen. My friend, the colleague who was in Middlesbrough, went back to his car to find it had been completely smashed up, and the police had to drive him home.

There’ve been 400 arrests, but the arrests keep coming because there are so many people involved. There are more demonstrations due to be held, and there’s a lot of likelihood that these are going to turn into riots as well.

Noel King

Robyn, you and other news media are using two words. You’re using “riot” and you’re using “protest.” The people who are protesting: What do they say they want to come out of this?

Robyn Vinter

Some of the protests are local to a situation, but there are broad themes. You hear the phrase “We want our country back.” A lot of it is about a kind of broader anti-immigration sentiment.

In Rotherham — where I was, where the rioters attacked the hotel housing asylum seekers — there was a feeling that asylum seekers were getting better treatment in the UK than British people were. People were saying, “Well, I have to pay my bills. I have to put a roof over my head. I have to work. And these people are coming here and they’re living in a hotel and they’re not working. Not doing anything. They don’t have to worry about paying bills.”

There were also — which I found very sinister — rumors going around in certain communities that certain men had been following women home. Or, the rumor in Rotherham was that two women had been raped by asylum seekers and that the authorities had covered it up. Obviously, as a journalist, that would be a very good story if I could stand it up. But I’m just completely unable to find any evidence that that’s the case.

But in a way, it doesn’t matter, because it goes around on social media. People hear it. Everybody has heard it from somebody else. Nobody’s the person that it’s happened to.

Noel King

This all got started with a rumor that the boy who had stabbed these little girls was an immigrant. Have rumors continued to contribute to what’s going on? Either rumors or deliberate misinformation — sometimes called disinformation, I suppose.

Robyn Vinter

Disinformation and misinformation have had a really pivotal role in the last seven days. There have been a lot of deliberate instigators on social media — a lot of people, actually, who wouldn’t perpetrate violence themselves, but will easily goad other people into doing so.

Something I haven’t mentioned so far, as well: there’s something that the far-right instigators on social media are calling “two-tier policing.” They believe that white British people are getting worse treatment — they’re getting more heavy-handed treatment — from the police than Muslims or other groups of people. I wouldn’t go as far as saying “conspiracy theory,” but it’s a huge talking point among the far right.

We even heard Elon Musk describe Prime Minister Keir Starmer as “Two-tier Keir,” obviously referencing this nonsensical and nonexistent idea of two-tier policing.

Noel King

Keir Starmer is brand new in the office. This would be his first real crisis. How is he perceived to be handling this?

Robyn Vinter

Keir Starmer is a very interesting character. When we had some riots in urban areas in London and other cities in 2011, he was the director of public prosecutions — kind of like your chief prosecutor, essentially making decisions about how these rioters would be handled by the courts, how they’d be prosecuted. His method of prosecuting was bringing people in quickly and prosecuting them quickly. There were late-night courts and courts running over the weekend in order to process the large numbers of rioters.

So far we’re seeing something very similar to back then. He’s very keen on clamping down immediately on the rioters, and you can see the method as well.

I think when people start to see the large sentences that rioters will be getting for attacking police and setting fires, they’re going to be more likely to think twice before they get involved in future violence.

Noel King

We are expecting more of this; more protests, potentially more rioting, potentially more injuries, potentially more clashes with police. What should we take from all of this? What does this tell us more broadly about what is happening in the UK right now?

Robyn Vinter

The summer of 2024 is going to be defined as a summer of rioting.

Although the riots will [probably] start to die down in the next couple of weeks, the sentiment will not go away. It’s going to take as long as it took to build it up to dissipate it.

I don’t have any answers about what we can do to improve that sentiment. It’s something that I feel very worried about.

We in the UK rarely descend into any kind of real nationwide violence. People from abroad have been saying that “it’s going to end in a civil war.” That’s absurd. But we do have to worry about this. We have to worry about it because that sentiment exists in other countries as well, places that don’t have a long legacy of stability. This kind of thing could be a spark that lights a fire somewhere else.

Why men are secretive about prostate cancer

2024-02-01T14:44:10-05:00

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in October at the Pentagon. | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin underwent surgery late last month to treat prostate cancer — a diagnosis and treatment plan he initially kept secret from his boss, and the American public. It wasn’t until several days after Austin ended up in the hospital due to complications from the surgery that the information was announced by the Pentagon.

Austin’s efforts to keep his health care scare under wraps backfired very publicly: Lawmakers on Capitol Hill demanded an internal review of Austin’s office and the Pentagon’s inspector general launched a probe into policies around the transfer of power.

