I had a fun sparring match with salad writer Emily Nunn last week. It was an informative lesson on psychological projection in the politics.
She has since blocked me and deleted her original Substack Note that spawned our thread. I took a couple of screenshots, but unfortunately not of her original post. So if I miss something, or misremember the exact details, please excuse me.
She commented and endorsed an Atlantic article entitled, “Substack Has a Nazi Problem,” that has been making the rounds on Substack. The article in question highlights the worst of Substack’s Nazi sympathizers and white supremacists, which are undoubtedly real and abhorrent, but represent a tiny fraction of the platform’s ecosystem. The main issue the writer, Jonathan Katz, has is that Substack profits from such ideologues, since that platform takes a cut of all paid subscriptions.
As has been argued before ad nauseum by the censorious left, there’s “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach/consequences/paid subs.” The problem with this is that, of course, it opens the gateway to demonetizing any ideas that upset mainstream sensibilities, as we’ve seen on YouTube, Instagram, and even Patreon.
In response, I posted the following Note recounting a legendary story of free speech defense by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
So I’m not the biggest fan of the ACLU, but there are things they get right.
One famous case was from 1977, when a group of neo-Nazis decided to hold a demonstration in Skokie, Illinois. Half the residents of the village were Jewish, with hundreds being Holocaust survivors.
Obviously abhorrent and disgusting. Officials tried to block them from doing so.
The Nazi leader, Frank Collin, reached out to the ACLU for recourse. He spoke with the legal director David Goldberger, a jew.
He decided to take the case, and they litigated the case past an injunction, appealing to SCOTUS. Despite the high court coming down on the side of the First Amendment, Goldberger and the ACLU faced immense backlash.
“One night during the case, I received a call at home in which the caller said I would be punished for representing the Nazis. Late one afternoon, members of the Jewish Defense League appeared at the Illinois ACLU office reception area swinging baseball bats while a staff member hurriedly closed the door to my office so I would not be seen. At my parents’ synagogue, a rabbi gave a sermon excoriating me for defending the free speech rights of Nazis. Fortunately, my parents were not present at the time,” Goldberger wrote.
In a sharp U-turn, the Nazis eventually agreed to change the location to downtown Chicago, with conditions.
This all came at enormous cost to both Goldberger and the ACLU. But their stand for principle above pressure is admirable and stands as an enduring testament to the value of free speech, including and especially for speech we find highly offensive, which of course includes “hate speech.”
I believe censoring abhorrent ideas is far worse than the risk of letting them propagate freely.
Just like in an individual’s psyche, if our society represses ideas, no matter how terrible they are, they will inevitably project outward in some contorted way. When we repress something, we give it power over us.
Reference: aclu.org/issues/free-speech/skokie-case…
A reasonable reply, I thought, pointing out that it’s possible to oppose Nazi ideology while standing up for free speech. But, Emily was not happy.
I know general advice is to avoid to arguing online — it’s rarely productive and often volatile. I usually avoid such “fights” on X, but I felt a different compulsion to do so here. While X has the backing of Elon “Go F*ck Yourself” Musk, Substack doesn’t have the same power backing up its mission statement.
What somewhat surprised me was that Emily replied to my comment (starting with “please don’t put words in my mouth”), saying that I was attempting to “silence” her. She was saying that my comment on her obviously bad-faith interpretation represents an attempt to censor her. This is obviously false, but I was struck by the mental gymnastics it took to arrive at that attempt as a “gotcha” moment.
But this isn’t to single out Emily. This is an endemic feature of modern politics, mostly on the progressive and radical left, but the right obviously has its own serial projectors as well.
Let’s consider for a moment why the human mind engages in psychological projection. Our most common conception of it comes from Sigmund Freud, who characterized it as a set of feelings, thoughts, desires in one’s personality that become defined as “other.”
We see it when a messy person is aggravated by someone else’s uncleanliness, or when a cheating spouse becomes overly suspicious of their partner. It’s normal, but often pathological. It also happens on the political level: when one party takes authoritarian action, while falsely accusing the other of doing so.
Substack’s main pillar is free speech. Nothing is revolutionary about a newsletter publisher or paid subscription models. But connect that to an unyielding commitment to the First Amendment, and you build something robust and unique. Several of its top earners were explicitly censored by other platforms.
So when carpetbaggers from other platforms come to try and change Substack — built to escape them — they will not be met with the same benefit of the doubt they once received elsewhere.
I can guarantee that if you asked today’s pro-censorship progressives if they supported free speech before 2016, all would have readily answered affirmatively. So there was once a time where they actually believed in it, at least until speech they didn’t like (ie, anything to the right of Marx) started to gain political power.
On an unconscious level, they realize that the establishment has been censoring thoughts, opinions, and facts contrary to the mainstream narrative, which for now, they happen to agree with. This contradicts the liberal value of freedom, so there is a cognitive dissonance produced.
Dissonance — or tension — by its nature, needs to be resolved.
The healthy thing for progressives to do would be to recognize what happened and to re-assess their world beliefs. But we know that’s not happening anytime soon. Likely, their only chance at this realization will be to lose politically in a big way. And so, anytime they are reminded of this, directly or indirectly, one of their most common reactions will be projection.
It’s worth nothing that if Substack has an alleged “Nazi problem,” it also has a “Marxist problem” :
If we’re keeping score, Marxism has the highest body count of any political ideology in history. But you don’t see anyone calling for their censorship in any concerted way on any platform.
This is a question we’ve already answered in the Skokie case. As much as we hate a thing, we don’t censor or hide it. We expose it to sunlight, criticism, and debate. If it’s evil, it shrivels and eventually dies.
After the New York Post / Twitter censorship scandal and follow-up reporting showing collusion between social media companies and the federal government, there should be little doubt about which way power flows in the current regime. That makes outposts of freedom like Substack and X so vital.
As
quips:If you enjoy LBRTY Digital and our mission of guiding New York toward a new era of prosperity and freedom, consider joining our inner circle of supporters with a paid subscription. For just the cost of a couple coffees a month, you’ll help establish LD as a powerful alternative to the local media landscape.
Great insight. Projection has become the leading cudgel for the progressive woke in politics as well. It doesn't matter how truthful it is, there is no need to walk it back when you keep plowing forward. Projection at first stuns, then destabilizes the thing to be replaced. In the media space, after we brush off the dust, we can leave and start our our own conversations. Eventually the thing they wrestled control over will die for lack of influence.
In politics however, we are forced to defend the rules of intellectual honesty and integrity because we cannot afford to leave or let it die. The rules are too important. The progressive woke know this and take advantage of it.
When we call out and dismiss their slurs as accelerant designed to burn it to the ground, we drag the conservation back onto the mat, the here and now, bound by facts and time tested language. This is the only place the battle of ideas is workable.
I abhor identity politics, and I love the idea the ACLU once did aswell. Thank you Jano for the great article, we have got to pound this drum, everything is depending on it.