Excerpting what I wrote to my subscribers today about Substack and Nazis. As I wrote here, I will be publishing my emails to Hamish et. al. every week — and will also continue to be in conversation with my fellow Substack writers about when and if it’s time to leave.

“You may or may not be aware of the current push for Substack to ban Nazis from the platform. I hope you know that I am strongly anti-Nazi — and believe that if Substack is going to philosophically hide behind the free speech argument, they can at the very least agree that while Nazis (and anyone else) have the right to write on the internet, just as they have the right to march down the street or publish a book, that does not mean that Substack has to allow the Nazis (and, by extension, Substack) to profit from that speech. I find hiding behind a righteous free speech argument while refusing to de-monetize cowardly.

Like many other writers on this platform, I have spent many, many hours trying to figure out what to do about this scenario. I do not use Substack as my publishing platform because I believe in their ethics; I use it because it is the best way to connect with current readers and connect with new ones. If you want to make a living on a subscription model of any kind, whether here or at The New York Times, both components are essential: you have to make it easy for your current readers to read you….but you also have to make it easy for others to discover you. Without it, the natural churn of the subscription model would eventually make the work unsustainable.

The “discovery” component facilitated by Substack is especially crucial in this current moment, when social media — previously the primary means for new readers to discover work — has imploded. In short: Substack allows readers to find more things to read. It has made it easier for you to subscribe (paid or not!) to other Substacks and it has made it easier for readers of other Substacks to subscribe to Culture Study (paid or not). Pretty straightforward network effects.

Now, you might argue that if a whole bunch of us anti-Nazi writers (we are the majority!!!) went to a site that allows you design a website and send newsletters from it — that you could reproduce that network effect, but those sites are not designed to create those effects, at least not like Substack. And you know what? The Nazis would come there, too, because part of what Nazis want to do is to make life worse for anyone who opposes their ideology. They want to make it harder for you to read the people you want to read and harder for me to write the non-Nazi things I want to write, and they want us to talk about them. Their business model is simple, and a significant part of it is ruining ours.

An independent writer like myself — and like the other writers you read and admire here on Substack — finds themselves with very few options. They can flee this platform, as we have fled Twitter, as we have fled mainstream news organizations that have opted for “both side-ism” on any number of issues including but by no means limited to fascism, as we have fled Facebook. The Nazis will follow. It has become more and more clear to me: This is no way to fight.

Reading the reactions from other writers, I’m reminded that we have power in solidarity. People who’ve been here longer and have larger readership bases and more secure income — like me — have a responsibility to think about our power as whole. Frankie de la Cretaz put it this way in a Substack Note earlier this week:

1) ….this was always going to be their response; it always has been their response. But.

2) The Substackers Against Nazis letter got what we asked for: a response. Remember that there was no ultimatum given or action we said we would take. We wanted an answer to our question and we got that. From that lens, the letter was a success.

3) The question becomes what happens now. Some people will leave & that’s their choice. But the beauty of organizing is that there’s now an opportunity to push for change & make it better. Leaving removes any existing leverage you might have to move the needle here.

4) What frustrates me about the willingness to pack up & exit, particularly from users with more systemic privilege, is that they’re morally opposed to Nazis (good) but is leaving actually using that privilege & opposition to facilitate change?

So here is what I can promise you, reader: that I will continue to be a thorn in the side of Substack’s leadership when it comes to this issue. That I will continue to use my power as one of its initial writers — one who they use as counter-evidence to the claim that they profit most off anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theories — to hold them to account. That I will try to make this particular home better and safer, because we are all so weary of building new homes only to have the Nazis (and anti-Trans assholes) show up once again and drive us to the fringes - which is where they belong.

I have a direct line to the founders at Substack. And in the weeks to come, I will be re-publishing the emails I send to them every week on Notes. I hope you’ll join me in telling them: to make the spectacularly simple decision to turn off Nazi monetization. Let’s start there.”