Perhaps Your Credibility is Somewhat Dimmed by Trying to Panhandle Off of a "Nazi Problem"

terms of service liberalism failed, and the media glory days aren't coming back

Ana Marie Cox has been running a somewhat demented series of anti-Substack posts lately. In this one, she wanders around for quite a bit before she gets to the nut of things, which is to say, the give-me-money moment:

A different newsletter platform isn’t all I want, because newsletters aren’t the answer to a disintegrating media ecosphere. We need a world where a social safety net protects risky writing. The idea that we can hustle our way to safety will only push us closer to collapse. We don’t need better tools as much as we need each other.

Until then: thanks for reading, and please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you can.

Inspiring! Paid newsletters aren’t the answer to a disintegrating media ecosphere, they’re just the answer for her. Of course, Substack is filled with people who don’t think that paid newsletters can replace the entire cratering world of news media - people like me - but who would nonetheless like to trade words for money with a committed group of readers. There’s a lot of vague ideas stuffed in here; the idea that it wasn’t a “hustle” when people were writing quasi-political celebrity slop for Buzzfeed or Vice, the vision of media that people like Cox never stop eulogizing, seems obviously a matter of motivated reasoning. (I promise, “Here’s Why That Celebrity/Album/Movie/Show You Like is Racist” was a hustle.) There’s so much of this phony mythologizing of media’s recent past in this vein, such as the ongoing efforts by former Gawker Media people to pretend that it was a social justice factory and not a place where Drew Magary mined ad dollars by calling Lebron James homophobic slurs. (I guess people really need to romanticize their lost youths.) Anyhow I have no idea what Cox means by “each other,” especially given the notorious mean girl tendencies in her strata of media, where people once delighted in enforcing the social hierarchy of the industry, back when anybody gave a shit about such things. “Each other” rings hollow when you know how hard the people endorsing it worked to keep media stratified and exclusive, a self-dealing cartel.

But of course all of this is just windup for me, too. What I really want to say is, maybe you shouldn’t wrap your grandstanding about fighting the fash with endless advertisements for your own paid product, yeah? They always get there eventually- Cox, Tom Scocca, Casey Newton, Rusty Foster, Ryan Broderick, the whole self-impressed crew of people who have loudly, performatively left Substack for that mythical clean part of the internet. (Even though, to be clear, they have no reason to be confident that their new environs are actually free of far-right politics.) And, you know, I find it a little hard to take, how “Substack is an evil place for evil people!” always seems to lead to “But for just $10 a month, you can support a tireless freedom fighter….” Perhaps the way self-interest endlessly emerges from sanctimony is part of the reason why institutional liberalism has such a bad rep these days, because self-righteousness and selfishness seem to be inextricably bound up together in that ideology.

The problem with the self-appointed anti-Nazi crusaders who are out for Substack is that they keep “fighting fascism” with the calculated cynicism of a mall kiosk cell phone salesman. They’ve turned what they claim is moral outrage over right-wing extremism into just another bit of audience capture: “Oh, by the way, if you liked my 2,000 words on how Substack enables Hitler 2.0, please smash that subscribe button and get the real tea in the paid tier.” This isn’t the grim, necessary work of standing up to dangerous politics; it’s list-building, panhandling, subscription grubbing. They’re pitching their anti-Nazi content with the same shamelessness a podcast grifter uses to flog a coupon code for SurfShark. And in the process, they’re making the whole concept of resisting fascism look like just another influencer strategy, something to slap on a mug and sell for $19.99 plus shipping. Which, to be clear, is why “The Resistance” has always been such a joke, because its leaders won’t stop using it as a way to pimp their “personal brand.”

To whatever degree it works (and I’m guessing it doesn’t work very well), the grift functions by flattering the reader into thinking they’re part of a vanguard - “you and I, together, will starve the brownshirts of oxygen… once we’ve processed your monthly payment.” It’s a cynical symbiosis between the writer and the audience, both addicted to the dopamine drip of moral superiority. You’re not fighting Nazis, you’re buying artisanal outrage. Meanwhile, the actual work of opposing right-wing extremism (organizing, electoral politics, policy advocacy, journalism that takes more than an afternoon to research) remains conspicuously disconnected from debates over which online newsletter service to use. You see, the constant invocation of Trump-era horrors cuts both ways - why bother to continue to flog extremely tendentious and selective outrage over far-right types on a given internet platform when people born in the United States are being shanghaied to Eswatini without due process? I find the “first, we purge the internet of groypers, tomorrow the world” logic here quite inscrutable. But I do get why the Substack Nazi discourse keeps coming back: you can always just repackage the moral panic of the week as a marketing funnel. For a certain class of media personality, every social ill is just another reason to grow the brand. The far right may be dangerous, but to these people, it’s also deliciously profitable.

