I think this particular Nazi controversy has brought Twitter vocabulary and concepts into Substack and laid the foundation for calling for other groups of Substackers to be ousted.
Sherman, I have found you via substack and greatly enjoyed your voice. This seems to be a novel idea, although I don’t know how, but it seems to me like what we need is the digital equivalent of due process. It seems like substack did do an honest review of these particular accounts but so long as substack is the wielder of the moderation power directly, and it’s not something that has checks and balances the way it does in real life, that there is always the threat of some surly group of grifters joining up into a mob and demanding action by threat. We’re all too old to go cry to the CEO of a company because we don’t like someone. There has to be a better way.
The digital equivalent of Due Process is the first amendment, ie there is always a need to just say "they are allowed to say anything, if you don't like it, don't listen."
There will always be cases that are borderline true violations of criminal content. So long as substack is the sole adjudicator of those cases and there is no transparency or right of defense, the problem persists.
Also there is an entirely separate consideration of how content is amplified. I can see people wanting additional protections there both for their work and from the work of others.
No, the problem only persists as long as you, the actor here, stay on the platform.
If you think there is an issue not being addressed, leave. Real simple.
The long and the short of it is that Substack is a private company, and can do what they like. You, having free will, may do what you like also. No one is forcing you to stick around, and if too many people feel this way, it dies. And so it goes.
You’re not engaging with my argument and seem to be arguing with someone who isn’t here that is in favor of censorship.
We recognize some companies are providing things that are so essential they *cannot* deny service to a customer. Your power company can’t shut off your lights because they don’t like your politics. Your water company can’t shut off your water because they hurt your feelings. I get that Substack is a private company but does that also relegate to them a supreme and unquestionable authority to turn people’s speech on and off? We’ve had all these arguments on other platforms but I think substack is likely to be more sympathetic to an alternative because they already seem to actively not want it but *at the same time* there is always going to be stuff out there that they are legally *required* to remove.
If substack itself is the only one with a lever at the executive layer to remove content, it will continue to be the target of any group of people with an axe to grind. If substack can instead point to an open, republic-style adjudication process where you can’t be excommunicated from the internet just because someone wants you to be, then there’s another option. And if substack can make that work then other companies will follow and we will have a more free and transparent internet where companies aren’t subject to collapse because of boycotts. Take the energies of people doing this, make them point to specific charges, impose some kind of cost to the transaction, and remove from the ability to just disappear people because they are upset.
Enforcement is supposed to be transparent, fair, and appropriate. Today, no one anywhere tries to do any of those things on the internet.
How is Substack "so essential," to use your words? You cannot go to, say, Yahoo, and buy some sever space, start your own newsletter?
I would argue that if Substack has ANY lever to remove content, than censors will attempt to pull that lever. Adding in a lever will, in no way, transform the internet back into what it was either in our (mine included) minds or shared history. You are basically arguing for Chekov's gun, i.e. if you show the lever, someone is going to pull it. And your "legally required" argument holds no ground, for when some such thing is required, then it should be pulled by legal action, i.e. it goes to court and a judge makes a decision regarding whether it violates the first amendment. Other than that, it is Substack's business to make that determination. As private citizens, we in no way should have any say in that except our choice to stay or go. Or do you think that Substack's leadership should be appointed by the executive? Which state, or the US, Canada?
No, the answer is to demand that other platforms either deregulate speech entirely, or start new and more platforms.
I'm not sure I agree. The Platformer found six tiny Substacks that they believe explicitly violated existing policies. Substack agreed on five and disagreed on the sixth. I'd need to know the exact Substack posts that led to the team deciding to give them the boot before I could really judge, but it smells a lot like Platformer and company inflating their own importance when they could have gotten the same result by pressing a report button.
Of course, I am running on very little information. If it turns out one of the five wasn't actually particularly "Nazi", or somebody loses their Substack for something a significant chunk of Americans consider reasonable, I'll eat my words.
EDIT: Yeah, Doug's comment below sums up my feelings. Newton expected to spark a great crusade. What he got was "okay, yeah, these five broke TOS. The sixth is fine. Thank you, have a nice day." He's spinning it as a win so he can get the hero points, but he knows he lost.
