Month: December 2023

So the Internet villain du jour is Substack, self-described “new economic engine for culture”, largely because of the above comment. Substack has a Nazi problem, to quote the title of an article on the subject by Jonathan Katz:

At least 16 of the newsletters that I reviewed have overt Nazi symbols, including the swastika and the sonnenrad, in their logos or in prominent graphics. Andkon’s Reich Press, for example, calls itself “a National Socialist newsletter”; its logo shows Nazi banners on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, and one recent post features a racist caricature of a Chinese person. A Substack called White-Papers, bearing the tagline “Your pro-White policy destination,” is one of several that openly promote the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that inspired deadly mass shootings at a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, synagogue; two Christchurch, New Zealand, mosques; an El Paso, Texas, Walmart; and a Buffalo, New York, supermarket. Other newsletters make prominent references to the “Jewish Question.” Several are run by nationally prominent white nationalists; at least four are run by organizers of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—including the rally’s most notorious organizer, Richard Spencer.

This resulted in something called Substackers Against Nazis, an open letter published by dozens of Substack writers unhappy with the Nazi situation; this was in turn answered by another open letter saying the problem’s overstated that was co-signed by a number of… interesting names like Abigail Shrier, Bari Weiss, Julie Bindel, Konstantin Kisin, Matt Taibbi, Paul Kingsnorth, Peter Boghossian, Richard Dawkins, and various others I’m not familiar with (plus Ted Gioia, who I otherwise thought was and is cool from what I can see). I decided to click one of those names I didn’t recognise and got… whatever this fuck this is:

Have you ever noticed the Substackers Against Nazis post is on a blog called The Racket by Johnathan M. Katz? It’s full of things that read as very Antisemitic to me, and it gets famous just as the Israel-Palestine Conflict is at its worst with October 7th! Forget Substackers Against Nazis, it should be called Antisemites Against Nazis! It’s also all related to The Atlantic wanting to demolish our independent platform by calling us Nazis, especially the Jews and the people who support Israel. Not that calling Jews Nazis is anything new.

Katz is Jewish himself, it should be added. Calling Jews antisemites… THAT’s something you don’t often see. Another of Katz’s critics is his self-avowed friend Ben Dreyfuss (you may know his dad), for whom the problem isn’t Nazis but the unserious liberals trying to deplatform them:

I don’t know that anything has made me more annoyed by this debate than last weekend when I saw an earnest, relatively offline, old Jewish writer make the mistake of thinking that the “Nazis on substack” open letter was using the term “Nazi” in any way that had to do with their understanding of the term. They were sad and scared and horrified! But also confused and looking for an explanation. They hadn’t seen any of the people who had killed their parents here.
I didn’t respond to them because I have a horse in this race and felt like someone who is as earnest as they and more unbiased than we should help them out. But what I would have told them is: don’t worry. They don’t mean actual nazis. They mean unreconstructed conservatives who could have any number of beliefs.
That isn’t how that dude understood the term “Substack Nazis.” That dude thought there were real popular Nazis on here putting Jews in camps.

I shouldn’t have to tell Ben this, but the Nazis didn’t start with death camps. They started with a newspaper. You know… words. Words they used to promote their ideas before taking direct action. Curious, too, that several of these “unreconstructed conservatives” would choose specifically Nazi imagery and iconography, or call themselves a “National Socialist newsletter”, if they weren’t at least Nazi-sympathetic. Just because they’re only talking about the JQ rather than personally spraying Zyklon-B at every Jewish person they see doesn’t mean they’re not Nazis. Or are they only “real” Nazis if it was before 1945 or something?

Anyway, the anti-Nazi open letter finally provoked Substack’s founders to respond, part of which response is cited in the picture up top… basically, “we don’t like Nazis either but they don’t bother us enough”. Which… was, frankly, far from the best answer they could’ve given. Business Insider is not having it, noting that, because Substack gives users the option to monetise their writing, in return for which they take some amount of what you make from doing so, they’re making money off the monetised Nazi blogs too (maybe not much, but any is too much). And The Verge were even less charitable:

I mean, maybe the problem isn’t as bad as some of the critics of the Substackers Against Nazis seem to think it is. Maybe there’s actually not a lot of Nazis on Substack, and maybe they don’t have a big audience, and maybe they don’t make much money, maybe we don’t really have much to worry about. Maybe. The Deutsche Arbeiterpartei had only a few dozen members when it was founded in 1919; by the end of 1920, NSDAP (as it was by then) membership was around two thousand. Who can say what we should or shouldn’t be worried about.

Anyway, I actually considered Substack myself as an outlet when I was considering becoming a blogger again near the end of last year. In the end I decided it wasn’t really suitable for what I wanted to do (though, ironically, a long post like this would’ve been ideal over there). And though I’m sure WordPress has issues of its own, I think I still made the right decision in the end. For once.