Help me out here

Or maybe, help me help you! Querying the Substack-Nazi thing

We missed out on the audience-participation Fun Friday thing last week (though all comments are always open for all readers, and if you’ve never made comments please sing out) due to the Year In BS roundup — full list with links here.

I expect funsies this Friday but today I’m hoping to hear from you as to where I should be running this newsletter.

You may have heard the Atlantic discovered that Substack — the very popular and user-friendly platform on which Roy Edroso Breaks It Down operates — has a bunch of Nazis on it. And when they say “Nazis” they are not being insulting, they are being clinically accurate:

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”…

Also running Substack newsletters: Richard Spencer (yes, the punched Nazi) and Richard Hanania, an allegedly reformed (but not really) white nationalist (i.e. a Nazi without the armband).

A bunch of Subtackers said hey, what’s the deal and Substack founder Hamish McKenzie responded with, as I told him in comments, bullshit. I mean, like this: “I think it’s important to engage with and understand a range of views even if —especially if — you disagree with them.” Because how can it be a true marketplace of ideas if we don’t hear from people whose stated intention is to put us in concentration camps?

McKenzie says beyond enforcing “narrowly defined proscriptions, including a clause that prohibits incitements to violence,” Substack will “let readers curate their own experiences and opt in to their preferred communities…” In other words, the Nazis stay.

Mostly this is just annoying. McKenzie, like a lot of other people who should know better, is completely (willfully, perhaps) snowed by Hanania, calling him “an influential voice for some in U.S. politics — his recent book, for instance, was published by HarperCollins,” and yes, he’s doesn’t realize this says something bad about U.S. politics and HarperCollins rather than something good about Hanania. Also when some commenters come back with the if-your-bar-lets-in-Nazis-you’re-a-Nazi-bar argument, they get answers from other commenters like “says a lot about today’s leftist Brownshirt brigades.” So much for the tolerant left — in the wild!

But there’s a part of it that’s not just annoying.

I’m not a purist — I realize that the corporations and zillionaires that run everything are scum, and to engage with the world will always (well, till Der Tag) require some interaction with said scum. Bluesky, my alt-Twitter of choice, has Jack Dorsey on its board, and just because the current Twitter owner is even worse doesn’t mean Dorsey is good, any more than the existence of Trump means George W. Bush (or Barack Obama!) is good. I’m not going to shut myself off from opportunities to reach the public just because bad people might get money from it.

It's arguable that this also goes for Substack and its Nazi friends — Substack is a vendor and can sell its service to anyone they choose. It’s not like a slice of my earnings goes to the Hitler Fan Club every week.

Two things, though. First of all, this isn’t like Substack is selling gardening supplies to Nazis — it’s selling them a valuable and respected platform. It’s not out of the question that the next guy who promotes Hanania (or some other Nazi) will say he’s “an influential voice for some in U.S. politics — his newsletter, for instance, is on Substack, alongside Matthew Yglesias and Roy Edroso.” I mean, sharing this thing with Yglesias is mortifying enough as it is.

Second, if McKenzie had just said: You know what, moderation is a slippery slope and an enormous pain in the ass to keep under control, and at this time we can’t devote the resources to doing it right while trying to reach our growth targets, so please bear with us and we’ll get to it in time — I might have gone for that.

But instead he chose to insult my intelligence and tell me you need Nazis to have free speech. I mean, come on.

So I have two asks for you guys: First, what do you think about this as a moral issue for me? No big deal? No quarter? Pray tell.

Second, can you suggest a good alternative? I’ve only started my research, and I confess I’m not great at it — the main reason I’m on Substack is that it was (and remains) so easy and user-friendly and well-run that I have seldom had to do anything besides write and hit buttons. So I never seriously considered TinyLetter or anything else.

Now there’s some online discussion of alt newsletter platforms, like this Bluesky thread. I’ve heard the most good things so far about Buttondown, and some Substack refugees like Talia Lavin have pulled that trigger. But — this may interest you — they don’t have a comments feature. They say they’re working on it but a comments-free platform is a hard no for me.

I’m asking you because who else would I ask, but also it affects you, too — I mean I want this to be at least as good an experience as you’re used to. Hell, I’d like to improve it! I probably should have asked about this before the Nazis.

So lemme hear it and thanks in advance.