The Growth of the Nazi Bar lndustry [UPDATE-2]
2[NB: check the byline, thanks. Updates at the bottom of this post. /~Rayne]
“The purpose of a system is what it does.”
— Stafford Beer
The subject of this post — Substack — is described as an American online newsletter platform. One might think it was social media and digital publishing, combined.
Launched eight years ago, it has been funded by multiple rounds of venture capital, with another round raised just this last month. One might think its end game was a for-profit business which would eventually be sold or operate on its own.
But to paraphrase cybernetics consultant Stafford Beer, what this business is is what it does.
It is not a profit-making venture though the founders and operations would have us believe it’s not yet a for-profit business.
What Substack does includes “accidentally” pushing the message below to users’ phones this past week:
The platform offered a tepid apology.
Unfortunately this is lip service. The platform has been a publisher of far-right white supremacist, white nationalist, racist and antisemitic content – and literally Nazi content, as you can see from the screenshot above – from its inception.
It has refused to remove this hateful content in spite of being asked repeatedly to do so.
It has argued they must permit this hateful content, according to this Dec 21, 2023 note by co-founder and chief writing officer Hamish McKenzie:
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.
As if legitimizing Nazi material by publishing and pushing it doesn’t make it worse.
~ ~ ~
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
— William of Ockham
Perhaps you recognize this as Occam’s Razor, contemporarily restated, “The simplest answer is often the best one.”
What is Substack?
If a system is what it does, it’s a Nazi publisher and promoter.
What if there are more answers to this question? Occam’s Razor tells us the simplest answer is the same: Substack is a Nazi publisher and promoter.
It defends keeping hateful fascist content on its site even as it moderates and bars other content prohibited by its terms of service, including that by sex workers.
It’s sought additional funding it has received to continue its operations publishing Nazi content.
Its funders have no problem with the business model relying on publishing Nazi content.
Substack is a Nazi publisher and promoter. It’s that simple.
~ ~ ~
This thou must always bear in mind, what is the nature of the whole, and what is my nature, and how this is related to that, and what kind of a part it is of what kind of a whole; and that there is no one who hinders thee from always doing and saying the things which are according to the nature of which thou art a part.
— Marcus Aurelius
What are the other newsletters hosted by Substack to this whole?
250 of them complained in December 2023 about the Nazi content. While a few notable members did leave, most of the 250 complainants didn’t leave en masse after McKenzie’s response.
More members have complained since the Nazi promotion message was “accidentally” sent to some users this past week. A. R. Moxon wrote about the complaints on his own column, The Reframe.*
Another tepid but actionless apology from Substack and no mass exodus of unhappy members ensued.
Substack’s non-Nazi members are part of this ecosystem. They’ve become bartenders at the Nazi bar who may not like the pub’s theme or some of its clientele, but they continue to serve the Nazis.
Ana Marie Cox wrote this past week about Substack’s business model, noting that the financing trend isn’t all that. Do read her post dated August 1 because there are tidbits within the numbers that are disquieting.
For example: one Substack funder is anti-ESG, a perspective aligned with Project 2025 (Cox notes this VC firm also employs Donnie Jr.). They threw in their capital in spite of the known Nazi problem. It’s not a pretty picture.
Particular disturbing are the discussions between Substack and the Washington Post that Cox discusses, that may lead to WaPo moving some writers to Substack’s platform. Cox worries about even more journalists being stuck in a trap they can’t escape while that trap moves toward enshittification a la defunct Twitter-now-X.
The challenge may be bigger than the journalists who fled to the trap or the journalists forced into the trap by their employer.
If a big fish like Elon Musk with enough money and fascist ideology decided to purchase Substack, it’d be bad enough that so many US journalists would be yet again working in a Nazi bar.
Worse, if the negotiations with the Washington Post are successful and WaPo moves some of its writers to a newsletter model at Substack, WaPo itself becomes a Nazi bar client, its employees published in a Nazi-adjacent platform.
Searches for WaPo writers’ work would be discoverable right alongside Nazis’ eliminationist rhetoric, legitimizing the Nazi content as on par with their work.
Nazis and the fascists who are okay with them will have co-opted one of the largest newspapers in the U.S. — a massive expansion of the Nazi bar industry.
Not mention other challenges like Substack harvesting personal data of newsletter subscribers. Adding WaPo subscribers to that data would be terrifying.
~ ~ ~
It doesn’t have to be this way. There are hundreds of very smart people who are unhappy with Nazi adjacency, who could organize and create their own platform. It wouldn’t take much at all.
Ask Casey Newton of Platformer who left Substack. Ask Molly White of Citation Needed who’s done all the number crunching and outlined the existing alternatives to Substack.
Or look for models to other sites that have never needed Substack, sites that have their own newsletters, like Mike Masnick‘s Techdirt.