But it was his efforts to keep details of his condition secret that caught the attention of longtime cancer screening advocate Howard Wolinsky. Wolinsky is a former medical editor of the Chicago Sun-Times who was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2010. He now helms a Substack newsletter dedicated to all things prostate cancer called The Active Surveillor.

“Thirteen years ago, I was diagnosed with low-risk prostate cancer and came this close — my fingers are close together — of having surgery that, in the end, it turned out I didn’t need,” Wolinsky said. “And it put me on a path that I never expected of creating support groups for men with low-risk prostate cancer like I have.”

Noel King, host of Vox’s Today, Explained podcast, spoke to Wolinsky and about the stigma associated with a diagnosis like Austin’s and the fear many men have when it comes to the prostate exam itself; and to Dr. Michael Leapman, a urologic oncologist and associate professor of urology at the Yale School of Medicine.

A transcript of their conversation follows, edited for length and clarity.

Noel King

I wonder if we can get very basic, very remedial for a second, and you can just tell us what a prostate is and who has one.

Howard Wolinsky

The prostate itself is a gland. Often you’ll hear it’s the size of a walnut. But that’s kind of misleading. I mean, when a boy is born, it’s a tiny little thing; as you get older, it grows larger. So where is this gland? It’s situated below the bladder and in front of the rectum. And it surrounds a part of the urethra, the tube in your penis that carries the pee from your bladder. So, okay, what does the prostate do? Prostate helps make some of the fluid in semen, which carries sperm from your testicles when you ejaculate.

Noel King

A-ha … so y’all need your prostates. Humanity needs your prostates …

Howard Wolinsky

You need your prostate — up to a point. And I should point out, too, if a man lives long enough, he’s going to have prostate cancer and probably won’t even know it. Something like 80 percent of men 80 and above have prostate cancer. It’s a disease largely of aging.

Noel King

Howard, one of the reasons that we really wanted to speak to you was because you wrote a column, “I understand why Defense Secretary Austin kept his prostate cancer quiet.” What made you write that piece? What were you thinking?

Howard Wolinsky

I understand why Austin would want to be quiet. But the sub-subheadline was to the effect that he should be more open because he could help other people.

I was watching the news with one of my sons, and I said, “Dollars to doughnuts, it’s prostate cancer.” And my sons think that I have prostate on the brain because I’m an advocate. But here’s why I thought this was the case with Austin. First of all, his age. He’s 70 years old. The average age for diagnosis with prostate cancer is 66. Second of all was his race. Black men have a higher incidence and a higher mortality rate from prostate cancer.

So if I were a betting man, I would have bet that it was prostate cancer. Well, I did bet dollars to doughnuts, right?

Noel King

And you won the dollar …

Howard Wolinsky

Well, I didn’t even get the doughnut, damn it.

Noel King

Why did [Austin] keep it secret?

Howard Wolinsky

Well, of course, only he could answer that. But I can speculate that, first of all, he was afraid. He was afraid of what was happening to him. He was making some of the biggest decisions of his life. And for all we know, he was in a bit of a panic. He keeps state secrets. That’s part of his training, and that’s his life.

And now he’s dealing with a cancer. And so I suspect that his first reaction was to be secretive about it. He was in the military. And I think that it’s a macho environment. And so I don’t think you want to show vulnerability, and I don’t think you can show vulnerability about a cancer in a sexual organ.

Noel King

I’m a woman, okay? So I don’t actually know what’s going on in these exams. But can you talk a bit about what happens in a prostate exam that seems to make men so uncomfortable?

Howard Wolinsky

Well … you’re exposing your butt to the air, you bend over a table, so you’re sort of vulnerable. A doctor — could be a male, could be a female doctor — puts a glove on and puts a finger or two in there and feels the surface of the prostate looking for bumps, lumps, so on. I personally didn’t find it that uncomfortable. I didn’t find it that embarrassing. But it’s been a number of years since I’ve had one.

Noel King

Dr. Michael Leapman, an oncologist at the Yale School of Medicine, is here to help us dig a little deeper.

Michael Leapman

Rectal examinations are helpful in some cases, but in some cases they can actually be a false positive. You can think you feel something, even if you’re very experienced, and it turns out to be nothing. And so I know it’s a barrier for some people who don’t want to even talk about prostate cancer screening because they’re worried it’s going to end up in a rectal examination. To the question [some Today, Explained callers sent to the show] of having an orgasm or ejaculating with a rectal examination, I’ve never seen it. It’s a quick examination, and I don’t think it’s a big concern that someone will instantly have an orgasm from having a rectal examination.

