Dave Ridley worked for almost 20 years as a videographer and editor at various television news stations around the country before starting THE RIDLEY REPORT blog. He moved to New Hampshire in 2004. In the past year, he says, he has served two jail terms for refusing to pay fines for acts of civil disobedience: the first for the distribution of handbills; the second for attempting to videotape in a courtroom. The following is an edited interview.

In a town with a 100 people, would you feel like you could make a change? How about 1,000, or 10,000? What if your town is 300 million people? That’s the situation we’re in. When the federal government is making town-level government decisions, how do you have any say in that?

Everybody is a libertarian about something. If we could just get to the point where at least the government isn’t growing so fast, or even downsizing a bit, that would be a huge accomplishment right there. We can argue later about the rest.

I like the 50 states, and I think of them as my country. But I believe something like secession is the only hope for people to live in freedom in New Hampshire. The states aren’t the problem. It’s this bloated central bureaucracy that’s gotten in the way.

Some people assume they have to go straight from the ballot box to the bullet box. Really, there are a lot of intermediate peaceful options that America has not even begun to explore yet. Right now, I think the First Amendment is a better protector than the Second. Guns aren’t much use against government anyway.

As long as the word can get out, there’s always hope. But when authorities start trying to quell speech, especially peaceful speech, then that’s a bigger problem than any of the others. They’re afraid of sunlight. If people are on your dime, they shouldn’t be hiding.

I hate being confrontational. I hate it. If I am, it’s by accident. But the process of gathering news is sort of like sausage making — it’s natural for people to object to the process because it isn’t always that pretty.

I studied journalism in college. We had this professor who was an ex-news reporter. He held up a copy of a total rag paper called Dry Heave in one hand and The New York Times in the other and said, “The same First Amendment that protects The New York Times protects Dry Heave,” And everybody cheered.

The Ridley Report is just as ramshackle as Dry Heave, but the First Amendment protects that, supposedly. At least it used to. And that’s what I’d like to see again, for the First Amendment to actually mean something.

There’s nothing reactionary about trying to run a video camera. I want to keep trying to get that message out: don’t get mad, get video.