The preening moral vanity here is bad enough. To so often try to use that moral vanity as a way to shake the donation jar just makes it more vulgar.

The simple reality remains that none of these people have even attempted to assess Substack’s “Nazi problem” in a systematic or fair way, certainly not with the kind of comparative rigor that would be necessary here. You see, the internet is stuffed with far-right types for the same reason every bar, bowling alley, and Facebook group in America has its share of them: they are a real, persistent constituency in the actual country. Singling out Substack without offering any baseline comparison to Medium, Patreon, X, YouTube, or any other publishing platform is just cherry-picking in service of a narrative. If you want to claim Substack has some uniquely toxic infestation, you need numbers, methodology, and transparency; instead we get vibes, screenshots, and innuendo. Without rigor, the argument isn’t journalism or analysis, it’s branding, a way to imply moral superiority without doing the tedious, boring work of actually proving your case. Besides, you can’t attack far-right content at the distribution side, it doesn’t work, sorry. Maybe truly boutique little operations Beehiv can stay “Nazi-free,” but as soon as they scale up at all, I promise that purity will go away. Cox seems completely unaware of this reality, despite asking for alternatives; any newsletter platform that scales sufficiently to be sustainable will eventually host objectionable content. Do you think it’s coincidence that every large platform eventually develops this problem? No. Human nature and the ubiquity of extremism, I’m afraid, are to blame.

And that is, of course, if we accept these people’s extremely sclerotic and self-serving definitions of what should be allowed and shouldn’t be. What these people always fail to point out is that Newton’s pioneering anti-Substack work identified eight newsletters on Substack that he called Nazi publications. When they were brought to Substack’s attention, seven of those eight newsletters were immediately banned. So what did the critics do? Fixated on the eighth, which was not banned because it wasn’t found to violate the terms of service. In other words, the anger is simply that people with views they found objectionable were allowed to keep using a network that’s intended to be value-neutral. Which was what this all ultimately came down to in liberalism’s great experiment with censorship as a political tool in the High Social Justice period of 2012ish to 2022ish - you start off banning “just Nazis,” and then you say, well, Alex Jones is pretty much a Nazi, and so is Tucker Carlson, and the next thing you know, you’re not even pretending that you’re up to doing anything other than banning conservatives. Which, among other things, makes people understandably cynical about the whole project of “fighting Nazis” online, which looks an awful lot like the vanity project of people who have never done a day of offline organizing in their lives.

Particularly funny is our buddy Jonathan Katz’s role in all this. Katz wrote a very influential anti-Substack piece… for The Atlantic, the individual American publication most responsible for keeping neoconservatism alive in our political culture. The Atlantic has never met a war it didn’t love, and has smuggled right-wing foreign policy views into genteel liberal circles for decades. It’s the kind of publication that teaches progressives that it’s OK to support every bombing, to endlessly call for regime change, to contribute to the project of limitless American empire. I find that easily far worse than the actual negative impact of any ten or hundred extremist Substack posts, personally. Funded by a tech billionaire fortune, The Atlantic is run by Jeffrey Goldberg, a man who admitted in his memoir to covering up the abuse of Palestinian prisoners when he was a prison camp guard with the IDF and then went on to produce reporting that directly contributed to the case for the Iraq war. So: why does our exemplar of media integrity Jonathan Katz feel comfortable publishing there? He’s so sensitive to the idea of sharing a platform with bad guys, after all. Yet he’ll take checks from a guy who sat by while his buddy beat a Palestinian prisoner to a pulp and then lied about it? Strange priorities, Jon! Now, I wouldn’t ordinarily take any of this for disqualifying, as I don’t think it’s fair or reasonable to expect writers to be judged by all of their potential associations at a given platform or publication. But Katz, obviously, doesn’t enjoy the benefits of that excuse.

The bigger thing, beyond all the petty hypocrisy, is that this vision of liberalism has comprehensively failed for at least a decade, and yet they keep trying. I don’t know what it will take for people to see that you can’t beat the right with the terms of service, that you can’t get the hall monitor to chase away extremism.

“Terms of service liberalism” is my name for the conviction, apparently tattooed on the brains of a certain kind of center-left figure, that you can meaningfully defeat the far right by giving more clipboards to the moderators. It’s the idea that conservatism is like a rowdy kid in the schoolyard who will finally shut up once the vice principal wanders over with a detention slip, as if the essential engine of right-wing politics were rule-breaking rather than an ugly but coherent and depressingly popular ideology embraced by millions of people. This worldview treats fascism as a ToS violation, something that can be resolved by appealing to the vague, benevolent authority of some platform’s Trust and Safety team. They’re looking for Big Mommy, in other words, the calm and wise authority figure that, they’re sure, will someday restore order. But the internet is crawling with reactionaries for the same reason the offline world is: because such people exist in vast numbers, they believe what they believe, and they vote accordingly. They vote in sufficient numbers, in fact, that Donald Trump won the popular vote and every swing state in the nation in the 2024 election. There is no procedural shortcut to changing that reality. The only thing that works in the long run is the hard, often thankless work of persuading people that your ideas are better than theirs - and the great irony of terms of service liberalism is that it’s a politics built around avoiding that work entirely.

