📙...Because America Has a Fascism Problem

2️⃣ A Personal Essay from Hanlon's Reader

💚 I write 📗Sci-Fi and post free content on Thursdays 💚

🧡 Sometimes I write 📙Non-Fi like this too sorry plug over 🧡

Summary of Contents:

• …Because America Has A Fascism Problem

• History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, But It Often Rhymes

• Why It’s Not Getting Better

---

📙Non-Fiction

---

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 (except YouTube grrrr)

  • 👻 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 👍

---

📙… Because America Has A Fascism Problem

A Followup Substack Essay by James Hanlon - 12/22/23

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

---

On second thought, let’s not go to the Marketplace of Ideas… ‘tis a silly place.

Substack has a Nazi problem… because America has a fascism problem.

The reason for such cruel fertility in the soil of American hearts goes back to our taproot, the dehumanization of indigenous genocide and enslavement. People who deny this live in other realities. This country was built on conquered indigenous land, by enslaved people, and there is a throughline all the way from those moments in time to these moments in time.

And throughout each of those moments, all the way until now, the number one rule with vampires is that you don’t invite them in, because we know what they want.

I feel like I’ve wandered into this big, beautiful interconnected community building Substack created, I’ve sat in some classrooms, read a lot, met some great people, hunkered down with new ideas, and wrote some sci-fi.

Then one day I see a fucking vampire just lurking in the corner selling literature and leading people away into a dark room. And I’m confused because I didn’t expect to see it here.

Then I realize… I recognize this vampire from the news. Like, he openly presents himself as the public face of a vampire coven: recruiting others, taking donations for the coven, making new vampires—and, I assume, twirling his moustache. So if we follow this tortured metaphor to its conclusion…

Who invited them in?

🐑 DALL-E did not deliver the vampstache and for that we are all diminished 🐑

Substack founders

Chris Best

,

Jairaj Sethi

, and

Hamish McKenzie

have recently faced criticism in the media (and here on Substack) after numerous reports of white supremacists such as

Patrick Casey

and

Richard Spencer

using Substack publications to spread hate, generate new Subscribers, and take revenue through Paid Subscriptions which Substack profits from.

Richard Hanania

, promoted by Substack and with thousands of Paid Subs, was also heavily criticised for unearthed “extreme and racist views” from before Hamish hosted him, which Hanania since claims to have disowned.

Hamish responded via Notes sometime later in the day on 12/21/23:

Digging through the replies was difficult on such a large post. I tried to tag

Hamish McKenzie

in the comments, and linked my original essay preceding this one (Dang It, I Didn’t See the Nazis at First) but it’s not like he can reply to everyone. Given how long it seems to have taken them to respond to the OG Atlantic article from Jonathan Katz, I’m not expecting one anytime soon.

At the risk of overstating my popularity, my essay kind of started to blow up a few days ago after I went around posting it on Notes and inviting people to read it. I’ve gotten many kind words, and even some new readers for my fiction writing. 💚

The marketplace of ideas was doing its thing! I had some people disagree more politely than others, a Covid denier showed up, it all seemed fine. Cool!

But early in the morning hours of Dec 21, a Nazi showed up in my comments posting The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and insulting my new readers with anti-Semitic slurs. As the owner of my publication Hanlon’s Reader, I was thankfully able to immediately ban this user and remove all comments, but I took this screenshot and censored as little as possible because this is a free speech platform and I’m not worried about letting people see what that means:

I reported Clarence through Substack’s Report feature, but did not receive any sort of confirmation ticket from Substack to track whether they received my report. I think since I’d already banned him, I had to go to his page to report him. It’s absolutely full to the brim with Nazi propaganda and I am not exaggerating at all.

They are literally disseminating the original anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, and not just on their publications. On mine. And on others’. Hate speech promotes violence.

---

History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, But It Often Rhymes

— Mark Twain —

You can find further context—there is always further context, if you go far enough—to the saga detailed below. This is just what I found stumbling around the internet. I didn’t exactly find an answer, but the question I was looking for an answer to is… why are we having this conversation, in this moment?

And why isn’t it going better?