Sorry but stopped reading at “obscuring key information.” Why give any journalist who does this the time of day? It’s obvious to some of us that the so-called Nazi problem is cover for a push to censor. For our own good - because we deplorables just can’t be trusted to vet information ourselves. Like it or not, this isn’t about what it seems to be about. It’s about the control of speech. Period. The ones who want to censor to save you from Nazis are the Nazis.
It's not for our own good. They know damn well how capable readers (people who actually read) are of comprehending information and making deductions. This isn't "for our own good," this is intentionally deceitful propaganda. Usually for self-enrichment, but often for ideology. They don't think they're the bad guys, but I don't think most of them see themselves as superior; they just feel that the ends justify the deceit and manipulation. Doesn't make it any less fucking disgusting, of course. Cretins.
After twisting my brain into a pretzel, I think I finally understand what Newton believed he was saying. Essentially “we didn’t share the number in our reporting because we expected our complaint to Substack to spur a larger, platform-wide investigation of extremist content. That would, in turn, lead to *many more* ‘nazi’ Substacks than the original six we reported being removed from the platform, thus obscuring Platformer’s role in banning any individual site. Instead, they just looked at the ones we reported, banned the 5 of 6, and left us holding the bag.” This feels deeply unfair to him and is not the way he thought the situation would go, because he feels entitled to dictate the internal politics of media organizations like Substack and expected this to go down entirely on his terms.
Yes -- I think Doug is being too generous. The simple explanation is that vagueness allowed Newton to imply that he had discovered much more "nazi" content than he did in fact find. Then it felt "unfair" to him that Jesse called him on it.
Everyone knows this "Nazi Problem" bullshit is a Trojan horse. They know most people find those ideas aberrant, so they say they are just trying to get rid of the "Nazis" (all six of them). But once this precedent is set, they will apply these "content moderation" rules to achieve their real purpose--to crack down on dissent. The twitter files should have made this obvious. Like Freddie DeBoer wrote about, he's a self-proclaimed Marxist, but these people would find a way to call him a Nazi so they could shut him up. Seriously, who falls for this shit?
They (The Censorship Industrial Complex actors who are trying to prevent dissenting or contrarian content from "going viral") do it because it WORKS. This m.o. has been utilized for at least 4 years.
What's scary is these organizations are, belatedly, now using the same operation against Substack, which is THE most-important free speech platform still left in the world.
My father joined the Army Air Corps the day after Pearl Harbor. Made it through the war with Japan and Germany.
So I, like many others, know that Nazis wanted literally to kill a member of my family (who I love and admired all of my life and who I miss every day since he died in 2012).
We also have two Jewish grandsons. I need not say more about what Nazis did there.
But, I'm not afraid of Nazi speech. Let the insecure, not-very-smart people prattle on. Enough of us know that they are just making up for the fact that they are losers trying to finally "be" somebody. The best response to them is ridicule.
Banning this kind of speech gives it power, and I don't want to give anyone who believes this crap power. Make fun of them. Make jokes. They are wanting the power of making you upset, so turn the tables.
We draw the line at racist talk. But let others ramble on and display their ignorance. Let the rest of us deal with them--don't do it for us by banning them. And we basically deal with them by ignoring them---a fate worse than death for insecure people.
The fact that they have almost no following and make almost no money is enough of a referendum. They probably got more attention because of that stupid Atlantic article than they've ever gotten in their lives.
I broadly agree, but your last paragraph had me wondering: Why do "we" (who is "we"?) draw the line at racist talk? In what way is racist talk different than Nazi talk?
"We" is our marital couple. Not speaking for anyone outside of ourselves. Your question is a good one, and one we would like to ponder. Nazi talk feels directed toward all races, but we'll have to study that more. Thanks for raising a good point.
The only Nazis left are bottom-barrel mentally-handicapped barely functional schizo-posters. Their maximum ability to display “force” is to get together like a couple hundred guys with tiki torches. That’s the zenith of their power. It’s like how the bubonic plague takes out one or two people a year in the middle of the desert, sometimes, maybe, because they came across one rat that is still carrying it.
The idea that theoretically, somewhere a guy who probably jerks off to internet porn all day and lives in his mother’s basement makes enough money from substack to go out to Red Robin and buy a cheeseburger once every three months, is a direct threat to all people everywhere that has to be put down with zero tolerance is just absurd. This isn’t even a hard moral quandary about the trade-offs for speech protections.
