Stacker Detractors & Nazis

thoughtcrime thugs attack substack

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Substack has changed my life. I would have gone to the ends of the earth for the kind of conversations I have here, and now the ends of the earth come to me. These are long form conversations, where a commenter can link their own stack or an outside source, something that’s added deep knowledge for me. The robust comment format allows for long threads in a coherent, organized way.

I’ve never monetized any of my platforms because I don’t want to have a two-tiered readership but I’d pay Substack directly for the value they provide. It’s an honest medium that doesn’t play tricks or make you second-guess their algorithms. They take a clean percentage and when you win, they win. No gimmicks.

And that’s why it is reprehensible that those who profit most from Substack have used their financial clout to bully them into deleting a hand-selected list of personal targets without even bothering to define their criterion:

The instigators of this purge seem to be Jonathon Katz and Casey Newton. In November, Katz published Substack Has a Nazi Problem in the Atlantic. (No MSM conflict there) Katz was #2 of 247 Substack authors signing an open letter called Substackers Against Nazis:

We’re asking a very simple question that has somehow been made complicated: Why are you platforming and monetizing Nazis?

After quoting the Katz article, it states,

As journalist Casey Newton told his more than 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.

Curious they’re now the ‘publishers’ of Substack. On Dec 21st, Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie responded:

We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power. We are committed to upholding and protecting freedom of expression, even when it hurts. As @Ted Gioia has noted, history shows that censorship is most potently used by the powerful to silence the powerless.

Our content guidelines do have narrowly defined proscriptions, including a clause that prohibits incitements to violence. We will continue to actively enforce those rules while offering tools that let readers curate their own experiences and opt in to their preferred communities. Beyond that, we will stick to our decentralized approach to content moderation, which gives power to readers and writers.

While not everyone agrees with this approach, many people do, as indicated by @Elle Griffin’s post in defense of decentralized moderation on Substack, which was signed and endorsed by hundreds of writers on the platform, including some of the leading names in journalism, literature, and academia. Even if we were in a minority of one, however, we would still believe in these principles.

It’s well worth going to this note to read the whole along with the thoughtful comments against censorship, often countered by mere insults and name-calling. This is clearly something that Substack has done under duress.

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On Jan 2nd, Newton posted that he was considering leaving Substack because it would not “demonetize or remove openly Nazi accounts.” He is an industry insider who has made the lucrative switch to going indie while using his mainstream credentials. Most of his posts are paywalled but he left open Why Substack is at a Crossroads, and wrote:

But turning a blind eye to recommended content almost always comes back to bite a platform. It was recommendations on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube that helped turn Alex Jones from a fringe conspiracy theorist into a juggernaut that could terrorize families out of their homes. It was recommendations that turned QAnon from loopy trolling on 4Chan into a violent national movement. It was recommendations that helped to build the modern anti-vaccine movement. …

Until Substack, I was not aware of any major US consumer internet platform that stated it would not remove or even demonetize Nazi accounts. Even in a polarized world, there remains broad agreement that the slaughter of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust was an atrocity. The Nazis did not commit the only atrocity in history, but a platform that declines to remove their supporters is telling you something important about itself.

If it won’t remove the Nazis, why should we expect the platform to remove any other harm? …

I’m proud of the Platformer readership for standing up for their principles in this way. Some of our earliest and best customers are people who work in tech policy, content moderation, and trust and safety. They’ve spent years doing the work, making the hard calls, and cleaning up the internet for all of our mutual benefit. It’s only natural that they would resist spending money on a platform that spurns their profession in this way.

Over the past few days, the Platformer team analyzed dozens of Substacks for pro-Nazi content. Earlier this week, I met with Substack to press my case that they should remove content that praises Nazis from the network. Late today, we submitted a list of accounts that we believe to be in violation of the company’s existing policies against incitement to violence. I am scheduled to meet with the company again tomorrow.

Whatever becomes of those accounts, though, I fully expect that more will spring up in their wake. So long as Substack allows itself to be perceived — encourages itself to be perceived! — as a home for Nazis, they will open accounts here and start selling subscriptions. Why wouldn’t they?

