Some of you said (and thank you for your comments) that you looked forward to my following up on my “preface” about Nazi writers being allowed on Substack. This has proved very difficult. I’ve already written many words and revised many times. The more I think about it, the clearer it becomes that the issues at stake are woven tightly into the unsafe situation that looms over a rocky 2024.
In my brief earlier preface, I summarized the situation, which, in a nutshell, is contained right in the headline for the November Atlantic magazine article that stirred up the pot: “Substack Has a Nazi Problem.” My preface included links to that article and some of the pro and con reactions to it.
Topics I’d like to address (not all today) include these:
Who are these Nazi writers and are they dangerous? Are they the ones we should be concerned about?
What if anything should be done about dangerous writers, and by whom? Where does free speech enter the picture?
How do we gauge the actual impact of writers?
A major reason this is a difficult topic for me is that thinking about Nazis forces me to face things I don't generally want to think or talk about, things that are therefore not part of my conscious identity. Like the fact that mine is the first generation to have no Old Country to visit. I rarely think about the concentration camps, though I grew up knowing about them. I don't know which of my three childhood hospitalizations included an awareness of the camps but at some point I remember deciding that no discomfort or pain I felt was ever going to be a big deal compared with what kids had to go through in the camps. When I learned to shave, I taught myself ways to shave my upper lip such that not for one instant did the positive or negative image of Hitler's mustache appear, and only recently did I ever mention that to one person, my older son. We knew in Hebrew school that one of our teachers, Mrs. S., had survived a concentration camp but we made fun of her and harassed her with subtle annoying tricks just like we did to any teacher who tried to be strict. It was many years before I learned that three of my mother's cousins and their father had been forced to stand naked facing a trench in Lithuania waiting for the impact of bullets from behind to shove them into their own mass grave on top of the screaming, squirming bodies of their friends and neighbors soaked in blood and other bodily fluids, some already dead, some dying from the bullets, the fall, or being crushed and smothered by the weight of bodies and lack of air. The Nazis killed about one-third of their Jewish victims in this way, though the murderers apparently found these firing squads a bit too distressing for themselves, so they switched to other less personal methods, such as mass gassing, which allowed them to increase production to a point where in mid-1942 they were able to kill one and a half million Jews in just 100 days.
And now back to the Nazi nerds on Substack.
It was difficult to find them. Some of the offensive publications mentioned in the Atlantic magazine article no longer exist. At first, I only found six, and other writers also mentioned they'd found six, probably the same ones. Using a few search engine tricks, I found about six more. Some had only been there for a few weeks or months, or had written only one or two articles in a whole year. There are several who write regularly, one of them with 9,000 subscribers, many of them paid. This kind of transaction alarms people, because depending on how closely you link Nazi words to deeds, these paid subscriptions can be seen as blood money, and Substack takes 10% for itself as provider of the platform. People don’t want to be associated with blood money.
Alarm bells also ring for those who presume that money is always a corrupting influence, in this case incentivizing Substack to draw in more Nazis. This may be, but I’m a little skeptical. For one thing, consider the numbers. Not counting the vast majority of writers who publish on Substack for free, there are something like 20,000 who are partly supported by paying subscribers. Even if you add in what the Atlantic described as “scores” of explicitly Nazi, neo-Confederate, and other white supremacist writers, the total comes to less than one-half of one percent. I'm not sure that a handful of paid Nazi newsletters necessarily encourages Substack to recruit more of them, especially since Nazis seem to drive out more writers and readers than they bring in.
I get the point about money being a corrupting incentive, given the way American business, particularly since Reagan and Milton Friedman, has unabashedly prioritized profit over service and the public good, hiding their greed behind a “fiduciary duty” to stockholders. Substack needs to make money too, so it’s easy to be suspicious of its motives.
But Substack has also staked its reputation on being a little different. This is what has attracted many of its writers, including me. It’s not a place like Facebook and Twitter, where people scroll through short posts and react easily, quickly, often mindlessly, where fires of controversy are stoked in order to get people to stick around and see all the ads. Substack has no ads, and you have to subscribe or search for someone in order to read their articles or get them in your inbox. The exception is the Notes feature, where people can scroll commentary and links by a variety of writers, though the writers I mainly see there are the ones I’ve subscribed to, and in any case, it’s not the main point of Substack, nor is it necessary that users of the platform view the Notes.
