The Atlantic Has a Sloppiness Problem: A Response to Jonathan Katz, part 2.

If you're going to going to smear a platform and its users using the most bellicose language you can muster, maybe do your homework first.

“Do you believe
Everything you see?
Children of the void,
Come follow me.”

- Nevermore, “Poison Godmachine”.

[Preamble: On December 2nd, I posted a response to Jonathan Katz’s article for The Atlantic titled “Substack Has a Nazi Problem”. In it, I was plenty deferential and gave much of the benefit of the doubt, my focus being largely that it was a well-intentioned but wrongheaded outing that carried with it the very real possibility of maligning an entire platform for the sake of a few isolated writers with seriously misguided views.

In the seven days that have followed to this writing, I’ve become considerably less deferential, as Katz has shown in no small way that he has a truly cruel, underhanded, and twisted bent. Katz engages in immature name-calling and derision, and refuses to answer criticisms for which he is accountable. As well, his misbegotten screed has created a burgeoning controversy on a platform for which many, if not most, writers simply want a place where they can be free to write apolitically. Katz has shown no regard for this peaceful ethic, instead choosing to rain on everyone’s parade by dragging them all, if only by proxy, into his self-centred campaign.

The vital question, though: does Substack, indeed, have a Nazi problem? And if so, do these putative Nazis generate revenue for Substack? And if so, do they do so through direct appeals to Nazi content? As I demonstrate below, Katz’s research is sloppy at best, and negligent at worst, and much of what he uses as sources could readily be interpreted as a means to wedge in an anticonservative agenda under the auspices of the overtly-laudable task of fighting Nazis, which appears to be an underhanded bait-and-switch founded on deception, intentional or otherwise.]

The furor that grips Substack in the wake of Jonathan Katz’s critical article is basically impossible to avoid at this point, save not going on the platform at all, which it seems many are doing until the inflated controversy blows over. For his part, Katz has been plenty smug and self-satisfied, mainly because he can pretend to not hear rational criticism from all the way up on his high horse with his nose stuck firmly in the stratosphere.

For those just tuning in because you’ve been hiding in the Caucasus mountains the last week trying to avoid the supercilious and halitosis-laden miasma that’s been ceaselessly emanating from Katz’s forked tongue, there was an article lazily thrown together with sloppy sourcing and scurrilous accusations penned by Katz and published unscrupulously on November 28, 2023 by accusing Substack of profiting monetarily from blatantly Nazi content by The Atlantic, whose editorial board doesn’t seem to have any qualms with eschewing adulterating their content with nettlesome fact-checking and journalistic ethics.

It’s not clear whether Katz came into the issue wanting to pick a fight, or whether he was just an innocent Substacker who just happened upon a seeming minefield of derogatory racist and Neo-Nazi content (don’t count on that), but the one thing we can bank on is he has a hard-on for holding Substack founders and heads Chris Best and Hamish Mackenzie to what he considers his standard of content cleanliness.

However, he does make a good point: it should be a no-brainer to expect a platform with explicit standards and practices against profiting off of hate speech to answer to credible accusations of abetting Neo-Nazi and racist content. The word “credible” in that last sentence is going to be the axis around which this entire issue spins, and will be rendered very relevant shortly.

[Artist’s (?) rendering of Jonathan Katz, dedicating deep thought to his arguments.]

Katz’s main ostensible gripe seems to be with Substack making money off of “confederate” and “Neo-Nazi” newsletters who charge for subscriptions. He notes “scores” - that’s multiples of twenty, for those who are archaically-impaired - of examples:

But cites only six. Richard Spencer:

The Tribalist:

Patrick Casey:

Richard Hanania:

Darryl Cooper:

And the People’s Initiative of New England:

If there’s one thing that you can give Katz credit for, is that he knows how to create an effective stink. So much so that no less a figure than Matt Taibbi of Racket News penned his own rebuke of him (although I’m not altogether convinced Katz did this because he’s a mere puppet of legacy media; I actually think he believes he’s being sincere). As an aside, I think this was a mistake in retrospect, since, while it was nice knowing we had noteworthy figures on our side, I think it served mostly to feed the illusion of aerobic credence.

Katz has dodged requests for more sources to satisfy his claim of “scores” of content under the shifty auspices of protecting people from this content, and copping that he doesn’t truly know the scope and number of these newsletters. Even though search engines have been around for thirty or so years now and proper research takes minimal effort, which I’m about to demonstrate. But the damning part: proper research would not help Katz’s manifest case of founding a scurrilous claim on cherry-picked examples. He relies, instead, on the rancour of his hordes of followers to bolster his illusion of credibility, and simply ignores any challenge. That’s his prerogative. But it sure doesn’t do much for your credibility to be both a coward and a weasel.