I mean, look at Twitter. In the second half of the 2010s and early 2020s, Twitter became far more aggressive about banning accounts that published content they deemed objectionable; conservative accounts fell by the thousands. For one thing, this didn’t placate any progressives, who simply expanded their censorious ambitions and defined “Nazis” or “extremism” to include more and more people they didn’t like. They also discovered that it’s essentially impossible to really censor anything online. (It’s both a bad idea and doesn’t work!) You see, you can’t censor away extremism. It’s not that you shouldn’t, but that you can’t, that it doesn’t work, particularly in the internet era. It’s a problem with what’s possible, not with what Substack or any other entity sees as appropriate. All of this grandstanding about building a clean internet is predicated on a horribly misguided notion about what’s possible when it comes to actually shutting down speech you don’t like. Then again, they’re actually motivated by the desire for personal purity - just keep it off my timeline! - but that just underlines that this is all emotional self-servicing and marketing.

There is also, of course, the banal observation that the speech codes you want will inevitably be used against you, especially if you care about the Palestinian people. The day strong anti-“hate speech” laws are passed in the United States is the day Palestinian rights activism dies here. Look at the UK, where more than 400 people were arrested this weekend for sitting and holding signs. “But we’ll be in charge of who gets censored!” No, you won’t, and your own ideology tells you that you won’t. It’s one of the most bizarre aspects of modern liberalism: liberals believe that the system is bent against the interests of “the marginalized,” that people from minority groups live under the yoke of oppressions that are systemic and existential, but also that they can build a coercive censorship apparatus that won’t ever come back to censor and oppress those minority groups. It makes zero sense, until you realize that they don’t actually have any intention of ever taking power but instead associate complaining impotently with virtue.

The most important observation is that the most ambitiously censorious period of modern liberalism happened in precisely the era where Trump rose, won the presidency, and become the dominant force in American politics. Sure doesn’t seem like all of that banning helped much! Sure doesn’t seem like rewriting the ToS really impeded the march of the far right, at all. Seems instead to have simply played into the persecution narratives that the right weaponizes effortlessly and effectively. But then, the usual suspects can and will always say we should have censored harder. All they have is the banhammer, so all they see are nails. It will never work. You guys: it will never work.

Finally… for me, the fact that it’s Ana Marie Cox saying this stuff has a certain wistful quality to it. Cox is very much a symbol of the now-dead early 21st-century media paradigm: she is an avatar of a time when building a media career was perfectly coterminous with becoming a minor celebrity in the eyes of one’s peers in the media business. Becoming popular with people in media simply was how you progressed, professionally. You had the right desultory liberal identitarian politics, you told the right kind of shitty jokes and made the right kind of annoying cultural references, and you performed all of it on Twitter. The rewards in terms of stature and financial security, in this century, have been much worse than they were in the latter 20th-century heyday. But of course the lure of being a writer is a romantic and noble one, and journalism is an important calling, and anyway there was always this ancillary benefit that to many wasn’t ancillary at all: you got to be one of the cool ones in an enticing new social hierarchy. Everyone in the industry always dismisses this, when I talk about it, but they dismiss it with a kind of sweatiness that suggests to me that I’m right on target. For lots of people, there was a perfect symmetry involved - people who deserved your professional support were people you liked personally, and people you liked personally were people who shared your politics. The whole profession looked, to way too many people within it, like one big party, and if you were cool and popular at that party you would inevitably climb the professional ladder as well.

A whole lot of the people who arrived in New York and were willing to live with four roommates in order to make $30K a year doing scutwork for Buzzfeed or Vox or Vice or wherever did so precisely because this deal sounded appealing, because it felt like an opportunity to enter a new social hierarchy. (And, no doubt, to be one of the cool people this time.) this has to all be based on fundamentally irrational considerations like that, given how little of it makes sense in rational terms. I mean, Broderick ostentatiously left Substack because of its supposed Nazi problem, saying he couldn’t share the platform with far-right extremists, yet still posts on Elon Musk’s X. This can’t be defended in intellectual or political terms. It can only be understood as an expression of his emotional reality - he’s willing to change newsletter platforms, but he’s not willing to lose his “friends” on Twitter. This would almost be endearing, but then you run up against the sanctimony again. My dude, saying that you can’t be on Substack because it has Nazis while participating on X is not coherent.

