Why I’m not leaving Substack

Much has been made over the last year about Substack’s tolerance of neo-Nazis and other extremists on their platform. Every week I see new posts offering up alternatives like Ghost, Write.ly, and others, where supposedly there isn’t a significant presence of “red hats.” And while I sympathize with the desire to not share a space with such appalling content, it doesn’t serve our cause to shrink back and run away from it. We’re in a time in history when people are being sucked down a black hole of disinformation; our youth are being fed a narrative that it’s “manly” and patriotic to be racist, sexist, homophobic/transphobic, etc. We’re not going to be able to stem the tide of these messages if we simply vacate every space where we encounter outrageous content. We should be trying to win people over, most especially those at risk for getting pulled in by conspiracy-driven propaganda. We should be trying to counter disinformation and false narratives, rather than spending our energies attempting to set up “safe spaces” where we don’t have to see things we don’t like.

It’s obvious to me that we can’t count on national Democrats to save us…we have to be the resistance we want to see.