Part 61: The Nazi Bar Problem on Substack – Donald Trump and the Alt-Right Dance

Published January 5, 2024.

Photo of Los Angeles from San Gabriel Peak taken by author (GoPro Hero 11 Black).

By Zachary Ellison, Independent Journalist

Those who have followed the unfolding crisis on Substack already know, but it’s not until you encounter them that you realize just how clever the alt-right trolls are who breath oxygen into the platform, which hosts the likes of white nationalist Richard Spencer. Now I have no need to recount the ways in which this Nazi pretender has made himself famous in the circles that cover violent right-wing extremism, and I fully condemn the violence that has come from the left as well in all circumstances.

However, the problem is more complicated. Substackers Against Nazis seemed surprised that Substack management responded with a Trojan horse article from Elle Griffin initially to rebut their verifiable claims that the platform is actively monetizing for white supremacists. Spencer writes in response to the scandal: “Substack has been a great experience for Mark Brahmin and myself. In a year-and-a-half, we’ve reached thousands of new readers and developed a strong community. Substack will be the basis for everything going forward.” This is Substack’s vision of success?

The post from Spencer seemed designed to undermine any suspicion that Substack might actually cave in their meeting scheduled today with journalist Casey Newton, founder and editor of the technology publication Platformer ostensibly to discuss the issue. While it remains to be seen if Newton, a most honorable dignitary on behalf Substackers Against Nazis, which I fully support as an online movement for decency and good order, given the recent reply from Substack’s leadership team it seems unlikely. There is no reason for them not to take heed and counsel in this matter.

The truth is that not only is Substack monetizing from Nazi lovers on the alt-right, but it supports a panoply of far right extremist authors who are just absolutely appalled on the idea of an lawful restrictions on their perceived free speech as part of their presumed natural rights. This includes prominent figures on Substack like Phisto Sobanii who hurls slurs and insults at those who support Substackers Against Nazis that you have to wonder if he thinks being an alt-right troll is Substack’s brand of business. Now Phisto isn’t alone, but he is representative of the greater problem of those who think monetizing Nazis is acceptable in the United States of America.

Much like my beloved University of Southern California, with its Cardinal and Gold, it’s Trojan Family the Nazi Bar allusion as Newton writes “The moment a platform begins to recommend content is the moment it can no longer claim to be simple software.” Much like USC and tuition, once you’ve pay-to-play on Substack enough as a revenue bringer it’s not just the Nazis themselves who are profitable patrons, but everyone who wants the Nazis around badly enough that they will work themselves into a frenzy denouncing you. It reminds me of the time that Ben Shapiro came to USC hosted by the Young Americans for Freedom only to cancel the tickets of his critics even as he took stage in our Bovard Auditorium. It’s a charade, simply game strategy.

Yes, to some people, being around Nazis and their related friends like the Ku Klux Klan, which Donald Trump famously in 2016 pretended to have total ignorance of is just a game to these types. So long as you give hatred and extremism a place to draw revenue, it’s literally going to rest its head on that fact grow. What we saw happen on January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol was just a prelude for what’s coming next as we move into the 2024 election season. The Nazis in the bar aren’t always so easy to spot, they don’t all walk into the Capitol with their Auschwitz T-Shirts on as one deplorable famously did, and they don’t concede on any basis that Trump in fact represents Nazism in America. We will discredit their erasure of real history.

Trump is their biggest brand ambassador. He’s the President of the Nazis in the United States, who have so thoroughly corrupted the Republican Party as a zombie vessel that it’s hard to recognize it even as patriots like former Congressman Adam Kinzinger who also writes on Substack fought their own party to try and hold Trump accountable for the vicious assault on our democracy. Today former U.S. Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn announced his run for Congress, I support that and hope that more of those who were attacked on that day will continue to speak out against Trumpism. Donald Trump and all of his Nazi followers, the fanatics, will be stopped.

The danger of fully failing to check an insurrection is that you will simply enable the next occurrence. We’ve failed, the wheels of our justice system moving too slowly, and being too corrupted to stop the threat of Trump and even literal Nazis on Substack. It’s really one and the same at this point online, plus or minus the brainwashing of average Americans in Red States through propaganda channels like Fox News and NewsNation. To be clear, there is no protected free speech right to advocate violent insurrection against the United States Government, that’s treason and Trump should have been hung out as a traitor. He is not a patriotic American.