Or emptywheel.
____
* Edit: Moxon’s site is not on Substack any longer. See his post regarding his migration to Ghost at this Techdirt link.
____
UPDATE-1 — 10:00 PM ET —
Mike Masnick posted this on Bluesky:
Techdirt @techdirt.com
Substack’s Algorithm Accidentally Reveals What We Already Knew: It’s The Nazi Bar Now Back in April 2023, when Substack CEO Chris Best refused to answer basic questions about whether his platform would allow racist content, I noted that his evasiveness was essentially hanging out a “Nazis Welcome”…
Go read the post at Techdirt, and then consider how toxic this is to every single writer on Substack who is anti-Nazi.
Consider what it would do to WaPo’s readers if WaPo actually agreed to home some of their writers at Substack.
The purpose of Substack’s algorithm is what it does.
_____
UPDATE-2 — 10:20 AM ET — 05-AUG-2025 —
I knew Molly White had done a more detailed analysis of the comparative costs between newsletter services but I had forgotten I read it last year in social media and not at her site. Here’s the breakdown as posted at Bluesky:
This was excerpted from a short thread at this Bluesky link.
You can see Substack wants the big volume newsletters because they make more on them…but ask yourself what purpose the smaller volume newsletters serve if they aren’t as profitable?
A REMINDER to all new and existing community members participating in comments:
— We moved to a new minimum standard to support community security over the last year. Usernames should be unique and a minimum of 8 letters.
— We do not require a valid, working email, but you must use the same email address each time you publish a comment here. **Single use disposable email addresses do not meet this standard.**
— If you have been commenting here but have less than 1000 comments published and been participating less than 10 years as of October 2022, you must update your username to match the new standard.
Thank you.
I subscribe to the Abortion, Every Day substack by Jessica Valenti, which is a pro-choice publication. I think that substack provides a way for a niche, focused newsletter like that to have a platform – and it’s probably much easier than making a website like Emptywheel
[Welcome back to emptywheel. Please use the SAME USERNAME and email address each time you comment so that community members get to know you. You attempted to publish this comment as “Windmill” triggering auto-moderation; it has been edited to reflect your established username. Please check your browser’s cache and autofill; future comments may not publish if username does not match. /~Rayne]
First, thanks for letting us know Jessica Valenti is apparently okay with the Nazi bar because she’s still there.
Second, thanks for offering an example of the problem with users who make up new usernames instead of using their established names.
Third, it takes about an hour using templates to set up a customized website in WordPress. That’s it. I don’t buy the excuses because I’ve made more websites and blogsites than I have purses and it’s just not that tough. What’s tough is getting a spine.
lol you deleted my previous reply, good to know that Emptywheel requires a very specific echo chamber now
[Moderator’s note: Complaints about moderation get deleted. You also claim you’re a long-time lurker – you should know how this site operates. /~Rayne]
Every site has rules. You break them here, you get punished in some way. It’s not you-personally, unless you want to make it so.
And it’s not that I disagree with your article overall – I just think it’s worth considering that there are still progressive writers on substack
It’s been twenty fucking months since 250 Substackers wrote a letter to the founders and they were blown off. Two more years of Nazi content they’ve willing allowed their subscribers to be exposed to, two years for the algorithm to harvest them.
There are no viable excuses, especially when Molly White and several others have laid out all the details about how to leave. Not even Taylor Lorenz’ whining about LGBTQ+ Substackers flies when many LGBTQ+ folks left Twitter to go to Xitter to escape hateful elimininationist rhetoric.
The fact that there are indeed “still progressive writers on substack” was the driving force behind the whole post to me. This post was one in an ongoing series of posts over time by (at least) Rayne and Marcy underscoring and rehighlighting the fascist-favorable underpinnings of the site, its monetization model, and more.
And yes, it provides useful features. But it is far from alone in that regard and that is all the more reason to underscore its willingness to monetize evil agitprop in ways that its comparably feature-rich competitors do not. Valenti should move to Ghost (or another leading Substack competitor). So should The Bulwark (whatever one thinks of them). So should many others.
Imagine an ostensibly free-range, organic farm that in fact abuses its animals. Your moral position on said farm shouldn’t have a damn thing to do with the number of warm/fuzzy patrons oblivious to the underlying reality. Indeed, your view should compel you to cast light on the truth and compel folks to shop elsewhere. Substack is just such a farm, in a land where other, better farms are readily accessible.
Good grief, Terry Gross snubbed this David Mamet guy and it led him to be radicalized?!
https://bsky.app/profile/coreyatad.com/post/3lvle2jeqxc2x
If that’s all it takes, Mamet didn’t exactly have a firm set of personal ethics to begin with. How convenient, though, to blame one’s personal weakness on an NPR talk show host.
