The 300th Post

So, as I often tell people, as I go to the fridge and get a root beer off the second shelf—which is mine, as that's where I keep my root beers and my double-stuff Oreos—if there’s one thing I hate about social media…

It’s all the damn Nazis.

And unfortunately, Substack has a Nazi problem. This isn’t just a Substack problem, of course, as this is obviously an American problem too, and really, always has been, but still, Substack definitely has a Nazi problem. A big Nazi problem.

That really sucks.

My first post over at my Substack was on August 16th, 2023. Posting it was a sudden whim, much like when I set up the Substack itself. My second post didn’t happen for over a month, on September 20th, Earth, Wind, and Fire Day Eve, after I had considered what this thing would be for a bit. You can find both of them under the Site News link at the top of the Homepage.

My first “real” post came just four days later, a review of Zack Snyder’s terribly conceived and terribly executed zombie movie follow-up to his fantastic, James Gunn-penned, re-imagining of Dawn of the Dead, Army of the Dead. You can find that one under the Reviews link at the top of the Homepage, all the way down at the bottom of the list... where it belongs.

And now, nearly forty-three weeks later, here we are at 300 posts.

That’s 285 reviews under the Reviews tag, five short stories under the Fiction tag, four posts listed under the Lists and Commentary tag, and five posts (six, counting this one) under the Site News tag. That’s a lot of content in nearly ten months, right?

Surely that’s worth a few bucks, right? 

If you agree, and you want to subscribe, and maybe even send me a few bucks too, or if you’re just interested in subscribing, but you want to do it for free—which is perfectly acceptable—click here.

No pressure, whatever you decide.

So! To business…

As promised in my last Substack post, why have I switched my hosting sites? Well, for a couple of months there after signing up and starting to post, everything was going great at Substack. I liked the platform, it was easy to use, and best of all, it was free, which was awesome, because I had no plans on making any cash off it, it was just for me. But in a nutshell, things were good, and I had no complaints, everything was hunky-dory.

So, of course, as these things usually go, Substack decided to seize the opportunity to make a problem of itself.

I talked about all of this originally in my 200th post, but to recap, it went like this… In December of last year, the other shoe dropped when the dipshit Tech-bro “Free Speech Absolutist” Fuck-knuckles who founded Substack revealed that they have no problem at all with providing a platform for Nazis and their Hate Speech, especially when those views can be monetized, and they can receive a cut from it.

Jonathan M. Katz first published an article in The Atlantic titled “Substack Has a Nazi Problem," where he reported that he had found at least 16 newsletters that depicted overt Nazi symbols, and dozens more that were devoted to far-right extremism. Marisa Kabas then posted her Substackers Against Nazis open letter to Substack’s founders, a trio of buttheads named Chris Best, Jairaj Sethi, and Hamish McKenzie, imploring them to take some kind of action in order to maintain the welcoming environment of the site. Hundreds of Substackers and Publications signed onto her letter in agreement, including myself... Not that anyone who was otherwise involved noticed, but still.

Anyway, once the bad press for their open support of Nazis and Hate Speech got too big, and started interrupting their “Nerd Wet Dreams come true” lifestyle of wearing hoodies and sport coats to floor seats at Basketball games, and driving ugly Italian sports cars through stop-and-go traffic to basic-ass clubs, where they overpay to be blinded by strobes and deafened by shitty techno, all so that women who would otherwise never even look at them would giggle and coo while serving shitty vodka for the bottle service, because that’s what these terminally uncool, cowardly, uber-nerd, fascist-enabling dipshits Tech Bros always do when they get their undeservedly large pile of cash… they initially tried to downplay the issue, and when that didn’t take, they tried to dodge the issue as much as they could, all while using the press to gaslight everyone.

Honestly, this is all you can reasonably expect from these Tech Bros, and their Corporate Finance cousins, because by the very nature of their existence, they were born completely incapable of giving a shit about anything but themselves.

Casey Newton and Zoe Schiffer, who write Platformer, a kind of tech and social media guide that at one time was one of Substack’s biggest publications (one that has since moved here to Ghost), had this to say: “Every platform hosts its share of racists, white nationalists, and other noxious personalities. In some very real sense, there is no escaping them online. But there ought to be ways to see them less; to recommend them less; to fund them less. Other platforms have realized this as they’ve grown up. Here’s hoping Substack does the same.”

Mike Masnick of the site Techdirt had his doubts about that ever happening, when he added: “If you’re not going to moderate, and you don’t care that the biggest draws on your platform are pure nonsense peddlers preying on the most gullible people to get their subscriptions, fucking own it, Chris. Say it. Say that you’re the Nazi bar and you’re proud of it.” An accurate summation of who these people are, something that can be proven true simply by taking a quick look at the Swastika-strewn Trumpian wreckage of the site that was once known as Twitter.

