Words like Violence Break the Silence

Come crashing in into my Substack world

I was hoping to follow up my piece on Aleister Crowley and Herbert Marcuse with an analysis of what happened after the sexual revolutionaries won and gay Americans moved from the fringes to the suburbs. But then Substack introduced its Notes feature.

Substack Notes is similar in design and function to other microblogging sites like Twitter and Mastodon. But since it caters to essayists and people who read essays, the conversation is, for the most part, a bit more literate and restrained.

For the most part.

Clarence Wilhelm Spangle doesn’t like Jews very much. His Substack site, Nordic Pagan Soldier, contains the sort of material one regularly sees on dissident Telegram. A recent article examines Trump’s recent arraignment in the light of Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion while another image… well…

Most who see Spangle’s Substack would agree it contains lots of problematic and yikes-worthy material. But until now, most would never have seen Spangle’s Substack. Few of us make searches for “Nordic Pagan soldier elders of Zion holocaust fraud” or “Zelenskyy Rothschilds Epstein Third World Immigration.” Those who do know exactly what they are searching for and Spangle’s site won’t disappoint them.

With Notes, Clarence can get his message out to a wider audience. And Clarence, showing promotional acumen worthy of a certain Austrian landscape artist, sent his message to a woman who was more than happy to broadcast it through the Substack universe.

Had Robin diAngelo discovered crystal meth at an early age, she might have become Chandra Hardy. Hardy hates racism almost as much as she hates White men and collects Cluster B disorders the way some people collect Pokemon cards. I had to remove a series of comments from my Substack after Hardy came screaming about Garrett Foster and Emmett Till. And it seems she has a history of this sort of behavior.

I was getting thrown off ISPs before the Eternal September that saw AOL join the Internet, and even I am impressed with the kind of dedication it takes to trash your professional reputation so thoroughly that you get yeeted from LinkedIn.

From Chandra Hardy’s Instagram Page

Chandra found an unlikely and better-medicated ally in Meg Conley. Conley took umbrage at Substack’s advice that Hardy block her account, and at Substack’s refusal to remove Clarence Spangle for his anti-Semitic hate crimes. In one of the most articulate defenses of moderating Substack Notes, she noted:

Legally made porn is protected free speech. There is plenty of ethically made, non-violent pornography. AND porn is the only truly proven online subscription business. But Substack has decided it does not work for their business model.

Overt racism, overt misogyny, overt transphobia, overt antisemitism is also protected free speech. There are no ethically made, non-violent antisemitic conspiracy theories or calls to kick all brown people out of the country. But Substack had decided that *does* work for their business model.

Allowing this antisemitic meme on here is not a free speech decision. It’s a business decision.

That decision was a problem when it Substack was an enterprise business for newsletters. But it’s catastrophic as Substack moves into becoming a *network business* that hopes to be “a new economic engine for culture.”

Who is being used for fuel in that engine when Nazi propaganda is allowed?

Here we see the discussion moving from a spicy meme into “overt racism, overt misogyny, overt transphobia, [and] overt anti-semitism” anywhere on Substack.

If I write about George Soros funding election campaigns, am I an anti-Semite? There are certainly many large and well-funded organizations (looking at you, ADL) who would see me banned as a Jew-hater for raising these questions.

If I quote the FBI statistics on violent crime, do I automatically become a racist?

If I write about trans-identified men raping prisoners in women’s prisons, am I a transphobe who should be silenced?

In response to those questions, Conley clarified:

I’m very happy to help clarify this for you. If you write about anything - from meal planning to campaign finance - in antisemitic, racist, transphobic ways then ... yes, you are being antisemitic, racist and/or transphobic. If you are not writing in antisemitic, racist, transphobic ways then you are not being antisemitic, racist or transphobic.

So what started as a spicy meme and morphed into an epidemic of overt hate has now become a plague of people writing in “antisemitic, racist, transphobic ways.” Conley further responded with a dictionary definition of the word “perspective.” But this still feels like running on a hamster wheel. Antisemitic, racist, transphobic material is material that is written in antisemitic, racist, or transphobic ways or from an antisemitic, racist, transphobic perspective.

