Substack Has a Nazi Problem

Updated at 8:40 p.m. ET on January 11, 2024

The newsletter-hosting site Substack advertises itself as the last, best hope for civility on the internet—and aspires to a bigger role in politics in 2024. But just beneath the surface, the platform has become a home and propagator of white supremacy and anti-Semitism. Substack has not only been hosting writers who post overtly Nazi rhetoric on the platform; it profits from many of them.

Substack, founded in 2017, has terms of service that formally proscribe “hate,” along with pornography, spam, and anyone “restricted from making money on Substack”—a category that includes businesses banned by Stripe, the platform’s default payment processor. But Substack’s leaders also proudly disdain the content-moderation methods that other platforms employ, albeit with spotty results, to limit the spread of racist or bigoted speech. An informal search of the Substack website and of extremist Telegram channels that circulate Substack posts turns up scores of white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters on Substack—many of them apparently started in the past year. These are, to be sure, a tiny fraction of the newsletters on a site that had more than 17,000 paid writers as of March, according to Axios, and has many other writers who do not charge for their work. But to overlook white-nationalist newsletters on Substack as marginal or harmless would be a mistake.

At least 16 of the newsletters that I reviewed have overt Nazi symbols, including the swastika and the sonnenrad, in their logos or in prominent graphics. Andkon’s Reich Press, for example, calls itself “a National Socialist newsletter”; its logo shows Nazi banners on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, and one recent post features a racist caricature of a Chinese person. A Substack called White-Papers, bearing the tagline “Your pro-White policy destination,” is one of several that openly promote the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that inspired deadly mass shootings at a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, synagogue; two Christchurch, New Zealand, mosques; an El Paso, Texas, Walmart; and a Buffalo, New York, supermarket. Other newsletters make prominent references to the “Jewish Question.” Several are run by nationally prominent white nationalists; at least four are run by organizers of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—including the rally’s most notorious organizer, Richard Spencer.

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Some Substack newsletters by Nazis and white nationalists have thousands or tens of thousands of subscribers, making the platform a new and valuable tool for creating mailing lists for the far right. And many accept paid subscriptions through Substack, seemingly flouting terms of service that ban attempts to “publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes.” Several, including Spencer’s, sport official Substack “bestseller” badges, indicating that they have at a minimum hundreds of paying subscribers. A subscription to the newsletter that Spencer edits and writes for costs $9 a month or $90 a year, which suggests that he and his co-writers are grossing at least $9,000 a year and potentially many times that. Substack, which takes a 10 percent cut of subscription revenue, makes money when readers pay for Nazi newsletters.

Some authors, I should note, reject the toxic label Nazi even as they ostentatiously deploy Nazi and white-supremacist language and themes. This is true of Spencer—as The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood documented in a 2017 profile titled “His Kampf.” Spencer later claimed to have disavowed white nationalism, but his Substack features content such as a recent post, written by a contributor, that begins: “Geniuses, in their most consequential forms, appear predominantly among Aryans … orbited by successful Jews.” That statement combines at least two Nazi tropes: the portrayal of Jewish people as schemers and the pseudoscientific fantasy that white Europeans are descended from a genetically superior ancient race.

Other Substacks amplify anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, including the century-old forgery known as the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” as well as more modern ones that accuse Jews of “occupying” the U.S. government and taking advantage of COVID-19. (A newsletter called Turning Point Stocks offers this choice headline: “Vaccines Are Jew Witchcraftery.”) One overtly Nazi newsletter called The Tribalist recently published a fawning interview with Billy Roper, a former skinhead who led the most prominent American neo-Nazi organization in the 1990s. Roper is infamous for celebrating 9/11 because, as he put it, al-Qaeda had set out to “kill Jews.” The Southern Poverty Law Center has called him the “uncensored voice of violent neo-Nazism.” The post’s lead image is a photo of neo-Nazis giving a Hitler salute.

In August, Rolling Stone reported that a group calling itself the People’s Initiative of New England—a barely concealed front for the neo-Nazi organization NSC-131—had published a manifesto advocating “separation from the United States of America” for the purpose of creating a white ethnostate in the Northeast. That manifesto was published on the group’s Substack.

The platform has shown a surprising tolerance for extremists who circumvent its published rules. Patrick Casey, a leader of Identity Evropa, a defunct neo-Nazi group, had been banned from Twitter and TikTok and suspended from YouTube after running afoul of those platforms’ terms of service. (Elon Musk, Twitter’s owner, subsequently announced an “amnesty” that restored Casey’s account, among others.) Perhaps most damagingly to a content creator, Stripe had prohibited Casey from using its services.

