📙Garden of Shadows: Soapbox Grifting, Forward Thinking, and the Substack Lore That Broke My Brain

3️⃣ A Personal Essay from Hanlon's Reader

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📙Garden of Shadows: Soapbox Grifting, Forward Thinking, and the Substack Lore That Broke My Brain

A Substack Personal Essay by James Hanlon - 1/8/23

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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Chris, Hamish, and Jairaj when asked to moderate Nazi propaganda on Substack - Paul Rudd, living work of performance art, in Wet Hot American Summer

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Many people on Substack are pretending that there is no Nazi problem here—or, if not so outright denying it, minimizing the extent. It’s a serious issue, and I don’t intend to minimize it myself with jokes and humor.

Humor builds empathy. Empathy builds trust. Trust allows understanding. I want to be understood. I also want to understand others.

You might wonder, why are you doing this? What’s the big deal? I don’t even see any Nazis, so as long as they’re not intruding on my space, or I can block them when they do—why is there all this uproar over like 17 Substacks out of 16,000?

Are private platforms like Substack, Facebook, and Twitter akin to public spaces on the internet? Should we really have private companies determining who can say what? Who makes that determination, and how do they define hate speech? Is there really a point at which hate speech becomes incitement to violence?

All valid concerns, worthy of consideration. I completely understand the importance of protecting free speech and freedom of expression. The government has already set lines in the sand regarding freedom of speech and hate speech… or rather, it has excluded itself from drawing that line.

From Wikipedia: First Amendment to the United States Constitution

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

But Substack is not the federal government. They are a business, backed by a venture capital company called Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), they need to make money to be viable to their shareholders, and moderation at scale is a minefield as well as a cost sink. Think of how much money it would cost them to do the right thing!

No, seriously, think about it. Would it cost them money? Because the more I think about it, the more it doesn’t really make financial sense for Substack to publicly support American Nazis like Richard Spencer. To me, this means one of two things:

1. Substack leadership and/or Andreessen Horowitz board members think they will make more money from their staked “free speech absolutism” position than by moderating Nazis.

2. Substack leadership and/or Andreessen Horowitz board members are not making a financial calculation, but a cultural one—whatever money they lose from the Nazi controversy is an investment in cultural change.

Madison Square Garden, NYC—1939: “America First” was an American Nazi slogan

“All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.” But only if we repeat the same mistakes. While trying to get my work out there, talk to people, and find answers, I keep getting accused of unconstitutional authoritarianism for wanting hate speech moderation.

And ironically, the “““““free speech absolutists””””” who care so much about the open exchange of ideas that they are willing to entertain debates with Nazis about the Final Solution are the first ones to tell me to shut up and go away.

The only response from any of the signers of The Elysian’s letter I have gotten was from Moriarty “Phisto Sobanii” who immediately jumped to insults and straight up refused to even look at what I had to say:

🤷‍♂️

FREE SPEECH ABSOLUTISTS: why do you think it’s okay to advocate for platforming (and monetizing!) Nazis so we can discuss their ideas and then not even care to engage in discussion with a regular-ass harmless person? It’s unreal.

What some are telling each other: the moderators are the real Nazis.

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From Liberty Scouts Magazine AKA wannabe American Hitler Youth - Substack please protect the children from Samara, this person is genuinely unstable

“I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up:
that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin —

One reason I’m doing this is because I was one of the naive writers drawn to Substack’s vibe more than anything else. I put something I love on this site, and I didn’t expect to regret that.

I love writing fiction because I think reading fiction books is where I learned to empathize most as a child. It requires putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, seeing the world from another perspective than your own. That child who read books to understand the world has survived and grown up.

We need to retain our empathy in order to understand why people do the things they do. We don’t need to dehumanize each other—evil people are still people, even pieces of shit like Richard Spencer, who is a profoundly disgusting human being and has nothing of value to offer the world. But he’s still human!

We’re all still human, even if it can be comforting to think of people as monsters, demons, etc. But I won’t pretend something can’t hurt me (or others) just because it’s over there, not over here. It could happen here, it did happen here, and we are all watching it happen here again.

Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally, 2017 - Wikipedia

I found this from 3 months ago. They already have known about Clarence’s Nazi propaganda for a long time at this point, and they don’t care to do anything unless he very explicitly threatens someone with violence.

Anti-Semitism rears its ugly head on Substack

In a sane world where Americans didn’t have to argue about whether our insurrectionist former President did or did not directly quote Adolf Hitler regarding racist statements that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” I might agree with those of you concerned people are casually throwing “Nazi” around.

