What Will We Do About the Nazis?
I am so excited about the coming election year that my hair is practically on fire, but let's start with why you will still find me on Substack in 2024--and how I'll give you alternatives to pay me
One of the first things I will be working on is a minor redesign: next year, the share button will be integrated into the body of the post, and I will eliminate this annoying text at the top. But today, go ahead and:
I think I knew there were Nazis on Substack before one left a comment on this newsletter. I assumed it: there are Nazis on every social media platform. There are the platforms like Gab, created in 2016 for, if not committed Nazis, the Nazi-inclined. Then there is Telegram, which is encrypted. That means if you are a Nazi and you get booted from another platform, Telegram can be the safe space for your Protocols of the Elders of Zion discussion group. Although Facebook banned white supremacists, antisemites, and other extremists in 2019, search for “white nation” and at least one pops right up. My guess is there are more hiding under other names; and then there are the Nazi-adjacent hate groups, like Moms for Liberty, each chapter of which has its own Facebook.
And then there is dear old Twitter, now X (or “Xitter.”) There, Elon Musk has gutted content moderation and welcomed Nazis and other right-wing extremists back onto the platform. This is supposedly as an exercise in free speech. LOL! That said, the pre-Musk Twitter did a terrible job of keeping Nazis off the platform. In 2019, Jack Dorsey announced that he was throwing in the towel on de-Nazification, even though he devoted far more resources to moderation.
While people talked about leaving Twitter in the Dorsey years, only a tiny number of people did until Musk bought the thing in October, 2022. Nazis cheered, and dozens of accounts started testing Musk’s commitment to free speech by posting racial and antisemitic epithets over and over again.
So, 2023 became the year where everyone who participated in internet communities had to make decisions about the role of social media in their lives, and which ones they could not bring themselves to support. This has been particularly agonizing at Xitter. It went through a number of phases—bleeding advertisers, changing the blue check system, bleeding users for cash, falling apart, bleeding more advertisers, inviting previously banned users and buckets of sh*t like Alex Jones and Donald Trump back to the platform, falling apart, Musk putting up posts that suggest maybe he’s a Nazi too, and bleeding advertisers. It’s been like being in an abusive relationship.
And I think it was the turmoil at Xitter that drew attention back to Substack’s Nazi accounts, which have been there all along but are said to have multiplied in the past year. Nazis were emboldened, while Xitter users left to open new accounts at places like Mastodon (a federated platform), Blue Sky (Jack Dorsey’s new toy), and Threads (a Meta product linked to Instagram that was absurdly easy to sign up for.) Some people touted LinkedIn, a platform I had avoided for years, but which has the advantage of being work-oriented, so Nazis have a financial incentive to keep things under wraps.
Those links in the previous paragraph are where you can now follow me, should you wish to: I nuked my Xitter account about a month ago, giving up the Tenured Radical handle I have owned for fifteen years. It wasn’t as hard as it sounds. It is there and on Facebook where I have had my most hair-raising social media moments. These have often been due, not to Nazis, but to a subset of DSA activists, disappointed Ph.D.’s, and BDS-prone academics who are committed to anonymous bullying.
I am not saying the left is as bad as the right (I have never gotten death threats from left-wing keyboard warriors, for example), but rather that portions of the political left are profoundly careless and vicious towards those with whom they disagree. In fact, I would rather be abused by socialist youth, pro-Palestinian activists and angry, underemployed academics any day of the week, since mostly it is not their politics I object to but their bad manners, self-importance, and unwillingness to make fact-based arguments.
Nazis and right-wing extremists are different. But here’s my point: I expect that, on any platform. there will be users who are not only nasty, extreme, and sometimes borderline dangerous, but that have followers who can be mobilized in the interests of causing anything from extreme discomfort to instilling fear that the world is not physically safe.
Needless to say, when the Nazi commented on Political Junkie, part of me wanted to make a pot of tea and say, “What took you so long?” OK, not really. I checked out their newsletter and faced the inevitable: there are Nazis on Substack.
But this is a reflection of real life. I’m not happy about it, but I share the nation, and the world with Nazis, and in general—except for moments like #January6, #Charlottesville, and #AnyTrumpEvent—we are more or less siloed off from each other. Which is fine. Substack does a better job of keeping us separate than most social media platforms. The Nazis have to find you first; they aren’t pushed into your feed by the algorithm; and they are easy to block.
And yet, this is a view not everyone shares. On November 28, Jonathan M. Katz published “Substack Has a Nazi Problem in The Atlantic. As Katz wrote,
Substack, founded in 2017, has terms of service that formally proscribe “hate,” along with pornography, spam, and anyone “restricted from making money on Substack”—a category that includes businesses banned by Stripe, the platform’s default payment processor. But Substack’s leaders also proudly disdain the content-moderation methods that other platforms employ, albeit with spotty results, to limit the spread of racist or bigoted speech. An informal search of the Substack website and of extremist Telegram channels that circulate Substack posts turns up scores of white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters on Substack—many of them apparently started in the past year.
