Chris Best

Oh, man.

So we had a thing that kept happening because you'd have these, especially like local journalism.

This happened a lot.

where somebody would be covering a local business or politician negatively.

And they'd be some independent person that's just trying to... Maybe there's no local newspaper anymore, but they're taking up the thing.

And they'd write some negative story, and they would get a really scary letter on legal letterhead that basically says...

we're going to ruin your life unless you shut up.

I mean, there's very strong legal protections for journalism and speech and criticism in this country.

And so very often,

These were just bogus claims, or claims that did not have a very strong chance of actually winning in court.

But the ability to make the threat, if you're an independent person, can be kind of debilitating.

Because even just the cost of defending yourself can be very high, and you don't really know.

How are they going to be able to find something, or what is this thing?

And so we created this program called Substack Defender that was basically like, we're going to have a fund for picking up defenses of these things that anybody can apply to.

We'll pick which ones we take.

And we're going to pick a few things like this where somebody is kind of trying to do censorship by lawfare, I think of it, just like really vigorously defend it and put a bunch of weight behind it, put a bunch of money behind it, try to like, you know, publicize it if necessary.

Yes.

Because the imbalance was if you're some business person or a government person, it's basically free for you to like send a scary, scary gram.

There's no real cost to you.

It's cheap to get a lawyer.