Unlike other publishing platforms, Substack is free to writers and provides tools to help them get the word out about their work. It also makes it easy to offer readers a chance to support writers with paid subscriptions, which is where the platform actually earns something. Reportedly, about two dozen writers earn seven figures annually from their paid subscribers. Calculate 10% of that and you can see that the platform doesn’t really need the $500 it might make from a popular Nazi publication.
The incentive for writers on Substack is to write regularly in essay or story form. Those Nazis have to actually write — and their readers have to read — theory and argumentation. The ones I have read are not very good thinkers. They don’t even get into much actual Nazi theory. Mostly, they parrot general white supremacist ideas and whine about Jews or Black people allegedly getting unfair advantages, and White people being excluded and victimized by the general public (suffering the same way Christians do when you say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”).
Like most people, they forget that the First Amendment does not protect anybody’s right to be respected, heard, read, or published; it just promises that the government won’t punish people for speaking their mind or peaceably assembling. Being shunned or blocked by private platforms, newspapers, media, or forums of any kind is not government punishment; it’s a judgment by others based on credibility and respect, and nobody has a right to that. It has to be earned.
That’s why Substack could ban Nazi writers on its private platform. But should it? Are the Nazi nerds I found on Substack even the ones we should really be concerned about, making demands about, boycotting for?
I ran across an interesting couple of posts on this topic by author Shalom Auslander on Substack. One of them, called “The Nazi in the Haystack,” attempts to place these Nazis in perspective. He includes this illustration:
Food for thought. Are they even one-half of one percent of the writers here?
In another article, “The Asshole Question,” Auslander describes an incident in which his son’s gym teacher used antisemitic and anti-latino epithets in class. Suitably outraged and prepared to speak with the principal, he was stopped in his tracks when his son objected, saying, “He’s not an anti-Semite, Dad. He’s just a fucking asshole.”
This is not a superficial distinction. (Auslander is happy to pepper his writing with profanity and I’m not, so instead of “asshole” I’ll just say “AH”, okay?) An AH is someone who loves to get in other people’s faces and make them squirm, or hurt them emotionally or physically, like a bully, but may not have any deap-seated convictions. This pretty much describes the politicians who are devoted to trumping their previous outrageous statements with even more outrageous claims, just to make “liberals” squirm, see red, and use up their energy, money and bandwidth on red herrings. This does not necessarily define these politicians as fascists, or even as believers in what they just said. They’re really just AH’s looking for attention.
Auslander adds another dismissive category that’s also worth considering. In his view, for example, some kid holding up an antisemitic sign handed to them by somebody else is not necessarily a Nazi or antisemite or even an AH. They might be, Auslander points out, just a “dumb fuck” (officially, in this post, a DF!). In other words, rather than wanting to hurt or bully others, they may simply be ignorant and mindless enough to follow the lead of an AH or another DF. For example, a Marjorie Taylor Green who very publicly walks behind a survivor of the Parkland shooting with a video camera trained on herself loudly mocking him so he can hear her is a good example of an AH. But a Marjorie Taylor Green who blames California forest fires on “Jewish space lasers” or who decries the “gazpacho police” is just a DF. This is not to say an AH isn’t dangerous; Donald Trump is an AH above all else. He’s not a reader of or subscriber to Nazi ideology or any other, even if some of his advisers like Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon are. He just wants attention and control.
There are writers on Substack who peddle dangerous ideas, but most of those who actually identify themselves as Nazis are pretty much either AHs or DFs, as far as I can tell. Are they really Nazis with the ideologies of the 1930s and 40s, or are they Nazi nerds, AHs in search of a cause, wannabes? Why have people been so obsessed with them, and not with professors who slip in antisemitic rhetoric, doctors who dispense health info and sprinkle in antivax ideology, radical right supporters of Trump who lie about stolen elections and immigrants, and revel in pulling the rug out from under people who seek tolerance and respect for the “wrong” people, or even radical left progressives who pepper their compassion with dehumanization of opponents — just a few examples, but the point is, there is a broad gamut of writers who some could consider more dangerous than Nazis. One Nazi post I read expressed hatred for Trump because he included Jews in his administration. There’s a dead end for you.
Not long ago, one of my comments on someone else’s Substack publication received an angry reply based on false presumptions and irrelevant observations. I pointed this out in my response as simply and factually as possible (I like to respond, at least once, to such folks). The interesting thing about this incident, though, was that Substack is set up so that I could look at that fellow’s own writing. Not surprisingly, it was full of right-wing radical ideas and grievances.