I try to give people grace but I don’t see how this isn’t some naked manipulation by Katz and his allies to try to win over sympathy from people who are so triggered by the existence of racism anywhere, with no context that might allay their fears, that they’re likely to give him $5/mos to be their champion. That’s an ugly thing to say but I can’t simultaneously imagine someone this stupid and this capable having any other motive.
I really want substack to be the innovators of something like due process for the internet. We’re all too old to just be having stupid internet battles like this that don’t resolve into anything. If you accuse someone of something, they should get to know who you are and what specifically you are accusing them of. They should get a right to defend themselves. And someone/something other than a mob should get to adjudicate the dispute.
We can’t just continue to exist in an environment where power is only wielded when there’s a mob at the door. This is basic civics stuff, and if old people had been the first adopters of the internet, it would have been built in day one.
I just wrote this note about exactly this subject - I think that the people who are actual Nazis today are likely to be deeply damaged weirdos who are inhabiting the role of "worst thing" as some sort of rebellion against society. It's just like the extremely weird people who heard all the terrible things about "witches" in the middle ages and decided "y'know what, actually I AM a witch!"
My step dad fell into this category. Would say the worst stuff you could imagine about how great Hitler was. He was a Micronesian meth head. Didn’t make any sense so people just filtered it out.
I started out on Usenet in the 1990s, which had porn and Nazis aplenty, and we just ignored them (through the snow, uphill both ways). I know that's significantly different because Usenet was genuinely decentralized and had no owner/publisher. But dammit, when I were a lass we just ignored Nazis, and we liked it.
You kids dont understand. Back in my day you never knew if the skinhead at the show was a nazi or straightedge. Or both! We still beat each other up in the pit anyway. And dammit we liked it.
I sort of sympathize with Newton here. Imagine trying to make a living writing about the "good fight" and spending hours trying to find "the Nazis." You can't then write an article saying "we really couldn't find more than a very tiny number of Nazis... it appears it's not really an issue." No one wants to hear that! So you have to somehow say "THERE ARE SOOO MANY NAZIS! WE MUST FIGHT THEM!!" That's way better, no?
Someone once mentioned that the SPLC had a similar problem: what do you do when you run out of Nazis or racists? You can either close shop or pivot. Often these groups choose the latter and pivot to whatever liberal cause cé·lè·bre they can find.
I remember hearing somewhere (maybe the 5th Column?) that when you parse the data on the number of members "hate groups" on the SPLC list have, they're almost always in the single digits, and when they report shit like "the number of hate groups doubled" it's because the 2 guys in the Tuscaloosa Hitler Humpers had a spat and respectively started the Neo Tuscaloosa Hitler Humpers and the Real Tuscaloosa Hitler Humpers
There's one indicator that tells us if a Substack newsletter has at least 100 paid subscribers - these sites are highlighted in the color orange (like my newsletter is) once you reach that level. None of these alleged Nazi sites have reached the orange color yet ... so none have reached "100 paid subscribers."
You can also just look at the number of "likes," "Reader Comments" and "cross post" icons to gauge how many readers are reading this newsletter ... or in this case, how many people are NOT reading or visiting these newsletters.
How many times per week to you get breadsticks at Olive Garden and say a prayer of thanks to the Substack family for giving you enough money to buy a good family dinner?
And agreed, those accounts didn’t get any attention until this whole thing.
My users can also leave me a "Ko-fi" one-time gratuity. This has become known as "buying a cup of coffee" for a writer you want to support. I drink a lot of coffee and have used my ko-fi "tips" to get the next can of Maxwell House (I can't afford Folgers anymore). In my next article, I'm going to write, "Buy the author a plate of spaghetti."
Yes, but, when are people going to learn that the coverup is always worse than the crime? “We went to a lot of effort but it turns out we were mistaken” is embarrassing, but what Jesse documents has me cringing in pure second-hand humiliation.
I find it odd to start a comment with "I sort of sympathise with this guy" and then write a list of reasons why that guy is cynical, dishonest, craven and unable to admit fault
Newton and Katz care more that the media gatekeepers are a) losing power and b) less tolerant of antisocial behaviors from their ilk. “Nazis on Substack” is just a convenient pretext.
It's been around since the website's inception. Journalists were arguing that the advances received by Freddie deBoer and others were evidence that Substack is some kind of "pyramid scheme".