The Hateful Six

Richard Spencer is obviously Katz’s prize-pig example, being as he has been well-established as the darling of alt-right and white power circles over the years. But it appears that he has changed his tune, at least in public. In 2020, he renounced his white power beliefs and became a supporter of Joe Biden, now describing himself as a “political moderate:”:

Katz actually acknowledges this in the article, prior to inexplicably pointing out that, by making thousands off of his paid subscriptions, Substack is abetting Nazis by taking their ten percent cut:

Spencer edits the newsletter Alexandria on Substack, but try as I might, I can’t find a single instance of the rhetoric Katz describes. That’s not to say it doesn’t exist, but if it’s that hard to find, what can “Nazi problem” even mean? And we’re just scratching the surface here. Here is a chronological series of screenshots I collected myself from the latest post up until I got tired of doing it because I got the point:

Do you see any extant Neo-Nazi content? I sure don’t. You’ve got that entry about Anti-Zionism being Antisemitism and Nietzsche on Jews, but those could readily be discussed by any number of journalists and historians. So between Spencer publicly renouncing his troublesome beliefs and no overt Neo-Nazi content readily accessible, the only thing left is for Katz to link - or at least screenshot - the content directly, which I promise you, he will not do. Like Christopher Hitchens said: “That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence”. Of course, not before you’ve successfully gotten away with libeling the very platform you use along with all the innocent people who use it.

Think Katz has a long row to hoe already? Just wait.

Next, Darryl Cooper. That noted bigot who was publicly hosted on Breaking Points with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti. I don’t even have to qualify that one. No mainstream publication in their right mind is going to host an overt Neo-Nazi, and unlike Katz, I have total faith that Saagar and Krystal did their research beforehand:

So I’ll just throw that one in the can. Next, The Tribalist. Katz was actually right about this one, because it is ostensibly about white nationalism:

But there’s just one minor problem Katz omitted: The Tribalist is a free publication! So if Katz’s premise is that Substack is violating their own TOS by making ten points off of this publication, he shot himself in the ass. Unless this whole thing is a wedge for wanting to regulate even free content and this is actually just the bait-and-switch. The plot thickens.

Patrick Casey actually does charge, but once again, we’re faced with an acute case of where-the-hell-is-it-itis, because if there’s Nazi content, it’s not readily available. Again: it’s Katz’s onus to put up or shut up:

Richard Hanania also charges, and has been on record with his beliefs that black people should be especially surveilled due to their seeming predilection toward crime. But the problem is, he posted that on Twitter, not Substack, so it’s technically not even Substack’s problem. This wouldn’t be so much of an issue if he’d outright decried Twitter for this transgression. He did not.

Here’s a screenshot of his current newsletter page below. I leave it to you to judge if it’s a haven of Nazi propaganda or not.

Finally, The People's Initiative of New England doesn’t even seem to exist. Or at least, it doesn’t come up in a Substack search:

So if Katz and The Atlantic really want reasonable people to believe that Substack is a morass of Nazi content that they make hay off of, they’re going to have to do better than that.

The Other “Usual Suspects”

In his ceaseless protestations since the publication of the article, Katz has been generous enough to regale us with a few other examples of what a swamp of Nazi reprobation Substack truly is. Of course, the examples he provides don’t really help his case that much, which should not be a shock by now.

First up, The White Papers, a blatant white power publication that does not charge:

Next, Andkon’s Reich Press, which does not charge:

After much pressing, Katz released a collage of some of the Nazi content he dug up on Substack, much of which is redacted, presumably for fear of having someone check his sources and write a rebuttal like this one.

Of the ones I was able to see clearly enough to source, I found the following. First, SurrealPolitiks, which has an option to choose a subscription, but is currently free:

It’s written by Christopher Cantwell, who has gotten himself in hot water with the FBI before by his own admission, but that alone doesn’t make one a Nazi. Here’s a screenshot of his newsletter page, and by this time, you should rightly be asking yourself, “am I missing something?”:

Oh, to be sure, there’s criticism of progressives and Democrats, both of which I know Katz is somewhere between a fan and a disciple, but no Nazism that I can find. Which now is making me wonder aloud: what if this whole campaign is nothing but a smear of people he doesn’t like using the spectre of Nazism as a false patina? I personally wouldn’t put it past him.

The only other one I found here that isn’t conveniently redacted or I haven’t mentioned already is Barbaric Disciple, which touts itself as a celebration of the traditional ideal of masculinity, paying homage to Greeks and Nordic cultures. Now, Nazis do often resort to using Nordic or Odinic imagery as part of their semiotics. But automatically assuming that Nordic imagery is tantamount to Nazism demeans an entire culture. Funny how when Nazis themselves do that it’s a bad thing.