From Tim Reed at Reuters, Trump: I have not read Hitler's ‘Mein Kampf’

In 'Mein Kampf' (My Struggle), Hitler wrote in 1925: "All great cultures of the past perished only because the original creative race died out from blood poisoning."

But there Trump is. And there Republicans are, defending Trump again over rhetoric that has clearly crossed the line into—there is really no overstating this—true Nazi hate speech. And I’m sure more than one person is going to take me to task in the comments over it with some excuse or another to reject this reality.

There is no excuse for taking no action against open hate speech, just because it’s going to be hard and complicated and expensive. Hate speech starts with hate and inevitably leads to violence: you can’t be neutral on a moving train, and this one has long since left the station.

For example, Richard Hanania’s post here is very on-brand right-wing extremism:

“I had never seen a pronoun pin before, and decided to take this one as a souvenir. … The pronoun pin represented everything I hated about leftists, ‘experts,’ and intellectuals, and I keep it around where I work for motivation. I’m looking at it as I write this.

Of course, this is deranged.”

🏳‍🌈 Richard Hanania, extremely normal person from the extremely normal Substack post titled “Why I Hate Pronouns More Than I Hate Genocide” directly promoted by Hamish 🏳‍🌈

Here’s a few quotes from what

Hamish McKenzie

wrote about Richard Hanania on Active Voice:

“a distinctive new voice in American politics discourse”

“a streak of contrarianism”

“managed to win fans and challenge readers from across the political spectrum”

Hamish, my dude, you might as well be writing blurbs for Richard’s book jacket. This is not an objective assessment of what he represents. You’re fawning over this guy.

From my previous essay “…Because America Has A Fascism Problem”:

🔥 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.

Very rarely can we actually connect hate to crime in direct, measurable ways like the Unite the Right Rally co-organized by Richard Spencer and “17 other white nationalist leaders and groups,” which led to Heather Heyer’s murder by James Alex Fields.

Or January 6, 2021 when Trump incited a mob to attack the US Capitol and disrupt the counting of the electoral votes in an effort to retain power despite losing the election.

Unite the Right, January 6… right-wing events like these are the end result of hate manufactured on the scale we’re seeing. Stochastic terrorism is real. The more of these misguided lunatics there are out there like the MAGA Bomber Cesar Sayoc or James Alex Fields, the more likely it is people get hurt or killed. We already went though this during the Civil Rights era when segregationist bigots enacted terror bombing campaigns against their enemies, stoked by this exact kind of language.

Who else forgot about this guy?

Which brings us to our esteemed friend Joshua at The Storyteller’s Corner, who just can’t find any Nazis! They’re such good hiders!

On This Supposed 'Problem' On Substack

You pretty much get the point after the first sentence. I laughed out loud when I finished his piece, got to the comments, and found Clarence waiting for me again! This is the second time I’ve just been reading random Substacks and found this particular Nazi. To Joshua’s credit, he responded very quickly by deleting the comments after I reported them:

However… Josh was NOT amused when, after I reported Clarence’s comments, I invited him and his readers to engage in a free and open exchange of ideas at my publication Hanlon’s Reader. Others like

Michael Mohr

had already done this in support of Josh’s piece, so I thought it was okay. Josh threatened immediately to remove me and my free speech from his page and even went so far as to lecture me on “consistency,” but in his defense—I did try to get cute with him:

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If you look very closely, you can see I definitely did not edit Matt Taibbi’s face onto this 20th-century soapbox snake oil salesman.

The term “soapbox” often has a negative connotation. When we say, “Get off your soapbox, already!”, what we mean is that someone is expressing their opinion, and we don’t want to hear it anymore.

— Sterling Jaquith —

Free speech absolutism is a fantasy, it’s not here on Substack because they already moderate porn and other content. Anyone pushing this or self-describing as a “free speech absolutist” is a soapbox grifter trying to convince you they’re valiantly defending your rights.

If someone who calls themselves a “free speech absolutist” considers the right to post Nazi propaganda sacrosanct, but porn should be censored, they are nothing but an absolute hypocrite, a grifter in the public square standing atop their soapbox convincing you and others to buy into their scam. Now they have painted themselves into a swastika-shaped corner and they can’t get out.

So let me tell you about this goofy goober Matt Taibbi, his original Substack TK News, and the bit of archaic Substack lore that just made me stop and stare off into space in absolute slack-jawed disbelief. Do you guys know who Jonathan M. Katz of The Racket actually is?

To me, after a bit of clicking around and reading, he’s a genuine real-live journalist. The kind that actually goes out into the world and investigates. Worked for AP News most of his career. Not some hyper-connected supervillain out to take down Substack because he hates freedom.

