I’ve covered Casey Newton’s activism for a little over a year, and in that time I’ve learned to read his reporting through a lens of tremendous, committed bias. Even still, I assumed Substack had a Nazi problem when he reported Substack had a Nazi problem, as the exaggeration of such a tremendous claim really did seem to me, earlier this week, unthinkable. Then I read Jesse Singal’s great piece on the topic, which contextualized all of Newton’s claims to the point of — I would argue — an almost total debunking. In the piece, Singal referred back to the root of Substack’s Nazi phantom menace several times, which was not first born in Newton’s self-indulgent fantasies, but in the Atlantic, where Jonathan M. Katz initially charged the company with platforming a large and growing American Nazi movement.

Here, in an important piece that first appeared on Singal-Minded, Singal’s great Substack, Jesse turns over every single rock in the argument, thoroughly investigates the author’s claims, and lays the subject to rest. A definitive account of media malfeasance.

-Solana