American Samizdat

The Steady State | By Margaret Henoch October 8, 2025

A Free Press is as essential to a democracy as State Controlled Media is essential to a dictator. President Trump has been raging against our free press since before he became president, and has continued to rage until this day. We heard “fake news,” as a descriptor of mainstream media early on. We then heard his special assistant Kelly Anne Conway announce that there are “alternative” facts. As soon as Trump returned to the presidency, we saw him begin to try to shutter major mainstream media outlets. As prologue to doing so, in the spring of 2025, Trump made sure CBS would not renew Colbert’s contract, and only a month ago, he had Jimmy Kimmel fired. He may have gone after comedians so quickly because they are often a dictator’s worst nightmare. They are able to make the public laugh at the dictator himself as well as at his/her comic behaviors, proclamations, and declarations.

As President Trump and his allies continue to work to close down US media, our traditional media, from the Washington Post to CBS, ABC and NBC and any number of smaller newspapers and television stations, as well as National Public Radio and Public TV, have gone from being trusted, objective purveyors of facts to entities that have caved to Trump’s demands and are far less reliable and much more fantasy based. It seems clear that members of the pro-democracy coalition are going to have to find new sources of information, sources which provide factual data and opinions based on real happenings and actual events. And, it seems likely that we are going to have to do most or all of our news consumption, discussion and opining underground so that we are not punished for knowing and disseminating truth, and so we have and circulate true and reality based coverage among the larger coalition.

We are likely going to have to develop systems of publishing, delivering, and importing information that the Trump regime considers threatening to its continued existence. Soviet Union and Bloc countries depended upon Samizdat and Tamizdat for fact and reality based news and provide us with real world, successful models that created and delivered accurate content. .

During the 1950s through the 1980s, in the Soviet Union and its satellites, people advocating for freedoms like those of speech, gathering together, religion, voting, and many others, understood that their compatriots might be having trouble accessing accurate versions of another reality; the democracy of other nations. Many citizens were devouring only the fantasies published and sanctioned by the leaders of their countries, and these people had no source of truth about their situations, their country or the outside world. With no truth, those people had no one nor any reason to oppose the state and its ways and look for new leaders. Sound familiar?

As these governments continued their crackdowns on dissent and truth, arresting and jailing anyone who presented a view contrary to the state-sanctioned and state-distributed “truths,” members of the oppositions found ways to communicate, publish and deliver versions of events and situations that were fact instead of fantasy based. They wrote, published and delivered opposition messages, based in reality and they did so underground; away from the prying and deadly eyes of Iron Curtain leadership. Those publications were often typewritten in secret, mimeographed in secret and then smuggled to networks of resistance leaders, who used their own secret networks to pass the information to the public.

At the same time, people outside of the Soviet Bloc were writing actual realities about things affecting or going on inside the USSR. Material including that kind of information, called Tamizdat, was hidden from most people. As the Samizdat movement gained momentum and increased in support, the data available via Tamizdat availability increased and fueled a more potent anti-government force

Underground populations relied on Samizdat and Tamizdat to provide real reporting on the issues of the day in the rest of the world. Samizdat literally means “self-published,” and implies distributio underground networks. Tamizdat refers to things which were written abroad and distributed via underground networks inside the Soviet Union and Bloc countries. Samizdat and Tamizdat were critical to to the overthrow of multiple dictatorships; they provided truths and facts, and those, in turn, gave anti-dictatorship groups and movements a reality which contrasted with the propaganda and lies delivered by the authoritarian regimes, and a way to hold the possibility of democracy close. In a very real sense, these underground newspapers and radio provided a way for the people to hold onto the possibility that democracy would become reality.

Donald Trump began his assault on our information systems right at the beginning of his first term, using the term “fake news.” We all got the message that Mr. Trump has a violent reaction to and fear of facts and reality, that his once top advisor, Kelly Anne Conway, believed that there are “alternative facts” (there are not) and that Trump’s followers applauded their leader’s refusal to accept any information which did not line up with his and their views of the universe. The insistence that only Trump’s “facts” are true, continued and deepened the political divide in this country. When we can’t agree on actual reality, it’s kind of tough to debate philosophies and methodologies.

And, in Trump 2.0, this assault on the truth continues and will grow as he expands his effort to discredit and remove major media outlets and figures. Trump removed federal funding for public broadcast radio and TV, places upon which rural communities rely for weather and disaster information. Trump has cowed major newspapers, their owners, and specific news personalities and is gunning for broadcast media. In the face of this assault, we must not rely on traditional media: we cannot assume they will print or broadcast views and realities that oppose Trump’s, and we cannot look to them to support basic truth, ever. We will have to develop other ways to publish and distribute actual news and reality. We will have to develop other ways to communicate truth and protect it, as well as ways to protect ourselves. We will, in addition, have to find ways to funnel truths published outside of the US, to all manner of people who will not be able to to get them the way we used to.

Donald Trump is finding ways to turn us upside down, and we are going to have to develop new ways to stay right side up. One of the most important of those efforts will be paying attention to real facts and understanding how important they are to reclaiming the country. We will have to learn how to get and distribute such material, in ways that frustrate this administration’s attempts to silence us all. Samizdat and Tamizdat were fundamental to the overthrow of the fascist regime in Poland, and to the autocracies in other Iron Curtain countries as well as to the disintegration of the former Soviet Union. We will need new ways of looking at things, a lot more rigorous thought and action on publication of “news,” a lot more cynicism, and additional patience that getting to the actual facts of reality will take. All of which is a pretty small price to pay for a working democracy, and No Kings.

Margaret Henoch served in the Clandestine Service of the CIA for 25 years, at Headquarters and in the field, focusing on operations and counterintelligence and retiring as a Senior Intelligence Officer. She is a member of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 330 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.