📙Dang It, I Didn't See the Nazis at First

1️⃣ A Personal Essay from Hanlon's Reader

Hi! My name’s James Hanlon, I’m pretty new on Substack - just joined in August. It’s been super chill and friendly! There seems to be a group of cool people doing cool stuff like trying to make fiction Substacking happen.

💚 I write science fiction and post free content on Thursdays sorry plug over 💚

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📙Non-Fiction

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In this series, and probably most of my 📙Non-Fiction, I’m going to use A LOT of links. I hate ads, which is why I love Substack, but when venturing out into the wild wild web you won’t be so lucky. To prevent ad-itis, try these all-natural remedies:

• 🦊 Firefox - privacy-focused web browser with Read Mode (📄)

  • 🚫 uBlock Origin - extension to uBlock shitty ads

  • 👻 Ghostery - extension to make you a ghost, but in a good way

😵 If you don’t know where to start, tag me in a comment 👍

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📙Dang It, I Didn't See the Nazis at First

A Personal Essay by James Hanlon - 12/15/23

1️⃣ Dang It, I Didn’t See the Nazis at First
2️⃣ …Because America Has a Fascism Problem
3️⃣ Garden of Shadows

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🐑 Freeom Speeech vs X-Men of Twitter by DALL-E 🐑

Summary of Contents:

• Apparently Substack Has a Nazi Problem

• Free Speech Absolutism and Substack

• 🦑 Post-Vampire-Squid-Matt-Taibbi 🦑

• Richard Spencer’s Substack, the Unite the Right Rally, and Heather Heyer’s Murder

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Apparently Substack Has a Nazi Problem

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This topic really seems to be blowing up on Substack, which I think indicates that the Nazis’ presence here is reaching a crossroads, or maybe an inflection point. Does Substack kick them out? Pull their ability to get payments? Moderate their posts?

Or do nothing, as people continue to… make a racket?

Substackers Against Nazis

Hate 

Substack cannot be used to publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes. Offending behavior includes credible threats of physical harm to people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability or medical condition.

https://substack.com/content

Based on what I can tell here from Substack’s hate speech policy, this seems to indicate they’d be looking for a specific instance of incitement to violence or threats. Like if they were harrassing or calling for violence against someone in particular based on their race, ethnicity, etc. But I wanted to understand more:

Substack’s view of content moderation

We believe in the free press and in free speech – and we do not believe those things can be decoupled. 

These beliefs inform how we have designed Substack, which is why, for instance, we don’t support advertising in the product despite many calls to do so, and it’s why we will never use algorithms that optimize for engagement. However, we believe that our design of the product and the incentive structure we have built into it are the ultimate expression of our views. We do not seek to impose our views in the form of censorship or through appointing ourselves as the judges of truth or morality. 

I love the stance, love the transparency. Structuring the company around freedom of expression is great and I really do think much of the “shape” of Substack is why it’s appealing. Nothing shoved down your neck, but also the ability to say what you want. And I love that my email list is MY email list, not Substack’s—I can pack up and leave with it if I choose. But this is where something doesn’t sit right with me.

Substack does moderate their content already:

Of course, there are limits. We do not allow porn on Substack, for example, or spam. We do not allow doxxing or harassment. We have content guidelines (which will evolve as Substack grows) with narrowly construed prohibitions with which writers must comply.

To take a step back, it was a random Note in my feed from a Substacker I didn’t know to

Elle Griffin

at The Elysian which started my descent earlier this morning into this wormhole of interconnected historical events. The Substacker later deleted the Note as part of a yearly cleanup (I followed up by email to confirm), but it was non-confrontational, polite, and I found myself very compelled by this small quote I had copied before the Note was deleted:

… I don’t think we can absolve the company of the responsibility to limit hate speech.

Respectful disagreement about Nazis, on the internet? On the internet?? Substack, you really are something special. 😢

So then I’m wondering what Elle Griffin has said to trigger such a thoughtful and restrained response.

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Free Speech Absolutism and Substack

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I read Elle’s article before jumping to any conclusions:

Substack shouldn’t decide what we read

She makes many fair points about the way Substack is different from other platforms like Twitter and Facebook because it doesn’t force content on its users—they choose everything that gets sent to their inbox. So, to a degree, there is a sort of institutional or structural protection from hate speech just by self-sorting like that.

