The Continuing Attack on Substack

It’s what the leftist media do.

Most readers know that the leftists who deplatformed Parler, who cost Musk’s X most of its advertisers and are trying to silence him, who came after Spotify, and so on, also attacked Substack.

But is that assault on Substack a thing of the past? Are rightists here safe from the leftist hordes now, or are we in more danger than we realize?

The Day Substack Died

On the ides of March, 2024, Substack  for a while. It made some of us, such as Alex Berenson, think about what we might do without it.

It was the day that we published a piece about how similar the government and politics of the United States have become to the evil empire of Rome. The regime seeks to censor and silence those who oppose them.

The Assault Begins

Most readers will recall the charges by leftists that Substack harbors Nazi and white supremacists. But that accusation wasn’t the opening volley. The first salvo used “gender”.

An associate Professor of English, Critical Theory, and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, a man calling himself “Grace Lavery”, fled Substack in protest  “…because I’m a trans woman, and about a year ago, Substack was facing public criticism for its publication of a number of authors critical of the movement for trans civil rights." Accusingly, the Mashable article charged that “…her move comes after a long trail of transphobic incidents on Substack. Lavery is now a part of an exodus of Substack writers, overwhelmingly… Such a collective reaction to Substack's refusal to tackle misinformation and hate speech is still happening.”

As the gender attacks on Substack were going on, the left-leaning magazine Wired, perhaps not coincidentally, published:

And then later a Wired article recommending that writers leave Substack: “The Best Substack Alternatives: These four alternatives to the newsletter platform offer just as many—if not more—features.”

Then a few months later, the far-left Atlantic published its accusations that Substack was headquarters for Nazis and white supremacists.

That was a signal for all the mass media to mount a wide frontal assault.

“Substack Faces User Revolt Over Anti-Censorship Stance on Neo-Nazis” The Guardian

“Substack’s Woes Deepen as Tech Blog Leaves Over Nazi Content” Washington Post

“Pressure Builds on Newsletter Company Substack to Stop Revenue Sharing with Nazi Writers” NBC News

“Substack Says It Will Not Ban Nazis or Extremist Speech” New York Times

“Over 100 Substack Writers Sign Letter Condemning Site for Hosting Nazi and White Supremacist Newsletters” Forbes

And on and on. Pressure mounted. The Nazi charges didn’t destroy Substack, though, or force it to deplatform all rightist writers. But the threat is not ended, and it will not end. As long as Substack is a place where we who oppose the regime can speak truth freely, the leftists will not stop seeking ways to silence it.

Last week, the Financial Times published an article in titled “‘Way Too Much News’: US Conservatives Face a Fragmented Media Map” scouting ways to continue the attack. The article was really about Substack allowing way too much freedom.

“It’s never been [this fragmented],” said Jonathan Miller, a former chief digital officer at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. “The younger right-wing audience is all over the place... getting [news] from a multitude of places, not television, that includes Substack, TikTok, Instagram and so on.”

Substack was charged with playing a role in unfairly causing Claudine Gay to step down at Harvard.

“After writing about plagiarism allegations against Gay on Substack on December 10, Rufo amplified the topic on social media through a ‘substantive campaign of shaming and bullying my colleagues on the left’”.

Too much democracy on Substack.

“One longtime media critic said the conservative news ecosystem ‘has been democratised to a degree in that anyone can have a Substack’. Several media critics and professors declined to speak on the record for this story, however, for fear of being targeted by [rightwing] activists.”

And “Substack and podcasts have become landing spots for far-right writers who were banned or restricted by more established social media companies such as Facebook…”

Substack is accused of, “digging up dirt” against Clintons:

“Anthony Nadler, a professor of media and communications at Ursinus College, said: Going back to the 1990s, there’s always been these rightwing hit jobs… a lot of rightwing media operatives were running their own small independent outlets, digging up dirt on [then-president Bill] Clinton. Substack certainly makes it easier and changes the economy of this stuff’… Substack’s executives have defended the site’s role as a home to fringe views, in the face of backlash over the presence of neo-Nazis and conspiracy theorists across the site”,

The leftists are feeling around for a handle to use to get the leverage to bring sub stack down. The way they did to Parler. It's the way that the leftist media works. They generate labels and memes (in the original sense of the term). Until they throw something at their target that sticks and starts to get traction. Next comes “mounting pressure”, as we will see.

Financial Times wrote about, “…the backlash over the presence of neo-Nazis and conspiracy theorists…” The backlash didn’t stop Substack. But what exactly was that “backlash”? The word backlash suggests some kind of broad grassroots reaction by the public. But the backlash wasn’t that at all. Such a “backlash” is a tactic, a weapon used by the mass media against its victims.

“Mounting pressure…” How the leftist mass media system works.

The mass media is a huge and complex system. Some parts of it are organized as hierarchies of control, but much of the system is spontaneously-organizing, which is one of the reasons that it is so effective. Much of this system is public, of course, and so can be seen in operation, but it is also capable of large conspiracies, such as the one that denied Trump re-election in 2020, and which the media bragged later, as discussed by Substacker Brook Hines recently.

The “mounting pressure” and “backlash” reported by the media are in the mass media, and nowhere else. The media stories about “mounting pressure” and the “backlashes” are the “mounting pressure” and the “backlashes”. The media “reports” the news it wants to happen and then reports, as news, that it happened. And the leftists who create and control the mass media have many such tricks. They are tendentious liars whose primary intent is to is to generate propaganda to advance leftist political goals.

It is possible to know and understand the leftist mass media as a system: how it got started; how it creates its narrative stream and untruth; and why. But it is not easy to understand that. The mass media is a very complex system and the people in it are clever and have no intention of telling the truth about what they are doing. Still, the truth can be known.

Conclusion

“None of this would be happening, of course, if we had a legacy media that served any purpose other than to be what Devin Nunes called part of a ‘state-owned leftist enterprise’ that also controls ‘everything—universities, nonprofits, bureaucracies, and the Beltway corridor.’”

Sasha Stone, “January 6th and How the Press Became the ‘Enemy of the American People’”

Perhaps the fatal failure of the right is our inability — our failure, even our refusal — to understand how the leftists use the mass media as their primary weapon in their Long March through the Institutions of America. At least since the Associated Press was created, and certainly since the emergence of the daily big city newspapers as the first real mass media, leftists have been using it to manufacture consent, to create fake WUNC (Worthiness, Unity, Numbers, and Commitment) and to fake “mounting pressure”, to hide the depredations of leftist politicians, and to frame issues in ways intended to mislead the public, advance socialism, and to create a stream of untruths to erode away everything good and right in America. We could stop that, and turn the tables on them. But not if we fail to understand what they are really doing.