Substack’s extremist ecosystem is flourishing

This piece is a collaboration between The Handbasket and Jonathan Katz of The Racket. Katz and I worked together on the Substackers Against Nazis campaign back in 2023 and have reunited for this timely update. It was written by him and edited by me. Subscribe to The Racket here!

Substack has once again revealed itself to be a Nazi bar. Last week, the newsletter platform got caught sending push alerts featuring antisemitic invective to users’ phones. One of those alerts was for an explicitly neo-Nazi blog, whose profile picture and banner are simply the flag of Nazi Germany. When asked for comment by Substacker Taylor Lorenz, a company spokesperson blamed an unspecified “serious error,” one that, “caused some people to receive push notifications they should never have received.”

While this was undoubtedly an error–and an embarrassing one for a platform previously criticized for hosting hate speech–the problem runs deeper than a technical glitch. The Nazi push alert was only possible because of Substack’s continued commitment to not only hosting but actively promoting authoritarian, Nazi-sympathizing, and other bigoted forms of extremism.

This situation has only metastasized since major media last took notice, even as prominent journalists and politicians make headlines for moving their personal brands to Substack, and the company secures $100 million in new funding on a $1.1 billion valuation. With its increased power, Substack's influence in media and political circles continues to grow. And that growing influence brings with it greater potential for harm that is already bleeding over to even more established forms of media.

The role of Substack’s ecosystem in our larger politics was made clear last month in the New York Times. The paper reported that the Democratic candidate for New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, had checked both the “Asian” and “Black or African American” boxes on an application for Columbia in 2009. (Mamdani is Indian-Ugandan-American. He did not get into Columbia.) As The Verge’s Elizabeth Lopatto uncovered, the information for this story—which the Times framed as a major scandal—was the product of a hack by a self-described “violently racist” neo-Nazi. 

The relevant information was passed to the Times by Jordan Lasker, a Substacker with a reported neo-Nazi past of his own, who contributes to the eugenicist Substack Aporia as well his own, published under the pseudonym “Cremiuex.” (The latter is currently the No. 7 fastest rising Substack in “Science.”) Lasker in turn passed the information on to Benjamin Ryan, the writer of the anti-transgender Substack Hazard Ratio (No. 66 in Science.) The Times then hired Ryan to write the story, giving him the lead byline and allowing him to grant Lasker partial anonymity. He made no mention of the neo-Nazi origin of the information.

In other words, an anti-trans Substacker used a eugenicist Substacker to launder information from a neo-Nazi and smuggled it into the most powerful paper in the country–with the help of some of that paper’s editors–in an attempt to smear a mayoral candidate of color whose leftist politics they all oppose. As Substack’s founders have demonstrated in the past, this is an example of their platform functioning by design.

The last time extremism on Substack received widespread attention was in 2023, following the publication of my article in the Atlantic, “Substack Has a Nazi Problem.” My investigation had turned up scores of white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and full-on Nazi newsletters on the platform. Many of those newsletters were small, but others had tens of thousands of readers and boasted Substack “bestseller” badges.

Substack’s defenders, some of them creators making huge amounts of money on the platform, rushed to attack me while minimizing the problem. They highlighted the 16 newsletters I’d found that used overt Nazi imagery, such as swastikas and the Sonnenrad – a small subset of the many examples I had documented, not to mention the hundreds I’d reviewed. This group became a convenient stand-in and then quickly overshadowed the broader extremist ecosystem I had documented – one that ranged from explicitly National Socialist newsletters to more media-savvy white nationalists like Richard Spencer, to slickly produced online magazines advocating racist and discredited theories of eugenics. 

These defenders also ignored the ways Substack had gone out of its way to promote writers at the leading edge of the funnel. Substack founder Hamish McKenzie used an official podcast to promote Richard Hanania – an openly racist former writer for white nationalist blogs like Richard Spencer’s alternativeright.com, who had shifted from calling for the sterilization of “low IQ” minority groups to more strategically calling for more policing of Black neighborhoods and the gutting of the Civil Rights Act. The official Substack blog, meanwhile, had promoted Darryl Cooper, a podcaster who, as I noted in my Atlantic piece, had argued that the United States should have joined the Nazi Axis in World War II. (More about Cooper in a second.)

Under pressure, Substack not only defended their hosting policies but also asserted that Nazis should be allowed to keep making money on their platform. “I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don't think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse,” McKenzie wrote in a statement to the platform’s users. Nowhere did he explain how allowing Nazis and Nazi-sympathizers to make money and build large audiences on his platform would “strip bad ideas of their power.” 

The backlash was swift. More than 240 Substackers, including The Handbasket’s Marisa Kabas and myself, had co-published an open letter condemning the platform’s promotion and monetization of white-nationalist newsletters. In the wake of McKenzie’s statement, several prominent newsletters, including Casey Newton’s Platformer and The Handbasket, left the platform. After five years on Substack, I moved my newsletter, The Racket, to beehiiv.

