Part of being kind is being mean to fascists

Brace yourself, I'm about to make a strong statement. You do not have to tolerate Nazis.

You've probably heard that Nazi bar allegory. The one where, you go to a bar on a regular basis and one day there's just one Nazi. And the bar lets him stay because, what's one Nazi? We don't want to be rude. And eventually that Nazi brings a friend. And then a few more. Until other patrons start to feel unsafe and stop coming. And before you know it, you aren't a bar with a Nazi. You're a Nazi bar.

Everywhere is like this, in real life and online. What you tolerate and how you conduct the space sends a signal for what (and who) is allowed. And any boundary-pushing can only expand the margins of possibility.

It's a longer topic for another day, but the company you keep influences the thoughts and experiences you have, and the connections you're able to forge in your lifetime. Those are well worth guarding, because the communities we create influence our broader society as well as ourselves. It's hard to live in alignment with your values when you surround yourself with people who regularly violate them and push the boundaries of them.

And it's easy, when the boundaries and edges of your values are constantly violated, to eventually yield some space. To eventually take for granted that perhaps we must simply tolerate intolerable behaviors. That perhaps hate, racism, sexism, and the like are just "natural" parts of our social environment that we need to learn to live alongside.

It's a big topic, but I want to talk about Substack as an example. I wrote about this briefly when I set up this very site on Ghost a few months ago, but it's worth exploring in slightly more depth, with slightly more length.

Substack's Nazi problem

Substack, at first glance, seems like the obvious choice if you're trying to write long-form content right now. Everyone has one, the terms is synonymous with the substance. Notice that no one really uses the word "blog" anymore—somehow that seems less serious and refined. Oh, you blog? What, you're still using WordPress in 2026? Gross.

ANYWAY. Despite everyone jumping on the Substack bandwagon, there are serious reasons to pause. At the top of the list for me personally (and many others), is the platform's unrepentant sponsoring of Nazi, white supremacist, and far right content. As early as 2021, users noted that the platform was pushing and promoting far-right and white supremacist content, and many creators expressed their dissent in a letter to Substack leadership. At the time, the concern mainly emphasized how the platform was allowing the far right to build connections and distribution lists. Despite claiming to remove "some" Nazi publications in the intervening years, the platform's more recent overt promotion of newsletters featuring Nazi content has made the concern even more acute.

It's part of the structure of Substack, after all, and part of its appeal to creators: you can write whatever you want, and there's a built in "discovery" mechanism where the platform will recommend your writing to others so that you don't have to do all the work of self-promotion. Similar to algorithmically driven feeds on Meta platforms or on the artist formerly known as Twitter, this feature is designed to attract up-and-comers in the writing creation space with the promise of putting their work in front of eyeballs that they might not otherwise attract without big media by-lines or a book deal under their belt.

That's where the rub came in: some creators absolutely could not tolerate the idea that their work might be promoted alongside Nazi content or white supremacist materials. Substack responded in a very "ye olde internet" way, appealing to principles of free speech and a desire not to interfere with everyone's capacity to express themselves without moderation. From co-founder Hamish McKenzie in 2023:

I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse. We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power. We are committed to upholding and protecting freedom of expression, even when it hurts.

It's worth noting, though, that Substack isn't a free public sphere, it's a monetized platform. When you have a lot of subscribers, and any of them pay, Substack takes a cut (and a pretty hefty one at that). The promise to promote your content to drive up your number of subscribers increases your revenue as well as theirs in a pretty classic flywheel.

What's a creator to do?

I mentioned on Instagram that a creator whose work I've benefitted from recently talked about her experience with Substack as well. She had left the platform and then rejoined, and posted a video to her Youtube channel about it. In that video, which she has since delisted, she claims that if you exist on the internet, Nazis are basically inescapable.* If you wanted to create places without Nazis, you would have to do it entirely alone, build your own website, etc. And who has the time and skills to do all of that? So we simply can't worry about that and should just keep creating our art and using whatever platforms are available, is the upshot.

Needless to say, I find this attitude disappointing and also completely wrong.

It's wrong on the facts: even if you needed to build your entire own platform and website, you do not need to "do it alone." In fact, part of the strength of operating within your own values and politics is finding other people who align, and who have skills that are complementary to yours, and working together to build things out of collaboration. You do not need to simply take what exists as a given. You do not need to simply accept the state of the world as it is.

It's also wrong on the principle: Nazis exist on the internet because we let them, and they exist out loud when we let them. No individual contributor on Substack is "letting" Nazis win in the same way that the founders, staff, and moderation team do: obviously the people who run the company hold greater responsibility for what is conducted in that space. Just in the same way that you individually refusing to buy clothes from Target or coffee from Starbucks is not going to make global capitalism fall, you choosing to write on Substack or not is not going to be determinative of whether they continue to platform white supremacists.

However.

The lack of imagination or vision or values that contribute to the idea that Nazis existing out loud in your spaces and communities is inevitable? That is on you. It might be way harder to swim upstream away from spaces and places that normalize fascism, but what are you saving your energy for if not that?

Speaking personally, I made the decision to move my writings from my Squarespace site to this site on Ghost, rather than Substack, for exactly this reason. And with a view toward the future. For those of us who watched the precipitous decline of Twitter into X, Substack's trajectory looks very similar. And we know how that went for X.

But it's also about who owns and represents who you are and what you do. It's beyond my personal comfort for a company to make money from me directly for cross-promoting my work alongside Nazis. There's always room for this to change, but to me in this moment, Ghost feels more like this: I went to the hardware store and bought a hammer. A Nazi went to the hardware store and bought a hammer. The hardware store made money from both those transactions and might report our sales alongside each other in an annual report, but the Nazi's business need not have anything to do with mine, and I'm welcome to take my hardware purchases elsewhere at any time.

I lay out that example in part because you might notice, uncomfortably, that other platforms like Facebook or Instagram, look a lot like how Substack looks. They induce some level of consumer capture by being the main or only game in town, they cross-promote your snapshots of life alongside the worst people and things you can imagine, they make money from mostly scams and fraud with you as the collateral damage.

I'm not of the camp that would argue for you quitting all things that have unsavory associations or could have negative downstream implications. I am also not a person who is going to award gold stars for Most Moral Human Person to everyone who eschews Target and Starbucks and Amazon and Whole Foods and Spotify and Walmart and and and.

Those decisions are between you and your conscience. And there is no such thing as moral perfection.

What I am going to do, though, is suggest that you do not at all have to tolerate Nazis. You do not have to participate in systems in which they exist. You do not have to accept that they are a natural part of your online or real life environment. Sink holes might naturally arise from pressure, force, and erosion, but you are under no obligation to drive directly into them and remain inside resigned to your fate.

It probably requires thinking harder, doing more research, being more intentional in your decisions, forging relationships with others, and not simply accepting the status quo. But my contention is that that work is worth the cost of your values and integrity.

~~~

* I just want to note that this video has been edited several times, both before and after it was delisted. You can still see someone raising the concern about Nazis in her comments. I don't know whether her beliefs about this have evolved since posting, but I'm using her initial comments as just one example of the way that many people discuss their existence on compromised social platforms.

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