Signaling a Mass Exodus After the SAN Controversy Defeat, Jonathan M. Katz and His Publication "The Racket" Have Left Substack for Competitor, Beehiiv.
"There are others in this exodus." - Jonathan M. Katz
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I just wanted to take a minute to congratulate everyone that defended free speech against Jonathan M. Katz and his brigade of firemen. And a special thanks to:
Katz and his propaganda printer, “The Racket,” are now moving to beehiiv. He has claimed it wasn’t just the fact that the anti-censorship side was present but the fact that Substack wouldn’t play ball with the Left’s playbook.
Katz had been on Substack since 2019 when Substack’s co-founder, Hamish McKenzie, personally invited him to start a newsletter publication. Katz even decided to donate to the company in March of 2023 during their fundraising campaign. Katz was under the impression that this would give him some sway with the company. He was clearly wrong.
Katz has said that one of the reasons why he left Substack was because he claims that McKenzie was upset with him:
Then he hosted an open racist—soon after exposed to have been a formerly genocidal white supremacist—on the flagship Substack podcast, and I reported on it. He hasn’t replied to an email from me since.
If you notice, the second link that Katz uses is dead. Great proofreading Katz. And I wouldn’t be too jazzed if I were McKenzie either. Mostly because, Richard Hanania who is the center of the original SAN controversy isn’t a genocidal white supremacist; I mean he supports Israel, that’s a tell. And McKenzie hosting him on his podcast is reasonable, because Hanania is considered a thought leader amongst some people on the right.
Katz also claims that the founders
, , and as well as the administrators of Substack stonewalled Katz all of the attempts to talk publicly and privately about the situation.Even after my piece on the outright Nazis who’d found “a safe space” on Substack ran in the Atlantic, I didn’t think I’d go. Sure, Hamish and his colleagues, including CEO Chris Best, had stonewalled all my attempts to talk publicly and privately about the situation. Substack’s Head of Writer Relations, Sophia Efthimiatou, blocked me on Substack Notes, the platform’s Twitter clone. (Blocking is a kind of relationship, I guess.)
Well the reason why they may have tried to ignore him was because they didn’t like the personal attacks that Leftists like him are known for doing. And Katz should understand that Efthimiatou has the same right to block him, even though she’s the Head of Writers Relations, that he had to block me.
But finding no validity to Katz’s claim of Nazis being everywhere on Substack, Katz received no answers. And thus Katz decided to start a pressure campaign with his possible mistress, Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket (we here are Liberty Magazine would like to say that we have not confirmed whether or not Mr. Katz is a heterosexual; we reached out to Casey Newton for comment but he declined to comment, just kidding).
After the attempt by Katz and his fire brigade to pressure Substack into moderating content for the Substackers Against Nazis (SAN), he finally got an answer. On December 21st, 2023, Hamish McKenzie along with Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi, made a joint statement defending the anti-censorship movement and reiterating their dedication to keeping Substack open to all.
Now Katz had decided to leave Substack for safer waters where journalists like myself can’t ridicule him in the open market of ideas. One of the reasons for this was Substack’s Twitter alternative, Notes, which has created a mainline to reaching Katz by giving users the ability to comment on his notes. And so Katz simply couldn’t block people fast enough, as the dissenters directly challenged him. With the amount of ridicule and how he handled it, he never realized most people hated his work and his false sense of principles, and so he left to feel safe. But he wasn’t the only one.
Among those that are leaving or have already left are Ryan Broderick from Garbage Day, a publication with 68,000 subscribers and before mentioned Casey Newton from Platformer who has 172,000 subscribers. I have already written about Newton and the hilarious turn of events that led to him leaving. I’ll leave the link for you to check that out:
Katz has claimed that the answer from McKenzie has damaged their platform while also making international headlines. Apparently to Katz “most tellingly and disturbingly, German and Italian newspapers.”
For those of you who don’t know, Germany has sentenced
, the American political satirist, to prison or to be fined for calling their Covid policies similar to that of the Nazis. And you can take my word for it that Italy’s newspapers are owned by plutocrats seeking to make money off of politics at the cost of the Italian working class. Just look into their former prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi.Katz even tells us this ridiculous lie:
“The trickle of unsubscriptions I’d started getting from users who didn’t want to be on “the Nazi platform” turned into a stream.”
Since the beginning of the SAN controversy, Katz gained more than 1,000 followers (12,000 to 13,000) on Notes. We can’t see how many subscribers he has to his newsletter but if his Notes following is going up, you can be assured that so is his newsletter subscription rate.
The last straw that broke the camel’s back for Katz was when Casey Newton decided he would be leaving Substack after trying to pressure them into censoring “dozens” of publications.
The trouble was what was going on behind the scenes. Facing criticism from one of their most respected and bestselling newsletters—Platformer was, as of this writing, the featured newsletter on Substack’s sample page on the App Store and Google Play—they freaked. They immediately leaked details from Netwon’s correspondence—conversations that Newton understood were off the record in both directions—to Public, a newsletter run by Michael Shellenberger, a climate change denier and reactionary culture-war ally known as one of the public faces of Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files.”
