Have you heard about the Substack Nazis? Guys, there are NAZIS on SUBSTACK making MONEY for NAZI THINGS. It’s a very serious problem, according to the crackerjack “reporting” of one Casey Newton, this problem of literal Nazi Substack writers — hundreds, I imagine, with an audience in the hundreds of thousands I’m sure, and millions of dollars pumping through this horrifying Nazi publishing machine. American democracy is at stake! But fear not, for the small price of $100 a year Casey Newton, a “journalist,” will keep away the Substack Nazis.

I’m kidding of course, there is no meaningful Substack Nazi movement, and Casey isn’t a journalist. Casey is a political activist who calls himself a journalist in service of mainstreaming his activism under the cover of neutrality, and providing his tech industry readers with a good excuse to expense his blog to the very companies Casey sets out daily to unfairly malign (note: if you work at a major tech company and have the power, please stop giving this man money). In any case, we really should unpack this latest clown car crash, because through it we can clearly see the future of tech, once again wading through a toxic waste dump election year.

Back in November, in the pages of the Atlantic, left-wing activist Jonathan M. Katz accused Substack of sustaining an actual American Nazi movement, wildly distorting the issue, and outright falsely claiming at least one Nazi thot leader made his entire living on the platform. Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie published a response, reminding readers 1) Substack, a service that helps writers send emails, basically adheres to the First Amendment, and 2) anyone inciting violence of the kind implied by the Atlantic would be, and has always been, removed from the service. This triggered Casey Newton, the Sam Smith of tech journalism, into this month’s frenzied bit of “journalist” performance art, in which he surfaced six nefarious “extremist” writers (out of several hundred thousand Substacks), and sent them to Substack for comment. Substack, which seems not to have known they existed on account of they were so few and so entirely irrelevant, immediately took down five in violation of their terms. Nonetheless, Casey left the platform in protest of the Nazi Substack movement that did not, and still does not, exist.