Follow-up to "Far-Right Extremists" (FRE) Letter
FRE, J.R.R Tolkien's Legendarium, and Me
The posts linked below are by some of the group of Substackers who originated and/or shared the “Substackers Against Nazis” letter which I posted on December 14.1 I use “far-right extremists” (FRE) instead of “Nazi” in my title there and here (and will be using in future posts) first, because I think it’s a useful umbrella term, and, second, because I think using the word “Nazi” provides too much cover for the growing range of far-right extremists. Relying on “Nazi” (or the “Ku Klux Klan [KKK]”) as a generic meaning for white supremacists (as opposed to identifying specific historical and/or contemporary groups) also ignores the extent to which mainstream conservatism is operating as a pipeline to white supremacy.
I posted, and will be posting more on this topic, on my Tolkien Substack because my recent scholarship requires it.2 During the past five years, I have been editing an anthology on racisms in Tolkien’s legendarium that refuses to defend “Tolkien” the human being from critical analysis of the racist as well as anti-racist elements in his work as well as also co-editing an anthology on Queer approaches to Tolkien’s legendarium that complicates and expands the range of Queer readings legendarium for the 21st century. I also have a project on atheist, agnostic, and animist readers of Tolkien’s legendarium next on my “to-do” list that I consider related to the anthologies because of my concern with a specific sub-set of Tolkien readers who attempt to claim that there is only one right/true/correct meaning of Tolkien’s work, and it’s “Christian.”3
All of these academic projects are related not only to the current socio-historical-political events in this country (and throughout the world), but also are driven by my experiences during the last sixty plus years. I was raised in small-town Idaho by parents who were “Goldwater Republicans.”4 I was nine when Barry Goldwater ran for president. I also remember the open support for the John Birch Society in Idaho. However, reading the intellectual and cultural histories of the political and religious coalitions of the last half of the 20th century from where I am now (2023!) is proving to be fascinating.5
The posts below differ in regard to the problem of Substack monetizing FREs, what potential solutions exist for that problem, and whether or not writers should stay on Substack or leave in protest. All are worth reading and thinking about. All emphasize the complications that exist.
My position at the moment is that I do not plan to leave Substack: I support those who decide to leave, as well as others who decide to stay, because there are good reasons for both. Please keep in mind that I am describing my thoughts not prescribing what others should do. Also, I may change my mind in future.
One reason I’m staying is (as Ken White/Popehat notes) that there are Nazis on the internet, and Substack is structured differently from other social media. But there are other reasons: I’m still learning how to work effectively here, and I don’t want to deal with finding another site and facing another learning curve only to find out a few years down the road that there are FREs there as well (see Popehat!).
There are a number of progressive writers here on Substack that I enjoy reading (some of them may leave, of course). In fact, I have found some of the books on FREs after following a link to their Substacks! One ethical problem the writers identify is not particularly applicable to me: a percentage of their paid subscriptions go to Substack which then uses the money to pay some of the big names to bring them to/keep them on the site. The payments have gone to some of the FREs. I don’t plan to set up paid subscriptions. I do have a couple of paid subscriptions, but very few (I read/follow a whole lot more than I could ever subscribe to).
After reading Marisa Kabas’s post on how easy it was to search/find white supremacist Substacks, I did a search for “Tolkien” on Substack. The Substack search function is crummy, but when I used Google (which has sold out and become “enshittified”) the first five results include Substacks by people I know and follow who are among the progressive Christians doing Tolkien scholarship (Tom Emmanuel, Nick Polk), but also two Substacks that have the warning signs of right-wing (if not far right) dogma (railing against the “Woke” and lamenting the loss of “Western Civilization”). I also found a new Tolkien Substack that focuses on memes, Jokien with Tolkien, which sounds like fun! And I plan to follow up with checking out some of the other Substacks with Tolkien content when I have a bit more free time.
So I’m here for the foreseeable future, and I will be posting a list of resources (a bibliography!) in future! I have been working on creating what Substack calls “Sections” which they assume are most important for Substacks that produce content in various media or have multiple contributors but which I’m using to identify posts on specific topics so people can easily find the posts on the topics they are most interested in reading!