The first thing that is wrong about this statement is the fact that Newton and Substack did not agree to keep their meetings confidential. Newton didn’t end up claiming this until January 11th, days after Substack told Michael Shellenberger the whole story about the meeting. Also this claim was made after Newton had already made an article discussing the agreed upon moderation that Substack would do. However, Katz still claims this:
The point of the leak was to embarrass Netwon and undermine the anti-Nazi effort by making the problem seem trivially small. Casey had submitted six extremist websites his team considered the most iron-clad examples of Nazi ideology they could find. (It seems Platformer did not include, for instance, Richard Spencer’s co-edited blog or that of the “pro-White policy” front for a neo-Nazi organization I named in the Atlantic, both of which sport Substack bestseller badges indicating that they have between 100 and 1,000 paid subscribers each.)
Katz continuously misspells Newton’s last name which means he doesn’t proofread. He also doesn’t fact check but that’s not anything new. Also the reason why Newton left out Richard Spencer’s Substack was because it did not violate any of Substack’s terms of service. Spencer also mostly talks about music reviews. How incredibly “Alt-right” of him.
Newton deliberately lied about the amount of publications that were violating Substack’s terms of service. Not to mention he deliberately left out Substack’s full statement regarding the moderation they agreed to do. This was all an attempt to try and jump scare the more paranoid publications to leave Substack and go elsewhere. Some of us who were more skeptical didn’t leave Substack but we did, however, create parallel communities so that we would be able to have a backup for our work. Speaking of parallel communities, here’s a shameless plug:
I happened to have made a Locals community dedicated to free speech which will feature writers and artists from all walks of life. Click the picture below to check it out.
Please do me a favor by liking, subscribing and restacking this article to keep me favored in the algorithm. Substack’s algorithm is a fan of me so I would appreciate your support. Thank you! Also now until February 1st, enjoy a 50% discount to my annual subscription, as a token of my gratitude for supporting my work.
Thankfully,
from Singal-Minded reported on the issue after receiving the full statement from Substack. After the record was set straight by Singal, Newton having been embarrassed decided that he should go over to Ghost. But as pointed out, the whole situation seemed like ploy to create a false narrative and promote Ghost. Myself, believing this to be a reasonable thing to think, having noted that Newton has often virtue-signaled to promote his company’s growth and it is very likely that Ghost paid him to cause this drama to take away their competitor’s business.Katz has also insinuated something quite defamatory. It’s actually quite close to being subject for grounds of a defamation suit, which is something that Katz doesn’t have the money or the intelligence to defend against.
Casey seems pissed, and with good reason. Selling out one of your best publications to a rival you consider friendlier to your interests—to defend a Nazi-tolerating policy, no less—is beyond gross. Substack holds reams of its writers’ and users’ sensitive private information, including home addresses, credit cards, and unpublished and paywalled drafts. If they’re willing to sell out a profitable newsletter that’s much-loved in their own industry, who wouldn’t they sell out if they saw some potential gain?
If you examine this closely, Katz has erroneously claimed that Substack has sold out Newton and would potentially sell out his private information, including but not limited to, his home addresses, credit cards, and unpublished and paywalled drafts. He then makes the implication that Substack will try and do this to you for opportunistic gain. This is an absurd claim as this action would be highly illegal and would leave Substack open to a class action lawsuit.
Katz is also furious that Kabas’ SAN letter was preemptively challenged by Elle Griffin and the rest of the free speech side. Katz alludes to the notion that Substack tipped off Matt Taibbi to Kabas’ intentions, which is highly unlikely.
Katz and his fire brigade didn’t exactly leave their intentions a secret and dull Leftists such as Katz never actually keep their intentions a secret because they can’t wait to morally posture their virtue signaling.
However, Hamish McKenzie did in fact offer to help find journalists and other signers for Griffin’s counter petition for self-moderation, but he was not the one that started the counter-movement. Griffin had already been aware that some writers were looking to start an opposition movement to Substack before she created her movement. She was reached out to by McKenzie after she wrote a Substack Note in the same vein as her petition letter. Griffin confirms this on the 1984 Today! podcast starting just after the 11 minute mark. McKenzie was more interested in finding out how many people would be open to joining her movement and ultimately most did.
However, this is Katz’s view of the events:
McKenzie repeatedly pointed journalists to the letter, offering it as organic proof that many Substackers agreed with the site’s policies. It wasn’t until Griffin went on a little-known Substack podcast this week that the truth came out: McKenzie had played a critical role in the pre-buttal, contacting Griffin after noticing a complimentary post on Substack Notes, encouraging her to expand it into a newsletter piece, and promising to “help [her] find people to sign it.”
