*We have a Nazi problem...
*Insert any and all of the following: Substack/Iowa City/Iowa/America
Hi everyone. I’m currently writing this having just traveled 12 hours in a day to be with family for the holidays. This is also on the tale end of a sickness that our home has been wracked with for the better half of last week. Which is to say the topic of today’s post is the last thing I want to be spending my holiday thinking about but white supremacy is gonna white supremacy so here we are. I am not one of the original writers of this letter but am amplifying in solidarity. Check out some of my personal thoughts after the letter sign off.
I’m part of a group of Substack publishers seeking answers to questions about the platforming and monetizing of Nazis on this site. We are all publishing the open letter below, to which I’m proud to be one of the original signatories, on our own individual Substacks today for visibility, and to make our readers aware of our asks and concerns.
Now to the letter:
Chris, Hamish & Jairaj:
We’re asking a very simple question that has somehow been made complicated: Why are you platforming and monetizing Nazis?
According to a piece written by Substack publisher Jonathan M. Katz and published by The Atlantic on November 28, this platform has a Nazi problem:
“Some Substack newsletters by Nazis and white nationalists have thousands or tens of thousands of subscribers, making the platform a new and valuable tool for creating mailing lists for the far right. And many accept paid subscriptions through Substack, seemingly flouting terms of service that ban attempts to ‘publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes’...Substack, which takes a 10 percent cut of subscription revenue, makes money when readers pay for Nazi newsletters.”
As Patrick Casey, a leader of a now-defunct neo-Nazi group who is banned on nearly every other social platform except Substack, wrote on here in 2021: “I’m able to live comfortably doing something I find enjoyable and fulfilling. The cause isn’t going anywhere.” Several Nazis and white supremacists including Richard Spencer not only have paid subscriptions turned on but have received Substack “Bestseller” badges, indicating that they are making at a minimum thousands of dollars a year.
From our perspective as Substack publishers, it is unfathomable that someone with 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. And yet you’ve been unable to adequately explain your position.
In the past you have defended your decision to platform bigotry by saying you, “make decisions based on principles not PR” and “will stick to our hands-off approach to content moderation.” But there’s a difference between a hands-off approach and putting your thumb on the scale. We know you moderate some content, including spam sites and newsletters written by sex workers. Why do you choose to promote and allow the monetization of sites that traffic in white nationalism?
Your unwillingness to play by your own rules on this issue has already led to the announced departures of several prominent Substackers, including Rusty Foster and Helena Fitzgerald. They follow previous exoduses of writers, including Substack Pro recipient Grace Lavery and Jude Ellison S. Doyle, who left with similar concerns.
As journalist Casey Newton told his more that 166,000 Substack subscribers after Katz’s piece came out: “The correct number of newsletters using Nazi symbols that you host and profit from on your platform is zero.”
We, your publishers, want to hear from you on the official Substack newsletter. Is platforming Nazis part of your vision of success? Let us know—from there we can each decide if this is still where we want to be.
Signed,
Substackers Against Nazis
Thanks for reading. If the contents of this letter resonate, please share this post with others. If you’re a publisher who would like to join this collective effort, we encourage you to repost the letter on your own Substack.
Okay. Chuy here to add some of my personal insights because this whole thing infuriates me. I’m grateful for these substackers making this visible and so succinctly calling out this platform. If I could even be more succinct, I’ll echo the seminal punk band the Dead Kennedys:
That’s what this needs to boil down to. Collectively as a platform and as a society we need to fully embrace the mantra of Nazi punks fuck off. Because Nazi rhetoric is contaminated water in a flood, it will seep into every nook and cranny. Some backstory on the Dead Kennedy’s song. They wrote it after white supremacists started infiltrating and attempting to co-opt the punk scene. Having a “skin head” used to be the marker of a punk rocker…but you get enough white supremacist dick heads to get buzz cuts and all of a sudden it becomes a marker of their cult. So the band did the only sensible thing and told them off.
Because if you don’t tell them off then they’ll just follow wherever you go. I say this from experience.
My place of work was only a few blocks away from this mural that was defaced with Nazi graffiti. A few years later an even closer incident happened at City Park. At the time I was working at Hancher and this was, essentially, the backyard of my office. I remember bringing it up with some of the team and it seemed like such a far removed issue for them. Like, “Yeah that’s horrible but what you gonna do?” Whereas it legit gave me this feeling in the pit of my stomach. It felt gross to be so close to such wretchedness. It felt minimizing to feel like these markers of hatred were following me. Here’s what I mean: I’ve been exposed to swastikas and white supremacist imagery since I was a little boy. Spoiler alert for those who haven’t read my book. One of the big “its” in “We Heard It When We Were Young” is white supremacy and nazi-ism. That nazi punk told me that I needed to hear his racist tirade when I was young.
I don’t remember how old I was when I saw my first swastika, adorned on the slide at Kimberly park near my house. Maybe five years old? These things have been a part of my life so long I can’t place the age in which I first discovered them. While thinking about this post I unlocked a core memory. You remember in grade school how we would recycle text books? You’d write your name at the bottom of the inside cover, below the names of students before you. I remember hoping that the textbook I got wouldn’t have nazi shit in the cover. Or worse, sprinkled throughout the book when you thought you had a clean, un-tainted book. How wild is that? To have children hoping the books they read don’t have messages wishing for their destruction. Let’s be clear here, that’s what this is about. This isn’t a philosophical debate on the merits of free speech. This is about a group wanting to eradicate people like me. And once we get into that territory I’ll follow the lead of folks like the developers of the game Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. In said game you play as B.J. Blazkowicz, a character of Polish and Jewish decent who mows down third reich soldiers. Wolfenstein is the latest in a long running series, the original of which released way out in 1981 and contained the exact same formula of mowing down nazi baddies. Because really as far as having an evil video game skin for your antagonist avatars…you can’t find anything better for the personification of evil than nazis. This is something Steven Spielberg found out with Indiana Jones forty years ago. But here is where things deviate from the original Wolfenstein to the latest installment. Gone are the days where society barely bats an eye to the fundamental truth that nazis are scum. With the latest game the developers released a campaign, “…on social media that included the hashtag #NoMoreNazis and slogans like ‘Make America Nazi-Free Again.’ A vocal group of people complained enough about this that Bethesda ultimately issued a statement, clarifying the company’s position that “Nazis are bad and un-American.”
These complaints tried to merge into the lane of outcry that it become “woke” and “political.” The alt-right tried to do that thing where they make everyone else seem like the close minded ones. They demanded that the developers apologize for some reason? For choosing to follow the same formula as the original I guess? Said developers responded with this absolutely beautiful tweet: https://twitter.com/wolfenstein/status/919684333207568385
I’ll end this post going back to the image of swastika graffiti on public murals. Platforms like Substack and Twitter need to treat this white supremacist rhetoric like the scrawls that deface public property. Because what do our parks do when these images pop up? They get rid of them. They cover them up. They don’t leave them up and ask others to be open minded about the “conversation.” They don’t advocate for others to think about the merits of free speech. They realize that by leaving these messages up they are accommodating and enabling the message to spread. And that message is two fold. It emboldens others to commit more violence and it signals to people like me that we’re not wanted here.
-C