The main way that we screen people for prostate cancer is using a blood test called PSA that stands for “prostate-specific antigen.” It’s quite accurate. It doesn’t find every prostate cancer, and in fact, in people who have a lower PSA, you can still find prostate cancer. But it’s a very good tool that does detect the majority of aggressive cancers at an earlier stage.

We just said that PSA is a great test, but it is prone to fluctuation. PSA is a protein that’s made by the prostate, and it’s made by cancerous tissue in the prostate. It’s made by non-cancerous tissue in the prostate, so it doesn’t perfectly distinguish between cancer and not cancer.

Noel King

What does treatment for prostate cancer typically look like?

Howard Wolinsky

The most common treatment options are — especially for low-risk or active surveillance, which is close monitoring of the cancer, which is what I do — radiation therapy and radical prostatectomy. In some men, it’s hormonal therapy, which is androgen deprivation therapy.

Michael Leapman

Successful treatment to me is the right treatment for the right patient at the right time. Every person is different, and every treatment and every plan has to be different. And so for some people, it’s not treating the cancer. In some people, it’s careful monitoring and doing what we call active surveillance.

In others, it is local treatment to the prostate involving surgery to remove the prostate or radiation. In some cancers that we find, they have spread beyond the prostate. And then it’s really a multimodal treatment involving systemic therapy, hormonal therapy, and potentially chemotherapy and other treatments.

Prostate cancer is interesting because it is one where you are balancing multiple risks. You’re balancing the risks of the cancer itself, the risks from the treatment, and every person’s preference.

Michael Leapman

We know that the cancers that are ultimately lethal and aggressive probably start at a younger age, and they could be as early as 30s or 40s or 50s. Most men are diagnosed with prostate cancer in their 60s in the US, and that’s usually because they haven’t been screened earlier. The guidelines from the American Urological Association and other organizations recommend at least a consideration of getting a PSA test at age 45, and earlier if you have a stronger family history. So if you have a first-degree family relative, a father or a brother or a known strong family history of cancer, or Black ancestry, those are considered higher-risk groups for which screening could be done as early as 40.

Noel King

Howard, all of this worry around the test, the secrecy around when you’re diagnosed, you don’t want to tell people — it makes me wonder whether prostate cancer is maybe even deadlier than it needs to be because so many men really don’t want to have awkward conversations with their doctors, or don’t want to get a test that sounds, to me, profoundly uncomfortable.

Howard Wolinsky

Noel, could this be any worse than what the doctors do to women with vaginal exams?

Noel King

Absolutely not. Point taken, thank you, sir. I’m going to get in so much trouble with our listeners. But women do tend to man up a lot better than men.

I think one of the reasons that we want to have this conversation for our listeners is because we want to draw attention to the fact that this diagnosis doesn’t have to be the end of the world, and the test itself doesn’t have to be the end of the world. It’s just sort of wrapping your head around, okay, buddy, this is going to be uncomfortable for a while.

Howard Wolinsky

If I can disagree with you a little bit … I’m on something called active surveillance. Maybe once a year, I have a PSA test. My doctor told me I have about the lamest cancer he’s ever seen. Those were the words. But on the one end of the spectrum, like me, it’s the sleeping lion, and the other end, with advanced cancer, it’s the snarling tiger. And there’s a huge difference.

Michael Leapman

The challenge is that a proportion of [cancers] are dangerous, and many of them are not. We encourage people to stay up to date on screening. But in fact, guidelines suggest that we should not screen people over the age of 75 or people with less than a 10-year life expectancy, because finding cancers and treating them might not improve their life, might not improve their longevity.

What an abortion hotline reveals about reproductive care after Roe

2023-02-10T17:36:05-05:00

Sen. Patty Murray (D-OR) looks on as Dr. Nisha Virma of Physicians for Reproductive Health speaks about reproductive rights during a news conference outside the US Capitol, in August 2022. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Linda Prine is a family physician and the co-founder of the Miscarriage and Abortion Hotline, which counsels women who want to use medication to self-manage their abortions. For women who need abortions in the states where the procedure is fully or partially banned, the medication, mifepristone and misoprostol, is often the best chance they have at receiving abortion care, particularly if they are unable to travel.

In 2020, the last year for which full data is available, medication abortions accounted for more than half of all abortions in the United States. While the FDA recently authorized pharmacies to carry the pills, and patients to receive the medication by mail, online pharmacies in the US still won’t sell or ship to states where self-managed abortion is illegal — meaning patients are often relying on overseas providers, which can take weeks.

