More Handy Things To Know

(Ben Werdmuller is always thinking forward.)

Building distributed media for a democratic breakdown

Preparing viable alternatives for broadcast censorship and a restricted internet.

Ben Werdmuller 25 Sep 2025 — 5 min read

*Combat, the underground paper edited by Albert Camus during the French Resistance*

Jimmy Kimmel returned to the air on Tuesday and delivered a 28-minute monologue that set the record straight and sharply criticized the Trump administration. Sinclair and Nexstar, two TV networks whose affiliate stations collectively represent 25% of ABC’s broadcast audience, refused to transmit the show, pre-empting it with extended news programming instead. Trump, who is only increasing his authoritarianism, took to Truth Social to threaten ABC with new legal action for bringing it back.

Someone needed to introduce them to the Streisand effect: his monologue was streamed over 17.7 million times on YouTube in the first 24 hours alone, breaking records in the process. In the age of the internet, broadcast television is a legacy technology, and the content can always be obtained elsewhere. The median age of a primetime ABC viewer is 65.6 years old. Everyone else is streaming.

While the discussion of Kimmel’s week-long indefinite suspension dominated media discourse, a few other things were going on. New Jersey public media announced it would cease operations due to funding cuts. Cascade PBS in Seattle announced it would stop producing written journalism. Arizona public media made significant cuts to its content production staff. And on, and on, and on. Public service media has been gutted by the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and other attacks. It’s maybe not as exciting as the former host of The Man Show being canceled for a very mild criticism of the current administration — which, to be clear, is an alarmingly fascist abuse of power — but it’s ongoing and harmful. It leaves rural communities in particular with no information sources and no meaningful journalism covering their local governments.

If you believe that public service journalism is a load-bearing prerequisite for democracy, as I do, these are scary changes. These changes are particularly alarming because they’re happening just as the news industry overall has been contracting for decades, leaving fewer resources to fill the gaps. Other, larger, newsrooms could theoretically help fill the content and funding gaps, but there are fewer and fewer resources to share around.

The irony is that local news is the one place where this erosion of trust hasn’t been happening: local newsrooms know how to build community and are disproportionately trusted as a result. It’s also the one place where the broadcast medium is still important; in an emergency, or in a broadband desert, a radio signal can be the last source of real information. You can’t, yet, take a closed rural station and move it to YouTube without losing a large proportion of its audience. Around 90% of Americans have access to broadband internet, but that last 10% really matters.

Of course, if all the shuttered public media stations did move to YouTube, the government would go after that, too. As a service owned by a single corporation, it’s a central point of failure. Publishing on the open web would remove that risk, but the internet itself has been repeatedly under attack. In some areas, legislation has passed that effectively bans certain kinds of content (Bluesky is unavailable in Mississippifor this reason) and net neutrality has been decimated nationwide, making it far easier for an ISP to cut access to a particular service, perhaps in response to pressure from the government. With the government flexing severe restrictions to broadcast media, and nothing stopping severe restrictions to streaming media, there’s nowhere left for information to go.

In Cuba, the internet was legalized in 2019, although you need a permit to have a home connection, and connection quality is still intermittent. Starting long before that, people with access would download content to flash drives and then distribute them through a vast, illicit network called El Paquete Semanal, or The Weekly Package. You could think of it as a magazine: every week there would be a new issue of media that couldn’t be obtained any other way. It became so popular that the government tried to release its own competing USB drop containing approved media; unsurprisingly, it didn’t catch on.

There are other analogues through history to draw on: Samizdat was a method for reproducing and distributing censored material by hand in the USSR; its network was similarly decentralized. In France during the Nazi occupation, there were over a thousand underground publications operating with portable printing equipment and distribution cells, with over two million copies circulated in total.

We’ve become very reliant on the internet, but we may need to prepare for a post-broadcast, post-open-internet era. Ironically, newspapers, long the poster-child of media’s death throes, are semi-distributed and would be more resilient to this more restrictive media landscape, as the French resistance example demonstrates. (Of course, a newspaper that relies on a centralized printing press can always be shut down.) These are things that might happen, not things that definitely will, but it doesn’t hurt to consider this as a potential future that we might need to react to.

