The Atlantic Has a Fallacy Problem: A Response to Jonathan Katz.

[Preamble: on November 28, 2023, The Atlantic published an article by blogger Jonathan Katz titled “Substack Has a Nazi Problem” which espoused many issues I felt were worth addressing. What follows is my best possible rejoinder outlining the problems.]

On April 21^st, 1999, one day after the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, ABC’s renowned flagship investigation show 20/20 broadcasted a quickly cobbled-together exposé titled The Goth Phenomenon. It was a truly underhanded and scathing indictment of the Goth subculture replete with innuendo, sensationalism, and outright falsehoods that, nonetheless, helped satiate panic among suburban and rural Americans desperate for a scapegoat to help them digest what had happened.

            This was, clearly and in retrospect, a wrongheaded move that served only to exacerbate the very ostracism that led to the shooting in the first place, as well as provide salacious fodder for ABC’s primetime programming. In reality, it was an instance of a very powerful corporate media model sacrificing many innocent (and young) people to the fiery witch-hunts of a populace desperate to place easy blame to a cultural movement that, to that point, had been treated with uneasy suspicion, and overnight, had become a public enemy due to the power of broadcast media. To the best of my knowledge, ABC has never apologized nor acknowledged any culpability.

            Enter Jonathan Katz, author of the newsletter The Racket on the popular open-posting platform Substack. Like many other prominent contemporary writers, Katz enjoys exposure and remuneration on the platform alongside myriad poets, independent writers, journalists, and prosists. Substack is, in brief, a next-level blogging platform that makes commission off of paid subscriptions to popular bulletins.

            However egalitarian that may sound, it is far from a utopia. Writers with an established professional profile like Katz naturally have more clout than those who are not professionals, yet seize the opportunity to hone their talents and get what words across to limited audiences they can (myself included). Katz’s specialty of late, alongside many of his contemporaries in the upper-class American literati, centers around identitarian concerns, the mot du jour of the zeitgeist. In particular, his focus appears to be Neo-Nazis and the American White Supremacist movement, no doubt inflamed by recent incidents between Israel and Hamas, and the collegiate protests that inevitably followed.

            On November 28, 2023, Katz published an indictment in the American periodical The Atlantic not only of these pervasive and pernicious movements, but specifically of the platform Substack under the glaring headline Substack Has a Nazi Problem. The piece has enjoyed widespread exposure, having been featured on MSN as well as shared across Substack by many of his well-wishers and contemporaries. The thesis is essentially that Substack is not only complicit in the proliferation of Nazi and racist propaganda, but abets it by making commission off of subscriptions to their newsletters, citing lax moderation and insinuating that Substack actually gives incentives to publish bigoted content under the auspices of preserving the freedom of speech denied by many of Substack’s competitors.

            The vital difference between Katz’s article and ABC’s lazy hatchet piece is that he’s actually right to target Neo-Nazis as a menace. He’ll find no argument from the great swath of writers and readers with any semblance of a conscience. However, he uses many rhetorical twists and turns and association tactics that a keen observer could readily hypothesize constitute an attempt to throw Substack and its thousands of writers and subscribers under the bus, echoing both the widespread sacrifice of innocents in the name of advancing a well-intentioned agenda with questionable results and the derision and reputation-tainting that followed the 20/20 hit piece.

            And once again, Katz and The Atlantic stand to represent the powerful media conglomerate that can leverage its power as a cudgel with impunity simply because of established accessibility privileges, and the twist here is that prospective critics can easily be painted with the Scarlet Letter of underwriting racists by potentially pressing an us-or-them dichotomy (“I’m going after Nazis! How dare you criticize me! Are you trying to offer aid and comfort to racists and bigots? Are you defending the rights for miscreants to propagate hateful content?”). It should be stressed that this has not happened overtly as of this writing, but if patterns of the past are any indication, the affair could easily go in that direction.

            But even if it doesn’t, the damage has clearly been done already, and Katz can clearly get away with it unscathed even if only due to the numbers of people who support his article because they have an emotional connection (Jewish people, in particular). For ill or good, this is still a propaganda technique, and if that is the angle Katz wishes to exploit, he’s in a glass house calling out others for using the same techniques, only sanctioned for decidedly nefarious purposes. Dishonesty, however, is still dishonesty.

            I use the vague word “if”, because Katz seems to be content with limited exposition and being explicit about very little, relying on examples that, while they may stand up to empirical scrutiny, nonetheless provide next to no context about the scale of the influence of Neo-Nazis, and how much responsibility Substack themselves have in the spreading of antisemitic and nationalist propaganda, particularly compared to all the alternatives (much of the fodder for pogroms against Jews came long, long before the internet. Are we to assume Gutenberg bears responsibility for giving antisemites of years past carte blanche to publish their wares abetted by the “platform” of the printing press?)