From Wikipedia:

Katz was the only full-time American correspondent in Haiti when the 2010 Haiti earthquake struck on January 12, 2010. Katz, then 29, was on the second floor of his rented house in the Pétion-Ville neighborhood when the swaying started at approximately 4:45 p.m. He rushed outside barefoot as his house collapsed, borrowed a cell phone on the street, and became the first to report the earthquake; the alert he sent out hit the newswire at the same time as the U.S. Geological Survey's initial report of the quake.

Just listen to the guy! You can tell a lot about a person just by listening to the way they talk about something they care about. Like the way Matt Taibbi talks about Elon Musk!

You know, Matt Taibbi of the now-rebranded Racket News, not to be confused with The Racket, which already existed on Substack for 2 years prior to Taibbi’s name change. Given how many people he’s got working with him, there is no chance Taibbi didn’t know about this. For some reason, this specific pathetic and weird wrinkle on the whole story completely short-circuited my brain.

Anyway back to Substack! The way I see things, right now on Substack there are 3 basic groups related to the Nazi issue:

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1. Cool people doing cool stuff

2. People who might otherwise be cool except they’re cool with platforming Nazis

3. People who support the platforming & monetization of Nazis

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I’m using the word “cool” here very intentionally, believe it or not (and not just to plug an excellent podcast). It’s because coolness is something nearly indefinable, which shifts and changes with each generation, adapting to new environments effortlessly as people experiment and determine what works in the moment.

Coolness is just like fascism! We can outline the broad strokes, but it’s not always going to look exactly the same as what came before because people respond differently to the pressures of history. When we say Nazi we’re obviously not literally referring to members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party of the 20th century. Instead, today a Nazi perpetuates Nazi ideology, which is a disturbingly pervasive rot, and they don’t wear the uniforms anymore (usually).

That’s why I’ve tried to be very clear with who I describe using this word “Nazi.” My audience is all of you. I want everyone to read my work and tell me what they think, knowing in advance I won’t agree with everyone, and that some people are going to argue in bad faith without any intent to change their minds on anything.

For example:

• Not Quite A Nazi: Richard Hanania in his disgusting and deeply weird essay “Why I Hate Pronouns More Than I Hate Genocide”

• Nazi: Richard Spencer in his private in-group, other Nazis

• Nazi: Clarence Wilhelm Spangle in… everywhere seemingly

There’s a line between these two, which is open hate speech advocating for violence. Richard Hanania (Not Quite A Nazi) is different from Richard Spencer (Nazi) because Hanania is smart enough not to cross that line—but he’s getting as close to it as possible in order to push some very bigoted views. And because he doesn’t go full Nazi by calling for violence, he’s able to gain public acceptance through his fancy dog-whistle institute and cozy up to morally void tech companies who further amplify him.

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1. Cool people doing cool stuff

2. People who might otherwise be cool except they’re cool with platforming Nazis

3. People who support the platforming & monetization of Nazis

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I think most people are in Group 1 or 2, and we’d all rather not be having this debate over defending Nazis at all. You’re here to enjoy the place, why else would you be here? My goal is to persuade those in Group 2 who have been convinced by Group 3 that we should be cool with Nazis on Substack, to join us in Group 1 as we extend a warm welcome to everyone except the Nazis.

Group 3 includes, but is not limited to, well-meaning people, free speech absolutists, and the Nazis. Regular people of Group 3, no one is forcing you to do stand with the Nazis.

Zero Nazis allowed.

I think a lot of people siding with the absolutists and Nazis have just been persuaded with bad arguments, and I aim to persuade them otherwise. The “banality of evil” suggests that normal people who aren’t ideologically-driven will just… go along with this shit without thinking too hard about it. Or make excuses for it. I want to make them think about it.

Most of Group 3 is unpersuadable, but in my brief experience here at least some are thinking about what I say. Sometimes all it takes is planting a seed. The vast majority of these conversations are not to actually convince the person I’m speaking with—it’s to convince people reading. Always keep your audience in mind.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something,
when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
— Upton Sinclair —

So uh speaking of failed bids for the Governor of California, I have been looking into several of the signers of The Elysian’s anti-moderation letter. Near the end of December I was pretty active in going around hawking my first essay to anyone talking about the whole Substackers Against Nazis effort. I spoke to plenty of people in the comments. And in my research, I found some genuinely weird stuff.

RESTORING ORDER?? DOES THAT SOUND A LITTLE FAMILIAR TO Y’ALL??