In a world where we succumb to truly authoritarian control over the media, I think there may be something to learn from El Paquete. A discrete bundle of digital media can be transmitted in multiple forms. It can be accessed via the web; consumed via an app that downloads the new bundle every week; transmitted over peer-to-peer networks; stored on resilient alternative file systems like IPFS; and even through sneakernet networks like Cuba’s. The bundle could contain archives of entire websites in the Internet Archive’s WARC format, downloads of video podcasts, and so on, linked with a web-based interface that would be somewhat akin to a DVD menu.

Such a bundle would probably not be collated inside the US. Instead, a group might be established in safe third-party countries like Switzerland, who could communicate securely with journalists on the ground in the US and elsewhere. They would bundle the release, publish it to various networks (the open social web, IPFS, p2p networks), publish a checksum hash, and publicize it in Signal channels.

It would be paid for in various ways. The central newsroom would need to be funded by international non-profits oriented towards re-establishing media freedom in the US (for example, the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders). Individual journalists and creators in the US would need to be supported by communities more local to them and would likely take the form of mutual aid as much as direct support. Because traditional payment and crypto networks are both highly traceable, direct donations or subscriptions might not be feasible or safe.

I think it’s important to establish this ahead of time. By the time the internet is locked down and major restrictions have been applied to broadcast media, it’s too late. The good news is that it’s kind of cool in itself: the form of an online magazine that carries submissions from multiple news and media creators has a lot of scope for experimentation at every level, from content to design. It’s offline-first, which means you can interact with it on a plane and in other situations where internet is not an option. That’s neat in itself!

It also solves the problem of how this would be found by new readers to begin with. After a democratic collapse, discovery would need to be through word of mouth; before it, though, such a product could be promoted through more traditional channels (emphasizing the innovative nature of its issue-based format rather than its resiliency to authoritarian control). Early adopters who are attracted to the initial product would form the backbone of the word-of-mouth network later on. Just as newsrooms today thrive if they successfully build community, building trusted networks of people becomes vital for distributing underground material in an authoritarian environment. Historical underground media networks took years to establish, as all communities do; building community would need to begin immediately.

Our entire software stack — our content management systems in particular — are designed to be accessed through a functioning internet. Luckily, thanks to tools created by organizations like the Internet Archive, we can simply build websites locally on our own devices and create an archived version to distribute. The tools are there; the work to be done is all at the human level.

A Story From Imani Gandy:

Trump’s Second Term Hits Different Now That I’m Out—Opinion

Sep 24, 2025, 9:00am Imani Gandy

The target on my back got bigger once I stepped into the light.

Brown hands making a heart shape with the colors of the Pride flag filling the heart. The hands are placed over top of a red background with a gavel, Project 2025 papers, the U.S. Capitol, and hearts sketched into it. Queer people don’t have the luxury of treating Trump’s anti-LGBTQ+ actions as a simple policy debate. Cage Rivera/Rewire News Group

I often joke about being a Meredith Baxter gay. You may remember her as Meredith Baxter Birney, the woman who played Elyse Keaton on Family Ties. She came out as a lesbian in 2009, when she was 62. I don’t know why Baxter is stuck in my mind as the quintessential “coming out later in life” queen. Plenty of people have come out late in life, but I’m firmly Gen X, so somehow she became my northstar of late-stage queerness.

When I finally came out at 50 in 2024, it wasn’t particularly dramatic. It was quiet and overdue. Something inside me had been waiting for years, tapping its foot, wondering when I’d finally be ready to stop pretending. Maybe that’s why I’m writing this column—to elicit a reaction that’s more dramatic than “no shit, Imani.”

Coming out later in life means you’ve probably already got bad knees and sciatica. I certainly do. I can’t drop it low anymore unless there’s a paramedic nearby to hoist me up. I missed the whole glamorous L Word era because, even though I knew I was at least a little gay around the edges, I had no idea what to do about it. I was even living in Los Angeles when The L Word was on the air. I knew all the places I could go if I wanted to spread my gay wings.

But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I just kept plodding on and trying to date men. I even considered marrying two different men in my 20s and 30s. And I bless the rains down in Africa that I didn’t, because both marriages would have ended up in disaster.

Sometimes I grieve for the queer Imani who could have been tearing it up in Los Angeles in 2002. But I can’t go back; I can only move forward. And I’m moving forward with an additional identity that colors the way I move through the world.

And on top of that, I’m moving through that world under Trump 2.0.