In my article, I mentioned the UK newspaper, The Guardian, which ran the "Substack infiltrated by Nazis" story. I've now learned from Jesse that other news organizations are promulgating the same narrative. I say we should always look at the news organizations which are used as fronts to get these operations (key narratives) going.
Upon reflection, "Operation Mockingbird" might have been the most-important operation of our Shadow Rulers pulled off. They couldn't get away with all these operations without such willing partners in the propaganda press.
The only place these faux narratives can be debunked is Substack ... which our rulers are clearly now trying to shutdown or bully into compliance.
Just to clarify: is Hamas a "Nazi" organization? They certainly are very upfront about exterminating the Jews -- surely that qualifies as a (dis)honorable mention. There were associations between the Palestinians and the genuine, honest-to-God Nazis in WWII, and there was even a Palestinian SS regiment, so the historical connections are factual. And unlike the wimpy Nazis who are content to just publish a newsletter on Substack, Hamas really does go out and kill Jews.
If we're going to ban Nazis from Substack, should we also be banning Hamas supporters? How about people who downplay Hamas atrocities? How about people who are just critical of Israel? Lots of potential Nazis here, although of course they are on the wrong side of the tribal war.
"...and that he’s made the mistakes a lot of journalists have made when they aren’t careful enough to separate reporting from activism."
That should be enough to tell you that this has nothing to do with reality or news and is only a smear campaign. Frankly, this seems to be the case of all "news" generated by a certain subset of reporters and journalists. Activism has replaced the search for truth, and a lot of people who do not have the temperament to dispassionately report facts have gotten into the business. And this is having ripple effects all over the western world, from Russia to Trump.
Yes. The reason people are out here committing the awful crime of “doing their own research” for the last few years is because journalists became activists and pissed away all of their credibility. Getting the facts right is difficult; just focus on that.
Stop hiding information that you find inconvenient and blowing other “facts” out of all proportion. Seek multiple sources; when you hear that a hospital in Oklahoma is turning away gunshot victims because of all the ivermectin overdoses, maybe call the hospital before you write a story. Get people on the record. All the basic rules of journalism that I learned on my high school paper must be known by all of these j-school graduates, right?
Every time I read a big story that has any culture war relevance at all (and almost anything ends up right or left coded at this point), I assume that some significant portion of it is bullshit. The questions are: does the reporter know it’s bullshit, and what’s the percentage. 20% bullshit? 100% bullshit?
If I really care about a topic, I may take time to go to primary sources and local reporting to try to see what actually happened. But, just by way of example, Florida could ban every book in the state before I waste time reading another “book ban” story. Book banning may be a real problem now, but the first few big stories were 80-100% bullshit and now when I see such a story I just roll my eyes and go read something else.
These people have no credibility, and they have no one to blame. We needed them, continue to need them to help keep a grip on consensual reality. But who, beyond a handful of hardcore MSNBC junkies, still trusts them after the last few years?
The conspiracy theorists I know never cracked a newspaper at any time, or a book for that matter.
You're giving them way too much credit in assuming they're just turned off by bad journalism by mainstream sources. If they were, they would recognize that the garbage they choose to believe is even worse.
I think this particular Nazi controversy has brought Twitter vocabulary and concepts into Substack and laid the foundation for calling for other groups of Substackers to be ousted.
And THAT is the whole issue here. They set the crybully tone on Twitter, then lost their power when Elon turned into Howard Hughes.
Now they’re casting about for someplace to flex where they can find moderators as servile as they wanted old Twitter to be.
Sherman, I have found you via substack and greatly enjoyed your voice. This seems to be a novel idea, although I don’t know how, but it seems to me like what we need is the digital equivalent of due process. It seems like substack did do an honest review of these particular accounts but so long as substack is the wielder of the moderation power directly, and it’s not something that has checks and balances the way it does in real life, that there is always the threat of some surly group of grifters joining up into a mob and demanding action by threat. We’re all too old to go cry to the CEO of a company because we don’t like someone. There has to be a better way.
The digital equivalent of Due Process is the first amendment, ie there is always a need to just say "they are allowed to say anything, if you don't like it, don't listen."
There will always be cases that are borderline true violations of criminal content. So long as substack is the sole adjudicator of those cases and there is no transparency or right of defense, the problem persists.