We didn’t get it done though, foremost because even the Republicans who were attacked that day refused to do the right thing with former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy being the most prominent example along with Senator Mitch McConnell. So long as the media remains fractured, and moderates are snuffed out when they try to flip slides, what the next election promises is nothing but protracted conflict. Make no mistake, there will be violence around this election again, Trump and his followers simply can’t help themselves, and I fear it from the far left as well that views things as absolutes and in some instances embraces political violence.

Now as my longtime readers will know, I’ve extensively covered the LA Fed Tapes scandal in Los Angeles, which will still officially case open, clearly looks like an attempt using alt-right tactics to divide and conquer using racism as a weapon for inflammation. The note posted on Reddit along with the recordings clearly suggest familiarity with that website. I wasn’t surprised to hear that former Director of Finance for the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor Santos Leon was described in initial reporting by Los Angeles Magazine’s Michele McPhee as a “very macho guy” who used spyware to capture his boss speaking poorly of him, his spouse being the President of the LA Fed Ron Herrera’s executive assistant. The inside man at play!

I’ve heard the same about Santos from a completely separate source from McPhee’s and this does seem to be the case. I do think the purpose was to help the perceived tough guy campaign of Rick Caruso and that this lead to engagement with the Caruso campaign in advance of the leak based on my observation of Caruso associate Sam Garrison at USC. Garrison served as both Caruso’s Chief of Staff and VP at Caruso Affiliated. The number of days where I woke up and imagined that I had just seem someone seriously about to commit acoustic audio interference against an election is just about zero. Every day I feel better about my opposition to it on August 26, 2022.

Now I do think that Caruso is evolving and in a Richard Spencer type of way. Spencer who according to another prominent conservative Substack writer Koltin Scott who has attempted to dismiss the issue of extremism on Substack ostensibly voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 election. There is no unlimited right to free speech in the United States, and Substack already regulates both violent and pornographic speech. You can literally be a Nazi like Richard Spencer, but you can’t post a picture of a naked female breast, doing so would violate their terms of service. Ironic, isn’t it, the same people who would conclude a breast is a violation of their Terms of Service seem to literally want the business of the worst bigots ever? People who were murderers.

I’m not for the sex bots that seem to now stalk Threads as rapidly as they did on Twitter, but I find this contradiction ironic for from the free speech crowd that simply doesn’t understand that the Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly in favor of certain restrictions on speech dealing with violence, and even insurrection. The right-wing loves their dirty tricks from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump’s Roger Stone, they will do just about anything to get at opponents including stalking, harassment and spying. That’s how they play the game, and their only hope is that they won’t get caught and held to account. People who think they are above and beyond the law are just wrong.

Even if they do like so many did on January 6, 2021 their plan is simple, seed the future for others to follow in their footsteps using digital means.  The other day someone even told me that the right loves Donald Trump precisely because he acts like a criminal. I can’t in good conscience allow this to unfold again without even trying the power of the pen to rebut its fundamental indecency. What happened before, can and will happen again, and all we can do is try to exert pressure on those who platform and promote such dangerous behavior. It’s a conscious decision at this time.

While I understand that some in Substackers Against Nazis are reluctant to embrace this larger fight against fascism, it is one in the same. The literal Nazis are just most extreme symptom of the long rot in American politics that seeks to demonize liberal democracy to the benefit of fascism, from Charles Lindbergh to Tucker Carlson, it’s really the same old spiel. Before Barack Obama came along in 2008, my favorite U.S. President was Harry S Truman who hailed from my father’s state of Missouri, the Show Me State, where the rubber hits the road, truth-telling time. Game over trolls!

Truman was a man of unsparing words, a Midwesterner like the Hawaii-born Obama would become, and reading Truman the orator is to ingest the sharpest of rhetoric in defense of democracy. Truman didn’t tolerate the Nazis, and although his use of nuclear weapons is much debated, it’s clear that it brought an end to what otherwise was a bloodbath in waiting. There is no place for Nazis or Oathkeeper’s in our modern civil society, and we have an obligation to “Give ‘em Hell” for every piece of the Internet, and every yard of the Capitol grounds where Truman once served as a United States Senator. They left bloodstains on the hall of our cherished democracy.

There are no profiles in courage awarded to those who cower in the face of extremism from right or left. The liberal democracy that we love and cherish, that is tolerant, that integrated the United States Military is stronger because of it, and whether Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has to do another stand down on such extremism in our military just might determine the outcome on the next play for power from the right. The same people who would have sacrificed Europe to Hitler today are preparing to turnover Ukraine to Russia and to allow Israel to be attacked viciously by the terrorists of Hamas. The turn of this debate into Zionism being Nazism is the most perverse thing I’ve heard in my adult life. I’m honestly scared for the future of this country.