So I’m confident that I’ve given you enough to be able to conclude that, for the most part, Katz doesn’t have even a wooden prosthetic leg to stand on, here. His examples are kinda-sorta close to being proof of his thesis, but it’s not enough for a robust conclusion, and far, far too short of being a statement of Substack’s complicitness in his accusations.

The Signatories

It didn’t take long for many writers on Substack to smell a rat, and realize Katz’s exposé was nothing more than a thinly-veiled hatchet job filled with innuendo, mealy-mouthing, and as is apparent now, unfounded citations. Post-haste, Elle Griffin of Substack newsletter The Elysian drafted a petition fighting the proposal for Substack to actively moderate content as is done elsewhere. Signatories included Richard Dawkins , Edward Snowden , Slavoj Žižek , Michael Shermer , Lawrence M. Krauss , among hundreds of others.

Naturally, Katz wasted no time going into a paroxysm of damage control:

“Ex-writer for Nazi magazines”. It’s becoming apparent that Katz sure has a fixation with the sins of people’s pasts, even if they’ve been duly renounced. I suppose he doesn’t believe in absolution. It would be interesting to see what muck people could rake up about his own past.

And anyway, that’s a bogus claim if it’s being used to support the frivolous argument that Substack abets Nazis. As I pointed out in my last piece, white supremacists and Holocaust deniers were invited on network television with regularity on such shows as CNN Crossfire, Geraldo, Dick Cavett, and Donahue (check the previous entry for links to each of these). These instances were over thirty years ago, and it’s safe to say that the Nazi problem must have gotten alleviated at least somewhat if the KKK can no longer march in the streets and if its most vocal proponents are now relegated to dusty corners of the internet, unearthed mostly by hotheads trying to support a prejudice that the internet is a simmering hotbed of hate and bigotry.

But the final challenge which Katz must meet if he wishes for his claim of a “Nazi problem” to be taken seriously is to demonstrate, using unequivocal evidence, that exposure to Nazi content inexorably creates Nazis. To be sure, there’s a lot of heated rhetoric floating around - much of which is blatantly false - about how Nazi content leads to hate and genocide, Third Reich-style. But there are a few issues with this claim, namely:

• The number of people who consume Nazi content for research purposes who don’t become Nazis, and,

• The number of instances of genocide that erupted independent of narrative and manifestos, which is just about all of them. In fact, many of them are attributed to religion, which by numbers alone is a much, much bigger menace than Nazism, so at the very least, those who are calling for Substack to rein in Nazi content are being selective, and at the worst, they’re being harrowingly ignorant.

Conclusion: What To Make of All This

Katz’s ilk are not news. History is lousy with instances of bitter people who encounter a world full of things they don’t like who resort to underhanded trickery to get what they want. These could be anyone of influence from dictators to cult leaders to political ideologues to writers like Katz: anyone who can wield their influential specialty through deception or coercion to see through what they want, and damn the cost to others.

One of the more pervasive and dangerous tactics is to exploit the vulnerabilities of certain groups by choosing an obvious stimulus - in this case, references to one of the most heinous massacres in history in the wake of another heinous massacre on the same ethnic group - and using it as an easy pretext to wedge in an agenda. It’s been amply demonstrated that Katz does not have a well-founded case against Substack if he’s trying to make them out to be Nazi-abetters, so what could his motive be?

It’s hard to say, but a common theme among his examples is that they appear critical of progressive initiatives. I caution to not let prejudices guide anyone to jumping to this conclusion since that’s exactly the tactic Katz has been using this whole time, and unlike him, I am unwilling to draw conclusions based on circumstance. But as a hypothesis, it holds water.

But among all the vagueness, one thing for sure can be counted on: in light of Katz’s evasion of criticism, consistent use of derision, and failure to provide ample evidence of his claims while simultaneously continuing to propound them with gusto, Katz is clearly acting in distilled bad faith, and should be given zero credence.

However, the silver lining here is that Katz apparently doesn’t realize the economics of equilibrium; that the more you accuse and throw around the word “Nazi” and attribute it to more people, the less it means. At some point soon, everyone will get wise, and everyone will get tired of it, and Katz will be left scrounging for another fifteen minutes of fame. The only consideration that remains is whether people will be wise to his antics when that time comes, and he won’t even get afforded a measly fifteen seconds. That’s the tangled web that almost invariably becomes the fate of those who deceive.

ZeroGrav, aka Ian,

12/16/23.