My friend whose wife Mamet had an affair with would agree that Mamet has little to no personal ethics.
Sounds juicy.
Can we blackmail him for a few million with proceeds to save NPR?
Terry Gross hosts “Fresh Air” an interview format; whereas “All Things Considered” is a deeper-diving news format.
Dude said he had Terry Gross to his house and considered her a friend (I’m sure he means ally), but received a form letter when he sent her his book, declining to interview him, motivating his turn to conservatism.
Dude sounds like every aggrieved MAGAt in Fox News comments section: “A liberal hurt my feelings/made fun of me and I want revenge.” (Also sounds like the sexual deviant and felon in the White House).
If that was this guy’s rationale, he and Terry Gross were never even acquaintances, let alone friends. The guy’s a nebbish and a snowflake, trying to pin his radicalism on the behavior of a well-known personality, something he will never be.
This sounds like kind of a “Trump would be a progressive, if Rosie O’Donnell hadn’t denied him a friend request on Facebook” thing.
He got radicalized a lot earlier than his Gross interview. In perusing his WP entry, he wrote an essay for the Village Voice in 2008 entitled “Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal” and has been a member of the formerly liberal, and definitely “anti-woke” crowd since then. He endorsed Mitt Romney in 2012. Also being “strongly pro-Israel” has undoubtedly pushed him to have rather narrow views as to the definition of “anti-semitism” that the Trump admin is now using rather cynically against universities these days…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Mamet
“…no longer a brain-dead liberal”?!?
Has this guy ever read Fox News comments section?!? Sheesh. Liberals ponder nuance; whereas MAGAts can’t even spell the word, let alone understand its meaning.
Beyond the deeply unsettling ethical considerations, this is a special brand of stupid. In the Nazi bar analogy, the Nazis at least appear to still need the bartender to keep on bartending. Most interpretations of National Socialism argue that all media must be under at least a subservient organization if not directly a government organization. I have never heard of any branch that unequivocally supports grassroots publishing. Mr. McKenzie would find himself jobless. At BEST.
MAGAts conflate Democratic Socialism with communism and nazism and intertwine the three philosophies. Fox News capitalizes on this ignorance when discussing NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.
The 1930s German Nazi Party promoted nationalism to its working class, broke the trade union movement, and handed the economy over to German capitalist monopolies – akin to what Trump and the Republican SCOTUS members are doing to America today.
Many Germans at the time, particularly right wing Germans, associated their values with a Bismarkian right wing policy that had been called “Socialism,” in the sense that state provided goods and services. To take political advantage of this feeling, the NSDAP named itself “National Socialist.” The NSDAP did not hope for the abolition of capitalism, nor for workers’ control as socialism would dictate.
The fact that 1930s Germany used corporate capitalism as an economic engine clearly is indicative of right wing political thought.
Nazism and Fascism are a pro vertical structure – that there are those on top, and those on bottom, and this is the desirable state of its society. In this sense, Nazi Germany was absolutely 100% pro-hierarchy in that it saw a certain group of people as superior – very much how MAGAts and Trump view America today.
Left wing politics are those associated with equality – a horizontal structure – an idea of which MAGAts, Donald Trump and Fox News find abhorrent.
Not to quibble, but while the Nazis proclaimed some were superior, the real psychological energy was the opposite, i.e., they took that thought as a license to look down upon, castigate and kill those they though inferior. I’ve always thought it a sort of mis-description to say Nazis believed some were superior because the whole point for those who buy into the ideology is to look down, not up, not to admire, but to hate.
I view this phenomena as looking down on someone stemming from a deliberate self-decided superior perspective of one’s self vs others? “I am better than you because of x, y, and z.”
So here is the question- was it more the ability of AH to manipulate and influence people to obscene ideologies, or was the problem the economic turmoil in Germany post WW I with insane inflation followed by the global depression of 1929 which exposed the weaknesses of the Weimar Republic and of Germans to be manipulated. Of course the intersection of both is what happened.
You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught from year to year,
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear—
You’ve got to be carefully taught!
Oscar Hammerstein II
I like to remind MAGAs that they and Trump are socialists. Trump handed out covid checks and they never repaid them.
OT: Montana Man and Tennessee Man killed 8 white people. Both killers are white. Cincinnatti “brawlers” are Black and killed no one. Guess which story Fox and MAGA are more “concerned” about?
C’mon Matt. That question is like shooting fish in a barrel…the Cincinnatti one of course!
A.R. Moxon is not only not on substack anymore, he has written about how to leave it. At TechDirt:
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/04/11/a-newsletter-writer-reflects-on-leaving-substack/
[Welcome to emptywheel. Please choose and use a unique username with a minimum of 8 letters. We adopted this minimum standard to support community security. Because your username is too short and common, your username will be temporarily changed to match the date/time of your first known comment until you have a new compliant username. /~Rayne]
I’ve added that Techdirt link to the post above. Thanks.