While I agree that the IDF has failed to take all steps possible to limit civilian casualties, that conflation is disgusting Antisemitism and I will not turn an eye away from it just as I would tolerate Islamophobia. That the alt-right trolls of the right so casually turn to attacking our LGBTQ friends at every turn and even the disabled shows their cards. The game is up, it’s Show Me Time, and I intend to give them every last little bit of hell that I can summon. We’re playing for keeps now, another 4 years of Trump will comprise our national security. That’s simply a risk that we can’t take.

To all those who swore an oath to the U.S. Constitution to defend it against enemies foreign and domestic, I ask you to consider the meaning of that last part. It’s not free speech to undermine America to the benefit of foreign adversaries. Donald Trump is not a normal human being, the media can and must stop platforming him as Univision recently did to great controversy. It’s not about both sides, it’s about the Government of the United States and whether we’re ready for another Banana Republic, whether it’s the Trump Organization in Washington D..C or Caruso’s lame attempt on Los Angeles. We’re not going to let it happen again my friends! I will resist them! They can call it censorship, but there is no protection for such appalling, dangerous behavior. The deliberate incitement of violence by others is not protected free speech.

Don’t tell me both sides do it. Nancy Pelosi never told a crowd to go the U.S. Capitol and fight. That’s rubbish. For all those who question the values of liberal democracy, in the end, it’s just us still standing, still giving battle as law enforcement did against the MAGA Mob on January 6, 2021. They weren’t tourists in the same way the U.S. Marines on Okinawa weren’t invaders. The Japanese slaughtered the Okinawans and the Marines in term crushed Japanese resistance at a great cost to U.S. lives. I’ve stood in the presence of our military and it is those fundamental values alone of service to country, that stopped January 6 from being even far more deadly.

I intend to give every last Nazi, every last alt-right toll absolute hell no matter how hard they squeal back as the new Chief Nazi Hunter of Substack (more on Nazi Hunting to follow), and that’s satire for your dense people. Let me be clear, I’m not having it, and I’m intimidated by the shrieking that somehow hunting Nazis is an unsound policy. Richard Spencer led that march in Charlottesville, Virginia and Stewart Rhodes led those Oathkeepers into our cherished Capitol.

How dare they play us for fools, and how dare Substack management capitulate to Nazism by giving it aid and comfort! Such actions will only lead to more offline violence. There is no protected right to be a Nazi on a private server, and there is no public right to try and overthrow the government when you’re the soon-to-be ex-President. That’s what happened, you can read about in a complete Congressional report on the event.

To those who would interfere in our elections, who would use illegal means to gain a personal benefit for themselves and to sow division. Sure as two Los Angeles Police Department Internal Affairs detectives going to the Office of Inspector General to report alleged political meddling by LAPD Chief Michel Moore, we see you, we know you’re trying to do the right thing, and we will hold the line of peacefulness and civility in good order, because that’s what America is really about. We will not repeat the mistakes of the past. There will be no tolerance for Nazis and insurrectionists.

Link: Why Substack is at a crossroads

Link: Substack faces user revolt over anti-censorship stance on neo-Nazis

Link: Select January 6th Committee Final Report and Supporting Materials Collection

Link: Biden makes impassioned argument Trump could destroy American democracy as he opens 2024 campaign

Link: What Does Free Speech Mean?

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Zachary Ellison is an Independent Journalist and Whistleblower in the Los Angeles area. Zach was most recently employed by the University of Southern California, Office of the Provost from October 2015 to August 2022 as an Executive Secretary and Administrative Assistant supporting the Vice Provost for Academic Operations and the Vice Provost and Senior Advisor to the Provost among others. Zach holds a Master’s in Public Administration and a Graduate Certificate in Sustainable Policy and Planning from the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. While a student at USC, he worked for the USC Good Neighbors Campaign including on their newsletter distributed university-wide. Zach completed his B.A. in History at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon and was a writer, editor, and photographer for the Pasadena High School Chronicle. He was Barack Obama’s one-millionth online campaign contributor in 2008. Zach is a former AmeriCorps intern for Hawaii State Parks and worked for the City of Manhattan Beach Parks and Recreation. He is a trained civil process server, and enjoys weekends in the great outdoors.