No Speech Cops—Please!
Substack needs no self-nominated Thought Police
The campaign against Nazism on Substack rumbles on—much to my annoyance and disapproval. Freedom of expression is both indivisible and broadly applicable: Once it becomes selective or is hedged around with dos and don’ts, it ceases to exist.
Now of course, there are and must be narrowly defined exceptions to that expansive standard: prohibitions on incitement to violence, for instance. And I realize that Substack is not legally bound (though it’s morally bound, perhaps) by the First Amendment. As a private entity, the platform has the right to make rules concerning the speech of those who publish here. For instance:
Substack cannot be used to publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes. Offending behavior includes credible threats of physical harm to people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability or medical condition.
This rule makes clear that any such speech on Substack emanating from the radical Right can be suppressed. But the current agitation for a ban on Nazis isn’t really about the rules. It’s about selective censorship. The argument is that since radicals of the Right are terrible people, they should be purged. The people agitating for such a policy no doubt consider themselves to be dauntless defenders of “our democracy,” fearless anti-fascist warriors. But these progressives have their toes over the edge of a slippery slope.
Take another look at the Substack rule quoted above. It seems clear enough—but what precisely is the definition of credible threats of physical harm? Slippery slopes, I’ve noticed, tend to be paved with adjectives. For instance, does the following statement embody a credible threat of physical harm? The Jews control American foreign policy. Or how about this one? From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
Where the first example is concerned, there’s room for disagreement. Some might argue that such a bigoted statement implies a threat of some kind. Others may demur, pointing out that it doesn’t specifically advocate violence. The second example, however, is significantly less equivocal. The course of events since October 7, 2023, has clarified the meaning of from the river to the sea: It’s a call for ethnic cleansing, even genocide. People who chant that slogan are calling for the destruction of the State of Israel. Or to put it shortly: “Anti-Zionism” is antisemitism.
The claim that one can be an anti-Zionist without being an antisemite was always dubious and now it’s ridiculous. If you’re against Zionism, you’re against the Jewish state that Zionism created, and you wish to see it destroyed. Recall the approval with which so many self-described anti-Zionists in American and Europe greeted the bloody Hamas assault on Israel, lauding that Islamofascist death cult as an army of liberation, reviling its victims as “settler-colonialists” who got what was coming.
Just because this variant of antisemitism employs the language of postmodern discourse is no reason to hold it to a lower standard than the racist hate speech of the radical Right. On the contrary, as we’ve seen, it’s much more dangerous. When was the last time that a large mob of Nazis tried to close Los Angeles International Airport? How many Klan rallies have taken place on university campuses? Have the Proud Boys been ripping down hostage posters?
If the Nazi shouters were serious about the urgent need to “demonetize” extremist speech on Substack, they’d have the anti-Zionists in their sights as well. But that’s not the agenda. What we have here is an ideological crusade, part and parcel of a drive to brand everybody and everything to the right of progressivism as Nazi, fascist, racist, White supremacist, and so on and so forth.
Case in point: When Claudine Gay’s scholarly fraudulence, plagiarism and anti-Zionism caught up with her and she was forced out as president of Harvard University, what did progressives have to say about that scandal? Only that the whole thing was a conspiracy of right-wing racists who somehow had “weaponized” plagiarism to kneecap an uppity black female.
Progressives, in short, can’t be counted upon to act in good faith—their definitions of fascism, racism, etc. have the malleability of Silly Putty. Even if I agreed with them that actual Nazis need to be purged from Substack, even if they professed to agree with me about anti-Zionism, I wouldn’t trust them to respect the general principle of free speech. Conveniently framed double standards would always apply.
The existing Substack rules concerning hate speech and incitement of violence are adequate and proper: Let them be enforced and no one on this platform will have legitimate grounds for complaint. But Substack, which was founded on a principle of intellectual pluralism, must never compromise that principle to placate a self-nominated, ideologically motivated cabal of speech cops. Heaven knows there are plenty of other platforms and publications on which virtue signaling has crowded out robust debate.