But again, something didn’t sit right with me.

From The Elysian:

I, and the writers who have signed this post, are among those who hope Substack will not change its stance on freedom of expression, even against pressure to do so. 

Because we’ve seen that before and it hasn’t worked. Other social media platforms have actively given reach to an enormous amount of divisive content, and moderation has amounted to private companies deciding who to deplatform based on their own agenda. Facebook has struggled with hate speech and misinformation no matter what it has tried with its moderation policies, and Twitter’s moderators have actively suppressed stories that might sway an upcoming election, among other discrepancies.

Make sure and take a gander at those two links, because this is where my red flags started going up. We’re dealing with rhetoric through and through here when she says “moderation has amounted to private companies deciding who to deplatform based on their own agenda.” I mean, that’s not a serious statement right there.

I also don’t think the scale of moderation needed at Substack is anywhere near what companies like Facebook and Twitter are dealing with. In monthly pageviews (as of Dec 2023), it’s the difference between 43.5 million (Substack) vs 5.9 billion (Twitter) and 16.1 billion (Facebook). Given their size, not taking action on this stuff isn’t a matter of Substack’s ability, but a principled choice not to.

In the first Elysian link about Facebook struggling with misinfo/hate speech:

From Karen Hao at MIT Technology Review 11/5/21: “The Facebook whistleblower says its algorithms are dangerous. Here’s why”

The machine-learning models that maximize engagement also favor controversy, misinformation, and extremism: put simply, people just like outrageous stuff.

Sometimes this inflames existing political tensions. The most devastating example to date is the case of Myanmar, where viral fake news and hate speech about the Rohingya Muslim minority escalated the country’s religious conflict into a full-blown genocide. Facebook admitted in 2018, after years of downplaying its role, that it had not done enough “to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence.”

So I mean… this is the kind of thing we’re talking about here. Where companies didn’t take enough responsibility over the power of their tech platform, and people did what people do: they used a tool for evil. Genocide. Nazi shit.

Let’s not pretend that reasonable content moderation means no freedom of expression. Yes, content moderation is an extremely fine line. It takes balance, people are always going to try to work the refs, and we absolutely need to ensure that the power to moderate is never abused.

But it’s presenting a false dichotomy to imply that completely unrestricted freedom of speech is the only solution. That’s where, to me, people lose credibility. We have to draw the line somewhere. And so I was intrigued again when I saw this list of co-signers at the bottom of the article:

Sorry, kinda small, but it’s a long list! Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi are two names I am familiar with, and I don’t trust either of them. I’m not accusing anyone on that list of co-signers of anything, but I absolutely do not trust these two because I think they’ve both acted disingenuously in the past with this whole “why I left the left” shtick. Which brings me back to the second link from The Elysian! IT’S MATT TAIBBI!!! (Bari Weiss also participated in the Twitter Files.)

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🦑 Post-Vampire-Squid-Matt-Taibbi 🦑

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You’re squidless, Matt! Absolutely squidless!! Make Taibbi Cool Again!! Get back to your roots and stop helping billionaires suck more money out of us, I want more of this unrepentant tomfoolery from you:

“The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

— Matt Taibbi back before he jammed his blood funnel into Elon’s moneyhole —

If you’ve never heard of the Twitter Files, here’s an article from The Nation that I thought did a good job picking apart the legitimate worries we should take from it.

And here’s another explanation—or perhaps visceration 😎—of the saga with some of my very favorite left political commentators, Sam Seder and Emma Vigeland of the Majority Report:

Conservatives are most upset about the Twitter Files because they think the Hunter Biden laptop + dick pic wombo combo would have won Trump the election in 2020, if only Twitter, the FBI, and their stupid talking dog hadn’t foiled their plans. That would have meant Trump wouldn’t have been forced to attempt Brooks Brothers Riot 2.0 by overturning the election results on Jan 6. Lucky for us, Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do something he knew he didn’t have the legal authority to do by refusing the count.

