00:00:00 Glad you're with us on this Friday. All right. I'm going to tell a story on the show that I have never told before because lawyers have advised me not to tell it. And I figured out a way to talk about it today that I think is going to be OK legally. And the reason I'm going to tell the story today is because some of you reacted by saying. When I said last week, I'm hearing from lawyers about how they would go after progressive independent media, they being the Trump administration, they would do it indirectly. They wouldn't do it with criminality. They would
00:00:33 do it with frivolous audits or they would do it with frivolous lawsuits So they would do it by pushing social media to demonetize or restrict And a lot of people wrote in and wrote in and said, no one's ever done anything like this to you. Nobody ever would. And it's just, you don't matter essentially. I want to tell you a story of what happened. This is a few years ago. We did a piece of content and an elected official was mentioned in that piece of content. And I'm sorry that some of the details will be vague, but what our lawyer who represented us in this matter
00:01:07 said is you just don't want this to crop up again. Well, we did a piece of content about an elected official. And shortly thereafter, we received a letter from a very expensive DC law firm, um, uh, saying we believe that this piece of content is defamatory. We believe that you knew that what you were saying was false and you specifically decided to publish it anyway to ruin the reputation of our client and elected official. Uh, and we. uh, believe that this might, might be $150 ,000 worth of damage. Now, of course they throw around these numbers to scare you. And I was scared. And so we
00:01:55 got a lawyer who specializes in this stuff and he looked it over and he spoke to the attorneys representing the elected official and we looked at it up and down. And you know, he explained to me, listen, they make a lot of claims here that are really not supported by the law. For example. One of the claims in the letter was, you know, David, you didn't come to our client to get his side of the story. And our lawyer explained to me, that's true. You didn't, but you're not required to. It's not defamatory because you didn't try to get that guy's reaction. That doesn't
00:02:35 determine whether it is or isn't defamatory. And we work through this and accrued. know, five grand in legal fees. And ultimately, what our lawyer advised me was, listen, David, I think you're absolutely in the clear here. I believe that if this went, if we pursued this legally, this individual would not even want to subject himself to discovery. He did. He just It would be too much risk. If it went forward, I believe that you would win and you would be eligible to recover attorney's fees. However, however, I have to advise you based on the representation that this
00:03:20 individual has, how long these things are likely to go. You'll eventually get your legal fees back, probably not a guarantee, probably. But you might have to float one hundred thousand dollars in legal fees to get there. And how does that sound? than I said, especially at the time. I said, we don't have the capacity to float $100 ,000 in legal fees. And he said, I am for speech. I am always for more speech. And I never recommend that people censor themselves or anything like it. But in this case, because of what this would mean financially to even have to fight this, even if at
00:03:59 the tail end of the rainbow, you get your legal fees back, which is never a guarantee, likely, but never a guarantee. I'm going to recommend that you take the content down and they will likely say we reserve our right to come after you. But we are telling you we are not going to pursue this matter at this time. And that's what we did. And it felt like shit. And I was in a situation where I didn't think I had any other option because of what that represented financially. Now, I do think today the show is big enough that if something like this happened. And I just went scorched
00:04:36 earth and went to my audience and said, listen, at the risk of getting myself into more problems, this is who's coming after me. This is what what it's going to cost to fight it. Let's open a legal defense fund. And I think right now we could probably gather $100 ,000 to float such a fight, a fight that I think would be ideologically correct. The point here is the following the idea that these right wingers wouldn't come after us with frivolous this or frivolous that meant to bully and push us around because we're too small. This story I just told you was years ago. OK. And
00:05:14 if we were big enough, then certainly there's at least a dozen shows like this one that could be plausible targets from this new weaponized Trump DOJ and other associated organizations, IRS, et cetera. And I don't want to have to go up against them, but lest anyone think it's implausible. We dealt with what I just told you years ago and we were already talking about a hundred thousand, a hundred and fifty thousand dollars then just think about what it could be today. Terrifying stuff. Best thing you can do. Just make sure you're subscribed.
00:05:50 Subscribe to the podcast. Subscribe to the YouTube channel. If you've got a few bucks, certainly get a membership. But the most important things are The bigger we are, the bigger our network, the larger the number of people. If we have a problem I can go to and say, guys, this is what we're up against. Let's figure out what to do.