But like I said, you can only reasonably expect one thing from these people, and that’s to serve their own interests and only their own interests. So, as a result, for some Substackers like Talia Levin, this meant that there was only one option left, saying: “I must admit that there's a fair amount of anger and resentment that comes along with this decision—anger at the feckless rich crypto-fascists like Hamish McKenzie of Substack, and his many Silicon Valley peers, who all seem to subscribe to the notion that race-based hatred is just a simple quirk of the marketplace of ideas.” Talia has since moved to using an email newsletter service, which can be found here, and you should consider signing up for it, if for nothing else than her incredible coverage of politics, as well as various types of sandwiches.

So, in the end, it was an incredibly disappointing turn of events, because like I said, I liked what Substack offered me. But this kind of shit just can’t be ignored. At least, I can’t ignore it. It’s sadly all too common of an occurrence these days, and the end result has proven to be all too inevitable, so I know what’s going to happen. Mostly because there are only two types of people who claim to be “free speech absolutists.”

1. The bigots who want to be freely and loudly bigoted whenever they want to, and without any kind of consequences.
2. Stupid idiots who simply don’t understand what they’re talking about.

The worst part is, this is clearly the default position of the wealthy and the privileged, those powerful and pure evil monsters who don’t care you or me or anyone because they simply don’t have to, especially now, because they know they can count on the undying support of White Christian America, especially the ones from the small towns and suburbs. They’re big bigot fish who make safe spaces for small bigot fish, because that crowd provides them protective cover.

Sadly fucking typical.

So of course, after all that, it came out that the Anti “Substackers Against Nazis” Open Letter, as it came to be known, something originally touted as a grassroots effort, and also something that the Substack founders referenced in their initial attempts to downplay the burgeoning outcry, was—surprise, surprise—directly orchestrated by them, in collusion with an eager horde of (mostly white) bootlickers and Centrists, and the direct help of some of the more well-known White Supremacist talking heads.

Yes, this was an unsurprising reveal, but still… it sucks, as it’s also the clearest picture yet of who these fucking assholes really are.

So, by this point, I was feeling resigned and defeated. All I want is one fucking place… one fucking place… where I can put up my stupid little blogs and bullshit, and all without the bigots of White Christian America coming in and shitting all over the place. I’d love to be able to have a space where I don’t have to think about these fucking trash monsters every day, all the time, everywhere I go. That this is apparently too much to ask for these days is a really shitty sign of the times.

I hate it.

But at this point, I understand that this is just the reality of life in America, that this is what the rest of us have to live with, because the overwhelming majority of White America has decided to publicly embrace their fascist, misogynistic, racist, antisemitic, and anti-GLBTQIA ideals for good and forever. This is how shit goes these days, folks. Yes, it’s ruining everything, and no, there’s no way to stop it.

This is simply who they are. It sucks. I hate it, and I hate them.

But the problem was, I didn’t want to just jump over to some other Substack alternative, and then six months later repeat this exact situation, which was the most likely thing that was going to happen, because that's what always happens, and if that was going to be the case, then why fucking bother? Also, honestly, does anyone care if I do anything at all? Probably not. I have thirty-eight subscribers, plus a few more regular readers on top of that, so I’m not even a rat in this rotten house’s walls, I’m just an ant hunting for crumbs.

But still… it bugs me. Of course it does. I honestly don’t understand the people who aren’t bothered by it, the ones who put effort into ignoring it, especially as it’s now clear that they are legion in this society. Legion. I’d love to have one part of my life that isn’t impacted by this reality, but I don’t get to have that choice, none of us do, because apparently White America doesn’t care who it is that puts them first in line, just as long as they are first in line.

The thing is, it’s one thing to know that these Nazis are out there. 

I can deal with that. I have to. As someone who‘s considered a person of color in America (even though I was born mostly white, and was raised white, and lived in progressively smaller and whiter small towns in the middlest of Middle America), I’ve had to learn how to do that. Ask anyone who’s been the lone POC or was mixed race, or was a Transracial adoptee raised in hardcore White America, and they’ll tell you the same thing… learning to deal with this shit is just the reality of living cheek to jowl with White America, the place where strange white people will come up and openly ask you “What are you?” as they gesture vaguely to your face like you’re a good damn alien, or will turn to you and magnanimously reassure you that “they don’t even think of you as another race,” smugly assured that they have just paid you the highest of compliments, because when racism in this country isn’t used like a bomb or a hidden knife, it’s a constant background dirge of white noise, a low level hum that runs through every facet of our society, something you can hear clearly any time you walk into a small restaurant in a white area, and they all stop talking, and as one, turn to look at you.