I remember I was working from home on January 6, 2021 when Donald Trump, the biggest traitor to the US since Robert E. Lee, sent an angry, armed mob of his supporters to attack the US Capitol and disrupt the process of formally counting the Electoral College votes—all based on the lie that the election had been stolen. Key figures appointed by Trump refused to send help for Capitol Police during the attack.

January 6th had never really been a significant date in my mind before that point. The whole ceremony was, well, ceremonial before. The swearing in, the speeches, were all part of this politics-as-ritual before—as long as the right words are said, the power magically transfers from one person to another. And every single US President until Donald Trump engaged in a peaceful transfer of power.

Bottom line, I think Taibbi, Weiss, and others exaggerated claims and generally tried to make hay out of a story that was handed to them by a billionaire to serve his own interests. They want it to seem like conservatives are being censored by these social media companies, but conservatives are often the most amplified voices on these platforms. Part of that strategy is working the refs, getting them to be more lenient.

It’s not like I’m not worried about government censorship and surveillance, that kind of overreach 100% happens. But these types of historically right-wing institutions like the FBI tend to have an anti-left-wing, not anti-conservative, slant:

From Branko Marcetic at The Nation 4/26/23: What Were the Twitter Files?

Take the FBI, which just in recent years has turned its spying power on Black activists protesting police brutality in ways that the ACLU has said are “built on anti-Black racial stereotypes,” investigated and infiltrated the Standing Rock protest movement, and carried out a nationwide sweep of Muslim households on the eve of the 2016 election. There is alarming evidence of far-right sympathies within the Bureau and its collaboration with far-right extremists for the purpose of targeting anti-fascists. The FBI most recently made headlines for its role in the prosecution of “Cop City” protesters in Atlanta and its surveillance of connected activist groups.

I think this is all really interesting because the Twitter Files actually ties in to this whole current Nazi-free-speech-absolutism conversation happening now on Substack. Part of what caused a falling out between Elon and Matt is that Elon tried to censor Substack on Twitter (like all links from the entire company) after Substack Notes launched, and Matt left Twitter over the OBVIOUS conflict between Elon’s censorship of a direct competitor and his claims of being a free speech absolutist:

Meet the Censored: Me?

Whatever was going on between Twitter and Substack had nothing to do with me or with other Substack writers, and if Twitter was going to label our work unsafe and not allow us to share my articles, I couldn’t endorse all this by using the platform, and said so.

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Richard Spencer’s Substack, the Unite the Right Rally, and Heather Heyer’s Murder

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Yup, there it is. I won’t link it but it’s easy to find. Pretty innocuous-looking, which is what someone like Richard Spencer is there for. Nice, uh… pure white bust. Just a subtle dash of the ol’ western chauvinism.

From Southern Poverty Law Center’s bio on Spencer:

His clean-cut appearance conceals a radical white separatist whose goal is the establishment of a white ethno-state in North America.

I’ve seen interviews, podcasts, etc with Spencer openly saying this. Some choice quotes (censored) here from leaked audio when Spencer thought he was only talking to other bigots like Milo Yiannopoulos and Nick Fuentes.

What we all need to understand is that fascists are fundamentally not obligated to take language seriously. They will say ANYTHING. They don’t care about the truth, they don’t even really care about freedom of speech, they just care about the freedom of their speech. The second they have the power, or it becomes inconvenient, they walk back on those claims, just like Elon Musk with his professed virtuous free-speechiness. The argument is designed to make you put your guard down.

And they often get away with it because they know that many people in America are unable to reckon with our country’s history, and conflate criticism of our own racist past with anti-American sentiment. It’s like… white supremacy kind of goes with the grain here.

Almost like maybe there was a long period where white supremacists controlled the historical narrative and filled it with bigoted myths and lies to justify the horrific barbarity of chattel slavery, which over time seeped into the public consciousness to the point where we’ve lionized the biggest traitors in the history of our country.

Which is what the entire “Unite the Right” rally was about—protecting the statue of Robert E. Lee (which the citizens of Charlottesville VOTED to remove) because a lot of Americans have a soft spot for white racist leaders of insurrections.

So what’s stopping Richard Spencer, or other Nazis, from using the money they are currently getting from Substack paid subs for another event like Unite the Right?

by Ryan M. Kelly at The Washington Post

Spencer and others who organized the rally lost a civil lawsuit which ended with a jury ordering “17 white nationalist leaders and organizations to pay more than $26 million in damages Tuesday over the violence that erupted during the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.”