At the hotline, Prine and other volunteers talk women through the process of self-managing abortions, offer advice about a range of medical and privacy concerns, and help provide resources to women looking to order pills (the hotline does not provide the pills themselves). Prine and physicians like her are on the leading edge of the effort to ensure women retain their right to abortion care — an effort that will have important legal and political implications in the years to come. Vox spoke with Dr. Prine about how her work has changed since the fall of Roe v. Wade (the number of calls to the hotline, she says, have tripled since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision last June), and what she thinks will be needed to protect their work providing telemedicine in states with restrictions in the weeks and months ahead. You can hear a portion of the conversation on Today, Explained — Vox’s daily news explainer podcast — wherever you like to listen. The interview below has been edited for length and clarity.

What made you decide to start the hotline?

We actually started it during the Trump years, when we were just frustrated with all of the piling on of state restrictions, and little did we know how bad it would get. Initially there was only a group of 12 of us, and we staffed it for about 12 hours a day, and we each took a couple of shifts a month. That was plenty in the beginning. And then it got busier.

Do you remember where you were when the Supreme Court decision came down overturning Roe?

I was actually in a car, traveling to go on vacation, and my phone just blew up. It was calls from the practice I was participating in, in New Mexico, because several of the clinics on the Texas side had given out our phone number as they were canceling people’s appointments. I think I spoke to 60 people that day, just nonstop, trying to help them get care wherever we could. It was a really traumatic day for all those people. They were really calling us sobbing and freaked out and upset and incredulous.

What has changed since the fall of Roe? How has it changed your work?

Well, the hotline is getting more calls, and the difference now is that many of our callers are later in their pregnancies, because they’re getting their pills from overseas. They’re ordering pills from online pharmacies, and they come sometimes with no directions. So they call us about that. But also, they’re further along in pregnancy and they’re calling us scared, because they’ve passed a tiny but recognizable fetus, and they are freaked out and they weren’t expecting that. And it’s frankly traumatizing, what people are going through, because they haven’t had any anticipatory guidance that this might be happening, and people who’ve had an abortion before with pills didn’t pass anything that they could see.

The pills are approved by the FDA for up to 10 weeks and by the World Health Organization for up to 12. Most of the time, though, they’ve been used in our country under eight weeks; something like 75 percent to 80 percent of people using pills were using them under eight weeks pre-Dobbs. But now, they’re using them whenever they can get them. And sometimes that is quite a bit later. Sometimes it’s 14 weeks, 18 weeks. And so we get calls from people completely freaked out, crying, sobbing. I think for us, the trauma and the horror of the Dobbs decision is that people are having to go through something that they should not have to be experiencing.

Do you feel like these delays are compounding trauma for people that they wouldn’t otherwise have to go through, if they had access to the pills early on?

Yeah, absolutely. People were not using the pills this late in pregnancy, pre-Dobbs. This is a huge shift. There’s not research to support [that] yet. This is just what we’re seeing on the ground.

You mentioned that your staffing needs at the hotline are different now, post-Dobbs.

We are up to 60 volunteers now. We went from 12 to 20 to 40. And then, yeah, with Dobbs we had to expand our hours and shorten the shifts. You just can’t be on the phone for eight or 12 hours straight. So we do six-hour shifts now, and it’s intense. You’re getting text messages and phone calls at the same time and trying to talk to as many people as need you, and it’s a little bit exhausting by the time the six hours is up.

Are there other kinds of concerns that you’re hearing from patients who are calling in?

People are afraid to go to the emergency room if they think they need it, and most of the time they don’t need it, so we talk them off that ledge and explain what they need to do to take care of themselves. But we also tell them, if they do decide to go, how to protect themselves in terms of how they explain what’s been happening to them. In other words, they’re having a miscarriage, they’re not having an abortion, and that it’s impossible for anyone in the emergency room to figure out that they used pills. There’s no blood test for that. There’s no exam to show that that’s what happened. So letting them know how to preserve their privacy in the medical setting, when it’s become a potentially dangerous place to go, has been really important.

Now, it’s not really true that any medical personnel has any duty to report a patient. In fact, they are not supposed to do that because it would be a HIPAA violation. And it’s not illegal for people to be buying pills off the internet and using them. What’s illegal, in most of these states that have passed laws, is for doctors to provide the pills. So the doctors, if they were providing the pills, would be the ones breaking the law, not the patients. But that doesn’t mean that there’s not an ambiance of fear out there. It hasn’t been made clear to the general public, I don’t think, that people using abortion pills are not breaking any laws.

What are the other challenges patients are facing?