Also there is an entirely separate consideration of how content is amplified. I can see people wanting additional protections there both for their work and from the work of others.
No, the problem only persists as long as you, the actor here, stay on the platform.
If you think there is an issue not being addressed, leave. Real simple.
The long and the short of it is that Substack is a private company, and can do what they like. You, having free will, may do what you like also. No one is forcing you to stick around, and if too many people feel this way, it dies. And so it goes.
You’re not engaging with my argument and seem to be arguing with someone who isn’t here that is in favor of censorship.
We recognize some companies are providing things that are so essential they *cannot* deny service to a customer. Your power company can’t shut off your lights because they don’t like your politics. Your water company can’t shut off your water because they hurt your feelings. I get that Substack is a private company but does that also relegate to them a supreme and unquestionable authority to turn people’s speech on and off? We’ve had all these arguments on other platforms but I think substack is likely to be more sympathetic to an alternative because they already seem to actively not want it but *at the same time* there is always going to be stuff out there that they are legally *required* to remove.
If substack itself is the only one with a lever at the executive layer to remove content, it will continue to be the target of any group of people with an axe to grind. If substack can instead point to an open, republic-style adjudication process where you can’t be excommunicated from the internet just because someone wants you to be, then there’s another option. And if substack can make that work then other companies will follow and we will have a more free and transparent internet where companies aren’t subject to collapse because of boycotts. Take the energies of people doing this, make them point to specific charges, impose some kind of cost to the transaction, and remove from the ability to just disappear people because they are upset.
Enforcement is supposed to be transparent, fair, and appropriate. Today, no one anywhere tries to do any of those things on the internet.
How is Substack "so essential," to use your words? You cannot go to, say, Yahoo, and buy some sever space, start your own newsletter?
I would argue that if Substack has ANY lever to remove content, than censors will attempt to pull that lever. Adding in a lever will, in no way, transform the internet back into what it was either in our (mine included) minds or shared history. You are basically arguing for Chekov's gun, i.e. if you show the lever, someone is going to pull it. And your "legally required" argument holds no ground, for when some such thing is required, then it should be pulled by legal action, i.e. it goes to court and a judge makes a decision regarding whether it violates the first amendment. Other than that, it is Substack's business to make that determination. As private citizens, we in no way should have any say in that except our choice to stay or go. Or do you think that Substack's leadership should be appointed by the executive? Which state, or the US, Canada?
No, the answer is to demand that other platforms either deregulate speech entirely, or start new and more platforms.
I agree.
I'm not sure I agree. The Platformer found six tiny Substacks that they believe explicitly violated existing policies. Substack agreed on five and disagreed on the sixth. I'd need to know the exact Substack posts that led to the team deciding to give them the boot before I could really judge, but it smells a lot like Platformer and company inflating their own importance when they could have gotten the same result by pressing a report button.
Of course, I am running on very little information. If it turns out one of the five wasn't actually particularly "Nazi", or somebody loses their Substack for something a significant chunk of Americans consider reasonable, I'll eat my words.
EDIT: Yeah, Doug's comment below sums up my feelings. Newton expected to spark a great crusade. What he got was "okay, yeah, these five broke TOS. The sixth is fine. Thank you, have a nice day." He's spinning it as a win so he can get the hero points, but he knows he lost.
Exactly where it's going. Set a precedent, widen the parameters.
It's so disappointing 😞
Sorry but stopped reading at “obscuring key information.” Why give any journalist who does this the time of day? It’s obvious to some of us that the so-called Nazi problem is cover for a push to censor. For our own good - because we deplorables just can’t be trusted to vet information ourselves. Like it or not, this isn’t about what it seems to be about. It’s about the control of speech. Period. The ones who want to censor to save you from Nazis are the Nazis.
Casey mentioning Shellenberger tips off what this is really about.
They don’t care about random Nazis, they want to purge everyone exposing the “disinformation” scam.
It's not for our own good. They know damn well how capable readers (people who actually read) are of comprehending information and making deductions. This isn't "for our own good," this is intentionally deceitful propaganda. Usually for self-enrichment, but often for ideology. They don't think they're the bad guys, but I don't think most of them see themselves as superior; they just feel that the ends justify the deceit and manipulation. Doesn't make it any less fucking disgusting, of course. Cretins.