Rayne,
Thank you so much for this post. I will be leaving substack as a result. Facebook, Shitter, and now substack’s support for Nazi’s is unacceptable to me.
Thank you,
Peace,
Yogarhythms and family
Let us know how the migration goes. Hope it’s smooth. *fingers crossed*
thank you Rayne for continuing for years to call out the Substack toxicity and dysfunction.
You have saved me countless hours of searching thru the silos there to find if I should be harvesting reading and knowledge there.
just when I had time for more deeper reading on current events and ideas your sharp rebuke of the unsustainable and devious nature of Sbstk reminded me to keep all my readings minimal and sustainable
i have always loved small blogs and respected those who truly lived up to the immense potential for spiritual and informational and creative fruit and sustenance.
and thanks for your labors here on this blog, you offer Marcy and us readers the site assistance we need.
I can’t even fathom of a more vital and fruitful blog or publication than EW in this current moment of cultural distress and evolution.
It looks like they selectively enforce their Content Guidelines, or have an abnormal definition of Hate.
Hate
Substack cannot be used to publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes. Offending behavior includes credible threats of physical harm to people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability or medical condition.
Nudity, porn, erotica
We don’t allow porn or sexually exploitative content on Substack, including any visual depictions of sexual acts for the sole purpose of sexual gratification. We do allow depictions of nudity for artistic, journalistic, or related purposes, as well as erotic literature, however, we have a strict no nudity policy for profile images. We may hide or remove explicit content from Substack’s discovery features, including search and on Substack.
Since I’m more of a most all speech (event hate speech) is protected speech person, I more bothered by their unequal treatment of nudity, porn, erotica. We are all equally able to decide, based on individual values, if Substack is a place to patronize or boycott. Calling-out those who publish on Substack may help them to consider their values and make their decisions.
Advocating elimination of groups of people should be a hard pass and yet it’s not at Substack.
I’m going to send a link to this to Heather Cox Richardson who is anything but a Nazi or Nazi adjacent. I don’t go to Substack to get her “Letters From An American” (sent to me via email), but I know she has a Substack presence. I’m just a nobody as far as she’s concerned, but if she reads it, maybe it will convince her to move.
Don’t be surprised if you get blown off. Substack folks with left of center ideologies are frequently asked to leave Substack and they just don’t.
They are literally feeding the fascist VCs like a16z that fund attacks against human rights. Worse, they expose their subscribers to these fascists.
It’s not uncommon for her to cite Emptywheel in the Notes section below her letter if something relevant from here comes to her attention. She’s certainly aware of the existence of this blog…
I canceled my Substack subscription to The Bulwark. I wrote the following in the comments section of one of the posts: “Substack is a Nazi bar. I canceled my subscription.” My comment was then promptly removed. Figures.
I’m not worried about The Bulwark. They identify as conservatives or Never Trump Republicans.
I’m more worried about voters left-of-center who pay too much attention to The Bulwark when it comes to their criticisms of the Democratic Party and the left. They make all kinds of bullshit statements about why Democrats didn’t win in 2024 and yet they have lost what was their own base, their own party for three terms in a row. Not exactly proof they know what they’re talking about. Democrats shouldn’t heed their electoral advice.
I cannot stomach that 10% of my subscription is going to Substack – I believe that is the business model. I agree with you about The Bulwark, they have a wide spectrum of pundits, most of whom (e.g., Mona Charen, Bill Kristol) are quite conservative. Their base is gone.
Their base is gone, they’re not winning them back, and yet their pontificating about how to win elections and what Democrats are doing wrong actively undermines Democrats because it insists Democrats do what old school Republicans want and that didn’t win their own base and it turns off yellow dog Democrats who don’t want old school Republican-lite.
They want to try to reach the Nazis, they can knock themselves out, but they’re doing it from a barstool inside a Nazi bar.
LNDUSTRY?
Thank you Rayne. I will pass this on. I REALLY don’t like Nazis, Or Klansmen, Or Jihadis; which I normally find infested in left wing sites and comment sections. Horseshoe theory just gets proven and proven again in my life.
When I see a tweet that leads to a substack article by someone I respect I read it. I didn’t, probably like most people, have any idea that this is what was going on because I don’t spend any time on far right stacks and there’s just an overwhelming amount of stuff to keep up with and substack wasn’t one of them. I’m guessing writers are just trying to make a buck and this works for them.
Trying not to live my life in a state of perpetual outrage gets harder all the time.
Thanks again.
Tennessee armory thefts are being investigated by the Pentagon’s Office of Provost General and the FBI. Isn’t that like having the Mafia look into organized crime?