Part 52: Against the Nazis on Substack – Why We Shouldn’t Endorse Street Fighting Man

Published December 15, 2023. Updated August 23, 2024.

Photo of the Angeles Crest Highway Tunnels, finished in 1943, by the author (GoPro Hero 11 Black).

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By Zachary Ellison, Independent Journalist

I wanted to be at Los Angeles City Council this morning, where our elected officials recently moved to change meeting rules to move general public comment to the end of the meeting. You can still speak to individual items as usual. While I’ll be the first person to admit the displeasure of watching regular commentators spew the most vile language, including sporting Swastika signs and presenting themselves as “Adolf Hitler” for official public comment, it’s not just that this morning that we are going to talk about in this treatise.

As so many have noted with the rise of Donald Trump, fascism is on the move in America. The ex-President who won’t go away now faces more felony charges than I can count. In 2016, when Trump was elected, I launched a solo effort to protest him directly at his golf course in Rancho Palos Verdes. For 5 Saturday lunch times in a row, I’d stand out there in front of his sign with my “Not My President” and “Love Trumps Hate” signs. The security guards tried to chase me off at first, but after pointing to the real estate times on the space between the sidewalk and the curb, there was nothing they could do about my protest.

I also joined in protest with University of Southern California students who peacefully marched from campus to downtown Los Angeles, marching through Fraternity Row chanting “My body, my choice,” and I stood with our community at Los Angeles International Airport when Trump imposed a Muslim ban. I am for protest; I am for free speech, but I am against the Nazis, and I am against Donald Trump. This morning, the Los Angeles City Council took up a measure for consideration that would make it an offense to aggressively leaflet with white supremacist or other hateful literature.

Protest cannot be intimidation, and free speech cannot be fascism. What happened in Munich in 1923 in the “Beer Hall Putsch” led by Adolf Hitler from November 8–9 can happen again, and it can start in a city just like Los Angeles! That such a coup succeeded in the United States of America in 2016 and lingers like a pestilence was not unforeseen. Donald Trump perpetuated the racist birther movement against Barack Obama, insisting that he had been born in Kenya and not in Honolulu, Hawaii, at Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital. Sadly, the media fed fuel to this fire, and so it was that Obama confronted Trump in the open but not in the street.

Barack Obama’s roast of Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner on April 30, 2011 was probably the first and only time in Donald Trump’s entire life where anyone has dared to publicly hold him to account. Obama began his remarks by joking about the Press Corps: “The end of the Republic has never looked better” in his 8th appearance at the event as President. After complimenting actress Helen Mirren and billionaire Michael Bloomberg backhand about his failed campaign effort in comparison to Trump, he said, “After all, Mike was a big city mayor; he knows policy in depth, and he’s actually worth the amount of money that he says he is,” to roaring laughter from the assembled reporters and dignitaries.

That’s how you take someone down — not in the streets, not at their doorstep. So it was that as I protested at Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles, but as the protest went on, and people gradually became even more hostile, lowering their windows to yell epithets including “Go back to Mexico,” I decided that I was in fact not a street-fighting man, as the Rolling Stones Mick Jagger famously sang: “Hey think the time is right for a palace revolution, — But where I live the game to play is compromise solution.” Street Fighting Man was heavily criticized when it was released in 1968 for ostensibly promoting violence, and many radio stations boycotted the song’s release.

The divisionism that followed Donald Trump has no compromise, just like no compromise was possible in Germany with Adolf Hitler. There is no protected right to free speech online for a private business to post propaganda in support of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the NSDAP, or the Nazi Party. Trump’s transformation of the Republican Party into a blind machine that follows his every lead is terrifying. America cannot be entrusted to such a maniac again, and as we head into another election year in America in 2024, the idea that we should compromise with such a movement is farcical. Censorship has its right time and place to check hate and violence, but it can’t be a blanket rule to suppress all unpopular expression, even as it offers a recourse against the direct incitement of violence and hate in society.

Now there has been much news of late about activists in Los Angeles and how violent they are, and I’ve seen this. I’ve watched the videos of People’s C’s City Council and JTown Action and Solidarity provocations against Councilmember Kevin de León. There’s no excuse for de León’s physical response to Jason Reedy and others, but I’m not justifying it either, even as I will cover its developments. Nor is there an excuse for the reported violence committed by prominent Instagram activist influencer Edin Alex Enamorado! He was arrested along with 7 others by the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department for allegedly staging incidents in the name of protecting street vendors in order to collect profit through building a public profile.

