Nag-Swarming Substack 2: Excessive Tumblrshrew!

Here we go again...

The creative process is an interesting thing. I don’t know about others, but for me, there are two basic inceptions of my essays. Some I plan on advance, like the one I’m currently working on featuring Zora Neale Hurston, myth, crime, and Florida. But sometimes something just jumps in front of my car as I’m driving to that destination, and I have to swerve into oncoming traffic. The following is one of those happy collisions.

I’m really going to keep this one positive, I promise.

I’m serious about the positivity, too. I would say that that’s my general tone, and even when get a touch vitriolic I try to insert as much humor as I can. I realize that the internet can be a toxic place, but I want to assure readers that it doesn’t have to be that way. Like attracts like online, and I’ve gathered a readership of close to (but not quite) 10,000 subscribers who represent a following I’m quite proud of. Even when people disagree with me, they tend to do so respectfully, and my comment section, notes feed, and correspondence I would say are nearly entirely salutary. When they’re not- when they turn out to be bad actors or try to hijack what I’m doing toward their own ends, I ignore them or block them as needed.

It’s one of the best things about Substack. I know everyone can find something to criticize about it. People don’t like notes; people don’t like the video feature. I and many other people I greatly respect have mocked the invasion of washed-up TDS grifters from the mainstream media or politics who churn out slop at the combined hands of interns and AI. You might disagree, but as a whole, I have greatly enjoyed my time here and I am deeply grateful for what I can only call a life changing opportunity. I started with nothing- no big name, no big followers- and now I count among my readership leading academics, national pundits, successful businessmen, bestselling authors, prominent activists, and best of all, other grinding strivers like me. If I had tried to do this- as the kids say- IRL, every door would have been shut to me and, as a white male (a rightist Southerner no less), none of you would ever have heard of me.

How it looks in my head when I get ready to write.

Thus, I tend to be a bit wary every time one of these ‘petitions to rid Substack of hateful istophobes’ comes around. I’ve addressed this before, during the “Substack Against Nazis” fracas, when woke Cringesaders tried to shame management into banning a whole bunch of people who were exercising their free speech rights within the Substack terms of service. “Nag-Swarming Substack” was written back in 2023, but like some infectious fungus that grows in dark places and feeds on crap, the problem never really goes away. I thought it might be good to look at the situation then, compare it to now, and see what lessons can be derived.

The immediate pretext for this is a petition currently being circulated by some refugee Tumblrinas claiming that the threats and harassment they face on Substack make them feel unsafe, and that they want Substack leadership to ban all of the people they deem problematic. The clutch of hens who pecked it out wrote an essay decrying said leadership’s lack of interest in their carping, to which I offered some nuanced and broad minded commentary. I can’t link to it, as the authors have blocked me, which suggests they already know how to deal with the issue they claim to be triggered by in the first place. But of course, just like with the Nazis, that’s only the superficial cover for what they actually want. Before I get to that, however, I should note some things.

Maybe if I just start adding this at the end of everything I write, people will take my criticism with good nature and aplomb, like they do with this dog puppet.

I will stipulate that one argument I advanced at the time was that Substack did not feature many people who actually style themselves Nazis in any case- Nazi was just the campaign’s catch-all term for anyone to the right of Will Stancil (though he himself seems to be edging in that direction, prompting Antifa to beat him up). That has changed; there are now scores of ACTUAL NAZIS!!! on Substack, complete with swastika avatars and a strong collective desire to blitzkrieg the comments sections of others. But while their numbers have shot up like a V2 rocket, their brains remain as smooth as the Autobahn, and you can multiply any number times zero relevance, and the result will be the same. Letting them exist gets exactly the same result as banning them.

I like that the second thing that comes up in the search is the stack for special needs stosstruppen, and that they’ve embraced diversity. Where are my Kongolese Kampfbund Kameraden at?!