This looks very much like the gatekeepers who migrated from Twitter are seeking to make a new home in their own image, a place where they can once again silence dissenting voices and stamp out misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech. This is not about a Jewish caricature posted in an obscure Substack. It is about power.

Along with the cries for moderation has come concern-trolling about Substack becoming a website where only Nazis and fascists hang out and where all the normal people have run away holding their noses. But if history is any indication, customers prefer robust and even (especially!) heated debate to a hugbox where everyone is reciting the same slogans.

In November 2022 many users swore off Elon Musk’s Twitter and migrated to the Mastodon Fediverse. Mastodon is the best-known of several user clients that let users find, join, or create “instances.”

These smaller instances each had their own policies on hate speech, and could defederate any instance whose policies they disliked. (The right-wing social media site Gab runs on a Mastodon fork). But sites that wish to be listed on the Mastodon website and federated with other servers must follow the Mastodon Covenant, which requires as its first rule “Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia” and insists:

Users must have the confidence that they are joining a safe space, free from white supremacy, anti-semitism and transphobia of other platforms.

On December 17, after Musk suspended a few prominent journalists, Forbes provided a list of journalists and celebrities on Mastodon and noted:

Whatever the drama being played out on Twitter, it’s coming up daisies for Mastodon which has been growing steadily since Musk’s takeover on October 27. The mood is collegial with the occasional photo of Star Trek’s George Takei sending warm greetings from his kitchen. Much of the chatter is revolutionary talk about Twitter’s descent into darkness, but there is also some great reporting on the war and the economy.

But the Twitter Exodus only lasted a few weeks before users started coming back to Pharaoh Elon’s brickmaking factories. In the month after Elon Musk’s October 27 purchase of Twitter, Mastodon monthly active users increased from a bit over 300,000 to 2.6 million. But today those MAU numbers have dropped to just 1.2 million — approximately 0.27% of Twitter’s current base of 450 million monthly users and a bit over 12% of Gab’s 9.8 million MAUs.

There are a few reasons for this. Setting up a Mastodon client and joining the Fediverse is more complicated than signing up for Twitter. Choosing a server can be confusing, and, as activist Hannah Roditi noted “[A] big portion of the world is on Twitter. They’re not on Mastodon. It’s more limiting.”

Another user, Jonathan Flowers, a Black philosophy professor, was called out by Mastodon users who demanded he use content warnings on his comments about racial politics. When Flower refused, his inbox was flooded with a torrent of racist abuse. Other users complained to administrators about Flowers’ use of a tool to cross-post his Mastodon toots to Twitter. As Flowers put it:

I’m just like, ‘What are you guys doing? Why are you being cops?’ There’s no wonder that we started calling Mastodon the homeowners’ association of social media.

There’s a good bit of disagreement on right-wing sites, but there’s also a general push toward blocking and ignoring rather than calling for moderation and a tendency to discourage complainants as “tattletales” and “Karens.” Lacking conflict between opposing sides, progressive microblogging sites soon squabble amongst themselves.

Notes will likely change Substack for the better and for the worse. I don’t expect a mass exodus of left-wingers. At the present time, Substack is the easiest and best-known choice for monetizing your newsletters and blogs. And after the failure of the trans boycott against Hogwart’s Legacy, C-suite execs are learning that you can ignore the loudest social media voices without damage to your bottom line.

Notes encourages communication between writers and readers, but it also encourages communication between writers. I expect to see more cross-promotions and cross-pollination between Substacks as like-minded writers share ideas and support like a modern-day Algonquin Table or Lovecraft Circle, depending on their interests.

I expect the trolls to keep on trolling. Both Hardy and Spangle have likely gained new followers from their performance. Others will engage in similar kayfabes for clicks. Those who wish to sling mud will find their targets. Those who are not interested will use their mute and block features to curate their feed and their article comments, the way Usenetizens in the late 20th century used “kill files” to block problem posters and topics. I don’t expect the arguments for moderation to go away. But neither do I expect them to go anywhere.

Here are two other excellent Substack entries on the Great Moderation War.

“Anti-Racism” Damages Everyone by Holly the Math Nerd

How to Slay a Magic Word Cult by Bad Cattitude