Saluting our brave free speech absolutists

The internet is a better place thanks to these scrappy heroes.

I came into 2024 enthusiastic about what I planned to do with this newsletter. I was going to continue trying to grow it, and maybe, finally even open it up for paid subscriptions. I had no aspirations of making an actual living off of it, but knowing that people are willing to pay you to keep writing, even about dumb shit like music videos no one has thought about in decades, is a powerful motivator.

Of course, doing that meant having to ignore a significant issue with Substack, which was that it had no problem with making space for such noted racists and/or transphobes and/or Nazis as Richard Hanania, Jesse Singal, and Richard Spencer. Part of me had hoped that maybe someone in charge would eventually come to realize what the phrase “lay down with dogs and get up with fleas” actually means, and I could continue writing here with a clean conscience.

But, silly me, it’s 2024, and as it turns out a lot of people are at least tacitly okay with letting other people publicly engage in hatemongering. Substack is really okay with it, because it makes them money: for every mouth-breather who pays to read Jesse Singal’s deranged ranting about doctors forcing children to transition at gunpoint, Substack earns a few cents, which is more than they get from the thousands of other newsletters that don’t talk about how trans people should be rounded up and sent to live in a leper colony.

Any time anyone has pushed back against Substack’s open door to potential mass shooters policy, they’ve responded with the limpest of arguments, mostly that supporting free speech means hearing what Jim Henson’s Goebbels Babies have to say, which turns out to be a lot of the same tiresome “it’s scientifically proven that Blacks have lower IQs than white people, and that Jews make their bread with the blood of Christian babies” nonsense they’ve been spouting for hundreds of years, but with a faux intellectual/philosophical edge. At least “men only go through the mentally and physically straining process of transitioning so they can win at girls’ softball” is fresh and new, come on, guys!

What side Substack’s alliances truly lean towards was made clear when its co-founder, Hamish McKenzie, posted a response to the increasing amount of negative attention the site has gotten for whose work it chooses to platform. While it can be summed up with “Yeah, we know it looks bad, but also we don’t give a shit,” I’ll be charitable and copy an excerpt here:

“I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don't think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.”

You won’t be surprised to know that he doesn’t explain how not giving Nazis a platform where they can make money to spread their filth is somehow worse than giving it to them. McKenzie’s non-response would be less offensive if he simply admitted what is likely the truth: that the money Substack makes off of people like Hanania, Singal, and Spencer is what’s keeping the lights on. Fine, whatever, times are tough, and sometimes you need to take Nazi dollars so your business can stay above water. I get it.

But I don’t know who McKenzie and his colleagues are trying to convince, other than people who were already on board with Nazis being allowed to freely expound on their “ideas,” that by giving such ideas exposure it’ll somehow have a neutralizing effect on them. It’s a theory that doesn’t hold much water when you mention in the same posting that Richard Hanania has a book deal with HarperCollins. If the current state of American political discourse is any indication, giving Nazis, transphobes, and racists a platform has done little else but create more Nazis, transphobes, and racists, only now they think they’re brave freedom fighters struggling for the right to voice their shitty, destructive viewpoints.

I think what’s perhaps the most offensive about McKenzie’s response is its self-righteousness. It’s not easy taking hate money, but by God, they’ll do it. It’s all part of being a free speech absolutist, which is something Elon Musk claims to be, unless you’re criticizing Elon Musk, then all bets are off. You see, it’s really a brave stance to be a white person who gives other white people an outlet to dutch oven everyone with their racist, antisemitic, and/or transphobic brain farts. That kind of lack of self-awareness is what results in people like Ricky Gervais ranting that he’s being silenced in his fourth Netflix special.

McKenzie does go on to say that newsletters that incite violence would be banned, which, hey man, don’t go mad with power here, huh? He doesn’t expound upon what he considers “inciting violence” to mean, but evidently it isn’t Jesse Singal’s newsletter, so chockful of conspiracy theories about child grooming and pedophilia that, along with sentient bag of vomit Libs of TikTok (who does all her damage safe within the confines of X), it’s resulted in a rash of bomb threats at children’s hospitals across the country.