But of course, the people who sought to ban the Nazis and the people who supposedly want to end abuse and hate don’t actually care about any of those things. There are Nazi stacks that express a general contempt for most of humanity, but such sentiments exist under every banner. Nor are they the only Substack degenerates. One of the people who came after me in the wake of Substack Against Nazis is a long-standing advocate for pedophilia; others support infanticide, the sexual mutilation of children, and any number of other horrors. Many people will contest that point, arguing that those things are normal subjects for political debate, and that I’m wrong to characterize them as such. But that’s to concede their framing, which I refuse to do, which is the deeper context for the controversy.

Bring your copy of The Atlantic for Berlatsky to autograph at ChomoCon ‘26.

What the people circulating that gaywad petition really want is not security, but validation. They are demanding that Substack management enforce the culture and moral norms the petitioners absorbed in school and have never questioned. It’s a code that goes by many names- ‘woke’ being au courant- but it’s essentially a signalling system for the devotee to express his/her/their adherence to the values of a global neoliberal elite. The dim-bulb votaries of this religion are attempting to police Substack according to its dictates, that and their own malignant vanity.

If you doubt me, just check out the actual text from Change.org. Here’s how it opens:

Substack was supposed to be my sanctuary after a tragedy. Following my brother's death, I was lost, searching for a supportive community in the vastness of the internet, a place to express, reflect, and heal. Substack provided that haven—a place where voices mattered, where discussions thrived, and where I could finally breathe again.

Yet, today, this haven is under threat. A growing epidemic of online abuse is targeting women, BIPOC communities, and the LGBTQIA+ individuals on Substack. This isn't just about offensive comments; it's a barrage of death threats, insidious harassment, and even the malicious creation of deepfake pornography. These abuses aren’t just breaking spirits—they’re driving away people who once considered this platform a home.

Substack is not a platform for writers from all backgrounds, you see, but her home and personal therapy circle, which other people are ruining with all the deepfake porn you can’t actually make on the site and their déclassé thoughts on Acronym-Americans. She doesn’t make an argument or offer examples; she just sympathy baits her own brother’s death to guilt you into listening to her rant. She could just block these people she claims are harassing her, like a mentally healthy person might- and which I have no doubt was the prompt and correct response of management- but of course that doesn’t solve the more fundamental problem of these people existing and her having no power to cancel them. Thus, the petition.

In the spirit of building bridges, I did sign the petition, and I did so under my legal name, Dee Snutts.

But there’s another side to it as well. Looking back at my older piece, I thought this quote especially relevant concerning what is going on here:

As a thought experiment, I think it would be instructive to see what she and the other common scolds would replace all of us with, were they given the chance. Going over to her page, The Handbasket, I see that she too has a broad range of topics that she covers. They generally range from Republicans are bad to Republicans are Nazis- also, Elon Musk is a Nazi and also RFK Jr. There’s a good bit about women in journalism, trans-inclusion- and you can pretty much predict everything else. I mean that quite literally. Miss [Marisa] Kabas is a central-casting urban neoliberal white Jewish Millennial woman from New York. Her prose is what you would get if a fair-trade pumpkin-spice latte could type.

“One could argue that after January 6, 2021, the halls of Congress would never be the same. With the insurrection, a piece of the institution died—and along with it went any modicum of faux-respect many congressional Republicans showed towards their workplace. If that awful day was the culmination of how Trump fundamentally changed voters, this past Tuesday was the culmination of how he’s fundamentally changed the way lawmakers comport themselves.

There have been plenty of examples of heinous behavior in the House and Senate—lest we forget Marjorie Taylor Green calling Lauren Boebert a “little bitch” on the House floor—but the total sum of Tuesday’s events made it feel like we are headed straight to hell…in a handbasket.”

All of this tame and banal. You can almost hear the programmed laughter of the in-house audience for an unwatchable late-night comedy show- “Yeah, give those antivaxxer Nazis hell Stephen Colbert!” I’m not entirely convinced this text isn’t the product of an AI trained on John Oliver and NPR. And to be clear, she does this for a living. Miss Kabas is featured on MSNBC and writes as an independent journalist. She is the proud recipient of an orange check mark, signifying that she has hundreds of paid subscribers on Substack and something over 6,000 regular subs. And even with that . . . no one seems that interested.