---

I read about a tweet that went viral a while back about a “14 Early Warning Signs of Fascism” display at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.:

• As Snopes reveals, the bullet-points of fascism was merely a poster! Not truly “on display” after all.

• However, the poster was factually based on this 2003 Op-Ed in Free Inquiry which is “the most reprinted—and most pirated—article in the magazine’s history” and you should read the whole thing but here’s a quote:

“Does any of this ring alarm bells? Of course not. After all, this is America, officially a democracy with the rule of law, a constitution, a free press, honest elections, and a well-informed public constantly being put on guard against evils. Historical comparisons like these are just exercises in verbal gymnastics. Maybe, maybe not.”

— Sarcasmaholic Laurence W. Britt, 2003 —

From Wikipedia:
Sophia Magdalena Scholl (9 May 1921 – 22 February 1943) was a German student and anti-Nazi political activist, active within the White Rose non-violent resistance group in Nazi Germany.

She was convicted of high treason after having been found distributing anti-war leaflets at the University of Munich (LMU) with her brother, Hans. For her actions, she was executed by guillotine. Since the 1960s, Scholl has been extensively commemorated for her anti-Nazi resistance work.

---

From Wikipedia:
The White Rose was a non-violent, intellectual resistance group in Nazi Germany which was led by five students and one professor at the University of Munich

---

Excerpt from “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is the Hand that Rules the World”:

Sophie Scholl wrote an essay (I was unable to find it) about this poem in 1940 when she was 16 just before graduating from secondary school:

Mingled where no tempest darkens,
   Rainbows evermore are curled!
For the hand that rocks the cradle
   Is the hand that rules the world.

- William Ross Wallace, 1865

---

From Wikipedia:

Fourteen Words (also abbreviated 14 or 14/88) is a reference to two slogans [that] have served as a rallying cry for militant white nationalists internationally.

The primary slogan in the Fourteen Words is,
We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children,
Followed by the secondary slogan,
because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the Earth.

---

Why It’s Not Going Better

---

Ro

is the Substacker who had to deal with the anti-Semitic Nazi poster in the comments of my previous essay. I wanted to go check out their page and see what they write, and I really liked this piece that fit with the historical narrative I’m exploring:

Freedom in the Mellow Era

These three main competing outlooks of the Mellow Era—conservatives, liberals, and the left—all shared some experiences that enhanced their commitments to an atmosphere of free exchange of ideas. Most essentially, they were shaped by the excesses of McCarthy, and by attempts to adjust accordingly in regret for some of these.

It helps if you remember what you want to avoid. McCarthyism was something that both liberals and the right participated in to some degree,  but which had widely come to be seen as excessive by liberals. 

One reason was that, though it was instigated by the right against the left, it gradually came to threaten liberals. And liberals were the dominant force in society at the time. 

---

The left always had the most to lose when it came to punishing speech, and freedom of association (you can punish communism, you can claim that any political dissent is communist), and this made them highly committed to protections on speech. 

---

… the reaction to attempts to silence, even violently silence, the speech of Black activists was a stronger commitment to free speech given the excesses that had occurred in the McCarthy era, the Vietnam era, and the general panic around communism.

---

I had a whole lot to say about this, with a few Upton Sinclair quotes loaded up and ready to go as a sort of preface to this period. So imagine my surprise when I finished reading and found this:

More Nazi shit while I’m trying to ask permission to quote this

So yeah is anyone else a little uneasy about this now?

Hamish McKenzie

? This Nazi saw my anti-Nazi post, came to my publication to spew hate, and then followed my reader to their page to spew hate. The increased exposure from Notes intensifies this kind of crossover interaction.

Speaking just for myself, personally and selfishly, I would love the opportunity to help ruin Richard Spencer’s day. So I have some recommendations. This might be an oversimplification, but here are 3 types of Substack extremists to moderate:

🔥 Indirect Extremism: Richard Hanania uses indirect rhetoric to avoid pulling too much aggro, simmering the hate on a smooth, low boil—presenting his views in a more subtle, less overt manner by using the cover of academic, intellectual, and seemingly moderate ideas to cloak or conceal the most extreme ideas.

