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?
Kudos for posting the list of stacks that signed this letter!
Katz has painted himself into a nasty corner. Here is how this will play out. He’ll post a story about how, after some deep soul searching, he had decided to remain on Substack because he believed the best way to fight against Nazis is to speak out against them on this platform. Thereby de facto acknowledging that those that opposed his demands for censorship were, in fact, right all along when they contended that the best way to combat speech we abhor is not to ban that speech but to counter it with speech we adore. Katz knows what fattens his bank account and his moral outrage has financial limitations.