Excerpt:

...

Honestly, even if I weren’t a free speech absolutist, the self-regard and confusion of the people pushing this line would set me off. The combination of preening self-righteousness and total incoherence is really remarkable here. For example, Nathan Tankus of Notes on the Crises, an economics blogger, very loudly and ostentatiously took his newsletter to Ghost due to the supposed transphobia of Substack. This mostly engendered discussion about Substack, but it probably should have instead put the spotlight on Ghost, which was designed to allow for no central moderation at all and thus certainly hosts transphobia and all manner of other ugly content. It’s so fucking bizarre! “I can’t stand the refusal to moderate the transphobia off of this platform, so I’m moving to a service that has no ability to moderate transphobia” is ridiculous and incoherent on its face. Hell, Ghost even makes it hard for you to tell when someone’s using a Ghost install at all, so it’s difficult to even know who’s hosting the Bad Stuff! The logic here is so strained and unworkable that it leads me to conclude that Tankus simply found that he wasn’t seeing the kind of financial success he was hoping for on Substack and went through with his whole peacocking exercise in a desire to brand himself as A Guy Who Really Cares, and in doing so harvest more subscriptions.

Wordpress? Really? The backbone of a vast portion of the written content on the web, and thus certainly a repository of far-right attitudes? Let’s not just talk about Wordpress run on private server space, let’s look at Wordpress.com, which is hosted by Wordpress itself. Here’s the blog West Hunter. I wouldn’t ever want to censor this blog because I wouldn’t want to censor any blog, but let me tell ya, that’s an ugly, ugly place! It’s been written by the late Henry Harpending, considered a white nationalist by the SPLC, and Gregory Cochran, a physicist who a) pushes race science and b) believe homosexuality spreads pathogenically. These are certainly the kinds of guys that Katz would want to force off of Substack, were they on there. Instead they’re not just using a Wordpress install, they’re hosted by Wordpress - which is frequently celebrated as a purer, more progressive alternative to Substack! Google’s Blogger service? Though he hasn’t written there for years, notorious race-science proponent Steve Sailer’s blog is hosted on Blogger. I’m sure there are many, many more examples for any given blogging service. What are we to conclude from the fact that so many prominent platforms are home to offensive content? That we just need to get much more aggressive about cleaning up the ol’ web, free expression be damned? No, I think the conclusion is that the problem is not with platforms, the problem is that the world is full of bad people who believe bad things. And it is so indicative of the liberal mindset to insist that there’s One Weird Trick to stopping the far right, like you can flip a switch and just turn of Nazism.

...

I’m sorry to repeat myself, guys, but I must: we fought a war against fascism that killed 4% of the world’s population, and yet fascism survived. You can’t stop it by tweaking the terms of service. The only thing liberals know how to do anymore is to work the refs - to beg someone in authority to run in and enforce some sort of rules that, they’d like to imagine, secretly run the universe. This was stupid, entitled behavior ten years ago. But after the election of Donald Trump, it stands as something else, something darker. Do you remember the cry that rang out when Trump was elected and in the first years of his presidency? “This is not normal!” As if “normal” ever meant anything, and as if there was some benevolent clockmaker watching over it all who could adjust the dials and fix it so that our country was normal again. How on earth so many educated and successful professionals continue to believe that there is some celestial authority out there who will eliminate fascism if only we pass the right legislation, I cannot understand. Not one of us will live to see the elimination of fascism. Luckily, actual fascism is a tiny fringe ideology that has no power. Unluckily, mainstream conservatism, and its great enabler mainstream liberalism, are bad enough.

By the way, Jonathan, The Atlantic is run by Jeffrey Goldberg, who helped lie us into the Iraq war and admitted in his book to abusing Palestinian prisoners when he was a literal prison camp guard. Great company you keep there! And, indeed, he is vastly more influential than any of the people you want to deplatform. You strengthened him and his position and the ideology he serves; you put money in his pocket. Does that feel good? Like you’re on the side of the angels? Sometimes, it feels like none of our hands are clean.