What I find funny is the fact that Katz is trying to insinuate that the counter movement was manufactured. But if that’s the case, how did I go viral on Substack? I had around 40 subscribers before I wrote my head shot of an article rebuking Katz and the Atlantic. Less than a month later and now I have over 350 subscribers. So was the algorithm being artificially manipulated to favor anyone that fought against SAN, or was it because thousands of people came out to support those willing to put everything on the line to defend our God given rights? I attached the article that made me go viral below:
If the movement was so manufactured, then why would it promote someone as far to the right as me? I’m so zealous about free speech that I even went after Griffin for advocating for Voltaire’s wet dream, “humanism”. For those of you that don’t know, Voltaire advocated for the French state to ban the Catholic Jesuits from France. This actually occurred in 1764 and it was a huge violation to the right of free speech.
“Once we have destroyed the Jesuits, we shall have the game in our hands.” - Voltaire
My article ended up causing some of her followers to leave her publication in disgust of her hypocrisy. Griffin then blocked me following the success of this article and she then decided to take my name of the list of signatures that fought against SAN. This article has now been viewed roughly 1,000 times.
Katz’s Substack career began with an invitation to Substack by McKenzie with some other perks. I’ll let the ungrateful Katz tell you with his own words:
I myself am a substacker. I started my newsletter in 2019, at a time when the platform was known for hosting freelance journalists and bloggers, many on the left and center-left, attracted by the promise of a new way to scrape together a living amid the collapse of the journalism industry. McKenzie, in fact, personally encouraged me to join Substack. Along the way he offered suggestions about possible names for my newsletter and topics I could cover, and facilitated introductions to other journalists on the platform. I didn’t get any money up front from the platform, but for one year in the middle of my tenure, the company provided me with a part-time editor and podcast producer.
McKenzie, asked you to join the platform, helped you make connections with other journalists, gave you leads for your articles, and even provided you with an editor and producer. A lot more than many of us have received and yet you have no loyalty?
That was it for me. My Substack career began with a phone call and warm invitation from Hamish McKenzie. It ends with Hamish selling out one of his best writers and astroturfing an attempt to preempt criticism from hundreds of his users—criticism that, again, concerned his site’s hosting and profiting off of Nazis, neo-Confederates, and other white supremacists. After years of claiming that all Substack wants is to be a neutral place for free and open discourse—a “new economic engine for culture”—the Substack co-chief put his thumb on the scale for a position that promised to bolster his own bottom line, and tried to hide the fact that he had done so. Halas.
Allowing people you don’t agree with to speak openly is creating a “neutral place for free and open discourse”. You would know that if you actually understood anything about anything. Katz is a Leftist hack that loves talking out of his ass without providing evidence like journalists such as
, , Michael Shellenberger from the , and I would do.Katz isn’t the first nor the last to leave Substack over losing the SAN controversy. Joining him are Rusty Foster of Today in Tabs, Marisa Kabas, Ryan Broderick, Casey Newton, and many more smaller publications. Foster had already made the move to Beehiiv last week and Newton’s departure hasn’t quite happened yet, however, it is Katz’s departure that is actually the signaling of a mass exodus. Since Katz was the originating of the censorship campaign his departure will be the one that sets in motion a signal to walk away from Substack.
There are others in this exodus. Rusty Foster took Today in Tabs to beehiiv over a week ago. Marisa Kabas, the organizer of the Substackers Against Nazis campaign, is now writing the The Handbasket here as well, along with Sharon Hurley Hall’s Anti-Racism Newsletter. Molly White’s Citation Needed is now self-hosted. Hana Raskin’s The Food Section is going independent.
Substack’s actions to defend free speech have made it a prime target for future attempts to destroy the platform. But luckily they have earned my trust for now and I will continue to fight with them against censorship if they prove to be able to keep my trust.
It is ironic that Katz is fleeing to beehiiv and Newton fled to Ghost.
Both of these platforms are traditional hosting platforms, right down to the mercenary attitude towards publications.
Ghost is far more expensive than Substack, and takes its money up front.
Beehiiv you can't even browse the main site without a pop-up that insists on your email address before you can even find out about pricing.
Both are typically corporate fascist presentations of the service: you give first and they may give you what you want later. And yes, sports fans, that behavior is EXACTLY what lies at the core of actual fascism as described by Mussolini.
I don't always see eye to eye with Hamish and crew--I have challenged them in the past to do more to promote small Substacks rather than the "names" that come over from corporate media (I'm one of those small Substacks who would like to be a larger Substack)--but their basic business model is very much in line with my own philosophy. I have been fearful that they have bent too far towards appeasing Katz and his merry band of corporate authoritarians, but they have clearly not bent far enough to satisfy the authoritarians. These are good things and they deserve kudos for taking the stand they have.
I am far more comfortable with my future publishing prospects on Substack than I would be on Ghost or Beehiiv. This also needs to be said. Because loyalty and integrity may mean nothing to Jonathan Katz, but I like to think I make genuine efforts to demonstrate both.
Katz is an example of a mainstream media hack who thinks too much of himself; in my analysis, a good percentage of why he left has more to do with Substack ignoring him than anything else - https://wholistic.substack.com/p/censorship-advocate-jonathan-katz-leaves