Every platform hosts its share of racists, white nationalists, and other noxious personalities. In some very real sense, there is no escaping them online. But there ought to be ways to see them less; to recommend them less; to fund them less. Other platforms have realized this as they’ve grown up. Here’s hoping Substack does the same.

What Katz and Newton make clear is that Nazis are the low-hanging fruit. At one time, pedophiles were used to justify censorship, but now it’s posts exposing them that are censored. And Platformer, which should be called Deplatformer, is made up of all those high-tech fact-checking flunkies who have appointed themselves the new thought police for the peasant class, now that no one cares about MSM anymore.

As Bill Rice, Jr. has pointed out, “By now, nobody should be naive. The real goal is to shut Substack (as we’ve known it) down—which must mean the truth bombs its correspondents are launching every day are starting to hit too close to key targets.” And the form of their initial onslaught is a clue to what those key targets are.

And So It Begins …

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To look at these questions systematically calls for How to Have a Better Argument. What is hate speech? In moderating my own stack, I follow:

Principle #1: Resolutely love all people and relentlessly challenge all ideas that see other people as inferior.

Superiority is cold hatred. It only turns hot when it’s challenged. How many caricatures and stereotypes has Newton invoked, in order to assert how morally superior he is? Is this not hate speech? I ban commenters who insult and call others names rather than challenging their ideas.

Labels make others see those people as legitimate targets of violence, as Antifa demonstrated. You can’t counter someone’s dehumanization of others by dehumanizing them. People are individuals, not categories of good and bad. If, in fact, these accounts are real people and not set up as fodder to push censorship, as false flag media attacks.

Substack standards need to follow:

Principle #2: An ethical statement can contain no proper nouns.

No matter what rules Substack invoked, if they were written without proper nouns, they would be ethical. They would apply to all people equally and protect all people equally. Once a proper noun is introduced, it becomes a one-sided attack on some while protecting others who engage in the same behavior with a different target.

When Newton’s Nazi-hunters “submitted a list of accounts [they] believe to be in violation of the company’s existing policies against incitement to violence,” there’s no standard given for how they determined “incitement to violence.” Is exposure of wrongdoing an incitement? Choose from the following:

1. If a historical group has committed acts of violence and you write about it, are you guilty of inciting violence against them?

2. If they haven’t committed the acts of violence you say they did, but violence is done to them as a result, are you guilty of inciting it?

3. If you reveal that lies were used to intentionally incite violence, are you then guilty of inciting violence against those who wrote the lie or who belong to the same race or group?

4. If you perpetuate a lie that was used to incite violence in the past, and silence anyone who contradicts it, do you share in the guilt of the original violence?

Principle #3: Define your terms.

Newton doesn’t bother to define Nazi but from his context, it’s a person who does NOT believe “the slaughter of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust was an atrocity.” Curiously, however, those who question whether the Nazis slaughtered 6 million Jews or any are seen as people who want to kill Jews. They’re accused of saying, “This didn’t happen AND they deserved it”—obviously a contradiction in terms.

He quotes the NY Times giving Zuckerberg’s reason for deciding to censor Holocaust denial: “Facebook cited a recent survey that found that nearly a quarter of American adults ages 18 to 39 said they believed the Holocaust either was a myth or was exaggerated, or they weren’t sure whether it happened.”

Hmmm … 25% of the generation that grew up with the internet doesn’t believe the Holocaust? Better control what information people can access or they might not hate the hate group. And hating is loving, right? And loving, by which I mean paying attention, is actually hate. Controlling what people think is democracy, which has gone off the rails when 25% of young adults think for themselves. (Adorable otter pop photo who thought so hard his brain froze. Thanks Ratio.)

Katz defines Nazi by his extension “… and other violent white supremacists.” To question whether National Socialists were violent white supremacists is something he would censor. He continues, “If something that bills itself as ‘a National Socialist website’ doesn’t violate Substack’s own policy against ‘hate,’ what does?”