The thing that’s hitting us the hardest is the difficulty accessing care and then accessing the care late. And that’s why so many of us have gotten involved in this movement to get shield laws passed in the blue states so that we can serve people with FDA-approved medications that we can mail quickly through the US Postal Service into those red states, so that people can get what they need in two to three days instead of over a matter of weeks.

How do you think about your personal risk when doing this kind of work? Because it is not a zero risk for you as a provider.

I live in New York City, so I feel very safe there. If it comes to passing the shield laws and we’re mailing pills into the red states and some zealot from Texas or Louisiana or Alabama wants to try to arrest me, I feel confident that the law we’ve passed in New York state, and the lawyers that have surrounded us with pro-bono offers, will take care of me. And really, the optics of arresting doctors for providing humanitarian care in these states that are restricting the care, I don’t think that’s going to win very many votes for the Republicans. So I’m willing to be out there and let them see how that goes over.

Other than the shield laws, are there things that state lawmakers and places that protect abortion rights could be doing to help make your work easier?

Yeah, there’s new legislation being proposed by Assemblywoman Amy Paulin in New York state that would allow standing orders to pharmacies for abortion pills. So that just as you can go into a pharmacy and get a vaccine without having a specific doctor order it for you, you could go into a pharmacy and get your abortion pills without having a specific doctor order it for you. That’s brilliant. And if she needs a doctor to do the standing orders, sign me up.

We’re going to have to continue to get creative like this. And honestly, you don’t need a doctor to get you abortion pills. You’re swallowing them at home, no matter where you get them … It’s really not rocket science. And people are totally competent to decide if that’s what they need at that point in their life. So I’m all in support of all of the initiatives that are making access to these pills easier.

The safety and efficacy of these medicines is what people really need to understand, and especially the legislators, so that they can get more comfortable with easing up the access and making it possible for us to do telemedicine abortion across state lines, making it possible for people to pick them up in the pharmacy, and getting rid of the FDA regulations that make it hard to prescribe this medication.

The other thing that we’re seeing an increase in is people ordering the pills just in case. It’s called advance provision. And those of us who work for Aid Access get a lot of requests for advance provisions — people aren’t pregnant at all, but they want to have these pills in their medicine cabinet just in case. Especially if they live in the red states where it can take three or four weeks to get your pills, having them on hand is a really good idea.

Is that something that you saw a lot of prior to this, people wanting the pills just in case?

No. This has totally gone through the roof since the fall of Dobbs, especially in the first couple of weeks. People were overwhelmed with requests for advance provision.

The bigger problems that I’m hearing, from my OB-GYN colleagues in these red states, with normal maternity care, are terrible. I don’t know what the solutions are for that other than to really have referendums in as many states as possible to make abortion legal.

Would you feel comfortable telling us some of the things that you’re hearing from your own colleagues about maternity care?

I hear them trying to get their own patients to another state for care that they need, which is insane. If you have somebody who has a premature rupture of membranes with a pre-viable fetus, and they need to have that fetus removed for their own well-being and safety, and it’s not ever going to be a living being — to not be able to do that procedure in your own state, but to have to transfer somebody who is at risk of hemorrhage, at risk of infection, is insane. It’s an insane thing that’s happening to health care. People are literally on Signal chats trying to find care for their patients. So, yeah, that’s what I’m hearing. That’s the devastating news out of so many of these states.

What else should we keep in mind?

Now’s the time to get proactive. That November election, the voters told us: We want access to abortion. So we need to get going and see how we can get people access. Enough of being afraid of our shadows, or that we’re going to be criminalized for this, that, or the other thing. Let’s get moving and see what we can do to make abortion available by every creative [method]: legislative, underground, crossing borders, whatever it takes. I think we’ve won. The voters have told us they want abortion access, and the American people want it. So let’s get that for them instead of worrying about our own criminalization.

What election deniers want to do when they’re running elections

2022-09-19T15:53:47-04:00

Orange County Supervisor of Elections workers prepare mailed ballots for the high-speed tabulator in the Vote-By-Mail Ballot Counting Room, on Aug. 18, 2020. | Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

Mark Finchem, Jim Marchant, and Kristina Karamo are all one election away from becoming their states’ top election officials. They are the GOP nominees for secretary of state in Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan, respectively, and they have all denied the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. Their candidacies are raising fears that, should they win, they won’t fairly administer the 2024 presidential election in their all-important swing states.

One of the most disruptive things they could do is refuse to certify free and fair election results. But secretaries of state have broad influence that stretches far beyond approving vote tallies, and many of these candidates want to dramatically change the way future elections are run in those states.

