I am gone from Substack until they take out the garbage
This place *reeks*
When I first heard people saying Substack had a problem with far-right extremist content, I decided to wait to form an opinion until I saw it myself.
Friends, I have seen it. And it is not in any way subtle or a borderline gray-area judgment case.
Substack hosts accounts of literal fans of Adolph Hitler, posting their swastikas and holocaust denials. They are publishing literal translations of 1930-1940’s Nazi SS propaganda documents and antisemitic tracts. I won’t link to this stuff, but I have screenshots.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect a general-purpose platform to host only content that I agree with. I don’t condone “cancel culture”. But there is a line beyond which you won’t find me participating, and there is another line at which I am compelled to actively speak out.
What Substack has chosen to publish is beyond all bounds of polite society. It is beyond internet “edgelord” culture. It is beyond “offensive” or “harmful”, it is solidly in the “explicitly racist extremism” category.
Substack is literally hosting the promotional material of a declared-war enemy of the United States of America, content for which Americans were at one time tried and convicted of treason1. You may feel that we shouldn’t bring that up because Nazi Germany was defeated a long time ago and things are different now. Well, I would like to move past that too, but we just can’t use that logic when discussing actual efforts to promote literal 1940’s German Nazism.
These enemy nations, led by evil men and garbage ideologies, perpetrated blitz wars and systematic genocides that killed 70-80 million people in my grandparents’ time. Hundreds of thousands of American boys gave their lives to defeat them, and many countries sacrificed much more.
But defeated they were, and in the garbage bin of history they will remain, Substack’s policies notwithstanding.2
Marsh
One of the more dry examples of Substack’s policy choices, included here only for reference.
