The thing about freedom of speech is — it’s the government that’s required to permit unpopular speech. Not private individuals.
If you show up at the local borough council meeting and decide to unlimber your opinions during the “public comment” session, go nuts. The government can’t stop you. And I’m sure the South Park Township commissioners will be delighted to hear about how the squirrels in your backyard are actually secret agents sent by George Soros to inject you with COVID vaccines.
But if you show up on my front porch and decide to harangue me about how Hunter Biden is fluoridating your underpants, I’m going to turn the hose on you.
Same thing if you show up at my place of business. Sir, this is an Arby’s, and we are not required to let you make a speech. Take your horsey sauce and get off of the premises.
This brings me to Substack, the newsletter and blogging distribution platform.
Three weeks ago, in an article titled “Substack Has a Nazi Problem,” The Atlantic reported on how Substack is hosting an increasing number of openly white nationalist publications — some of which have literal Third Reich imagery in their graphics, and which openly advocate for jailing the LGBTQ community, ejecting Jews from public life, and stopping all legal immigration. (I looked for myself, and afterward felt the need to delete my browser history and bleach my eyes.)
Techdirt’s Mike Masnick had reported on the same issue back in April.
Last week, a group of prominent writers and publishers who distribute their own work using Substack called on the company to stop handing a megaphone to literal Nazis.
After several days of silence, Substack’s co-founder, Hamish McKenzie, has finally answered with (sustained wet fart noise):
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.
“Even when it hurts.”
Let me give you a tip: It hurts people who have brown skin, or who aren’t straight white males.
It does not hurt people who look like Hamish McKenzie:
Deciding you don’t want people smearing feces all over your walls isn’t censorship. It’s maintaining a minimum standard. Deciding you don’t want Nazis using your service to advocate for genocide isn’t censorship. It’s having a sense of right and wrong.
You know what I call people who publish Nazis? Nazis.
It’s what’s sometimes referred to as the “Nazi Bar Problem.” The description comes from an anecdote Michael B. Tager told on Twitter about a guy who’s drinking in a grubby little bar when a man comes in decorated with swastikas and iron crosses and asks for a drink.
The bartender throws him out on his butt. When the guy at the bar asks, “Why did you do that?” the bartender says, “You have to nip it in the bud immediately.
“These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one,” the bartender says. “And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
“And then they bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a problem. So you have to shut them down.”
The government is required to permit freedom of speech. Private organizations are not. Unless they want their organization to turn into a Nazi bar.
As Masnick wrote: “Running a Nazi bar is not winning any free speech awards. It’s not standing up for free speech. It’s building your own brand as the Nazi bar and abdicating your own free speech rights of association to kick Nazis out of your private property, and to craft a different kind of community. Let the Nazis build their own bar, or everyone will just assume you’re a Nazi too.”
I just deleted my Substack account. I will miss the handful of creators I followed there, but I’m not sending a single penny to a company that platforms literal Nazis and then tells me “it’s free speech.”
If the private organization you run will not take a stand against Nazis — which is literally the lowest of all possible bars! — you are, yourself, a fascist, or at least lacking any sense of decency.
This is a tough one. Many people fled Twitter when Musk bought it cuz they knew the MAGA-verse would be back. And they are. But it hasn’t become MAGA centric. Leaving a platform doesn’t help brown skinned people or non straight white males. It makes the person who leaves feel better.
It would be a better plan to encourage those who oppose the Nazi view to join that platform in droves. Take over the bar. Ensure it doesn’t become a Nazi bar by shouting them down. Just a thought
Twitter has not only become MAGA land but also bot and bitcoin land. Musk has replatformed Alex Jones, a despicable greedy asshole who sold boner pills while lying about dead school children.
Let the Nazis go there.