To Grape Soda's point, they aren't journalists at that point, but polemists, rabble rousers, and propagandists.
After twisting my brain into a pretzel, I think I finally understand what Newton believed he was saying. Essentially “we didn’t share the number in our reporting because we expected our complaint to Substack to spur a larger, platform-wide investigation of extremist content. That would, in turn, lead to *many more* ‘nazi’ Substacks than the original six we reported being removed from the platform, thus obscuring Platformer’s role in banning any individual site. Instead, they just looked at the ones we reported, banned the 5 of 6, and left us holding the bag.” This feels deeply unfair to him and is not the way he thought the situation would go, because he feels entitled to dictate the internal politics of media organizations like Substack and expected this to go down entirely on his terms.
Still took a very public victory lap tho.
Yes -- I think Doug is being too generous. The simple explanation is that vagueness allowed Newton to imply that he had discovered much more "nazi" content than he did in fact find. Then it felt "unfair" to him that Jesse called him on it.
I think this is right.
Everyone knows this "Nazi Problem" bullshit is a Trojan horse. They know most people find those ideas aberrant, so they say they are just trying to get rid of the "Nazis" (all six of them). But once this precedent is set, they will apply these "content moderation" rules to achieve their real purpose--to crack down on dissent. The twitter files should have made this obvious. Like Freddie DeBoer wrote about, he's a self-proclaimed Marxist, but these people would find a way to call him a Nazi so they could shut him up. Seriously, who falls for this shit?
They (The Censorship Industrial Complex actors who are trying to prevent dissenting or contrarian content from "going viral") do it because it WORKS. This m.o. has been utilized for at least 4 years.
What's scary is these organizations are, belatedly, now using the same operation against Substack, which is THE most-important free speech platform still left in the world.
They have called Freddie a Nazi. Several times.
My father joined the Army Air Corps the day after Pearl Harbor. Made it through the war with Japan and Germany.
So I, like many others, know that Nazis wanted literally to kill a member of my family (who I love and admired all of my life and who I miss every day since he died in 2012).
We also have two Jewish grandsons. I need not say more about what Nazis did there.
But, I'm not afraid of Nazi speech. Let the insecure, not-very-smart people prattle on. Enough of us know that they are just making up for the fact that they are losers trying to finally "be" somebody. The best response to them is ridicule.
Banning this kind of speech gives it power, and I don't want to give anyone who believes this crap power. Make fun of them. Make jokes. They are wanting the power of making you upset, so turn the tables.
We draw the line at racist talk. But let others ramble on and display their ignorance. Let the rest of us deal with them--don't do it for us by banning them. And we basically deal with them by ignoring them---a fate worse than death for insecure people.
The fact that they have almost no following and make almost no money is enough of a referendum. They probably got more attention because of that stupid Atlantic article than they've ever gotten in their lives.
💯
I broadly agree, but your last paragraph had me wondering: Why do "we" (who is "we"?) draw the line at racist talk? In what way is racist talk different than Nazi talk?
"We" is our marital couple. Not speaking for anyone outside of ourselves. Your question is a good one, and one we would like to ponder. Nazi talk feels directed toward all races, but we'll have to study that more. Thanks for raising a good point.
The only Nazis left are bottom-barrel mentally-handicapped barely functional schizo-posters. Their maximum ability to display “force” is to get together like a couple hundred guys with tiki torches. That’s the zenith of their power. It’s like how the bubonic plague takes out one or two people a year in the middle of the desert, sometimes, maybe, because they came across one rat that is still carrying it.
The idea that theoretically, somewhere a guy who probably jerks off to internet porn all day and lives in his mother’s basement makes enough money from substack to go out to Red Robin and buy a cheeseburger once every three months, is a direct threat to all people everywhere that has to be put down with zero tolerance is just absurd. This isn’t even a hard moral quandary about the trade-offs for speech protections.
I try to give people grace but I don’t see how this isn’t some naked manipulation by Katz and his allies to try to win over sympathy from people who are so triggered by the existence of racism anywhere, with no context that might allay their fears, that they’re likely to give him $5/mos to be their champion. That’s an ugly thing to say but I can’t simultaneously imagine someone this stupid and this capable having any other motive.
