Dear SAN: Did You Even Read It?
"Substackers Against Nazis" goes hard with... copy pasta?
Good evening, friends.
As many of you are aware the latest salvo in the battle to censor Substack has been fired. The so-called “Substackers Against Nazis” have been spreading a “collective letter” in an attempt to pressure Substack to remove distasteful authors and their content.
We here at The Partisan take a maximal free speech stance and wholeheartedly condemn this blatant mob assault not just on the platform we all share, but on the liberty of every person who uses it not just now but in the future.
You are attacking us and we will not suffer it.
Make no mistake, we know this isn’t about speech. This isn’t about civility. This is about power. Your power.
For those just joining us on the show, the instigating piece by Jonathan Katz in The Atlantic underlying this new assault has been widely criticized and discredited. I’ll leave Matt Taibbi’s takedown here as the penultimate example.
With censorship, it’s always about who gets the power to evaluate, not what’s being censored. The choice isn’t between getting rid of a few obvious Nazis, or not. It’s between giving someone like Jonathan Katz, or a bunch of Jonathan Katzes, sweeping power over content or not. Americans have always understood the second danger to be scarier, for good reason.
And so I put the question to the so called Substackers Against Nazis: Do you understand the second danger Mr. Taibbi speaks of?
Because this is always the problem: who decides? Who gets to apply the label, “Nazi?” A cursory understanding of history will show the dangers of censorship: they lead to the concentration camp, the gulag, and the grave in equal measure.
So tell me, Substackers Against Nazis, where does this kind of thing stop? Where is the line drawn regarding “problematic” content? In my experience, you pro-censors never have a good answer for that. I’d like to be surprised, but after all these years I’m still waiting.
I’d wonder why, but I know the answer. It’s not about speech, it’s not even about Nazis, it’s about who controls what is speech. This is about power.
And who are you to tell me what I can or cannot think, say, or write?
Who are you?
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The would-be censors are all about signalling their superiority. Like a kind of journalistic master race, if you will 😜
Those from the mainstream are used to full-spectrum acquiescence. They are certainly not used to being challenged. That may prove fatal for them.
I honestly don’t think any of the signers give a shit about free speech, until its absence affects them or their cause. Even then they don’t care about it but will use the constitution as a weapon to get what they want and immediately deny the next person the very same right.