One thing that the people who get behind these sorts of petitions all seem to have in common is that- left to their own devices- they are terrible writers. They’re boring, predictable, and above all utterly safely within the boundaries of elite respectability. Because they read nothing else but the exact same stuff they write about, they exist within a closed epistemic loop whereby everything just gets recycled and repeated over and over, an increasingly threadbare simulacrum of prose, devoid of imagination or insight, all under the theory that reality can be constructed according to a narrative. The problem is, though, that they can’t really craft a narrative, either.

You could do some kind of quantitative measurement, I imagine, where you could compare the ratio of subscribers with the collective engagement as represented by likes, comments, and shares, but that can of course be manipulated, though honestly a quick review shows that they get little interest from readers despite superficially impressive numbers. I prefer looking at things qualitatively. Find someone who wants to ban all the Nazis or abusers or rightists (which amount to the same thing to them) and look at what they’re producing. It’s crap. It’s all crap.

When they say they want to be safe, what they mean is, they want to be free to perpetuate the illusion to themselves that they are creative intellectuals with important things to say, like they’ve been expensively prepared to be their entire lives. It’s what their parents told them, their schools, their MFA creative writing programs. They write the same things all the smart-presenting people they know read. But the great terror they all have is that the minute they step outside of that bubble, others not so conditioned will see them for what they really are- dull, mediocre, and fungible.

This is both who they all aspire to be and who they end up as regardless.

The online right makes it impossible for them to believe they are what they imagine they are. The hateful “alt-right” that haunts their nightmares does not defer to their certificates or their tastes or their pretensions. In our presence, they’re unable to convince themselves that they’re better than us. Thus, the radical feminist vanguard runs speedily to the nearest male authority figures to dispense with us, so they can lay in bed, smoke cigarettes, and write about their boutique traumas.

The saddest part about all this is that, were they as open to ideas as they imagine themselves to be, they might actually gain some insights into the human condition from people very different from them. These people project an aura of personal and collective misery, loneliness, and mental and emotional dysfunction.

I fucking hate men. Walking down the street in the middle of the sidewalk, all confident, in the middle of the night, when I’m frightened of being attacked. But you know what? I’ve come to learn that I hate them even more online, where they can hide behind their AI pictures and fake names.

The woman who wrote this lives in pain, pain caused by the spectacle of the happiness and confidence of others in the face of her all-consuming fear. Notice that it’s not the men who might attack her that she hates, but the men who aren’t afraid of them. The latter is her enemy, and she identifies that enemy with the anons who contest her ideas online.

Each word of my prose is a yowling feline, hurled in sputtering rage at a cruel patriarchy, landing in a dander cloud of bounding fleas of freedom!

And this is what it all comes down to. We simply can’t abide in the same place. They are working overtime to drive us from this platform so it can reincarnate as Bluesky- that open-air asylum for people too mentally fragile for Mastadon. Substack is a place for the free exchange of ideas, and if you are too damaged, weak-minded, or fearful to engage, then step out of the ring, and shut up.

I’m not any kind of liberal, so I don’t really go in for free speech arguments as such. While as a general polite heuristic I’m happy to share space with people who disagree with me, when they actively try to run me off, well, it’s on. Therefore, I encourage everyone in my audience to courteously and peacefully make your feelings on the subject clear to the people trying to censor you and to those who may be inclined to listen to them. They are pure bad actors. Don’t give them the benefit of the doubt, don’t accept their framing, and above all don’t write something like this:

This is supposed to be a joke, not a Jordan Peterson-style life lesson.

All simping, white-knighting, and Milhousing aside, there’s no greater show of respect you can give someone than to take his or her ideas seriously, and taking terrible ideas seriously means ensuring they’ll never have any influence over you. Given such consideration, I think it vital to make sure this petition dos nothing more than prove the perils of combining SSRIs and White Claw. So, Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie and everyone else, I urge you to keep me safe from these joyless, unstable harridans, prevent their abusing my rights, and try to stop them from firing up Substack AI to create haunted library porno featuring this author. The future of this platform is at stake.