🔥🔥 Direct Extremism: Richard Spencer advocates for violence, extreme discrimination, and overthrow of established systems (white ethno state).

🔥🔥🔥 Open Hate Speech: Clarence Spangle is the biggest bigoted asshole he can legally be at all times—he will push all boundaries to be as extreme as possible until someone steps in.

Deplatforming ideas works. It just unambiguously does. Regardless of the target, deplatforming removes their ability to drive attention and influence others. Years of research — on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc — supports this. Hamish is simply wrong about this. Empirically, provably, scientifically.

— Colin Henry, the legend himself

Colin recommends this extremely detailed guide on reddit's results deplatforming hateful content where they show exactly what kind of impact they were able to have. I mean, I’m just a guy and I’m doing something. Y’all have real power.

I was rewarded heavily by Substack readership for speaking out clearly: my Subscriber count has quadrupled this week (granted, I only had like 25 subs). My journey here has been brief so far, but I’ve found so many wonderful people and publications here through Substack’s small, budding fiction community. And even more through contributing to the public discussion on this issue.

Substack leadership’s hands aren’t tied, but they are in a bit of a bind given how many of their big-name writers like Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi co-signed the letter from The Elysian which started my original essay on this subject.

It’s a Catch-22 now: Substack wants to keep their free speech absolutist Substackers happy because they make an absurd amount of money. It’s actually amazing, I’m not even mad (well, except about the platforming & monetizing Nazis thing)—I’ll be thrilled if I can do 5% of that a year after I launch paid subscriptions soon.

Join us. Thrive.

The absolutists have very clearly laid out a marker here. A signal, maybe? Of their virtue? They can’t easily walk these positions back without losing a chunk of their audience, and thus their revenue, because their audience cares deeply about allowing Nazis complete use of the Substack platform. They have their reasons, but when you delicately stack your arguments, one by one, on such a slippery slope, it gets tenuous.

Chris, Hamish, Jairaj… please don’t limit the potential of this platform by absolving yourselves of the responsibility to moderate hate speech. You are making a mistake by drawing the line where you’ve chosen.

It’s not too late to draw a new line. We’re editors, writers, artists—we understand making mistakes, and even how making mistakes can lead us where we need to go.

There are 3 places I see where you can make this cut:

1. ✔(low): You can remove Substack Bestseller status from hateful publications

2. 💸(med): You can demonetize hateful publications but allow free posts

3. 🚫(high): You can ban hateful publications from Substack

I obviously can’t speak for everyone, we’re never going to all agree, but a couple of readers have kindly told me I changed their minds on this topic after they read my original post preceding this one.

Please take some time, although I know I’m only one small voice versus the many widely-read and well-intentioned bestselling writers who have signed in support of The Elysian’s letter. It’s the words on the page that matter.

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

I also want to say this to any employees at Substack, if I’m lucky enough that they see my post: Don’t look away from this, speak to it. You, me, these words on this screen… this is important. You have a voice somewhere very few people in the world do.

No one wants to make this wonderful community divisive, including me—I’ve had my head down writing fiction for the past few months, that’s all I came here for. We just want an honest response (meaning action, not excuses) to what’s happening in the shadows behind the walled garden.

We can all see it, if we choose to look.

Thanks for reading,

James Hanlon

---

🎁Bonus Content

More content for ya! It’s like free candy! 🍬 yum yum yum content 🍬

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

“ Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet has free access to the sum of all human knowledge. ”

— Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia

---

Yes, Trump's new talking point is full on Nazi

“It is what it is.”

---

Index Wordloafium

“Bread makes you fat??”

---

The Shetland Witch, or, Atropos Wants Her Shears Back (Prologue)

The beginning of a Substack fiction novel I am enjoying… hints of magic realism

---

“Unions are about the little guy standing up to the big guy.” - Mindy Isser

You made it all the way down here?? Thanks!

So like… maybe you want a palate cleanser? Some science fiction, perhaps? 🥺

Or you loved it and want more like this? Best way to get more 📙Non-Fiction content like this is to Donate at Ko-Fi or Subscribe for free now from this post! 🧡

---

📗Short Stories | 📘Books | 📙Personal Essays | 💌Newsletter | ❓About | 🏡Home