Jonathan Katz’s “The Racket”

You may remember that Jonathan Katz played an important role in spotlighting not just Substack’s platforming of Nazis, but its active role in promoting the voices of crypto-white-nationalists.

Most of those involved in the letter protesting Substack’s policies have remained on the platform. Katz has not. He left Substack on January 12th. As he wrote at the time:

After New Year’s, the last straws fell. On Jan. 4, Platformer’s Casey Newtonentered the fray, telling his over one hundred thousand subscribers that, following their own review, he and his colleagues had presented Substack with a list of accounts that they believed violated an existing policy against inciting violence. The result was that Substack banned five Nazi sites—an apparent but welcome contradiction of their (evidence-free) stance that doing so would make the “problem worse.”

The trouble was what was going on behind the scenes. Facing criticism from one of their most respected and bestselling newsletters—Platformer was, as of this writing, the featured newsletter on Substack’s sample page on the App Store and Google Play—they freaked. They immediately leaked details from Netwon’s correspondence—conversations that Newton understood were off the record in both directions—to Public, a newsletter run by Michael Shellenberger, a climate change denier and reactionary culture-war ally known as one of the public faces of Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files.”

The point of the leak was to embarrass Netwon and undermine the anti-Nazi effort by making the problem seem trivially small. Casey had submitted six extremist websites his team considered the most iron-clad examples of Nazi ideology they could find. (It seems Platformer did not include, for instance, Richard Spencer’s co-edited blog or that of the “pro-White policy” front for a neo-Nazi organization I named in the Atlantic, both of which sport Substack bestseller badges indicating that they have between 100 and 1,000 paid subscribers each.)

Casey seems pissed, and with good reason. Selling out one of your best publications to a rival you consider friendlier to your interests—to defend a Nazi-tolerating policy, no less—is beyond gross. Substack holds reams of its writers’ and users’ sensitive private information, including home addresses, credit cards, and unpublished and paywalled drafts. If they’re willing to sell out a profitable newsletter that’s much-loved in their own industry, who wouldn’t they sell out if they saw some potential gain?

Finally, there was the competing open letter. The day before Kabas’ open letter dropped, a preemptive rebuttal appeared on the Substack of a writer named Elle Griffin, defending management’s stance. That letter was signed by some of Substack’s most profitable reactionary accounts, including Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi (who had noted in his newsletter weeks earlier that he was aware our letter was in the works). Darryl Cooper, a Substack podcaster with tens of thousands of paid subscribers who once tweeted that “FDR chose the wrong side in WW2,” signed it as well.

McKenzie repeatedly pointed journalists to the letter, offering it as organic proof that many Substackers agreed with the site’s policies. It wasn’t until Griffin went on a little-known Substack podcast this week that the truth came out: McKenzie had played a critical role in the pre-buttal, contacting Griffin after noticing a complimentary post on Substack Notes, encouraging her to expand it into a newsletter piece, and promising to “help [her] find people to sign it.”

Deplatforming works, especially in arenas where network-effects predominate. That’s why Musk’s decision to turn X into an unconstrained hive of white supremacism and disinformation is such a disaster. Meanwhile, “mainstream” journalists, democratic governments, and government officials stay because they don’t want to lose access to its readership. But by continued to post on the platform, they sustain X’s importance, and thus help further undermine liberal democracy.

My understanding is that Katz’s principled decision to leave Substack has gone exactly as one would expect. His subscriber count has declined and he’s lost income.

The Racket is a really excellent newsletter, one of the two or three that I pay to receive. I don’t always agree with Katz, but I always value his analysis. So I thought it would be a good idea to promote his newsletter at LGM.

If so inclined, you can subscribe to it here. Like most newsletters, there’s a free version that will help you decide if you want to pay for full access.