Why We Really Can’t Have Nice Things
Writer Drama usually has an agenda. And that agenda is always Buy My Book
Writer Drama usually has an agenda. And that agenda is always “Buy My Book.”
I had held back from joining the “Substackers Against Nazis” letter because not much evidence had been shared. And yesterday, I got so fed up with the mincing of words by Substack in responding to the issue, that I angrily joined the fray. I mean, who doesn’t want to fight Nazis?
As an old punk, fighting actual Nazi skinheads is just natural. I got kicked out of school for wearing a Dead Kennedys “Nazi Punks Fuck Off!” shirt, which despite my town’s racist history, was kind of an answer to a problem we didn’t have; there were (and are) Nazi skinheads in New Jersey, but we didn’t have any in my school. It was an easy stand for me to make.
When I was at a punk show in L.A. and the SHARP skins were fighting Nazi skins who threw the salute, I will shamefully admit, I got the hell out of there. That was before I learned to fight, and fighting in a mob is dangerous. Those are the Nazis I’m talking about. And the people who incite them.
Platformer has discovered six accounts it deemed “explicitly Nazi,” five of which Substack banned for violating rules against incitement to violence.
A key piece of information, however, was left out of Platformer’s analysis of “Nazi publications,” which for some reason didn’t make it into their January 8 article: none of the “Nazi” newsletters Platformer itself had flagged were monetized, which means Substack wasn’t ever, in fact, making any money off of Nazis. (As Jesse Singal eloquently put it in his recent critique of the investigation, Platformer “made the mistakes a lot of journalists have made when they aren’t careful enough to separate reporting from activism.”2)
In other words, after seven weeks of investigating whether or not Substack did in fact have a “Nazi problem,” Platformer flagged six accounts—yes, six—
.00001% of all Substack newsletters.
Five out of 500,000 + Substack newsletters were sufficiently Nazi to be banned. (As for the Atlantic’s November 28, 2023 assertion that some “Nazi newsletters” have “tens of thousands of subscribers,” there is no evidence that this is in fact true. This doesn’t mean, by the way, that there aren’t plenty of bigots out there (Substack is a blogging service, after all) but it does mean the entire Internet now thinks Substack has, or used to have, a “Nazi problem”—and this is egregious and irreversible. Since when did the term “Nazi” stop meaning what it means?
You can read that and the other posts that it references if you want more details. There were 6 accounts with a total of 29 paid subscribers, 5 of which are now banned. I’m satisfied with the response and I will be staying on Substack, and reserving the right to criticize the leadership. Do I like that right-wingers, spouting the same right-wing dogwhistles that they’ve used for decades, also use Substack? No. But this isn’t a publisher, like Harper Collins, who publishes books by bigots and promotes them as well. Do we not buy any books by Harper Collins? I don’t like a lot of pundits and political writers. I wouldn’t be able to buy any books if I did that.
But earning money for them is another thing. I respect Roxane Gay for passing on a book deal with a publisher who had tried to make some bandwagon money with a now-forgotten Twitter hate inciter. But I would not want to hurt good authors who could not easily make that financial decision; Gay is a principled person, but she also can likely have her agent take her books to nearly any publisher she likes. Not everyone has that ability; integrity is costly. That’s why I was skeptical of the “problem” at Substack. If you notice, the first thing I did was turn off paid subscriptions last year. I expected bigger newsletters to follow suit; if you didn’t like what Substack was doing, it’s the one way to hit them in the pocketbook. By going on a sort of strike. But that didn’t happen.
I lost quite a few subscribers over that. And it’s on me. I should have done more research before I let my anger get to me. That’s why I’m posting this as a sort of mea culpa, and also to remind us that people who appeal to our quick-anger issues often have an agenda. It’s what drives social media engagement and click-bait headlines.
If I’d waited one more day I would have seen the numbers behind the “problem.” It’s like when someone takes a photo of the 5 wackadoos on a corner shouting conspiracy theory nonsense and amplifies their message, and uses an angle that makes them seem like a much larger problem than they are.
Nazis have always been in the United States, from their party’s inception. New Jersey has several parks that were repurposed from German-American Bund training camps, after they were shut down by the FBI during World War II. Millions of them rallied in Madison Square Garden. So we should be vigilant. But as Samuel Lopez-Barrantes says up there, perhaps we keep one eye on them, and another on the tougher target: the more insidious hatred among us that wears a friendlier face.