At the height of the exodus, Substack’s supposedly free-speech absolutist founders performed an about-face, banning five overtly Nazi blogs while leaving the rest untouched. It was clear that this was a superficial move. As I wrote at the time: “For those who are staying because they think the Nazi problem is fake or overblown, or too small to be worth their notice, I say just wait. Substack’s management just put out the welcome mat for some pretty horrible people. Many will surely answer.”

NatSocToday, the swastika-labeled newsletter that Substack pushed out to its users last week, was not one of the hundreds I’d identified in 2023. That’s because, according to its splash page, it was launched six months ago. The same goes for many of the 220 Substacks its author publicly follows. 

These include “Ava Wolf’s Substack,” a Substack specializing in Holocaust denial and pro-Third Reich propaganda (sample headlines: “Piles Of Corpses At Dachau And Buchenwald Were Dead German Soldiers Staged There For Propaganda Purposes” and “The Gospel of Goebbels”), which started in mid-2024. Other newer titles include the European New Right Revue – an unapologetic promoter of white supremacist ethnonationalism, which started in July 2024. “Ava” and NatSocToday also recommend “Karl’s Substack” – whose thousands of subscribers are treated to a running series on “Jewish child molesters” and a recent newsletter titled “The Populace Are Ready for Pogroms.” Another newsletter, called Celebrating Whiteness, was also started six months ago.

Some prominent Nazi apologists have also heeded the call. David Irving, who the Southern Poverty Law Center has called “the world’s most prominent Holocaust denier,” joined Substack in May 2024. Substack is also now the home of Arktos Journal, an extremist publishing house founded by a Swedish neo-fascist. That publisher helped found the far-right Scandinavian message board Nordisk, whose patrons “openly incite[d] violence,” as the Guardian reported, and whose former users included the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik. The Arktos Substack boasts nearly 8,000 subscribers of its own. A linked merch shop includes the works of Alexander Dugin and the Italian Nazi Julius Evola, as well as a T-shirt featuring smiling white people celebrating “REMIGRATION SUMMER.”

And the Nazi Substackers I previously identified remain. One of those, Thomas Vance Pollock, was convicted and sentenced to six months in prison last year for making violent threats against the mother of an anti-fascist critic. His Substack, which is dedicated to promoting the life of the 1940s American Nazi William Dudley Pelley, is still active, with paid subscriptions turned on.

While the push-alerted Nazi blog had limited reach before its inadvertent Substack promotion, many others command more substantial audiences. As Lorenz reported, users who clicked the alert were directed to other extremist content, including “White Rabbit” – a newsletter by a self-described Southern White Nationalist with more than 8,600 subscribers. It is one of the fastest-growing newsletters in Substack’s “History” category.

That category deserves particular scrutiny. The No. 1 History Substacker – for at least a year now, following Substack’s special promotion of his newsletter – has been the aforementioned Darryl Cooper. Cooper made national headlines last year, after an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show in which he whitewashed Hitler’s record and defended the Holocaust as “humane.” Last month, Mother Jones investigated Cooper and learned that he has a long past in online far-right and white-supremacist circles as a Holocaust denier and Nazi-sympathizing troll. 

Cooper now boasts over 172,000 Substack readers, tens of thousands of whom have paid subscriptions (of which Substack takes a 10% cut). As Mother Jones summarizes, his current series tells “World War II from the perspective of the Germans,” with a trailer featuring “a thundering Hitler speech, delivered in German, as metal music plays in the background.” Cooper has also repeatedly cited his fellow Nazi-sympathizing Substacker David Irving. 

Hamish McKenzie – a Cooper subscriber – promoted his newsletter and podcast on multiple occasions. His growth has been supercharged by Substack’s trademark “dark patterns,” such as pop-ups that pre-select a free subscription to his newsletter for some new accounts.

Nor is Cooper alone in the category. Curtis Yarvin, the alt-right’s favorite “neo-monarchist,” who advocates for replacing democracy with a monarchy headed by a CEO or dictator, had until recently the No. 3 History Substack. Yarvin was bumped to No. 4 by “The Culturist,” a Substack by a writer who calls himself the “Godfather of the New Renaissance” and has displayed an unhealthy obsession with defending white-supremacist Rhodesia.

Substack isn’t alone here, of course. X—under the leadership of McKenzie’s former mentor, Elon Musk—has become a veritable hate-speech fiesta, whose in-house AI recently began spouting pro-Hitler rhetoric. But as a rising star in the media world, and one that makes pretensions to civility and intellectual heft, Substack plays a crucial role in the laundering and dissemination of extremist speech.

This is not what Substack set out to be, but it is what Substack has become: a reactionary incubator where bigots of varying stripes can meet and collaborate, then take their work into the world, laundered with a tech unicorn’s imprimatur. Most won’t be self-identified Nazis, but reining them in would mean restricting the growth of the rest. As Silicon Valley swings right, a shift led in part by major Substack investor Marc Andreessen, Substack will only expand its role as a clearinghouse for the far-right, funded and legitimized by the non-fascists who remain on the platform. 

In short, sending out Nazi push alerts may not have been the company’s goal. But it is more of a feature than a bug.