No Room for Dirtbags

Below is the text of my final post for my Substack newsletter of the same title that'll be my first one here, I guess?

This will have to be my sign-off on (what’s turned out to be) this piece of shit platform.

The reason? Simple. Nazis.

There are apparently a number of newsletters here on Substack espousing overtly Nazi views. The dog shit non-reasoning for permitting them to remain on the platform and to CONTINUE TO BE MONETIZED is the usual laissez-faire “marketplace of ideas” hedge that plunder-bros always seem to use when they try to peel money (which they assert is amoral/neutral on political questions - a supporting bit of dog shit non-reasoning intending [and failing] to prop up the broader dog shit non-point they seek to make) away from ideology (necessarily partisan, so under the Mindset of Unexamined Capitalism that is literally killing us all, messy and low ROI.) This is exactly the kind of approach that has led us to Kleptocratic Killing Fields Run By Mutt-Headed Mall Cops dystopia we’ve built for ourselves. The shit-minded thinking that’s fueled the drill-baby-drill, celebrate-the-grind form of Jonestown Capitalism that’s beaten us all into prey animals, livestock impassively gnawing away at our cud as the loudspeakers overhead squawk at us that so long as there is the prospect of another nickel to be made, we must continue to climb this rock wall built from the skulls of the poor.

And when we fall, as we all must, we’re to shriek out some shoddily composed verse from the Prosperity Gospel aimed at keeping the livestock climbing. Before falling themselves. What unites us, in our plummeting, is the privilege of splashing down to drown in the same vat of swindler piss. The livestock who’ve yet to fall will each post reaction videos of our fall, damning our lack of hustle. Some of them won’t even post any, but will only shame-call “Self care!” after us as we hurtle past.

The Hand of the Market is NOT fucking invisible - it’s PLAINLY visible in the shit policies arising from shit fallacies and outright shit-lies told in service of shit beliefs.

In a time not long past, though - a time I was alive to see - it was agreed by every one of us who clocked in at a loom here in this Mill of the Shining Beacon, weaving dutifully away at our little square of the Celebration of Broligarchy Quilt that is the national project (and yes, true, to get to our looms, we must pass under the affirmation Arbeit macht frei over the gates of the Mill, which we’re assured is there in a fun, ironic, reappropriated way) that fascism generally and Nazis in particular were bad. And that believing as much as actually bigger than making a buck. We’d fought a war about it and everything - a famous war, one of the cool ones. We joined with other nations, even (a quaint thing we used to do in the last century) in declaring: Hey, man: the genociding and conquest? Not cool, yo.

We further agreed that there was peril inherent in the embrace of any of that Nazi shit - we were like: You know what, designed by Hugo Boss though they may have been, we’re not even gonna wear your little outfits anymore. And wherever we saw somebody with the little armbands and shit, we were all Nuh uh, bro. You gotta clear out of this picnic. And more - where we encountered Nazi-ass IDEAS and the RHETORIC, we’d shut that shit down - they’d tart it up in fresh-looking they-had-some-good-ideas-though wrapping tied up nice with a trains-ran-on-time bow, and we, some of us, had remained awake in Civics class (if you’re a young person reading this, snag one of your grandparents and have them explain what this was - time was, representative democracy came with obligations for every citizen - thank White Christ we abandoned that hard-to-maintain Republic for the present Free Market Vending Machine) and could recognize cowardly dog shit no matter how it was wrapped and politely decline. And when a Hate Speech Ponzi Schemer would not step down off his soapbox, we’d shout over him or push him to the ground if we had to. And you know something? If he got kicked in his repulsive little face on the way down, we didn’t see nothing, officer. Till Reagan, anyway.

This century, however, the Incel Hand, with its shiny, shiny Crypto Ring encrusted with Anti-Vaxxer Bling, slips so nice into the Nazi Glove, though. Fits like a, well, like a glove.

Which means that when your life’s project is to monetize every facet of human life, you become so skittish about the PROSPECT of offending any POTENTIAL customer that over a very short time, there comes to be NOTHING they could do or say that could impel you to refuse to serve them. Which is where we’ve gotten to today. Everybody’s money’s green, no matter how insane and dangerous they might be. In a nation where the last vestiges of feeling any sense of obligation to each other has sloughed off us like molted lizard skin. So the ONLY metric worth measuring is the green of somebody’s money, since the social norms that used to pertain to our public lives and exert some tacit demand of decency upon us have been cast aside, a relic of some imagined Snowflake Pipe Dream, there is nothing larger in us than Pursuit of Gain.

So tolerance and MATERIAL AID of Nazis - not in the public square, where principle demands that in order for Free Speech to be upheld, it must be safeguarded for all, no matter how detestable - but here, on a privately held platform, a profit-seeking enterprise that could A) evict Nazis from its premises, or B) AT A FUCKING MINIMUM PRECLUDE THEM FROM GETTING PAID TO POST ON HERE - goes swiftly from a position that’s Conceivable to one that’s Probably Prudent and Advisable, Even, till finally, where conviction is called for, where full-throated denunciation should come EASILY, a spineless murmuring about your Hands Being Tied, Really, a dry-lipped non-apology for how They’re Just Genocide-ADJACENT, Really? If You Think About It, Though?

Look, I know the economic power that I wield - here or in the wider world - verges on nil. And I know that my individual ability to influence Substack co-founders Chris Best, Jairaj Sethi, and Hamish McKenzie in their heedless, gutless acquiescence to fucking Nazis is nonexistent. But I am a person untroubled by the ongoing need to tell Nazis to fuck off, and a person able to recognize that Nazi acceptance is the necessary precondition of Nazi sympathy, and a person who can recall that Kristallnacht happens when a slim minority of thugs take up bricks and truncheons while a shitload of bystanders do nothing but try to arrange their faces in some approximation of Perturbed Neighbor. I’m leaving your platform, effective immediately. Just wanted to set this here for anybody who might, as I still do, think the only good Nazi is an Ignored and Marginalized and Pelted With Batteries Nazi.

Ian Belknap is a Chicago writer presently living in Baltimore.