About those Nazis

I didn't want to write about them, but here we are.

You may have read about “Substack’s Nazi problem.” Or maybe — lucky you — you have remained blissfully unaware of it. Either way, I hope you’ll bear with me while I try to figure out what I think about it.

Here’s the story so far.

On November 28, Jonathan Katz, a journalist and the author of a Substack newsletter called The Racket, published “Substack Has a Nazi Problem” in TheAtlantic.com (gift link). Substack — the platform on which you’re reading my words — “has become a home and propagator of white supremacy and anti-Semitism,” Katz wrote. He continued: “Substack has not only been hosting writers who post overtly Nazi rhetoric on the platform; it profits from many of them.”

This was, needless to say, news to me. I started paying attention. I even looked up the newsletter of a certain woman — her initials are A.C. — who is kinda-sorta fascist-adjacent and is a frequent right-wing token guest on “Real Time with Bill Maher.” She has published some nasty stuff on her Substack newsletter, and her readers have gleefully slurped it up. But … Nazi? Doubtful.

Within weeks of the publication of Katz’s article, the authors of 247 prominent Substack newsletters sent an open letter to Substack’s founders. They called themselves “Substackers Against Nazis,” and they said it was “unfathomable” that a writer who has “a swastika avatar, who writes about ‘The Jewish question,’ or who promotes Great Replacement Theory, could be given the tools to succeed on your platform.”

A smaller number of Substack writers, including Elle Griffin (13,000+ subscribers), countered with “Substack shouldn’t decide what we read.” “Let the writers and readers moderate,” Griffin wrote, “not the social media platforms.”

Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie responded to the uproar with a December 21 Note.¹ The gist:

I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don't think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.

That did not mollify the protesters, who pointed out that Substack already moderates some content, notably pornography (however it’s defined). And so, over the last couple of weeks, even after McKenzie et al. removed some Nazi-esque newsletters from the platform, a number of writers, including Casey Newton of Platformer, Paris Marx of Disconnect, and Jonathan Katz himself — each of whom had more than 10,000 subscribers, a number that I assume included many paid subscriptions — left Substack and set up camp on other newsletter services whose names were until recently unknown to me: Ghost, Beehiiv, Buttondown.² Influential blogger Jason Kottke now refuses to link to Substack newsletters, suggesting that we Remainers, if I may borrow a term, are sullied and complicit by association. (Way back in January 2022 Kottke had warned about Substack’s providing a “safe haven” for anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists.)

As for me, I’m still here. And so are many of the non-Nazi, non-conspiracy-theorist writers who drew me to Substack in the first place: historian Heather Cox Richardson, journalist James Fallows, journalist David Weir, curator of eclectica Rusty Blazenhoff, style philosopher Tiia VM of Sunday Style Thoughts, Sari Botton of Oldster, culture-and-tech writer Virginia Heffernan, salad maven Emily Nunn.

And so too is Shalom Auslander, who, as you might deduce from his name, is Jewish. (As am I, though from the extremely Reform end of the spectrum; Auslander has written extensively about his Orthodox roots, from which he has branched out.) Auslander writes a Substack newsletter called The Fetal Position, where last week he published “The Nazi in the Haystack,” a scoffing rejection of the — can I say this? — furor over Substack’s “problem.”

Auslander wrote:

Six.

Six Nazis.

That, if the research being revealed about this is accurate, is how many Nazi Substacks there actually are – assuming they are actual Nazis and not just ordinary assholes.

Six.

Fucking.

Nazis.

There are, if I recall correctly, somewhere in the area of 500,000 Substacks. We’re talking about .0012 percent of all Substacks.

One thousandth of one percent. Barely.

And he wrote:

So when I heard that people were leaving Substack, and writers’ earnings were being impacted, writers who had nothing to do with any of this, I thought, “You have to be fucking kidding me. Over assholes playing Nazi?”

And from another Auslander post, “The Asshole Question”:

Is Elon Musk an anti-Semite? Is Kanye West a Nazi? I doubt it. They’re just assholes. Powerful assholes, maybe. For the moment. But they’re not Nazis. They’re just garden-variety, run-of-the-mill, seen-one-you’ve-seen-them-all, dull-as-dirt assholes. The teenager with the sign saying throw Jews in the trash? You’ll probably disagree with me on this, but I don’t think she’s an anti-Semite either. I don’t even think she’s an asshole. I think she’s a Dumb Fuck, but that’s a different post.

And there’s more. For Tablet, a Jewish publication, Auslander recently wrote this:

Today, like other degraded words, words that once had crucial, pivotal power but are now exhausted, words that society desperately needs like “racist” and “sexist” and “homophobe,” the word “Nazi” has been made impotent and toothless. If I was a theorist of a more conspiratorial bent, I would suspect a secret plot to destroy the word, to reduce it to nothing, a linguistic form of Holocaust denial: What can’t be denied can at least be minimized.

Amen, Mr. Auslander. That’s a lot better than anything I could write on the subject.

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I’ll just add this:

I am staying on Substack — for now, anyway — not because I earn money from it (this newsletter is free, and likely will remain so), not because I’m in denial about the assholes, and certainly not because I sympathize with white nationalists and Jew-haters. I’m staying because — for now, anyway — this platform works nicely for me. I like the interface, the user experience. I enjoy your comments.

This isn’t the first time in my career that I’ve dealt with ethical conflicts. I’ve published stories — for very good money — in outlets that wouldn’t pass a contemporary purity test. There was Playgirl, which ran entirely fictitious “first-person accounts” of sexual adventures, purportedly submitted by readers but actually written by staffers. Worse, I wrote a personal-health column for a magazine called Tables aimed at the restaurant-server market. The magazine’s sole advertiser was a giant liquor company. Substance abuse was and is rampant among restaurant workers; the waiters and bartenders I interviewed constantly brought it up without any prompting on my part. Guess what subject I was never, ever allowed to write about. Yep: the downside of alcohol consumption.

What else? I worry a lot about censorship that travels under the righteous banner of “content moderation.” On a platform without editors, who decides which content is pure enough? What criterion, other than profit, is applied?

Finally, as you may have surmised, I’m a cynic. We are living in the assholocene, and Silicon Valley is Asshole Central. I’ve seen enough tech bullshit — so much bullshit! — that I am frankly surprised when a tech founder turns out not to be an asshole. My expectations are low, which means I’m less likely to be disappointed. I find what joy I can in the corners of the internet I can call my own, and when joy is curdled — see: X, née Twitter — I heave a sigh and move on.

Does that make me a useful idiot. a collaborator, a Kapo? Obviously I hope not. But I’m still working this out. I welcome your perspectives.

An anti-actual-Nazi protest in Los Angeles, August 1938. Via Smithsonian magazine.

1. Substack Notes are this platform’s equivalent of social-media posts. I’ve written a few myself; find the Notes tab and check them out.

2. Tiny Letter, another Substack alternative, announced in November that it would cease operations on February 29, 2024. That’s the thing about internet services: When they’re good, they’re good. Then they’re either enshittified or gone.