But Substack was willing to let a white supremacist get back on his feet. Casey launched a free Substack newsletter soon after the 2020 election. Months later, he set up a paywall, getting around Stripe’s ban by involving a third-party payment processor. The extent to which this workaround—and Casey’s presence on Substack more generally—contributed to his livelihood is unclear. “I’m able to live comfortably doing something I find enjoyable and fulfilling,” he wrote on his Substack in 2021. “The cause isn’t going anywhere,” he declared in the same post. Casey’s newsletter remains active; through Substack’s recommendations feature, he promotes seven other white-nationalist and extremist publications, one of which has a Substack “bestseller” badge.

Nazis and other violent white supremacists are “opportunists,” Whitney Phillips, a professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication, told me. “Even if you’re pushing them off of one platform … they’re going to find a space that gives them the ability to do what it is they want to do.” And in Substack, she said, “they have found a safe space.”

Moderating online content is notoriously tricky. Amid the ongoing crisis in Israel and Gaza, Amnesty International recently condemned social-media companies’ failure to curb a burst of anti-Semitic and Islamophobic speech, at the same time that it criticized those companies for “over-broad censorship” of content from Palestinian and pro-Palestinian accounts—which has made sharing information and views from inside Gaza more difficult. When tech platforms are quick to banish posters, partisans of all stripes have an incentive to accuse their opponents of being extremists in an effort to silence them. But when platforms are too permissive, they risk being overrun by bigots, harassers, and other bad-faith actors who drive away other users, as evidenced by the rapid erosion of Twitter, now X, under Musk.

In a post earlier this year, a Substack co-founder, Hamish McKenzie, implied that his company’s business model would largely obviate the need for content moderation. “We give communities on Substack the tools to establish their own norms and set their own terms of engagement rather than have all that handed down to them by a central authority,” he wrote. But even a platform that takes an expansive view of free speech will inevitably find itself making judgments about what to take down and what to keep up—as Substack’s own terms of service attest. For all his bluster about open expression, Musk has been willing to censor posts on behalf of foreign governments, including Turkey and India.

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Ultimately, the First Amendment gives publications and platforms in the United States the right to publish almost anything they want. But the same First Amendment also gives them the right to refuse to allow their platform to be used for anything they don’t want to publish or host.

“Substack is a platform that is built on freedom of expression, and helping writers publish what they want to write,” McKenzie and the company’s other co-founders, Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi, said in a statement when asked for comment on this article. “Some of that writing is going to be objectionable or offensive. Substack has a content moderation policy that protects against extremes—like incitements to violence—but we do not subjectively censor writers outside of those policies.” Still, some decisions seem obvious: If something that bills itself as “a National Socialist website” doesn’t violate Substack’s own policy against “hate,” what does?

I myself am a Substacker. I started my newsletter in 2019, at a time when the platform was known for hosting freelance journalists and bloggers, many on the left and center-left, attracted by the promise of a new way to scrape together a living amid the collapse of the journalism industry. McKenzie, in fact, personally encouraged me to join Substack. Along the way he offered suggestions about possible names for my newsletter and topics I could cover, and facilitated introductions to other journalists on the platform. I didn’t get any money up front from the platform, but for one year in the middle of my tenure, the company provided me with a part-time editor and podcast producer.

In the past few years, Substack has sought to appeal to more contrarian and conservative authors, such as Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan, and to readers disenchanted with mainstream publications. The company also began positioning itself more overtly as a fervent supporter of free speech—a laudable goal. But in practice, Substack’s definition of that concept goes beyond welcoming arguments from across a wide ideological spectrum and broadly defending anyone’s right to spread even bigotry and conspiracy theories; implicitly, it also includes hosting and profiting from bigoted and conspiratorial content. As far-right commentators have flocked to Substack, the company has refused to engage with the distinct challenges that these extremists pose to a platform that claims to prohibit hate speech.

In April, when Substack launched its microblogging service, Substack Notes, to compete with Twitter, Nilay Patel, the editor of The Verge, asked Best if the company would permit a hypothetical post that said, “We should not allow as many brown people in the country.” Best refused to answer, calling Patel’s question “gotcha content moderation” and saying: “We have content policies that are deliberately tuned to allow lots of things that we … strongly disagree with.”

Facing widespread criticism from many Substack creators—some of whom were threatening to follow previous outflows of writers who quit in protest—McKenzie insisted that “aggressive content moderation” didn’t work. “Is there less concern about misinformation? Has polarization decreased? Has fake news gone away? Is there less bigotry? It doesn’t seem so to us,” he wrote. (Though he added: “Now, this doesn’t mean there should be no moderation at all, and we do of course have content guidelines with narrowly defined restrictions that we will continue to enforce.”)