🤔🤔🤔

It’s just a little rhetoric though. Right? No big deal that Michael Shellenberger and Patrick Casey of white supremacist organization Identity Evropa totally sound like they’d vibe together. Michael did not respond to my request for comments on my original essay. I also reached out to Elle Griffin from The Elysian a couple of times, but no dice there either. And obviously no response from the Big 3.

But there’s good news!!!

Screenshot from Robert J. Rei Dec 31

Well, in an unlikely turn of events… it seems that Andkon’s Reich Press was the first of Substack’s Nazis exposed by the original “Substack Has A Nazi Problem” article to be completely removed (likely due to threats of violence)!

From CBS News

We don’t know exactly what triggered this particular openly fascist Substack publication to be removed yet, but several people did report specific instances of threats and hate speech by using this skillfully obscured form:

https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=1900000051827

How Do I Report A Content Violation?

Two examples of reported content on the Andkon's Reich Press Substack

So it seems fair to say that as a result of all this collective organizing from Substackers Against Nazis, Substack leadership has actually changed course on their previous response of not doing anything about the Nazis.

Substack says it will remove Nazi publications from the platform

I’m honestly kinda shocked. It’s still a little bit wishy-washy but this, to me, is the most significant way they’ve decided to address the Nazi problem:

In a statement, Substack’s co-founders told Platformer:

If and when we become aware of other content that violates our guidelines, we will take appropriate action. 

Relatedly, we’ve heard your feedback about Substack’s content moderation approach, and we understand your concerns and those of some other writers on the platform. We sincerely regret how this controversy has affected writers on Substack. 

We appreciate the input from everyone. Writers are the backbone of Substack and we take this feedback very seriously. We are actively working on more reporting tools that can be used to flag content that potentially violates our guidelines, and we will continue working on tools for user moderation so Substack users can set and refine the terms of their own experience on the platform. 

As I continue researching and compiling resources, I am seeing the outlines of a movement of focused and committed people who are going to continue being a thorn in the side of leadership. Some have left already over this controversy (and I don’t blame them honestly) but damn it, I just got here! I had a plan and everything!

I’m here to stay, although I’ve already overhauled my site to route all donations through Tips with “Buy me a coffee” at Ko-fi.com instead of using Substack’s Paid Subscriptions. Over the coming months, we’ll see how that goes!

Yes, rather thorny.

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Substacker Nathan Davis Hunt from Toward Solidarity:

“I’d like to weigh in with a couple brief tactical suggestions.” 

The tools of writing, journalism, academia, and digital activism are important but insufficient. I would like to see the leaders of this fight think more like organizers.

1. Do not relinquish collective action. Stay or leave, what matters is solidarity. Sustain relationships and tools for maintaining the ability to act together overtime. We cannot build the world we deserve alone or through individualized consumer choice. Dramatize your staying or leaving with others. How can either action be done in a way that builds toward the world we want?

2. Seize the whirlwind. Social movements have long quiet stretches punctuated by moments of mass participation and public attention. We’re in one. You rarely get your win in these moments. Rather, it’s the time to learn from the reaction to the action and recruit. (h/t Mark & Paul Engler)

3. Organize the organized. Participants (co-signers, reposters, essay writers, journalists, allies on and off this platform) need gathering and institutionalizing. How can collective action be sustained beyond a letter? Who emerged as leaders — ie, people with followings + people willing to put in work? What forms of association are needed to sustain cohesion and coalition? What trainings do people need?

4. Figure out the next ask and the next action. You wrote a letter that asked questions. That was the action. Their response was the reaction. The next step is to formulate demands and make them within a context where it’s extremely difficult to say no. 

5. Power map. Substack’s founders are unlikely to change their minds due to short-term drops in generalized public opinion. Instead identify your target: which one of the tech bros can make a change happen? What can we learn about them? Who has that person’s ear? Who is on Substack’s board? Who are their investors? Who is on the board of those investors? Are any of the power players at that level Jewish? Who’s their rabbi? How can you get to that rabbi with the ADL so the rabbi goes and slaps the shit out of that board member until they threaten to pull funding if Substack doesn’t change its moderation policy? Just an example. The point is, do your homework and get sophisticated at building and deploying focused power.

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Author’s Note 1/11/24: It is to my eternal shame and regret that I did not initially cite the wonderful

NickS (WA)

at “Earnestness is Underrated” for these helpful resources:

• https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/10/social-media-platforms-must-do-better-when-handling-misinformation-especially

• https://www.santaclaraprinciples.org/

Thanks for reading,

James Hanlon

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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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