In this episode of Today, Explained — Vox’s daily news explainer podcast — host Noel King talks to Zach Montellaro, a reporter who covers democracy and state politics at Politico, to understand how much is at stake if these election-denying candidates win their tight races.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so find Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Noel King

In these upcoming midterms, 25 states are going to decide who’s in charge of state elections. You’ve been looking into candidates for these offices who deny the results of the 2020 elections — and who may win. Tell me about who you’ve been following.

Zach Montellaro

The four I’m really watching the most closely is Pennsylvania, where Doug Mastriano is a state senator running for governor, but he can appoint the secretary of state. In Nevada, Jim Marchant, a former state lawmaker; in Michigan, Kristina Karamo; and then Arizona, where state Rep. Mark Finchem is running for secretary of state. Those are the four “top of the ticket” election-deniers running for chief election official in their states.

Noel King

Tell me about each of them.

Zach Montellaro

Mark Finchem is maybe the most prominent of the four of them. He really rose to fame in the state and elsewhere shortly after the 2020 election, where he hosted allies of then-president Donald Trump — right after the election for that “hearing,” where he spread conspiracy theories about the election trying to create misinformation about the election — has basically never stopped since then.

Karamo is running in Michigan after she was a poll watcher in the 2020 election, the folks who watch the proceedings, basically. And she claimed to have seen some malfeasance there, never backed it up, kind of shot off from there. She’s the Republican Party’s nominee, and she won the nomination through a convention, not through a primary there, so she didn’t have a whole regular population voting on her to give in the nomination. She’s spread some conspiracy theories and conspiracy theories-adjacent, both with and without elections. And there she’s running against the Democratic incumbent, probably might be one of the closest states. Jocelyn Benson, there, is the Democratic secretary of state.

Jim Marchant is the self-appointed leader of all these candidates. He brought them together in a coalition called the America First Secretary of State Coalition. They can kind of swap ideas, theoretically fundraise for each other, even though none of them are really strong fundraisers. And Marchant has been trying to rally them all together and give them a common platform and give them a common ideal to run on. Ironically, out of the four of those folks that we’ve talked about, he’s the only one not endorsed by former President Donald Trump.

Noel King

These folks have all secured the Republican Party’s nomination. But can they really win a general election?

Zach Montellaro

There’s not a lot of attention on these races, so it really gives any one of them a viable opportunity to win. Of course, this year we’ve seen a lot more attention on these races, and none of these folks are good fundraisers. Money isn’t everything in politics, but it helps your campaign. But just think about the states where they’re running. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada have some of the closest elections over the last decade. That probably won’t change this year. You know, could Mark Finchem win, Kristina Karamo, and could Jim Marchant win? Absolutely. These are down-ballot races that don’t attract a lot of attention. So it gives candidates a much easier path to winning in a nomination that they wouldn’t otherwise win in a Senate race where there would be hundreds of millions of dollars potentially pouring in to kind of tip the race.

Noel King

If these “America First” coalition candidates win in November — and they did pick a nice, anodyne name for their group — what is their platform? What are they pledging to do?

Zach Montellaro

The Marchant group puts forward six broad policy ideas. One big one that they focus on is voter ID. Voter ID is something that’s not just limited to this group of election deniers. It’s popular among the American right. It’s actually popular among most Americans. Most Americans think, in poll after poll after poll, there should be some level of ID, and ID laws are very, very different across the country. They’re running to have some level of ID, likely photo ID, in their state.

Another thing they’re running on, which actually most election officials broadly think is a good idea: paper ballots. Most people vote on paper ballots, meaning that when you go fill out your ballot, you actually have the physical paper that is counted. Most states then count those ballots with the machine. [It is] much, much quicker to count an election with a ballot tabulator than doing it by hand. A lot of these candidates are saying, actually, we want to go back to hand-counting ballots. Hand-counting is likely less accurate than a ballot tabulator, which has been proven over and over and over and over again to be accurate.

Another of the biggest things is looking to eliminate or severely curtail the use of mail-in voting.

Noel King

If they win, given that they’re in swing states, the big unknown will be the 2024 election. What could they do in their jobs to upend the electoral process in the states where they’re from in 2024?

Zach Montellaro

One that gets the most attention, I actually think wrongly, is certifying elections. That final check: This person won who said “We won.” That would almost assuredly end up in state and/or federal court. But even the premise of that, saying they’re not going to sign off on a free and fair election, is in itself a challenge to the fundamental baseline of the system.