As a Black woman, I never needed Donald Trump to show me who he was. I clocked him from the jump. Racist, misogynist, wannabe strongman—it was all right there. His first term was terrifying. Not in the politics is messy way, but in the this man will torch democracy if doing so makes him feel powerful way.

But this time hits different. Because now I’m out.

Project 2025’s ‘dark plan’ for LGBTQ+ rights

When Trump was in office the first time, I wasn’t living openly as a queer woman. I fought his administration on reproductive rights, voting rights, immigration, and racial justice in part by highlighting the misinformation and half-truths that are the core features of the conservative effort to impose Christian theocracy on queer people, immigrants, people of color—on basically anyone who doesn’t fit neatly into their straight, white, Christian box.

That’s because I’m a person who deeply believes in justice. Hell, I’ve dedicated my life to reproductive justice even though I’ve never been pregnant. Never had an abortion. (My girlfriend says it’s because I’m extremely empathetic and I hate injustice.)

But I didn’t feel the daily, stomach-clenching fear of watching a government try to erase LGBTQ+ rights while knowing my own life was on the line.

Now I do.

(Imani’s new podcast drops on Sept. 25, 2025. Subscribe to Boom! Lawyered to be the first to hear it.)

Trump’s first term was hardly neutral on queer people. He banned trans people from serving in the military. He rescinded guidance telling schools to protect trans students. His Department of Justice claimed in court that businesses should be able to fire workers just for being gay. He proposed gutting nondiscrimination protections in health care so doctors could refuse to treat trans patients. He appointed judges who seem to pride themselves on being hostile to LGBTQ+ rights.

Now, we’ve got Trump 2.0—and the plan is even darker. His allies wrote it all down in Project 2025, a 900-page blueprint for turning the country into a Christian nationalist theocracy. Project 2025 is about reframing queer identity and sexual expression as obscenity, criminalizing it, and pushing LGBTQ+ people out of public life.

The Supreme Court is already helping this project along, as I wrote back in July. This past term, the Court handed Christian conservatives two major wins: Mahmoud v. Taylor and Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton.

In Mahmoud, religious parents in Maryland didn’t want their kids reading age-appropriate LGBTQ+-inclusive books like Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, Prince & Knight, Pride Puppy! These children’s books don’t contain anything graphic or explicit; they just acknowledge that queer families exist.

In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court sided with the parents. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said parents should get a heads-up and the chance to opt out of any lessons with LGBTQ+ content “until all appellate review in this case is completed”—a process that could take years.

Alito gussied up his argument as “religious liberty,” arguing that requiring parents to submit their children to instruction that contradicts their religious beliefs constitutes a burden on religious exercise. But let’s be real: It’s a green light for parents to purge classrooms of queer content. Schools under pressure won’t build complex opt-out systems for kids whose parents object to these texts. They’ll just pull the books from classrooms.

Then there’s the Free Speech Coalition case. The Supreme Court upheld a law Texas passed in 2023 requiring age verification to access “sexually explicit” content online. Sounds like it’s about porn, right? But Project 2025 calls for a ban on pornography not just in the good, old-fashioned sense of the word. It expands the definition of porn in a way that can easily be interpreted to cover materials commonly found in a high school library, like books on sexual health, puberty, and information on sexual orientation and identity for LGBTQ+ youth.

To the architects of Project 2025, a book on puberty or a novel with queer characters is basically Hustler magazine.

Put Mahmoud and Free Speech Coalition together, and you see the playbook: Queer identity equals obscenity. Queer books? Obscene. Queer websites? Obscene. Porn? Criminal. Once you collapse all of that into the same bucket, it’s open season on LGBTQ+ people and culture.

This is the blueprint Trump and his allies are running with. Not just another round of chaos, but a coordinated effort to erase queer life—through schools, libraries, the internet, and the courts.

That’s why this second term feels different

It’s not that I didn’t know Trump was dangerous before—I did. But because I’m out now, I feel these attacks land in a new place.

It’s my life. My love. My newly-formed family. My right to be visible without being treated like contraband or pretending that my girlfriend, Portia, is my sister.

Coming out didn’t make Trump more dangerous. It made the danger he presents impossible to intellectualize away.

