Workin’ (Late) for the Weekend #71: Make-Me-Laugh Still Undefeated vs. Censor-Me-Daddy

Also: New Kmele Big Think thing!

Hi gang, sorry this is late, but last-minute travel + sickness + dog ate my homework, and so forth. Will hopefully make up for the deficit in timeliness with a surplus of humor, including of the unintentional variety.

* On Nov. 28. Jonathan M. Katz, a publisher at Substack, wrote a bad piece in The Atlantic headlined “Substack Has a Nazi Problem: The newsletter platform’s lax content moderation creates an opening for white nationalists eager to get their message out.” I say “bad” (which is just, like, my opinion, man) not only because I disagree with the main thrust, but also because the sauce advertises its own weakness right there in the second graf:

An informal search of the Substack website and of extremist Telegram channels that circulate Substack posts turns up scores of white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters on Substack—many of them apparently started in the past year. These are, to be sure, a tiny fraction of the newsletters on a site that had more than 17,000 paid writers as of March, according to Axios, and has many other writers who do not charge for their work. But to overlook white-nationalist newsletters on Substack as marginal or harmless would be a mistake.

The ostentatious conclusion: “How long will writers such as Bari Weiss, Patti Smith, and George Saunders—and, for that matter, me—be willing to stake our reputations on, and share a cut of our revenue with, a company that can’t decide if Nazi blogs count as hate speech?”

Oooh, sounds like a threat. Sure enough, on Dec. 14, Katz spearheaded a group letter under the brave banner of “Substackers Against Nazis,” declaring that:

[I]t is unfathomable that someone with a swastika avatar, who writes about “The Jewish question,” or who promotes Great Replacement Theory, could be given the tools to succeed on your platform. […]

We, your publishers, want to hear from you on the official Substack newsletter. Is platforming Nazis part of your vision of success? Let us know—from there we can each decide if this is still where we want to be.

How to put this delicately … it is counter-intuitive to imply that only those who favor a censorship net vast enough to ensnare the 4^th place GOP presidential hopeful are the anti-Nazis of the situation. Pretty confident by now that Michael Moynihan, for example, is a Substacker against Nazis; equally sure that his toolkit for combatting totalitarianism does not include browbeating publishing platforms to ban poorly defined undesirables.

At any rate, there were as of Monday afternoon 234 signatories, including such past Fifth Column guests as … well, I think none, though it’s hard to tell for sure upon a quick scan since people only signed with their first names and publishing handles. A pre-emptive group Substack letter from the day before (which I declined to sign, because ugh, group letters), counter-proposed to “Let the writers and readers moderate, not the social media platforms”; it has 82 fully named signatures on the initial post plus scores more on Notes. These include such familiar faces as … Michael Moynihan! Plus former Fif’ guests Nellie Bowles (Episode #187), Meghan Daum (#157), Ben Dreyfuss (#83, #97, #148, #214, Members Only #129, M.O. #140, #392, M.O. #180), Sarah Haider (#118), Glenn Loury (#121, #188, #366), Greg Lukianoff (#216, M.O. #183, #427), Ethan Strauss (#185, #333, #383, M.O. #151, #408), Matt Taibbi (#226, #348), and Bari Weiss (#89, #115, #159, #180 & #187).

Taibbi, unsurprisingly, has some tart words for the tattletales; he also distills in one paragraph my basic view on the matter:

In an age when censorship and deamplification are big factors for journalists tempted to say something unpopular […], moving to a platform that’s proven it won’t buckle is crucial. People like Substack CEO Chris Best and co-founders Hamish McKenzie and Jairaj Sethi have proven they won’t let outside groups dictate to them about content. This is why contributors like me, who have a lot to worry about on this front, are loyal. It’s also why people seek out content here: they know they’re getting a far less filtered version of reality than they’re seeing on platforms like Facebook and YouTube, where deamplification, strikes, and outright removals have become routine.

Dreyfuss, even less surprisingly, has some even more tart words for Team Censor, including “I just don’t care what services Nazis are fucking use lol,” and “This is America. This isn’t fucking Europe where the German government feels it necessary to ban discussions of the Nazis because they think so little of their citizens that they think they might start goose-stepping into France again should they see a swastika in the wild,” and “Congrats to the deplatforming caucus on tricking all these nice earnest Jews into thinking you used the word ‘Nazi’ in any sort of meaningful way when in reality you just found like two Nazis and used them as an excuse to complain about generic unreconstructed far right whackos.”