Hatred and bigotry against Germans is not just legitimate but questioning that hatred and bigotry using history and facts is actually hatred. Rather than labeling races of people who must be hated, I think Substack’s policy should target ideologies of violence and supremacy.

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Principal #4: Identify rhetorical devisives that pit one side against the other rather than answering the question.

Let’s now go to the WEFipedia definition of Nazi and determine what are labels and what are ideologies:

Wikipedia

Nazism is a form of fascism, with disdain for liberal democracy and the parliamentary system. It incorporates a dictatorship, fervent antisemitism, anti-communism, anti-Slavism, scientific racism, white supremacy, Nordicism, social Darwinism and the use of eugenics into its creed.

In contrast to Wikipedia, Mussolini defined fascism as the collusion of business and government, like the ‘private-public partnerships’ that would be running the world under the WEF. I’ve read credible sources, with no hatred towards anyone, who say that the origins of fascism as a political ideology were not militant or autocratic. It’s made me wonder if that’s also been distorted.

No one much speaks in defense of dictatorships, although hereditary monarchies with a House of Lords to keep the commoners in check seem to be given a pass. Fidel Castro, however, advised Che Guevara that a capitalist economy couldn’t go directly into a democracy because money would subvert the process. He wasn’t wrong, which is why my system ignores the form of government and changes the issuance of credit.

Who doesn’t have disdain for the theme park of liberal democracy? You submit your vote, it takes you on a ride and you end up the same place you started. If we change the ‘inner circle of elites’ to banks, tech, corporations, pharma and media, it’s another dictatorship. Katz and Newton want to keep the social hierarchy of free speech for the inner circle with the peasants confined to cat memes (thanks, Diva):

Antisemitism is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. This sentiment is a form of racism. …Primarily, antisemitic tendencies may be motivated by negative sentiment towards Jews as a people or by negative sentiment towards Jews with regard to Judaism.

As documented by Pepe Escobar, South Africa and 61 other countries have just filed at the Hague an 84-page lawsuit against Israel that includes violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention for “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Escobar quotes from the document:

It is estimated that over 1.9 million Palestinians out of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people—approximately 85 percent of the population—have been forced from their homes. There is nowhere safe for them to flee to, those who cannot leave or refuse to be displaced have been killed or are at extreme risk of being killed in their homes.

As noted by the Special Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons, Gaza’s housing and civilian infrastructure have been razed to the ground, frustrating any realistic prospects for displaced Gazans to return home, repeating a long history of mass forced displacement of Palestinians by Israel.

The entire population is facing starvation: 93 percent of the population in Gaza is facing crisis levels of hunger, with more than one in four facing catastrophic condition—with death imminent.

If this causes you to feel negative sentiments toward the perpetrators of this violence, then you are a Nazi. If you have negative sentiments towards the ideology that justifies it (as I have chronicled here and here and here and here) you must be a Nazi. Without those antisemitic Substack Nazis inciting violence, 20,000 Palestinians would be alive today! Wait a minute …

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I’m not going to hide and cower, giving my stacker detractors the ‘aha!’ of discovery. I’m linking My Hitler Journey and I follow with Conspiracy Theorist where I state that I am an anti-vaxxer, a conspiracy theorist, a Holocaust denier and 100% anti-Shemitism—read that last word closely. Not against any people but against the ideology that some are born to rule and others cursed by God to be their slaves. I will argue my points with anyone.

Was Hitler a hero to the Germans and a villain to the Jews or the reverse? I analyze the videos Hellstorm and Dresden: a Burnt Offering along with The Enigma of the Fuhrer. Nefahotep takes from Firestarter 16 Mistakes made by Hitler, and offers the premise that he was a British agent. Neo-Feudal Review gives a sophisticated analysis of the complicated relationship between the central bank owners and the Jewish people. I wonder if Israel is another sacrifice zone, like Ukraine, like Germany.

In response to James Corbett's analysis of the 1997 film Conspiracy Theory, I develop 16 levels of conspiracy theorists based on my own progression. I then name 9 rhetorical devisives that end the conversation rather than moving the question forward. I end with another Corbett where he takes the test on whether you're a conspiracy theorist.