Straight people can treat this as just another policy debate. Queer people don’t have that luxury. We know our lives and relationships are bargaining chips in a theocracy that Christian nationalists are trying to build one opt-out, one website ban, one court case at a time.

So yeah, Trump’s second term hits different because the target on my back got bigger once I stepped into the light.

And that’s the gut punch: Trump doesn’t just threaten democracy in the abstract now—he threatens the most personal parts of my life.

Republican Caught With Porn Hides Behind Charlie Kirk

I have read rumors about this guy for a long time. But I was always hopeful he played for the straight team because of how hateful he is. He is an all out racist. But they claim to have checked it out and it is true. There clearly is some excitement in Ryan’s pants.

He’s SO Bad At This…

I believe that Chuck Schumer cares far more for his big money donors and mythical Baileys than for the lower income people. I think he was good at the game in the 1990s. I think he relied heavily on Pelosi during tRump’s first term. If you don’t watch the video, know that the candidates running in red states to unseat the republicans in those seats don’t want Schumer to campaign with them in any way. In state after state, the new democratic candidates for Senate say they won’t vote for Schumer. The only one who may would be Mills in Maine because she has not declared yet and Schumer is pushing her hard to enter … in her upper 70s. Screw those young upstarts in their 40s and 50s, those wet behind the ears kids. let’s put a seasoned 77-year-old in the Senate for a six year term. It seems that Schumer’s plan for the midterms is to do nothing, take no position on anything that might upset anyone and hope that tRump is so bad people will be so sick of him that they vote for the democrats. It did not work that way in 2024 and it won’t in 2026. He went on Morning Joe, no young voter is watching Morning Joe. Only older voters and donors are. Sam points out Schumer could be saying to the public that tRump’s wealth has doubled in 8 months, has yours? He could be doing interviews saying what the FCC is doing is bad so if we win we are going to X and X. But Schumer won’t even bring up Epstein. I find all that Sam Seder says and shows of Schumer to be true, which heralds that we are in big trouble in the midterms. Hugs

Trump ICE Czar’s Bribe Bag Scandal

Trump’s Cult And Christian America

Some News (Tabs From Tuesday)

Some of it is not being covered so well elsewhere, what with the proponents being women and all, so some may still be new this morning! 🙂 A bit of blue language.

WELCOME BACK, JIMMY! Tabs, Tues., Sept. 23, 2025 by Rebecca Schoenkopf

CAN’T KEEP A FREE SPEECH DOWN. Read on Substack

Tabs .gifs by Martini Glambassador! Did I repeat one? Oh well if I did LOOK AT IT AGAIN

Good morning, it’s a short tabs because it just is, and because OH LOOKIE HERE?

https://embed.bsky.app/embed/did:plc:ihpglfqq3dapqjmwl2ntktil/app.bsky.feed.post/3lzh5zkhvpc2j?id=278835588257752

Ha, fuckers, ha!

But will MAGA hack companies Sinclair and Nexstar put it on their air? Who knows.

But we guess Disney got hurt right in the wallet. And it’s got to be pretty embarrassing when big Hulu documentaries are coming out and the literal stars of them (Sarah McLachlan) are declining to perform at the premieres, because of this whole censorship/fascism crisis we are in. Did you hear about that? That happened. [Billboard]

Um, we did not realize Trump was already babbling and making up “sir” stories about men with tears in their eyes in Memphis thanking him for the National Guard, but they have not been deployed.

https://embed.bsky.app/embed/did:plc:27jrcf2nmsofvwqcf6ztcnxy/app.bsky.feed.post/3lzgxktll2d23?id=8841689470383374

Anyway, crime is down in Memphis. It has nothing to do with shit nor shinola done by Donald J. Trump. [Tennessee Lookout]

Doctor Donald Trump says the old Ass Met Min Fin — how you say it? Words is hard — is more commonly known as “tylenol” and is definitely what causes the autism. You betcha.

hereswhykevin

A post shared by @hereswhykevin

Politico reports that Trump and Marco Rubio have absolutely destroyed the state of American diplomacy around the world. We knew that, but interesting details in this article. [Politico]

You guyssssssss, Tom Homan and Kristi Noem are having a diva fight about who goes on TV too much, you guyssssssss. [Daily Beast]

There was no Moral High Ground this week, because I’ve been out and about. It’ll be back later this week, but why don’t you go subscribe to it anyway? [The Moral High Ground]