This also resulted in the infamous quote from Trump refusing to initially condemn the neo-Nazis and Confederates at the event, claiming there were “very fine people on both sides” and that, basically, the anti-racist protesters started it.

From Jonathan Lemire and Julie Pace at AP News 8/15/17: Defiant Trump insists anew: Blame both sides for violence

Trump’s remarks were welcomed by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, who tweeted, “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth.”

Just… guys… let’s take a look around here at what’s really happening. Right-wingers literally tried to overthrow the government on Jan 6. They don’t care about democracy, they don’t care about the rules, they care about power. Don’t let yourselves fall into this rhetorical trap where if we don’t allow ALL discourse, everything’s going to get censored. It’s good to stop Nazis from being able to organize and fund their movement.

Richard Spencer & co used PayPal to organize the “blood and soil” march at Charlottesville University where a bunch of white bigots chanted “Jews will not replace us,” as well as the Unite the Right Rally itself, which ended in neo-Nazis and Confederates murdering Heather Heyer and injuring others. It’s pretty clear that the money Spencer used incited bigoted violence, and his beliefs haven’t changed.

PayPal revoked his ability to do business with them after it was proven by Southern Poverty Law Center that Spencer and other organizers “relied on the platform to move funds in the run up to the ultimately deadly event.”

This isn’t mindless thought-police censorship, it’s due diligence. Fine, you want to let him and other Nazis speak? I understand the conviction to stick to your guns and protect the pro-free-speech position you’ve staked out. But this guy, and others he’s helping promote, have actively harmed people. Are you going to wait for them to do something again using the money they’re getting through Substack?

You don’t have to completely remove the Nazis if you really don’t want to kick them out, but at least you could prevent them from getting funding. Free posts are still free speech. Just don’t let them make a safe, comfortable, paid home here. Don’t promote their content with “Bestseller” badges. There are multiple places where you could draw that line with varying degrees of severity.

Again, Substack DOES moderate by removing pornographic content so it’s not like it’s a glorious walled garden with 100% free speech. So is porn worse than Nazis—or is it just that porn is worse than Nazis for the business? You don’t want Substack to be the new OnlyFans, I get that, but can Substack not be the new Stormfront either?

Like I think people would be cool if you want to set another rule on top of “no porn” that’s just “no Nazi shit” and you can pretty much bet that’s gonna be a winner for everybody except the Nazis. Take it slow, go case by case. But do something.

Substack doesn’t have to worry about pushback from advertisers because they don’t have any. The way I see it, the best way to move the needle on this is continuing to speak out, monitoring their activity, and specifically not letting Substack leadership off the hook. Make them speak to this. They should be questioned since they are the ones making these decisions.

I’m going to end with one last quote from the Atlantic article that seems to have sparked this little firestorm on Substack:

From Jonathan M. Katz at The Atlantic 11/28/23: Substack Has a Nazi Problem

The platform has shown a surprising tolerance for extremists who circumvent its published rules. Patrick Casey, a leader of Identity Evropa, a defunct neo-Nazi group, had been banned from Twitter and TikTok and suspended from YouTube after running afoul of those platforms’ terms of service. (Elon Musk, Twitter’s owner, subsequently announced an “amnesty” that restored Casey’s account, among others.) Perhaps most damagingly to a content creator, Stripe had prohibited Casey from using its services.

But Substack was willing to let a white supremacist get back on his feet. Casey launched a free Substack newsletter soon after the 2020 election. Months later, he set up a paywall, getting around Stripe’s ban by involving a third-party payment processor. “I’m able to live comfortably doing something I find enjoyable and fulfilling,” he wrote on his Substack in 2021. “The cause isn’t going anywhere.” Casey’s newsletter remains active; through Substack’s recommendations feature, he promotes seven other white-nationalist and extremist publications, one of which has a Substack “bestseller” badge.

Unite the Right Photo by Ryan M. Kelly / Casey quote by Jonathan M. Katz

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1️⃣ Dang It, I Didn’t See the Nazis at First
2️⃣ …Because America Has a Fascism Problem
3️⃣ Garden of Shadows

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