But like I said, I can deal with that shit.

I do so in the same way I approach movies that feature problematic actors, directors, or writers, and that’s by just not listening to the commentary tracks on the films, or by not reading any of their interviews. As long as I do that, as long as I’m not forced to confront the fact that the actor, director, or writer are at best a dim bulb nitwit, with views they cultivated while being super-high and suffering from a mild case of sunstroke on the deck of some billionaire’s yacht, or at worst, a huge piece of shit living in a bubble of indulgence, I can still enjoy the art. That’s basically how I’ve learned to deal with the reality of living in this country too, I just cut all the unimportant shit out of my life, the stuff that isn't worth the hassle of dealing with all their racist bullshit. 

But still, that being said… while it’s one thing to know they’re out there, it’s another thing entirely when these people not only refuse to stop loudly telling you who they really are, but are also demonstrating at the same time that they’re not just proud of being this way, but they like being this way too, and because of that, they’re not going to stop being this way either. At that point, you can no longer ignore it. You have to make a change.

So, this is the point I reached with Substack.

100 posts ago, I said I’d figure out what I was gonna do by the 300th post, mostly because the symmetry of the number appealed to me, and it gave me some time to do a little research, and now… here we are.

This is how I ended up at Ghost.

Ghost is a non-profit organization, founded in April of 2013, with the stated aim of using a sustainable funding model to build the kind of open source technology that modern publishing needs.

“We set Ghost up as non-profit foundation so that it would always be true to its users, rather than shareholders or investors. Our legal constitution ensures that the company can never be bought or sold, and one hundred percent of our revenue is reinvested into the product and the community.”

The company has been a fully remote since 2013, long before that idea was a common thing, and as a result, their team now spans 5 continents, 16 nationalities and 15 languages. In addition to their remote workers, they also utilize volunteer open source contributors to code the product. Ghost has never had an office in the history of their existence.

I definitely approve of this, because Working Remote is The Way. At this point, it’s clear to me the only people who are pushing the necessity of the “Return to Office” model are the out-of-touch and over-privileged asshole CEOs, the greedy parasitic corporate landlords, the useless Middle Managers who realized during COVID that they couldn’t hide the fact that they bring nothing to the company when they aren’t acting as Hall Monitors, and the creepy little friendless weirdos in the next cubicle who rely on the captive audience of an office environment for their social circle, so any company that understands that cubicles and strict office hours are an arbitrary and regressive idea of the past… they’ve got my attention. Happy workers means a happy product, which means happy customers, right?

I certainly am so far. The Ghost Support Team has been incredibly helpful while I was transferring my Substack over here, and quick to respond with any questions I had, of which I had a lot, because I’m only nominally a computer guy. The fact that the platform itself is similarly as easy to use as Substack was great news too.

So, all in all, so far it’s been a really good experience.

Originally, I hesitated to move here, because I thought I read that Ghost’s servers were located in Texas. This would not have been good news, as the state is not only a dystopian hellscape of White Christian Nationalism that I won’t support with my own money, but due to the fact that Greg Abbott has been busy running the state into the ground, I had some valid worries about the viability of the infrastructure supporting those servers. A quick news search will show you that Texas has been flooding, freezing, and losing power way too regularly these days.

But, good news… Ghost’s servers are in the Netherlands, which I know from my own experience to be hard-fucking-core when it comes to privacy laws. Could the Netherlands get swamped by rising sea levels? Yes, definitely, the looming climate crisis is something that threatens us all, but at least they’re not actively exacerbating the threat every day like Texas is.

Ghost does cost me money for my subscription, but my paid subscribers are already supporting that, so that’s good. But otherwise, Ghost doesn’t take a cut from my paid subscribers. This is really great, because I figure, if I’m only going to make a few bucks off my writing, I might as well keep all of it, instead of sharing it with a bunch of fucking Nazi lovers.

So, what does this new home mean going forward?

Same shit. Just like always. The reviews will continue, of course, as will my lists and my pop culture commentary. I will continue to post old short stories, and soon I will put up at least the first three chapters of my current Work in Progress, from which this blog drew its name.

I also plan on being a little more active when it comes to spreading the word about this place too, and hopefully increase my subscriber numbers a bit, and maybe, if I’m lucky, some of them might say to me…

Fingers crossed.

Let me know if you don’t get the email from this one.