The next things they can do vary really dramatically state by state. But broadly, a lot of them can set policy. They can’t change the laws automatically, but they can make things much, much harder to happen. Think about [ballot] drop boxes, which have become a point of contention. What sort of rules could they put around drop boxes? If you submit a mail ballot in many states, there’s a process called signature matching (a process where states require voters to provide valid signatures on their absentee/mail-in ballots). How do they make it harder to have those ballots be approved?

What many of these candidates also say they want to do is totally erase the state’s current voter rolls and start fresh. And that is what I think is most concerning, at least to me. What can they do, not when everyone’s watching, you know, the day after the election, what do they do in the two years leading up to it?

Noel King

Have you talked to anyone who said if people like this win elections and start fiddling with the system, Americans’ trust in the way we vote is going to bottom out? And that could just be catastrophic.

Zach Montellaro

A lot of Americans don’t think about elections. They think about elections as a one-day event. Elections really are, you know, a full year. It does not take 48 hours to prepare for a primary. It takes a year. It does not take 72 hours to prepare for a general election. It takes that whole year running up to it.

So the challenge is how do you restore people’s trust in elections when they don’t trust them? And there’s been no really good answer to that. Some part of America, at this point, won’t be reachable by election officials, will never believe we have free elections. And they’re wrong, but they’ll never believe that they’re free elections. It’s a race for election officials of both parties to reach the rest of Americans who just don’t think about elections all that much and say, “no, look, we do have a fair system. Come in and see.” The real push, since 2016 but especially since 2020, is transparency, transparency, transparency. “Come in and see how we test the ballot machines to make sure that they are actually counting what they say they’re going to count, come in and ask questions.”

By and large, your state election official, your local county clerk, will be more than happy to answer your questions. Maybe not right at this very second because they’re super busy preparing for the general election, but election officials want you to feel good about elections. They want to answer your questions. They want you to come in and watch the testing. They want poll watchers to actually watch and see how American elections are run. So the arms race is: Can you reach enough Americans who just have a weird gut feeling about it but aren’t so … far gone? How do you reach them this year and ahead of 2024?

The isolation of Vladimir Putin

2022-04-06T14:27:22-04:00

Russian President Vladimir Putin marks the eighth anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, in Moscow, on March 18. | Mikhail Klimentyev/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images

Russian President Vladimir Putin is isolated — and getting more so. President Joe Biden calls him a war criminal. American intelligence says Putin’s own advisers are misleading him about the war, telling Putin what he wants to hear. So what’s going through this secretive, solitary dictator’s mind? We’ve found one man who thinks he knows the answer.

Journalist and author Marvin Kalb has loved Russia for almost 70 years. In the early 1950s, he studied Russian history as a PhD candidate at Harvard. In 1960, he moved to Moscow as a reporter for CBS News. He’s interviewed many powerful Russians. But he’s never talked to Vladimir Putin. To get insight into Putin, Kalb says, it’s better to read about him than to interview him.

For an episode of Today, Explained, host Noel King talked with Kalb about how Putin has come to rely on a skewed version of history and an increasingly small circle of advisers — and what that means for the war in Ukraine. A partial transcript of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

Marvin Kalb

I have found over the years that if you read intensely what a leader says or writes or thinks about himself, you’re going to get a pretty good idea of what he actually is. Sometimes in an interview, you get only what a major political figure wishes to convey. And he does that very well. Putin is an astoundingly good interview. And reporters who get interviews with him do very well because he can play to the personality. He knows how to deal with people. That’s terribly important to him.

Noel King

Based on your many years of reading and observing, and knowing that you have a keen sense into who people are, who is Vladimir Putin?

Marvin Kalb

Vladimir Putin at the moment is a very lonely figure. He is finally a dictator. He used to be an authoritarian figure. He used to have the kind of power that a czar had. He is now an absolute dictator. And for him, that’s a bad thing.

What it means is, on the one hand, he has absolute power to do whatever he wants in Russia. But the people around him are now terrified of him. And that means that they will tell him what they think he wants to hear. That is very bad for any leader of any country. Putin now is in desperate need of solid, 100 percent verified information, and he is not getting it. That is the belief of the US government, of Western nations, and I think, logically, given the history of dictatorship, that when you get to an absolute top point of power, you begin to lose it. And Putin now is in the process of losing the power that for most of his life, he sought to accumulate.

He is a former KGB official. One of the young men in the dying days of the Soviet Union who would try to live in the artificial world created by the KGB. He would imagine what the Western world was like. He would try very hard to understand it. He would pick up a language. The government gave him every opportunity to learn as much about the enemy as he could, and he did, and he thought he would be able to figure out how to manipulate the enemy so that he could destroy it. That was the whole point of the KGB operation. It was an intelligence unit, but it was also a unit that operated to achieve certain ends. And for the KGB, the end has always been the dissolution of the Western threat.