I really want substack to be the innovators of something like due process for the internet. We’re all too old to just be having stupid internet battles like this that don’t resolve into anything. If you accuse someone of something, they should get to know who you are and what specifically you are accusing them of. They should get a right to defend themselves. And someone/something other than a mob should get to adjudicate the dispute.
We can’t just continue to exist in an environment where power is only wielded when there’s a mob at the door. This is basic civics stuff, and if old people had been the first adopters of the internet, it would have been built in day one.
I just wrote this note about exactly this subject - I think that the people who are actual Nazis today are likely to be deeply damaged weirdos who are inhabiting the role of "worst thing" as some sort of rebellion against society. It's just like the extremely weird people who heard all the terrible things about "witches" in the middle ages and decided "y'know what, actually I AM a witch!"
https://substack.com/@theplenum/note/c-46939170?r=70xty
My step dad fell into this category. Would say the worst stuff you could imagine about how great Hitler was. He was a Micronesian meth head. Didn’t make any sense so people just filtered it out.
What an interesting idea. Did I need to add yet another Substack newsletter to my Big Fat Inbox? No. Did I subscribe to yours? Yes.
I started out on Usenet in the 1990s, which had porn and Nazis aplenty, and we just ignored them (through the snow, uphill both ways). I know that's significantly different because Usenet was genuinely decentralized and had no owner/publisher. But dammit, when I were a lass we just ignored Nazis, and we liked it.
You kids dont understand. Back in my day you never knew if the skinhead at the show was a nazi or straightedge. Or both! We still beat each other up in the pit anyway. And dammit we liked it.
"Lived in a shoebox, in the middle of the road, we did!"
Ah, you were lucky!
Ditto
I sort of sympathize with Newton here. Imagine trying to make a living writing about the "good fight" and spending hours trying to find "the Nazis." You can't then write an article saying "we really couldn't find more than a very tiny number of Nazis... it appears it's not really an issue." No one wants to hear that! So you have to somehow say "THERE ARE SOOO MANY NAZIS! WE MUST FIGHT THEM!!" That's way better, no?
Someone once mentioned that the SPLC had a similar problem: what do you do when you run out of Nazis or racists? You can either close shop or pivot. Often these groups choose the latter and pivot to whatever liberal cause cé·lè·bre they can find.
I remember hearing somewhere (maybe the 5th Column?) that when you parse the data on the number of members "hate groups" on the SPLC list have, they're almost always in the single digits, and when they report shit like "the number of hate groups doubled" it's because the 2 guys in the Tuscaloosa Hitler Humpers had a spat and respectively started the Neo Tuscaloosa Hitler Humpers and the Real Tuscaloosa Hitler Humpers
Splitters!
I want a spreadsheet with the actual dollar amounts because it is probably hugely humiliating for their argument.
There's one indicator that tells us if a Substack newsletter has at least 100 paid subscribers - these sites are highlighted in the color orange (like my newsletter is) once you reach that level. None of these alleged Nazi sites have reached the orange color yet ... so none have reached "100 paid subscribers."
You can also just look at the number of "likes," "Reader Comments" and "cross post" icons to gauge how many readers are reading this newsletter ... or in this case, how many people are NOT reading or visiting these newsletters.
How many times per week to you get breadsticks at Olive Garden and say a prayer of thanks to the Substack family for giving you enough money to buy a good family dinner?
And agreed, those accounts didn’t get any attention until this whole thing.
Most weeks I can't say that prayer of thanks and can't afford to go to the Olive Garden because I get no new "paid subscribers" from Substack.
However, this week - thanks to my "Nazi story" - I got 50 (!) ... so I guess I better treat my family to some spaghetti!
“Freedom paid for this spaghetti!”
My users can also leave me a "Ko-fi" one-time gratuity. This has become known as "buying a cup of coffee" for a writer you want to support. I drink a lot of coffee and have used my ko-fi "tips" to get the next can of Maxwell House (I can't afford Folgers anymore). In my next article, I'm going to write, "Buy the author a plate of spaghetti."
Yes, but, when are people going to learn that the coverup is always worse than the crime? “We went to a lot of effort but it turns out we were mistaken” is embarrassing, but what Jesse documents has me cringing in pure second-hand humiliation.
