Good-bye 2023, and good-bye Substack
Yes, this is about the Nazis
2023 is winding down, and 2024 promises to be interesting, in the sense of “may you live in interesting times.”
I’ll see you all in January. BUT… I won’t see you here. You may recall last week that I mentioned an open letter from many Substack users to management about this service’s hosting and monetizing of Nazis.
Substack responded to this open letter today, and guess what, they’re all in on continuing to platform Nazis. Not to mention actively promoting their platforming of other problematic content and people—specifically including an abundant supply of anti-trans and gender-critical content.
This isn’t a free speech issue; it’s about the people with whom I choose to associate, and those whom I choose to support with my labor and money. My freedom of speech means I am free to publish my work somewhere that doesn’t platform Nazis and anti-trans extremists, and I am free to spend my money on publications that don’t platform Nazis and anti-trans extremists.
So I’m out. And I hope you’ll consider doing the same.
If you’re already on LinkedIn, you can continue to receive this newsletter there. There will be one more newsletter edition here, most likely in January, which will update you on any additional places you can find me in the future, including where to find the archives after I shut this account down.
Sorry for the inconvenience. Believe me, the last thing I wanted to do after walking away from a big audience on Twitter is to walk away from another significant audience here. And, admittedly, there’s abundant moral hazard to be found everywhere online. We’re all steeping in it, honestly. Both of those factors slowed my decision to leave this platform, when they shouldn’t have.
As we go into 2024, it’s clear that a lot of malignant actors are aligning themselves in an effort to take democracy away from us and strip us of our rights. Nazis on Substack may seem like a small part of the problem, but it’s all the same problem. Supporting Substack with money and/or content is part of that problem.
There’s a too-real chance the Nazis will succeed, and we are all going to have to draw some bright lines about how and whether we’ll fight back.
See you in 2024…
Truth to power
Mr. Berger, I hope you'll reconsider. Your distaste at associating yourself with a site that platforms Nazis is justified without reservation--and while I think some of the substacks people are objecting to fall well short of what I use the term "Nazi" to characterize, I've found at least one full-on Nazi blog that Substack seems perfectly content to host. (The writer of that blog came to my attention when he replied to a comment I wrote concerning rising antisemitism and Islamophobia by calling me a "kikesucking Zionist ass-whore.")
But the legitimate objections you and lots of other bloggers are raising to Substack's policy response are, I think, very likely to undermine the goals that serious substackers have been trying to achieve: sustaining thoughtful, analytic, civil discussion about political and cultural issues that have become tribal shouting matches poisoning US politics and society. I think there is no way to quarantine the most toxic of those voices without drawing tribal lines by doing so, and that will just further diminish the narrow range of cross-group communication still left to us.
Of course no one doing the work you do (which I have been following with admiration for years) would want to be associated by platform with genuine Nazis and fellow traveling white nationalists, but I think the impulse to maintain clean hands will be tactically damaging by undermining a platform that I think has benefited serious civil discourse overall, and that highlights by exceptions the bankruptcy of extremist trolling culture and the ideas it promotes. By necessity we have to share a country with these types of people, and it will be that much harder to contest with them by refusing to share any platform of communication. Perhaps poorly camouflaged white nationalists like Richard Hanania or "respectable" full-on ones like Richard Spencer and Patrick Casey will use Substack as further cover, but I don't think they can be combatted except by their opponents getting their hands dirty occupying spaces where they flourish.
By the way, Substack doesn't seem to be totally neutral on the issue. When I checked the Völkisch substack blog of the person who treated me to that new low in invective I found that one comment that he had "liked" and praised on his own blog had been removed--obviously not by him. Someone is guarding *some* boundaries, and overriding the preferences of a true Nazi Substack client.