Of course, because the program limits “section” identifications to only one section, I’m also working on creating an index that allows for a bit more granularity (so a post involving “Queer Theory” and “FREs” for example could be listed in both. That isn’t available yet but will be as soon as I can get all the posts listed.
Ken White, Popehat, “Substack Has a Nazi Opportunity”
Substack has Nazis, because of course it does. Substack is on the internet, Nazis are on the internet, and if Substack doesn’t want Nazis it has to take affirmative steps to get rid of them. Flies don’t stop coming into the house because you want them to; they stop because you get off the couch and close the screen door. Any social media or blogging platform faces this. Substack may attract more Nazis than average because Substack has a “okay you don’t agree with me now but what if I wrote another 8,000 words about it” vibe. 2023 Nazis have a very “I didn’t have this insight until I read The Fountainhead for the sixth time, let me elaborate” thing going. Say what you want about the 1939 Nazis, but at least they were occasionally terse.
. . . .
Substack’s also right that it’s built a platform that’s qualitatively different than many others. On Twitter, Nazis were constantly in my face, I had to painstakingly block them one by one, and the interface recommended that I follow them. Here I generally only encounter them if I look for them or, very occasionally, if one wanders into my comments for me to block. You can publish here and comment here and never encounter Nazis stuff here. With respect to my friend Mike Masnick, I think that makes it a bit less like his Nazi bar analogy and more like a Nazi-tolerant banquet hall. You can have your niece’s quinceañera or your parents’ 50th anniversary there and probably won’t feel much of an impact from the fact that they’re always booked solid on April 20 unless you think about it. Put another way, it’s more like selling your books or goods on Amazon if Amazon allowed lots of overtly Nazis stuff instead of just thinly veiled Nazi stuff.
So I am not inclined to denounce people who publish on Substack nor assert that fleeing Substack is the only moral choice. I think that reasonable minds can differ on the morality of renting a walled garden at an estate that also rents walled gardens to Nazis, especially when the other walled gardens on the market are all rife with their own problems. I think reasonable minds can differ on the ethos of creating a platform that makes a conscious decision not to moderate based on most content.
But that doesn’t mean I have to accept Substack’s attempt to convince me that its branding is about the good of humanity. It’s about money. Hamish McKenzie’s apologia for Substack’s approach is full of dubious (if common) arguments. Let’s address just a few.
. . . .
What will I do about it?
I haven’t decided. McKenzie’s apologia deeply annoys me because it treats me like I’m a moron. It’s the equivalent of yelling over the wall of my walled garden “don’t worry, those guys three gardens over really just like Hugo Boss, and also they have some points on tax policy.” There’s a difference between the ethos of “we’re a platform that’s decided not to make value judgments about offensive speech, if that’s okay with you, you’re welcome” and the ethos of “we’re a victim of cultural Marxism and we see that a lot of these guys are not that bad and we’re doing a service to humanity by platforming them and listen to their guest spot on my podcast.”
Johnathan M. Katz, The Racket, “The Social Network”
. . .there is no logical throughline from “open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power” to the need to ensure that “bad ideas” have unfettered access to funding—funding from which, again, both Substack’s investors and payments provider Stripe get a cut.
I get that he, like many others, have convinced themselves that letting literal Nazis disseminate their views as widely as possible on private platforms is not only a necessary condition of but the emblematic use case for free speech. This is, I should note, not even necessarily the case. Here’s a quote from journalism professor Whitney Phillips that ended up on the cutting room floor of my Atlantic piece:
So it is a choice if you’re saying: ‘I don't want to censor anybody. I really believe in free speech. So there’s going to be no rules, and we're just going to let everyone have an equal say and equal voice.’ That makes a bunch of weird assumptions that are just not true, that haven’t been borne out historically and aren’t borne out now, that every voice carries equally and that everybody is equally safe in the world … Certain people are more vulnerable to certain kinds of attacks and have very good reason for not wanting to engage when they think they’re going to get the shit kicked out of them just for opening their mouth.
In short, by welcoming Nazis onto your platform—and make no mistake, that is exactly what McKenzie is doing: “You are facilitating less speech overall, period.”
Marisa Kabas, The Handbasket, “We Got Substack to Admit its Nazi Problem”
The other day, I decided to do a quick test. I typed in “great replacement” in the Substack app search bar and looked through the results. The third return was titled “Cheering for White Extinction,” written by a man who bemoans in the second paragraph that he “never signed up to be a crusader for White rights. I don’t like sounding like a white nationalist, whatever that is. But someone has to do it.”