I get the anger. Everything changed slowly and then all at once. Media has been devastated by the transition to the internet era, but we shouldn’t mistake that for either an incidental turn or an inevitable one; our corporate tech overlords decided to crush media as a professional endeavor for self-interested reasons, and media was in fact crushed. The ability to wring money out of pageviews was once sufficiently enticing that companies like Vice had nine-figure valuations, and then Mark Zuckerberg and people like him turned off the traffic on a whim, and that was that. The profession started to geographically disperse thanks to ever-worsening financial rewards and ever-escalating rents in New York, DC, and Los Angeles. Then, Musk bought Twitter, and the platform that determined media’s sense of itself was suddenly nothing like it once was. It immediately became declassee to be on the network, and more importantly changes to the algorithm suppressed a) external links and b) posts from people who didn’t pay for Twitter Blue, making it useless for its ostensible purpose, sharing work. Conservative hordes gleefully took over the network. Competitors like Threads and Bluesky have popped up, but efforts to remake 2016-era Twitter in those spaces mostly just look pathetic. The moment has passed and, anyway, there’s very little industry left in which to jockey for position. And as contemptuous as I have always been about how badly people needed the sense of belonging the media-as-cool-party paradigm provided, I get being mad about it all.

But Substack, obviously, isn’t responsible for any of that, and there’s such a strange desperation in wanting to anoint it the villain that definitely gets at the sense that people wish media still ran on its old hierarchies and exclusivity. One of the very first posts for this newsletter made this exact point: that a certain cadre of media people endlessly rage at Substack because they see the platform as a convenient target for their anger over the sudden destruction of their former way of life. That’s bad enough on its own, simply a mistake, not useful thinking, pointless. But I also think that people are mad because Substack is, for all of its abundant flaws, a tool for democratizing media, and of course the people who used to sit at the heights of the exclusivity pyramid don’t want media democratized. Yes, a lot of the posts waxing poetic about the writer’s life and the meaning of it all that you see on Substack Notes is a little annoying. But I’ll take it 1000 times out of 1000 over the endless mean-girling that defined Big Media Twitter during the decade or so that the industry was obsessively fixated on the network, and which people are trying to bring back on Bluesky in a pathetic attempt at era resurrection. I will take the affectionate dorks on Substack over the ambitious and nasty types that weaponized derision for professional gain in the last era of media, the ones who pretended to be doing social justice when they were just enforcing a particularly pathetic social hierarchy for vengeful nerds.

Substack is full of people who are talented and hardworking enough to have flourished in media but who would never have been given a chance because they’re congenitally unable to play the Media High game. That’s reason enough to celebrate the platform, as many misgivings as I still have about it all.

I’m sure Ana Marie Cox didn’t expect that it would all go down this way, that she’d have to crowdfund at this stage of her career rather than have some comfy sinecure at a big-deal publication. If it were up to me, there would be money enough for such chairs to still exist. But until there is indeed some sort of paradigm-shifting new approach to media - which, to be clear, will probably never happen - a lot of us are left scrambling to pay the mortgage by asking our readers to support us. Getting performatively angry at Substack, I promise you, will not bring about the next era of a healthy and secure media. There are ways forward for individuals; I am, I’m afraid, something of a nihilist when it comes to the bigger picture, given that it is in fact true that crowdfunded newsletters can’t replace all those shuttered newspapers. I can tell you, though, that the people who are suffering the worst are the ones who simply won’t let go. Look at Gawker Media. Some people who worked there have thrived since the company was murdered by a vengeful billionaire, discovering new projects, trying new things, adapting. And some former Gawker Media people seem like they want to spend the rest of their lives as Former Gawker Media People, clinging to the husk of what was, sinking deeper and deeper into the caustic bitterness that eventually ate that whole organization. Seems bleak to me. You can easily imagine a world where many liberal journos fall deeper and deeper into that resentment, try to live forever in that old stultifying social space, whining away into the night on their boutique social networks, telling the void that it’s not fair….

This is the sort of thing that I write that some people find very combative, but I think what I’m saying is pretty simple, even banal: the newsletter platform you use is not a choice that’s pregnant with moral values, where you host your blog makes essentially no political difference whatsoever, there is no clean part of the internet in which you can reside, Substack or any other platform getting more censorious will do nothing to stop the animal spirits that have empowered not just Trump but reactionary forces worldwide, if you want to fight fascism you should spend your time doing almost anything other than participating in this debate, all of this grandstanding is self-aggrandizing and ridiculous, and it’s best to move on, because your media glory days are never, ever coming back.