Since then, the company has tried to market itself in two contradictory ways. To nominally apolitical creative writers—poets, fiction authors, memoirists, and so on—it is billing itself as a “new economic engine for culture.” The platform has a growing roster of celebrity authors such as Elizabeth Gilbert, George Saunders, and the musicians Patti Smith and Jeff Tweedy. This effort was embodied recently by a strange new ad, created to market the redesigned Substack phone app, in which raging denizens of a burning cartoon dystopia beat one another in the streets, while more cultured readers take refuge in a tranquil bookstore called “Substack.”

To a different audience, the site’s leaders market themselves in the opposite way: by “leaning into politics.” In a recent post on the official Substack blog titled “In the 2024 U.S. elections, vote for Substack,” McKenzie declared that in the coming cycle, “the cable news channels, public radio stations, YouTube shows, and podcasts will all turn to Substack to find informed and opinionated writers to book for their programs. More and more, politicians and interest groups will look to Substack writers to help make their case for their policies and positions.”

Both of those marketing ploys are undercut by the co-founders’ willingness not only to accommodate but to promote writers with a history of making inflammatory racist comments. In June, McKenzie hosted the Substack writer Richard Hanania on the platform’s flagship podcast, The Active Voice. On Twitter the previous month, Hanania, a political scientist with a law degree from the University of Chicago, had described Black people as “animals” who should be subject to “more policing, incarceration, and surveillance.”

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Soon after Hanania’s appearance on the podcast, HuffPost outed him as having written under a pen name in the early 2010s for several white-nationalist outlets, including Richard Spencer’s AlternativeRight.com. In some of his older posts, Hanania called for the forced sterilization of those with “low IQ”—a group that he argued included most Black and Latino people. Hanania responded to the exposé with a Substack post in which he disavowed his past views, but in terms that raised significant doubts about his sincerity. “The reason I’m the target of a cancellation effort,” he declared in the post, “is because left-wing journalists dislike anyone acknowledging statistical differences between races.”

Nevertheless, Chris Best, who is also Substack’s CEO, hailed Hanania’s non-apology as “an honest post on a difficult subject.” Within weeks, Substack was promoting Hanania yet again, trumpeting in one of its newsletters that his new book, The Origins of Woke—in which he calls for gutting the Civil Rights Act—“is in hot demand from reviewers,” and providing a link to preorder it. (One of those reviewers, writing for The Atlantic, observed: “Put plainly, Richard Hanania remains a white supremacist. A real one.”)

In McKenzie’s recent post about “leaning into politics,” the Substack co-founder enthusiastically and prominently recommended a lesser-known Substacker, Darryl Cooper, as among the “up-and-comers” in political writing. Cooper’s podcast featured a complimentary interview with the white-nationalist magazine editor Greg Johnson—who, incidentally, published some of Hanania’s pseudonymous, more explicitly racist writings. Cooper has also used his personal Twitter account to claim that “FDR chose the wrong side in WW2.” (That tweet and the interview with Johnson were subsequently deleted.)

What should Substack do with the writers who are using it to spread Nazi ideas? Experts on extremist communication, such Whitney Phillips, the University of Oregon journalism professor, caution that simply banning hate groups from a platform—even if sometimes necessary from a business standpoint—can end up redounding to the extremists’ benefit by making them seem like victims of an overweening censorship regime. “It feeds into this narrative of liberal censorship of conservatives,” Phillips told me, “even if the views in question are really extreme.”

Yet, as she also noted, Substack isn’t just making decisions about whether to take posts down; it also has the choice of which writers to promote. “There’s a big difference between a platform hosting content and then maybe not co-signing what they’re saying, but giving them a microphone in an institutionally approved way: ‘I am inviting you onto my podcast and I’m going to let you speak.’”

The problem, Phillips said, is not that stumbling onto Nazi newsletters will magically turn anyone who reads them into a National Socialist. “The thing that is particularly concerning is, how is it going to take an already intense thinker about Nazi ideas and give them more of a community, more of a sense of belonging, more of a reinforcement of those beliefs, rather than creating the beliefs out of nowhere?”

The question is what kind of community Substack is actually cultivating. How long will writers such as Bari Weiss, Patti Smith, and George Saunders—and, for that matter, me—be willing to stake our reputations on, and share a cut of our revenue with, a company that can’t decide if Nazi blogs count as hate speech?

This article has been updated to clarify that the extent to which Patrick Casey’s Substack presence has contributed to his livelihood is uncertain, and that two sentences quoted from one of his Substack posts do not appear consecutively.