On Substack's Alleged "Nazi problem"

Recently, you’ve no doubt seen some posts from a group of writers called Substackers Against Nazis(SAN for short) railing against an infestation of Nazis on this site. There’s just one problem with that—if there is an infestation of Nazis they are incredibly difficult to find.

I have run into a few(meaning less than five) genuine Nazis on Substack, though it is perhaps more accurate to say that they ran into me. They seem to think that my handle, Ohio Barbarian, and my avatar, a fleet of Viking longships, means I’m a kindred spirit. I suppose I can’t blame them too much for that, as many liberals jump to the same conclusion.

I’m a native Texan who left for Colorado after 25 years because the place had literally become too hot for me in the 1980s. Yes, climate change is definitely a thing. I lived in Colorado, with a stint in the Navy, for 20 years. I moved to Ohio because my wife had family here, it has a climate I like far better than Texas, Colorado, or San Diego where I was once stationed, it has trees which I love, lots of Midwest Nice people, a wondrous variety of food, and because I could finally afford to buy a house here(I was in my 50s and had rented for my entire adult life).

A native Texan cursing like a sailor with an attitude comes across as a bit of a barbarian in Ohio, hence the handle. The longships go with the handle, I do have Viking ancestry, and being a sailor I appreciate well-designed ships. And the beast heads on the prows are just cool. Neither my handle nor my avatar have anything to do with my anti-authoritarian Marxist ideology, except maybe in the way I critique capitalism, imperialism, and their apologists.

The few Nazis, one was named Spengler and has been mention by the SAN a few times, replied to some of my posts critical of the genocidal maniacs in Jerusalem and Washington on the assumption that I was an anti-Semitic white supremacist just like them.

Oops. They quickly discovered their imagined ally was a Marxist coming from a well-armed Texan family with a motto that Nazis are only good for killing, and either left me alone on their own or were eventually blocked. The experience was more amusing than anything else. I was certainly never threatened by any of those folks.

Meanwhile, SAN is now whining in an increasingly irritating pitch that the Substack leadership is ignoring them, is refusing to discuss a topic that is so emotionally important to them they could just burst. Kind of like my stepson screeching at his mother that he needed a toy she could not afford when he was 9, and needed it now.

Personally, I think the Substack leadership is responding to these calls for censorship and ignoring the First Amendment in exactly the right way—to ignore them. It’s a very Zen way of demonstrating the leadership knows damned well there is no Nazi problem on Substack; just a few pathetic trolls here and there.

A far bigger problem is writers from US Empire establishment places like The Atlantic and The New Yorker coming in trying to scare Substack writers into letting establishment gatekeepers censor everyone here like they do on Facebook and still try to do on Twitter or X or whatever the fuck it’s called now.

Fortunately, “bigger” is a relative term. There are far more people calling for Substack to censor whoever they label as purveyors of hate speech, an ill-defined and dangerous authoritarian tool if there ever was one, than there are actual Nazis.

Meaning there are more than five people in this SAN group calling for our First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and of expression to be abridged. Congratulations, SAN! You outnumber the Nazis here! Whoo-effin’-hoo!

No, the real threat to Substack is from the establishment shills trying to spread their authoritarian web of censorship, not from Nazis, and the response from most Substack writers to that threat has been wonderful and inspiring.

Writer after writer, be they conservative, libertarian, liberation theology, Marxist, anarchist, or just plain poets and musicians, have spoken out strongly in support of free speech and for Substack’s freewheeling environment. Journalists like Matt Taibbi have greeted the first forays of sanctimonious and high-strung authoritarian imposers of oligarchy and conformity with a withering fire.

To use a medical analogy with which we should all be familiar by now, Substack has an immune system of independent, ornery, and stubborn free spirits who are swarming to the site of authoritarian infection, isolating and rendering it harmless. IOW, this place has a sort of herd immunity to censorship already.

All the Substack ownership should have to do is sit back and watch their own members preserve this place, and sooner rather than later the SAN people who are crying the loudest now will write their Good Bye Cruel World posts and exit stage right to a chorus of catcalls and “Don’t let the screen door hit your ass on the way out!”

Good job, my fellow Substack writers! I love you guys.