But sure, it’d be so much worse if Jesse wasn’t allowed to cook. He might just have to resort to posting in all caps on a Discord server, and that would be terrible for freedom, somehow.

In the interest of fairness, Substack did eventually remove some newsletters that promoted Nazi rhetoric. Five (5) to be exact, none of which were monetized, with a total of about 100 readers. Not each, all of them put together. Way to go on doing the bare fucking minimum, guys.

While I’m pretty sure Elon Musk doesn’t actually care about free speech, and just reinstated the accounts of people like Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin and Alex Jones because he thought it was funny, I do believe the folks in charge at Substack think they’re heroes, and that they care about “journalistic integrity” more than other blogging sites. Because that’s what Substack is, it’s a blogging site, not the Washington Post. You want to show you care about “journalistic integrity,” maybe try asking some of these people to show their credentials, or an actual legitimate source for their claims. But, no, please, continue to let them shit out in the open, because that’s better, somehow.

So it is with the deepest, most exasperated of sighs that I begin looking for a new platform to which I can migrate this newsletter. As some of you may recall, I just did this same shit last summer, when I got tired of clutching to the rim of the toilet Twitter turned into. I don’t miss it, but it is unfortunate that none of the half-dozen or so would-be Twitter replacements are anywhere close to what it was in its heyday. Hive certainly had the potential at first, and then (because only two people were running the damn place) it experienced a massive security breach, so that was it for that.

I haven’t bothered trying Mastodon or Threads, and while I do have a Bluesky account, it’s worthless if you’re trying to promote anything, and it’s baffling algorithm, which I have to keep manually changing the settings on, makes it appear as if there’s only six people active on it, and they’re just talking back and forth with each other. TikTok and Instagram are fine time killers, but I haven’t figured out the magic trick of getting more eyes on my posts, except people who were already following me elsewhere. Facebook is…Facebook. I’ve been posting there more often lately than I had been for a while, but it feels weird to post multiple times a day there, whereas on Twitter that’s how you grow your audience.

There are a few potential replacements for Substack, but the thing is that I like Substack. I like how it looks. I like how easy it is to promote my work on it. I like that people have the option of either receiving my newsletters by email, or just simply going through the website, or with links I provide. So far I’ve checked out two other competing sites, and neither fill me with confidence or enthusiasm. I don’t want to use something like MailChimp, because I don’t want to force anyone to have to subscribe to an email (again, I like that with Substack, you can just read individual posts to get a feel for someone’s writing). I do have an “official” website, but I had had different plans for that when I started the Substack. Plus its hosted by Squarespace, which at one point had its own fucking problems hosting Nazis, but at least they eventually removed some of them. I guess they don’t care about being a marketplace of (shitty, destructive) ideas.

I really don’t want to keep running. The more I change platforms, the more I lose my audience. I get it. No one wants to have to keep up with this shit. I’m a little appalled at how many of my colleagues have chosen to keep hanging in there at TwitterX, but at the same time I understand that their livelihood might depend on it. I guess I’m fortunate that this isn’t a decision that would impact me financially. It’s certainly not going to impact Substack in any meaningful way. I just can’t in good conscience accept that staying here means sharing space with Nazis and transphobes. I don’t owe anyone a platform to spew their filth, nor can I expect anyone to overlook who Substack earns a substantial chunk of their revenue from when sharing my articles.

I’m so tired of this shit. I’m tired of this cowardly post-2016 “but maybe we should give everyone a chance to speak” horseshit. No, we shouldn’t. That sunshine that was supposed to disinfect everything never came. All that happened is that the more space we gave these people to speak in, the more of them there are. It’s not a good or noble stance to take. It’s just soft, wishy-washy, centrist-at-best horseshit.

So I guess I’ll keep posting here for the next couple of weeks while I figure out where to move to next. If anyone has any suggestions, I’m all ears. Er, eyes. Whatever, you know what I mean.