One difference that leaps off the page when you compare Dreyfuss/Taibbi et al to the deplatformistas is the lopsided levels of humor. (Oh, how mainstream journalos used to think Taibbi was a side-splitter back when he more reliably directed his ire toward the Right, as I recall fondly from several National Magazine Awards judging sessions.) Nellie Bowles may have disgusting politics (the woman likes Gavin Newsom, fer chrissakes), but unlike every self-annointed Substacker Against Nazis she makes me laugh every damned week. (Also, pret-tay, pretty sure she’s not so fond of National Socialists.) It’s no accident that the rise in speech-policing, coupled with the (real, if hyperbolically stated) threat of a Donald Trump presidency, has proven so fatal to institutional comedy. Saturday Night Live basically gives itself just one full-on, yes-we’re-going-there hall pass each year; this was this past Saturday, and it was glorious:

Who displays that kind of IDGAFery full-time? Either those who were pushed out of institutional slots for various transgressions (including Louie C.K. and Shane Gillis), or those who made the decision from the get-go to bypass traditional gatekeepers, like our old friend Andrew Schulz (#30 & #32). Audiences have in turn rewarded them, as they have similarly rewarded so many of our comrades who escaped institutional media perches to go solo, particularly on Substack. When I interviewed co-founder Hamish McKenzie in 2022, I asked him in about five different ways, But seriously, when the censorship heat gets super hot, are you SURE you won’t crack? And his response, in about five different ways, was: I think we’re good!

* Anyway, speaking of comics going indie, there’s a new Kyle Dunnigan:

* There’s also a new episode of Dispatches from The Well, titled “How Should We Be Thinking About the Future?” Promo copy: “Physicist Sean Carroll, planetary scientist Nina Lanza, and futurist Kevin Kelly are three brilliant minds who have spent their careers studying how time has affected the Earth — and Kmele is on a mission to understand their findings.” Check it on out:

* Shall we bullet-point some recent bits from the Fifdom universe pertaining to post-Oct. 7 free speech controversies on college campuses? We shall. Jamie Kirchick (#55, #347, #394) wrote a piece for The New York Times headlined “Campus Speech Codes Should Be Abolished.” Greg Lukianoff on his The Eternally Radical Idea Substack wrote about “My ‘Real Time’ with Bill Maher and the ‘New’ Campus Free Speech Crisis.” Josh Szeps (#25, #80, #103, #117, #196, #328, #423) on Uncomfortable Conversations monologued on “Why Jews Are Literally Nazis – Notes on a Collapsing Conversation.”

* We talked at some length in #435 about The Fall of Minneapolis documentary. Other people in our world to have recently done likewise include: Glenn Loury (#121, #188, #366) and John McWhorter (#84, #121, #188 & #366) in a Loury podcast titled “Derek Chauvin Did Not Murder George Floyd”; Nancy Rommelmann (#79, Special Dispatch #27, S.D. #30, #198, #203, S.D. #34, S.D. #50, S.D. #64, S.D. #111) and Sarah Hepola (#354) in the Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em epi “Second Thoughts on the Revolution”; and Megyn Kelly interviewing filmmakers Liz Collin and J.C. Chaix.

* Comment of the Week comes from Brian Krause:

Thanks for reviewing the Fall of Mpls. Haven't seen it yet and I'm not sure whether or not I will.

I've lived in Mpls for 15 years. I closed on my first home, in south Minneapolis, the Friday before George Floyd died. There was some f*ckery in our alley and the corner store at the end of the blook was looted, but we were largely unaffected.

All that said, the city absolutely lost its mind during summer 2020. I'm really not going to ever forgive the behavior of our leaders and my neighbors during that time. I do not find it an "understandable" outpouring of emotion due to covid/Chauvin.

We're looking forward to listing our house in the Spring.

Regarding Frey — he is exactly the performative manchild he comes across as. Yet we had to re-elect him because his opponent would have Chesa Boudin look like Pinochet.

Outro music, by Bobby Caldwell, comes from my pre-preliminary work on a 2023 People Who Died playlist (for which I am accepting nominations in the comments). Fun & Fiftastic fact about it: “When it was released to R&B radio, TK Records did their best to hide Caldwell's racial identity, hoping not to alienate their predominantly African American audience. However, when Caldwell began making performances live onstage, demand only increased.”