But the really troubling parts were in the hundreds of comments on the post. [REDACTED: examples of comments because they say just what you think they are saying].
Did I have to seek this person out, as some have argued as a defense of platforming Nazis? Yes. Was it hard? No. As Substack star Casey Newton recently wrote: “The correct number of newsletters using Nazi symbols that you host and profit from on your platform is zero.” And the number of clicks away from Nazi content should be zero. In this case, however, it was three.
As for my future on Substack: stay tuned. I ask that you stick with me here until I figure out what comes next, which I’m carefully considering along with many of my fellow Substackers Against Nazis. If you want to financially support my work without giving money to Substack, I accept payments via Venmo.
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? Have people most directly impacted by Nazis asked you to leave? Trans people asked folks to leave with us in 2021 & most people didn’t. But they’re willing to leave now when no one has explicitly made that ask.
Frankie de la Cretaz, Out of Your League, “trans people are always the canarie in the coal mine”
It’s been heartening to see the way so many Substack authors have gotten behind the push to interrogate whether it is conscionable to give white nationalists the tools to profit off their abhorrent beliefs. I have watched as people have had real discussions about whether remaining on Substack is a viable option if leadership doesn’t address these concerns.
And I’ll be honest—I feel a little bit ambivalent about the whole thing. Because of course Substack has a Nazi problem. It was always going to have a Nazi problem. Trans people could have told you that years ago.
When Marisa first posted a note on her feed expressing a desire to organize Substack authors to take action against the platform’s Nazi problem, there was never a doubt in my mind that I wanted to be involved. I emailed her and said as much. But I also said that I did not have much hope that the founders would take any meaningful action. After all, I was here in 2021 for the “trans stuff.” It’s the reason I left the platform for two years.
Those [problematic] bylines themselves are not the problem. Self-publishing platforms can’t control who signs up. Substack isn’t [just] a self-publishing platform, though. It curates its writers. It pays them, sometimes massively, and it makes choices as to who gets paid well and who doesn’t. We’ve seen instances of tech companies allowing hate group leaders to acquire huge followings through negligence, from white supremacist YouTube stars to a President who has to be banned from Twitter for trying to start a civil war, but those were cases where the platforms failed to keep bigots out. Substack is actively bringing the bigots in. Then it’s giving them paychecks.
Most of the posts are by writers whose Substacks I already subscribe to, but I added Cretaz because one of the others quoted and linked to their Substack.
Terminology is important in this sort of work: see this interview by Alexandra Minna Sterns, “Understanding Contemporary White Nationalism: Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate.” Her work involves analyzing how white nationalist groups have been attacking popular culture, media, etc.
And the question with that approach is first, their claim that the only “right” reading of “Tolkien is whatever the author determines to be “Christianity” (and a number of the academics writing this sort of scholarship in the U.S. are more tied to evangelical traditions than to Catholicism which, given the anti-Catholic bigotry that was so strong in this country for decades, is ironic); and, second, the extent that position overlaps with Christian nationalism and or dominion theology which are another branch of far-right extremism that exists in opposition to progressive Christian theologies. See my “Culture Warrior” paper on the Journal of Tolkien Research, and my “Queer, Feminist, Atheist, Autist Response to Don Williams” on Mythlore for examples of my work on this issue.
For anyone wondering how I ended up the progressive killjoy type I have been working on becoming for about fifty years (it’s a process!), a few of the radicalizing events in my life are: my early exposure to Tolkien (at age 10); reading Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed” a few years later (and going on to read everything she ever wrote multiple times); and the horrible responses of people in my hometown to the Kent State Massacre. These responses to the murders (from the adults talking around me and in the local newspaper Letters column when I was fifteen and still being told “children should be seen and not heard”) were generally, “those kids are commies and deserved it,” “should kill more of them,” “shut down the commie universities,” etc. etc. etc. The same fascist rhetoric is coming from a number of GOP state politicians these days.
I am drafting a post on the books I’ve read/am reading on various aspects of the FRE movements although some of them are listed in the Multi-Disciplinary Critical Race Scholarship section of the Racisms and Tolkien Bibliography