It’s one thing to get mad and have a fight over racism, even audio racism from an unknown leaker then broadcast around the world, but it’s another thing to intentionally and deliberately create dangerous circumstances for your own advancement. That’s low. Recently, billionaire real estate developer and shopping mall magnate Rick Caruso stated to Elex Michaelson after hosting a fundraiser for President Joe Biden that he would at long last openly oppose Donald Trump. This comes after the MAGA arm had covertly online-backed Caruso, including flooding responses on X, formerly known as Twitter, to intimidate critics. Sound familiar?

The politics of intimidation must stop. My intention with this series hasn’t been to demonize Caruso but rather to tell the story of what happened at USC through its scandals on Substack as a whistleblower. Two weeks ago, we learned from reporting by The Atlantic’s Jonathan M. Katz that the popular writing platform: “At least 16 of the newsletters that I reviewed have overt Nazi symbols, including the swastika and the sonnenrad, in their logos or in prominent graphics.” You don’t have to be Rick Caruso to know that siding with the Nazis and fascists is simply bad for business. Rick Caruso had hedged for years on denouncing Trump openly to his followers.

In 2016, Caruso was interviewed by TMZ about his prior remarks jokingly banning Donald Trump from the upscale The Grove Shopping Center in West Los Angeles over his comments about women, including the famous Access Hollywood video where Trump remarked: “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

A younger looking Caruso, appearing slightly inebriated on a night out on the town with his white shirt unbuttoned in a navy blue blazer after asking “yeah” a few times, says that he ”would actually be happy” to ban Trump from The Grove. Caruso continues in the October 11, 2016 video by saying: “If you want to be in public office, you’ve got to be compassionate, you’ve got to be a gentleman, you gotta be professional, you gotta care about people, I just don’t see him being any of that.”

Dare I say that if Rick Caruso can ban Donald Trump from The Grove and turn on him in support of President Joseph Biden, even though I’m skeptical of his remarks trying to force both sides from the extreme out of the discussion, I can appreciate that even Caruso knows there are limits. Substack’s leadership of Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi should take notes from Caruso on moderation, not from Trump. As independent journalist Marisa Kabas, as part of a group of publishers, wrote in “Substackers Against Nazis: A collective letter to Substack leadership:

From our perspective as Substack publishers, it is unfathomable that someone with a swastika avatar, who writes about “The Jewish question,” or who promotes Great Replacement Theory, could be given the tools to succeed on your platform. And yet you’ve been unable to adequately explain your position.

Soon a dueling letter appeared from writer Elle Griffin titled “Substack shouldn’t decide what we read,” drawing just as much support. Substack replied in writing to The Atlantic article by Katz, saying: “Substack has a content moderation policy that protects against extremes — like incitements to violence — but we do not subjectively censor writers outside of those policies.”

Rick Caruso and Kevin de León have both said some terribly racist things in the past. Caruso in private about Congresswoman Maxine Waters and a fellow trustee at USC, as I recently wrote about, but they are not the same thing as Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump. I’ve told people many times that while I think Nury Martinez said things that were unacceptable, their type of racism is still not the same as open support for the Nazi Party. The inaction by Substack on this issue, and their flippant response to the Hill’s reporting on this from Dominick Mastrangelo simply pointing to the opposing letter is inadequate.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, but sometimes enforcement action is needed. I’ve got some questions for Rick Caruso about where those LA Fed Tapes came from, and I still need him to release his long promised investigation report from O’Melveny & Myers in regards to the sexual abuse committed by former USC gynecologist George Tyndall, who died on October 4, while awaiting trial, more than 5 years after the Los Angeles Times exposed that story and USC’s severely unethical response to reports by victims of such abuses. Wrong is wrong, but sometimes you can make things right.

After protests this morning, disruptions as they are termed, the Los Angeles City Council continued about its business. Don’t get me wrong, I’m for a vigorous and active democracy, but on the Nazi question, there can be no compromise. Recently, the Atlantic also ran an article on April 12, 2023, defending the rights of billionaire benefactor Harlan Crow to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harlan Crow, among others, by Graeme Wood entitled “Clarence Thomas’s Billionaire Friend Is No Nazi. He has a signed copy of Mein Kampf. That doesn’t mean he admires Hitler.” I’m going to disagree on that point, no one should be cherishing signed copies of Mein Kampf.

I will never endorse such an ideology or violence of any kind, including the use of hateful words. The few times I’ve uttered such things, it was always a terrible mistake. Substack should learn from its mistakes and not embrace a culture that tolerates Nazi symbols of any kind, and I’m pretty sure that even Rick Caruso doesn’t have a signed copy of Mein Kampf in his collection! I’m not sure what Substack thinks they’re doing here, but no to the Nazis. No to the street fighting men of both extremes. I still have hope and change that we will collectively, as a city, as an online community, and as a nation, start moving in a better direction than Trumpism and street fighting tactics.

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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 in 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.