I find it odd to start a comment with "I sort of sympathise with this guy" and then write a list of reasons why that guy is cynical, dishonest, craven and unable to admit fault
Newton and Katz care more that the media gatekeepers are a) losing power and b) less tolerant of antisocial behaviors from their ilk. “Nazis on Substack” is just a convenient pretext.
Given the rapidly rising popularity of Substack, it was inevitable that legacy media outlets, such as The Atlantic, would start issuing hit pieces.
It's been around since the website's inception. Journalists were arguing that the advances received by Freddie deBoer and others were evidence that Substack is some kind of "pyramid scheme".
In my article, I mentioned the UK newspaper, The Guardian, which ran the "Substack infiltrated by Nazis" story. I've now learned from Jesse that other news organizations are promulgating the same narrative. I say we should always look at the news organizations which are used as fronts to get these operations (key narratives) going.
Upon reflection, "Operation Mockingbird" might have been the most-important operation of our Shadow Rulers pulled off. They couldn't get away with all these operations without such willing partners in the propaganda press.
The only place these faux narratives can be debunked is Substack ... which our rulers are clearly now trying to shutdown or bully into compliance.
This is too reductive; lots of great stuff in the Atlantic.
Nowhere in my comment did I make the claim that the Atlantic doesn’t publish good stuff.
I don’t care. I will never willingly read anything they publish. Dead to me. (There is no one you hate more than one you once loved.)
I'm reminded of a certain congresscritter from the 50's who had a list of 57 "subversives".
I've never read the word "Nazi" so much in one month.
That's the problem with this platform: all anyone talks about is Nazis.
This Newton dude's constant evasion of Jesse's questions is hilarious.
Just to clarify: is Hamas a "Nazi" organization? They certainly are very upfront about exterminating the Jews -- surely that qualifies as a (dis)honorable mention. There were associations between the Palestinians and the genuine, honest-to-God Nazis in WWII, and there was even a Palestinian SS regiment, so the historical connections are factual. And unlike the wimpy Nazis who are content to just publish a newsletter on Substack, Hamas really does go out and kill Jews.
If we're going to ban Nazis from Substack, should we also be banning Hamas supporters? How about people who downplay Hamas atrocities? How about people who are just critical of Israel? Lots of potential Nazis here, although of course they are on the wrong side of the tribal war.
This was excellent reporting.
Substack is such a treasure, and I resent the careless, destructive, distracting, purely performative virtue signaling of the agitators.
"...and that he’s made the mistakes a lot of journalists have made when they aren’t careful enough to separate reporting from activism."
That should be enough to tell you that this has nothing to do with reality or news and is only a smear campaign. Frankly, this seems to be the case of all "news" generated by a certain subset of reporters and journalists. Activism has replaced the search for truth, and a lot of people who do not have the temperament to dispassionately report facts have gotten into the business. And this is having ripple effects all over the western world, from Russia to Trump.
Yes. The reason people are out here committing the awful crime of “doing their own research” for the last few years is because journalists became activists and pissed away all of their credibility. Getting the facts right is difficult; just focus on that.
Stop hiding information that you find inconvenient and blowing other “facts” out of all proportion. Seek multiple sources; when you hear that a hospital in Oklahoma is turning away gunshot victims because of all the ivermectin overdoses, maybe call the hospital before you write a story. Get people on the record. All the basic rules of journalism that I learned on my high school paper must be known by all of these j-school graduates, right?
Every time I read a big story that has any culture war relevance at all (and almost anything ends up right or left coded at this point), I assume that some significant portion of it is bullshit. The questions are: does the reporter know it’s bullshit, and what’s the percentage. 20% bullshit? 100% bullshit?
If I really care about a topic, I may take time to go to primary sources and local reporting to try to see what actually happened. But, just by way of example, Florida could ban every book in the state before I waste time reading another “book ban” story. Book banning may be a real problem now, but the first few big stories were 80-100% bullshit and now when I see such a story I just roll my eyes and go read something else.
These people have no credibility, and they have no one to blame. We needed them, continue to need them to help keep a grip on consensual reality. But who, beyond a handful of hardcore MSNBC junkies, still trusts them after the last few years?
The conspiracy theorists I know never cracked a newspaper at any time, or a book for that matter.
You're giving them way too much credit in assuming they're just turned off by bad journalism by mainstream sources. If they were, they would recognize that the garbage they choose to believe is even worse.
Well said.