            Katz’s fixation appears to be the practice of “platforming”, which as far as neologisms go, has gone unopposed and unquestioned for so long that one would risk being a pariah for doing so, even if it’s just for the innocent practice of felicitous due diligence, which gets harder and harder to do these days thanks to the hackles raised by inflammatory articles like Katz’s. But what Katz omits (perhaps conveniently) is mention of other, much more prominent examples of platforming that used to happen with regular occasion on network television, including CNN’s 1982 interview with the KKK Grand Dragon defending segregation, Dick Cavett’s 1970 interview with controversial pro-segregation Georgia Governor Lester Maddox, Donahue’s interview with prominent Holocaust deniers David Cole and Bradley R. Smith in 1994, and of course, Geraldo’s infamous 1988 incident where a brawl broke out between white supremacists and other guests that resulted in his nose being broken in the melee.

            The prevailing opinion appears to be that “de-platforming” is predicated on the necessity to keep these ideas from becoming virulent. Yet, in the many years following these supposed platforming incidents, lynchings, segregation, and outright racism among the lay populace has all but disappeared (yes, it does still exist in subtle ways, but no matter how you slice it, the days of the KKK being able to hijack the streets of South Carolina for marches are summarily extinct), and no one seems to see fit to question why it is that they hew to a doctrine that is, empirically, counterintuitive.

            In all fairness to Mr. Katz, much of the article is overtly anodyne, peppered with copious observations of examples of the succour that Substack appears to offer antisemites and white supremacist propagandists who continue to breathe life into long-since debunked pretexts for derision and prejudice against not only Jews, but, unsurprisingly, visible minorities. As well, he also acknowledges that, among Substack’s 17,000-plus paid writers, he found approximately only sixteen instances of Nazi and supremacist insignia slathered onto the various blogs he unearthed (curiously absent, however, is a number-sum of these blogs).

            The research, I’m sure, was painstaking and likely took a long time, but at what point is any platform considered morally cleansed? It would seem that Mr. Katz is interested in exhorting the Substack brass to pull out all the stops ensuring this number not only is zero, but remains zero. As well, what remains unanswered is the question of the scope of content Mr. Katz surmises falls under the auspices of Substack’s precarious regulations against hate speech. Without hearing from Substack themselves, it’s impossible to truly understand what all sides deem too controversial.

One could weigh the priority by plotting what effect and how virulent these ideas are, but it’s a notoriously sticky minefield that always threatens to call into question what amounts to thoughtcrime, and who is fit to prosecute. One of the reasons free speech advocates champion that ethos is because it’s the least restrictive alternative. Unappetizing as it may seem, it’s likely much easier to just let a fringe massage bad ideas than it would be to form a task force to ensure it never happens.

            However, the singling out of Substack in what seems to be a blatantly reductive manner calls into question whether the entire platform – which includes a number of creative writers who do it for free and with best intentions, remember – can be held morally culpable, and to what degree each participant bears liability. Painted in those terms, it’s analogous to imprisoning 99 innocent people in order to guarantee having caught one guilty person. Even in his efforts toward fair deference, it still remains that Mr. Katz and The Atlantic are complicit in throwing the baby out with the bathwater in the same manner as he claims Substack head Hamish McKenzie is complicit in promoting hateful ideals.

            Which brings me to the question: to what extent is it prudent to ensure the silencing of morally-objectionable viewpoints? Is it necessary to pull out all the stops, even at the risk of making unassociated people into potential collateral damage? To be sure, Katz’s concerns are worth addressing, but was writing an incendiary missive in a periodical published internationally really the right way to go? Even now, Katz has an open invitation to the Substack higher-ups to have a sit-down on the subject, which they have so far left unanswered. I would wager they would have answered with a touch more charity and alacrity had he not openly smeared them using powerful media.

            Or, better: why doesn’t Mr. Katz simply dedicate his own time and resources into outing Nazis and antisemites since he clearly has a mainline to a number of their outlets? Why involve the Substack administrators at all if it’s simply about exposing the problem? It would seem to have resolved the issue; Substack would have been kept out of the press, and only the guilty parties would have faced judgment in the court of public opinion.

            Publishing this article was, I believe, a mistake on the part of The Atlantic’s editorial board. An innocent mistake and a well-intentioned one, perhaps, but a mistake nonetheless that likely indicted anyone who is associated with Substack rather than only the guilty parties, which brings me back to 20/20: certainly people want closure and relief from alarm and tragedy, but potentially displacing the blame onto disinterested and uninvolved parties – like the association of Substack with Nazis the article’s title could easily suggest – just adds a problem to a problem, and no one who participates in these undertakings can truly make an honest claim to being an exemplar of social justice.