Cultivating a Garden of Nazis

Substack leadership answered the open letter asking why they promote and monetize Nazis, and if they will continue to do so. Their reply: a hearty yes! Of course they will continue to publish Nazis, because it is supposedly morally right to platform virulent racism and hate speech. Or because they make tons of money off all the hate. One or the other.

Over the holiday break, I will be considering my options. Substack is the easiest newsletter service to use, and the one with the most authors I know and read. I don’t think I would have started this series of essays with a higher barrier to entry. But as you can perhaps tell from some of what I’ve written, I’m largely motivated by anti-fascism. So it is unbearable to be on a site led by the equivalent of Franz von Papen.

Mine is still a very small publication, so I doubt anyone at Substack will lose sleep over me leaving. Nevertheless, I will lay out my thinking.

Before Substack leadership responded to the open letter, they directed readers to a counter-letter arguing out the laissez-faire—or pro-Nazi?—point of view. This other letter makes more of an argument than Substack leadership seems capable of, so let’s take a look. The letter is written by Elle Griffin and co-signed by the likes of such self-proclaimed free-speech warriors as Bari Weiss. Griffin argues in favor of letting Nazis roam unhindered about the platform—which she characterizes as a defense of “free expression.”

Even a glance at Griffin’s letter shows how self-contradictory and risible her argument is. She describes Substack as a “garden of learning” beset by outside forces—but this analogy raises obvious questions. Does she want to inhabit a garden full of Nazis? Aren’t such gardens more like cesspits? Even if, as Griffin suggests, each newsletter community on Substack is largely self-contained, that does not mean that they don’t affect those around them. We can all imagine how having a garden right next to the fetid waters of a Superfund site might not be ideal.

Griffin builds on the garden imagery, evoking other public spaces:

Again, the flaw in Griffin’s reasoning is obvious. Why would you want Nazis to “feel safe and flourish”? All reasonable people want Nazis to remember the Holocaust and the deaths of tens of millions of other people in World War II, and then recant. People who are pro-Nazi are unreasonable. Even people like Ben Dreyfuss, who are merely “fine” with Nazis on the Substack platform, are unreasonable. They are so by definition, because they want to repeat the worst experiment ever conducted. We already tried letting Nazis advocate for their ideas in the press and through democratic elections, and we know how that went. Nazis don’t engage in argument and the free exchange of ideas; they engage in propaganda and violence. In the past, they used that propaganda and violence to take over democratic institutions and, eventually, whole countries. The result was the most devastating war in history. The U.S. and its allies spent massive amounts of blood and treasure to combat the Nazis and their ideology. Who except the utterly depraved would want the ideological descendants of this most destructive of historical enemies to flourish?

Has enough time passed that we have forgotten what Nazis are like? Is that what has happened? Or do people like Elle Griffin and Ben Dreyfuss just have a death wish? It seems crazy to have to point out that NAZIS ARE INCREDIBLY BAD, and yet, here we are. Nazis are, in fact, the most recognizable, iconic villains our culture has. People regularly compare things to Nazis in order to show how bad they are. For example, Bari Weiss has been comparing Hamas to them for the past few months. The Nazis are a shorthand, a universal symbol for evil. The recent Indiana Jones movie used massive amounts of money to de-age Harrison Ford by forty years so that they could send his character back in time to again face Germans in metal helmets spouting about the Fuhrer. The studio knows what we all do: Nazis are the ultimate in villainy. Middle school children watching the movie understood this. Why can’t Ben Dreyfuss?

Elle Griffin and her fellow signatories are deeply confused about what free speech is. It is the right to speak without government censorship. This is not the same as a private company choosing to publish some voices and not others. Penguin Random House is not required to publish its slush piles. Nor is Substack bound by principle to endlessly fling Replacement Theory into online discourse. Principled people take a stand against Nazis, they don’t profit from them. Principled people try to combat ugly racist propaganda, they don’t hold a megaphone to the propagandist’s lips.

We are constantly being told by a vast crop of free speech absolutists that depravity is principle. But it is not. Broadcasting the most depraved voices online has contributed to the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S. and around the world. This country has already had its Reichstag—or Capitol—attacked. This is not a game; it is deadly serious. Why would anyone at this late date feel it is no big deal to empower voices that want to burn our democratic institutions to the ground? That is what it means to be a Nazi. They believe in taking power by force. They believe in rounding up undesirable people into camps and exterminating them. This puts them well outside the bounds of “free expression.” In the past, the domestic critics of Nazis lacked free expression because they were dead.

Griffin talks about Nazis as if they are ordinary citizens and political actors. She is wildly wrong about the writers of Substack inhabiting different “parks and libraries”—as the analogy itself suggests. She is describing utter degenerates taking over public spaces. Even if Nazis took over a park or library across town from you, that is still obviously your problem. To follow through on her own imagery, what about the schoolchildren who live in that part of town, who just want to go to the library? What will they do if the degenerates destroy the place and burn all the books? Or if we just confine ourselves to what we’re really talking about, how many times have people from online communities steeped in hate acted out that hatred in the real world? Isn’t it a vast societal problem in the U.S. that racists and misogynists regularly engage in mass shootings? Identifying as a Nazi is itself an expression of violent intent, because that is the totality of the historical association. It is similar to labeling yourself a suicide bomber. There are no Nazis who hang out quietly in gardens and libraries. They have claimed the mantle of violence of the people responsible for conquering and jailing and torturing and killing millions of people. It is not subtle! It is not a thing we should be confused about or let Elle Griffin or Ben Dreyfuss or Bari Weiss or the leaders of Substack gaslight us about. When people tell you they are Nazis, take it as the threat it is.

I know that hateful online rhetoric is a threat, because family members of mine live in Pittsburgh, a block from the Tree of Life synagogue. They lost people they had known for decades in that massacre. Nazis may be a joke to Hamish McKenzie. They are not a joke to me.

One notable thing about Nazis is that they sucked at self-preservation. In the short run, they may have made a tidy profit in stolen art—and gold teeth—but things ended kind of abruptly for them. If the leaders of Substack and their flunkies somehow think unfettered Nazi discourse will turn out well for them, they are mistaken. If they look it up, they will find things didn’t turn out too well for Hitler’s best-known propagandist. The Niemöller warning did not just hold for critics of the Nazi regime; in the end, it held for everyone not actively engaged in waging war on them. Might as well start now!

The thing is, not one word of this argument is hyperbole. We are talking about the worst people in the world, who believe and do unspeakable things. Again, we’re not talking about marginal cases. We’re talking about people who identify as Nazis. Yet Substack encourages them in their sick beliefs and actions. They absolutely do. They should go ahead and own the parts of Nazi ideology they subscribe to, rather than hiding behind mealy-mouthed free speech defenses. I noticed that several of the signatories to Griffin’s letter lead hate campaigns of their own. The British Union of Fascists brayed on about free speech in the 1930s, too, with equal bad faith.

We have been down this road before, and it is all endlessly documented for Substack leadership to explore. There is still time to take the hint.