Noel King

We know that US intelligence has tried to assess whether the pandemic changed Vladimir Putin’s mental state, whether isolation from the pandemic changed him. Was he a solitary person before the pandemic?

Marvin Kalb

Every leader is, to some degree, a lonely figure, but Putin was not. Putin enjoyed being with people, but at the same time, he was always very suspicious of everybody. And so there was always a distance between him and anyone he was negotiating with. And certainly between him and a person he would regard as an enemy, and so, yes, distance existed. He was surrounded always by his own intelligence, his own ambition, his drive for power. And when he achieved that, he was very good at persuading the man above him, the president of Russia, [Boris] Yeltsin. In the 1990s, Yeltsin brought him down from St. Petersburg to Moscow and Yeltsin appointed Putin the head of the KGB, or the new version of it. And a couple of years later appointed him prime minister. And then when Yeltsin wanted to resign, he looked around and the only person he felt he could trust was Putin.

So Putin became his successor, and almost immediately established a new kind of governance in Russia. He had his KGB folks ready to roll into power not only in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but all over the country. It is a vast country. It extends over many time zones. It is difficult to run a country that large and Putin had his people in position to run it, he had control over the entire operation. He became the boss.

Noel King

And so who surrounds Putin now? Who are his advisers? Who are his friends?

Marvin Kalb

The people who are around him now are the same people, more or less, who’ve been around him for the past 22 years. They are the people from the KGB. He allowed those people to take control over large economic assets in the country. Oil, gas, timber, invested in the hands of a very small group, and this small group proved to be effective enough for Putin to become the boss and run this very complex society.

Noel King

What does it tell you that Vladimir Putin has not made new friends over the last 22 years? That the same people who surrounded him when he was a KGB agent surround him as he is president of a world power?

Marvin Kalb

And that is an extremely important observation, because what we learn from it is that we are dealing with a man who had a certain vision of the world 20-30 years ago and retains it only in sharper form today.

Please remember, Putin is first and foremost a Russian nationalist. The question that comes into mind: is he an ultra-nationalist? By which, I mean, does he see everything from a Russian point of view? And the answer, unfortunately, is yes. And because he sees everything from a Russian point of view, he looks at a country, for example, like Belarus; at Ukraine; they are both Slavic. They are both Orthodox in religion and therefore in his mind, they are Russian. And it is not understandable to him at all that people who are authentically Russian, as he sees it, could ever be in rebellion against Moscow. In his mind, they have to be part of Moscow.

So we can look now at the war in Ukraine and say, “Isn’t it marvelous?” and indeed it is, that democracy appears to be holding on in Ukraine. For Putin, that is heresy. That is blasphemy. That is unacceptable. And so he will continue to fight to achieve the realization of what to him is perfectly normal.

Noel King

At this point, it has become very clear, in both reporting from on the ground and in reporting from the US Pentagon, Vladimir Putin is not winning the war in Ukraine. It seems as though it’s too early to say he’s losing it. What does that do for his mental state, do you think?

Marvin Kalb

Oh, I think it’s a shattering experience. That does not mean it totally undermines him. He’s a strong man and he’s very smart. He’s cunning, in fact. There’s a Russian word, хитрый, which means cunning, in a street corner sense. He understands power and he understands the utilization of power. He has very little patience for intelligence that comes to him saying, “We’re killing too many people.” Forget all of that. Where are we in terms of the end that I have articulated as our policy goal?

In fact, his policy goal, now, is never going to happen. He thought the war would be over within two or three days. We’re now into a second month and it may go on much longer than this. I hope not, but it’s possible. And in his mind, he is pursuing a legitimate historical goal. And can he lose? No. Can he persuade himself, ever, that he has lost? No. The only people who can persuade him will never persuade him, they will have to get rid of him in one way or another. And those are the people closest to him. They are the ones who know his mind, know his methods because they are the same people.

And if they get rid of him, there may be somebody very much like him who would come into power, or if we are lucky … if we are lucky, we may get to see the other promise of Russia … of literature, of music, of history, of growth, of creativity — Russia and the Russian people, it’s a great society.

And if there were another way of leaving the KGB mentality and reaching into the other Russia, we would all be so much better off led by the Russian people themselves. Is it possible? Yes. It’s there. It has to emerge from the soot and the gutter that it exists in today.

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