How It Ends

with special thanks to the adl

The ADL has written a much-discussed hit piece about Substack…

Substack, a subscription-based online newsletter platform for independent writers, continues to attract extremists and conspiracy theorists who routinely use the site to profit from spreading antisemitism, misinformation, disinformation and hate speech.

…and I’m grateful. It’s gloriously stupid and clumsy, and shows how the braindead disinformation racket works. If you read Jacob Siegel’s important examination of the disinformation hoax in Tablet, and then read the ADL’s laugh-out-loud stupid article about Substack, you’ll be inoculated. You’ll be a dead end for this mind virus. See, this discussion is a vaccine, and that means it’s good and you can’t ever question it.

Start with the headline:

So the opening claim, the frame the headline establishes as you wade into the text, is that this is an exposé of antisemitism, of people — like Nazis! — who hate Jews. Substack is a Nuremberg rally, y’all, and Leni Riefenstahl has the film rights. The topic of the piece is hate and bigotry. And then the text says things like this:

1.) Antisemitism is on Substack!

2.) For example, Steve Kirsch criticizes Covid vaccines.

Pretty sure Steve Kirsch is Jewish, by the way, and listed alongside other monsters who publish on the Jew-hating platform Substack. Also a vicious hater writing on the antisemitic platform, as the ADL warns us: Chaya Raichik (of Libs Of TikTok fame), an orthodox Jew. I’m not a technical expert, but this may be poor form for antisemitic publishing. “Anti-Papist mob to publish G.K. Chesterton box set.”

The lumping in of this thing, this thing, and this entirely other thing is a way to dirty up a bunch of Not X by reference to X, warning about antisemitism at the top and then delivering text about people who criticize pharmaceutical products. This website hosts people who love terrorism, genocide, and baking. For example, cupcakes.

Second, and this amazes me, the ADL piece — in 2023! — runs on the premise that the line between good information and dangerous disinformation is perfectly clear and eternally unchanging. Steve Kirsch writes “anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.” See, and not one of those have ever proved to be true. What we think is true now about mRNA vaccines in the spring of 2023 is exactly what we believed in March of 2020. Truth never changes, and no ambiguity ever exists in any scientific question. No debate is ever real or reasoned. No skeptic has ever turned out to be right about anything, ever, on any topic in any field, like eugenics and phrenology. This narrative approach, the rhetorical equivalent of watching a writer hit himself in his own drooling face with a boot, is why every person of ordinary good sense sighs heavily at the first sign that someone claims status as a disinformation expert.

Third, and related, the ADL uses presumptive framing to reduce arguments to a good side and a bad side. Here’s their description of Chaya Raichik:

Also known as Libs of TikTok, Chaya Raichik has gained a large following on social media due to her repeated demonization of the LGBTQ+ community and promotion of the unfounded “groomer” narrative, which she has discussed with prominent conservative media pundits like Tucker Carlson.

Besides Twitter, Raichik relies on Substack as an additional venue to spread misleading and hateful rhetoric against drag queens, trans individuals and experts who specialize in gender transition.

Same boot-in-the-drooling face narrative style: If you say anything at all about “trans individuals” other than delirious fanboi squeeing, you’re engaged in demonization. There are no legitimate questions, and there’s no reasonable debate. If you’re not actively fellating Dylan Mulvaney at this very instant, you’re Literally Adolf Hitler. Those are the choices.

So here’s how this ends, with the swimmer Riley Gaines being actually, physically beaten at San Francisco State University after showing up to speak critically about the transgendering of women’s sports:

Riley Gaines @Riley_Gaines_

The prisoners are running the asylum at SFSU...I was ambushed and physically hit twice by a man. This is proof that women need sex-protected spaces. Still only further assures me I'm doing something right. When they want you silent, speak louder. 🗣️

When the clumsy, lazy policing of discourse prevents cultural and political course corrections through ordinary debate, the only possible course is a growing cycle of violence, coupled with an increasingly desperate enforcement of intellectual orthodoxy, which ends with an explosive reaction. Which probably results in more repression, and more reaction, and so on. If you don’t live in a culture in which “I don’t agree with that” is considered a normal statement that demands a reasoned and measured response, then you get violence. Normal debate is how people live with each other. The repression of ordinary debate is unwise.

You can read about it on the hate platform called Substack.