Much more interesting, though, was that I could see what publications he subscribed to. There were over 70, and they were not all right-wing. They included, for example, Heather Cox Richardson, a historian who writes a daily analysis of the day’s news in an informed, factually-based historical context.
Isn’t this what free speech is really all about? That someone can express views, however obnoxious, but also be exposed to opposing points of view?
Hatred is not an emotion. It is taught and learned. And it can be unlearned. Consider Darryl Davis, the Black blues musician who befriended Ku Klux Klansmen, and over the course of 30 years, convinced 200 of them to quit and turned in their robes. He kept some as souvenirs.
The dangerous ones today are not necessarily Nazis. Some are simply Trump supporters looking to, as Trump’s policymakers have described it, “deconstruct the administrative state,” i.e., end constitutional restraints on power.
Keep in mind that there were 21 groups involved in the Unite the Right Rally at Charlottesville in 2017, only one of which identified itself as Nazi.
Perhaps writers are only as dangerous as the traction they get, and it could be argued that a platform on Substack gives them traction. But I’m not so sure that giving them a chance to gain readers is as determinative as people fear. By contrast, holding rally after rally to funnel dangerous views into the mainstream, or buying Twitter and featuring oneself spreading misinformation, or writing Nazi-inspired text or outright lies for a presidential candidate to read and rile the media and public with — these are surely acts of dangerous communication. But even these messages are usually vetted to avoid words that violate free-speech restrictions, such as actually inciting violence.
Substack’s rules say they will not allow language that constitutes “credible threats of physical harm” or that “promotes harmful or illegal activities including anything that “advocates, threatens, or shows” harm being done to people or animals. Of course, people define these things in various ways, often through the lens of their own agenda.
If a writer on Substack does avoid inciting violence, but echoes dangerous opinions and praises dangerous people, is he to be removed, even if he is just an AH, like a mini-Donald Trump with infinitely fewer followers? What if he calls himself a Nazi but doesn’t even seem to know what that really means? Is that worth boycotting the whole platform? According to Substack’s rules, he won’t be removed; only an offensive post will be.
Many have written about their reactions to hearing that there are Nazi writers on Substack in a heartfelt, even agonizing way, and some have left the platform while others have not. Some have left simply because any even potential association with Nazis leaves them feeling personally grimy. I can sympathize. But zero tolerance of anything never seems to be worth the resources it takes to enforce. Think of China’s zero tolerance for Covid and the cruelty they felt they had to use, without a successful result.
Recently, Substack actually removed some Nazi posts which violated the site’s rules. This was announced by The Platformer, a popular publication which got its start thanks to financial and promotional support from Substack. However, one day after the announcement that Substack responded to the situation and removed some Nazis, The Platformer decided to leave Substack anyway, taking with it all its material, subscribers, and paid subscriptions (one attraction for writers is Substack’s willingness to give us full control over our work and the subscriptions we earn). The publication’s sudden exit was a bit confusing. They simply said they didn’t believe Substack was doing enough about the problem. Possibly this was due to private conversation we don’t know about, but all we know is that they moved to a platform where they could keep all their money, and gained more subscribers for doing so. Still, it is promising to know that Substack is willing to respond to complaints and remove posts that violate its rules.
The world is a colorful mess and we have to keep fighting to make it more liveable by engaging in whatever ways each of us can manage. It's not a black and white world, for sure, and we can’t afford to listen to those who say it is.
As for me, I’m sticking with Substack. I think they’ve done a lot of things right. Coming up, I’ll talk more about what we can all do about the problem of dangerous writers.
Ed, I commend you on your even handed approach. I'm pretty sure I'd be less gracious about the whole thing. Mountains out of molehills and all that, with some folks following the crowd because they heard about the latest must-have outrage cause.
Reminds me of the old joke about the guy who calls the cops because his neighbor is walking around naked. When the cop arrives, he says "I don't see anything" and the guy says "Well, you have to get up on this chair and use the binoculars."
I don't have a lot of patience for these cause-of-the-day things, nor for those who get riled up because someone told them it was the thing to do this month. As Auslander mentions, the purity that some people insist upon simply doesn't exist. Instead of mindlessly pushing the cancel button, we can step back and access the situation for what it is, not for what the virtue zealots want it to be to justify their indignation.