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Thousands of Afghans fled their homes when the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in 2021.

The government of the United Kingdom pledged to take in 20,000 of them as refugees.

But in the first year, only 22 Afghans had been approved for asylum in the United Kingdom.

So what happened? And what does this mean for the tens of thousands of people left behind?

Hear that story on the latest episode of Into the Mix.

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is now and then.

I'm Heather Cox Richardson, and I'm Joanne Freeman.

This week we want to talk about the question of third party candidates and how they influence presidential elections.

And obviously one of the things that's front and center is we're talking about this topic is the current discussion and various controversies that exist having to do with the candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Seemingly, a Democratic candidate perhaps not, and that's the very sort of question that's going to be in part at the heart of this episode, which is we assume, and we'll talk about this more momentarily, that America has a two party system, and that is how things work, and that is how they've always supposed to have worked, and that's how things go, and like, oh gas, look, there might be another party, and that it's actually more complicated than that, or interesting than that.

And it has to do with a lot of different kinds of things, some of them having to do with political strategy, some of them actually having to do with principles and ideals.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. he is actually running as a Democratic primary competitor to President Biden, anyone who's been watching the news in any way is aware that he has a variety of different views about things that don't necessarily put him at the center of the Democratic party stance.

Now, Kennedy has long been trumpeting a range of conspiracy theories, for example, suggesting that vaccines may cause autism and other medical conditions that exposure to chemicals and drinking water may cause gender dysphoria.

He somehow or other has linked the rise of antidepressants to school shootings. He suggested that the CIA may have killed his uncle, President John F. Kennedy.

Most recently he started talking about ethnically geared biochemicals, somehow or other linking that with COVID in a way that he has made increasingly unclear, as he's tried to explain what it is that he was trying to talk about.

So in one way or another, he's an interesting candidate, potentially, and this is some of what we're going to be talking about in today's episode, the kind of candidate who's put forward to complicate or change the way a two party election is going.

And Kennedy is, I think, a slightly different case than the ones that you and I are going to talk about in terms of American history in that he's a deeply problematic candidate as an individual.

He has a very problematic past. He does not at all fit the democratic party, but it strikes me one of the things about the Kennedy candidacy in which he insists that he is running to win the election, even though that's really not anywhere in any card that anybody can see, is that he seems to reflect a new political moment that has been characterized by this new concept of politics that comes out of Russia.

It comes out of Russia called political technology in which a party that is trying to run as a spoiler picks somebody who has a name that will get great name recognition among the voters that they're trying to split.

That's one thing that Kennedy has going for him is a name that a lot of people, if they're not paying attention, might say, oh, Kennedy, he's a Democrat.

He says things I believe in and what that will do is it'll split the Democrats. So he is slightly different, I think, than the other cases we're talking about because of this new concept of how you can take over a country that is a democratic country and turn it into an authoritarian government through voting.

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