Reasonably, Katz asks why “white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters on Substack” don’t count as hate speech; why Substack is ok with allowing such people to build community around themselves; and why Substack wants their dirty money.
I’m really glad Katz started this conversation, and that he wrote such an open-ended essay that invited response. Subsequently, like all Substack authors, I had the opportunity to sign on to a letter that asked the company to explain itself. Part of me wondered why the ad hoc group, Substackers Against Nazis, had not previously known that we had colleagues who were Nazis. But having figured it out, the group concluded, in the words of tech journalist Casey Newton: “The correct number of newsletters using Nazi symbols that you host and profit from on your platform is zero.”
Substack responded by declining to change its policy: you can read co-founder Hamish McKenzie’s response here. I found it cogent and only partly persuasive. I say partly, because I do believe in free speech. It is one of my foundational beliefs. But I also think that the events of the last decade or so suggest that “supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power” may no longer be true. I am also unwilling to abandon my platform here. It would take significant work to relocate Political Junkie—it combines text and podcasting in one easy space—because of a problem (Nazis) that I not only can’t solve, but that I have also been coping with on every platform I have used since a started blogging in 2006.
I also believe we have to solve the Nazi problem, not through running away, but through politics. By this, I mean voting and organizing) and through implementing policies that speak to the “cannibal capitalism” (see my podcast with political theorist Nancy Fraser) that is strangling the most vulnerable among us.
So I respect the decision of those who will leave Substack over this, but I won’t be chased out of another space by extremists, antisemites, and Nazis.
That said, I appreciate it that my paying subscribers may not wish to have even the fraction of their support for me go to Substack under these conditions. So I am willing to do a little work to tweak my subscription model.
Here’s the plan.
I have established a Patreon account: if you are already a subscriber, and wish to separate your support for my writing from Substack, you can either renew your annual subscription over there when it runs out here, or cancel your $5.00/month subscription here and sign up to support my writing monthly at Patreon for the same amount. I will then use the tools on this end to comp you a parallel subscription over here, so that you can still get this by email and have access to all subscriber-only material. This is a little more work on my part, but I think it’s fair to give you, my audience, choices.
I will cross-post everything at Patreon. What does this mean? Theoretically, if you want to have nothing to do with Substack in the future, you don’t have to. Second, if you want to express appreciation for the work that went into a particular post or podcast, I will Patreon to leave me a tip there without subscribing. If you find yourself leaving tips often enough, and you want to subscribe, you can do so on either platform.
Short takes and comments will remain over here for the time being.
I’ll re-evaluate how this is going in three months.
Happy New Year, friends. I couldn’t have a better set of readers to move into 2024 with: let’s clap our hands, get onto the field, punch some Nazis in the face, and put Joe Biden back in the White House.
Short takes:
What’s going to make the difference for Joe Biden in 2024? Not his deft handling of the economy; not the tightrope the administration is walking successfully to keep the fuse Hamas lit on October 7 from immolating the whole Middle East; and not the preservation of democracy as we have known it. It’s…abortion! Because having embraced radical positions that are opposed by Americans everywhere, the GOP always loses when abortion is on the ballot At The Status Kuo, Jay Kuo thinks that the purple states to watch are Arizona and Nevada. “Arizonans elected a Democrat, Katie Hobbs, as governor in 2022 over her challenger Kari Lake. Many voters in exit polling cited abortion as a key reason for their vote,” Kuo writes. And as Nevadans who love liberty work to get a reproductive freedom amendment into their state constitution, “have now proposed a different ballot measure that, like Ohio and Arizona, would guarantee the right to an abortion until fetal viability, or when necessary to protect the life or health of the pregnant patient.” (December 31, 2023)
Liz Dye at Public Notice reports on a motion prosecutor Jack Smith filed last Wednesday asking Judge Tanya Chutkan to keep Trump from drenching Chutkan’s D.C. courtroom in lies, fabrications, and irrelevant motions, all aimed at broadcasting to American voters that the Biden administration is engaged in a “selective or vindictive prosecution.” This is a lie on multiple levels, but the point is this: “Prosecutors accuse Trump of attempting to engage in jury nullification, that is, securing an acquittal by convincing jurors to disregard the evidence and law in favor of their own personal feelings of justice.” (December 29, 2023)
At The New Republic, Nina Burleigh details how Fox News became “a mass radicalization operation” that pushed conservatives further to the right and made nonaligned voters into conservatives. You know how they did it—by straight up lying, something that taught a certain real estate dude that his own penchant for dishonesty could be spun into gold. Today, Burleigh points out, it is the most potent political obstacle President Joe Biden faces, since everything good he does is twisted into evidence of how terrible his policies are for the country. And hten there’s the age thing. “Fox is an anti-Biden meme factory,” Burleigh writes. “If Biden pauses during a speech, or appears to lose his footing on a podium, the network will cut and loop the video for hours, making the president look demented, as every guest is invited to banter about his age.” (December 28, 2023)
Thanks, Claire. I’m good --not going to read the nazis.
Read Rachel Maddow’s “Prequel” for the overview of nazi activity over the last many decades. Rachel has the audio which is so effective as well.