Does Substack Have a Nazi Problem?
Does Substack have a Nazi problem? This concern, raised by journalist Jonathan Katz in an article in The Atlantic, accuses this platform of allowing white supremacists to spew their ideas, find and harbor community, and raise money.
I don’t want Nazis on Substack. I don’t want Nazis anywhere. But I’m also becoming a free speech absolutist, worried less about a handful of gross white supremacists and more about the implications of what happens when we police speech.
Because: what happens when a critical mass of people changes who they decide the Nazis are?
We are already seeing this, of course. I spent the last week picking fights with anti-Israel Substackers just to see where their logic would and could take them. The results were alarming.
It started when a Substack newsletter by an Australian named Caitlin Johnstone appeared in my feed. Johnstone’s writings are “geared toward awakening human consciousness and drawing humanity into my understanding of what a healthy world would look like.”
Sounds interesting. Then it gets a little weird:
I see illusions as the only obstacle to the creation of a healthy world, which in my view would look like a movement from the competition-based models of capitalism, militarism, imperialism and domination to collaboration-based models where all humans work in cooperation with each other and with our ecosystem toward the common good of all beings. The only things preventing that movement are the large-scale illusions that our rulers have been indoctrinating us with since birth about what’s real and what’s possible, as well as the small-scale illusions of ego and separation which keep us enslaved to fear, greed, and unconscious reactivity.
I added the italics because you can always smell a conspiracy theory when you hear about vague “rulers” and “they” making plans to control the masses.
Since October 7th, Johnstone has been writing constantly and obsessively about Israel. The newsletter that caught my eye is titled “Israel Supporters Would Defend Literally Any Israeli Atrocity,” in which she writes “Israel supporters will defend any evil—literally any evil—as long as it is being perpetrated by their favorite regime. There are zero constraints of any kind, because Israel supporters are completely uninterested in morality.”
In a recent post she declares (sorry for the expletive):
I don’t give a fuck if you’re Jewish. I don’t care what religion you are. If you’re murdering thousands of children, the very least significant thing about that situation is what religion you happen to be. I think the overwhelming majority of people on my side see it this way.
❖
Actually what fuels antisemitism is murdering children by the thousands under the banner of the Star of David while adamantly insisting that your actions are inseparable from all Jews and the totality of Judaism.
Responses to her posts look like this:
You are “antisemitic” if you complain about genocide carried out by those who claim they are chosen people to rule over us all: the zionists who are cloaked in American Exceptionalism and Israeli exceptionalism.
It totally makes sense: how dare you oppose god’s will, which according to the zionists is for 1% of the world to lord over a massive state of global apartheid - and for the other 99% to be serfs and slaves serving the the chosen ones.
Remind me again who the Nazis are?
In interacting with some of these types, I found some patterns.
There is the “Zionists are not Jews” and “Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism” crowd, who will go to great lengths to ignore history and come up with fantastical alternative political solutions. There are the “no ethno-state” people, who might be the most genuine but who live inside a John Lennon song. There are the straight-up Hamas supporters, those who think it’s a legitimate resistance movement. There are the deniers, who will sow doubt around the most atrocious evidence. There are those who creep in the swamps of anti-Semitism, which you can tell because they will let slip some esoteric and negative reference to the Talmud that they picked up in some dark corner of the internet. By extension, there are the people who come right out with their conspiracy theories about Jews trying to run the world. And then there are the simple ones, the ones who do not know how to ask, who have nothing better to say than to call you a liar, sometimes punctuated with a few f-words or an emoji.
Now might be a good time to mention that Caitlin Johnstone’s newsletter has more than 38,000 subscribers.
People like Jonathan Katz are not writing articles in The Atlantic complaining about the problem of people like Caitlin Johnstone getting platformed on Substack, building community, and making money (Johnstone even has instructions for those who want to pay in crypto). This is an extension of the free-speech double standard that is the hard left’s biggest blind spot, the blind spot that tripped the wire for Claudine Gay’s downward spiral. Nazis = bad. People who say all the same things as Nazis but who aren’t right wing…context. (For another example I find interesting, Katz calls out Substack author Richard Hanania for past racism he has disavowed, while Substack author and “award-winning journalist” Aaron Mate is publicly questioning Israeli rape and massacre testimonies. I won’t share the details but you can follow the sordid conversation here.)
But more than all this, the reason I’m not griping to Substack about white supremacists or Muslim supremacists or anyone-but-the-Jews supremacists or had-too-much-ayahuasca supremacists is because you can see how easily the worst person in any given room according to any given person becomes “a Nazi.” Another recent post of Johnstone’s, a sort of hallucinatory ramble, imagines the world from a Jewish Zionist perspective. It’s called “‘Stop Murdering Thousands Of Children,’ Said The Evil Crazy Nazi.”
It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that people who think “Zionists” are the new Nazis will reach a critical mass and decide that “Zionists,” whoever they are, need to be de-platformed. I don’t see this happening any time soon, truth be told. But I also didn’t see October 7th coming, and all the signs were there.
So I will continue to champion free speech, and I will probably continue to use freedom of speech to pick fights with people who believe in Jewish space lasers, because I also enjoy the right of getting satisfaction from making them mad.
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