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Author: tworuru
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The Rub
The ACT Party’s attempt to neutralise New Zealand’s founding document, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, has not started well. The far-right, ultra-neoliberal party, emboldened by the defeat of Australia’s Indigenous Voice referendum – thanks largely to a campaign orchestrated between dark-money-funded, far-right think-tanks and the Murdoch media – has Te Tiriti in its sights. The result? More than 10,000 people attended a hui at Turangawaewae Marae to declare, collectively: hands off Te Tiriti.
There are some great write-ups addressing the hui’s significance. This, by Newsroom‘s Aaron Smale, is fantastic:
The Crown’s invasion of Waikato, and the violence, death and dispossession that followed were all instigated on the same premise – Māori were getting too big for their boots and needed to be taught a lesson. The lesson always seemed to involve the loss of land and resources but also the loss of any kind of independent power. The Crown was not ‘just’ taking land – it was rearranging the terms of engagement. It was usurping power.
John Campbell and Mihingarangi Forbes also have excellent write-ups.
Of course, media are also giving near endless space to ACT leader David Seymour to advance his arguments for his proposed Treaty principles bill. Despite the fact that his statements on the Treaty and the effects of his party’s proposed bill span a spectrum from specious to ahistoric to false, they’re rarely checked or disputed when he makes them. His disinformation is also couched in language like “fairness” and “rule of law” and “not discriminating on the basis of race” – concepts that no-one opposes, which has the effect of making his disingenuousness appear ethically watertight. But it’s not, and never has been. There is nothing fair in re-writing a treaty that was almost immediately broken and then dismissed as a “nullity”, only to be given reluctant, limited recognition almost a century later. There’s no rule of law in a system that sees Māori imprisoned at twice the rate of Pakeha for the same crimes. (To be fair to ACT, there is plenty of discrimination on the basis of race in New Zealand, but practically all of it is to the benefit of Pakeha.)
Seymour’s prevarication is expected, as someone whose career was born and bred for years in a series of murky Atlas Network think-tanks (Seymour’s real-world work experience is around ten months work as an electrical engineer.) What’s interesting is that the major think-tanks one would expect to play a major role in an attack on Te Tiriti have been – since the hui – mostly silent. Don Brash’s Hobson’s Pledge has, at the time of writing, said nothing. The reliably mask-off NZCPR’s last post is a piece that wishes members Merry Christmas.
💩Deeply annoying update: Hobson’s Pledge updated their website overnight (after this newsletter was finished and scheduled), with a fundraising drive based almost entirely on the hui. The content is mostly the usual Brash bullshit about “Māori separatists” and peddling his thoroughly discredited, ahistoric take on Te Tiriti, claiming that the treaty was a cessation of sovereignty. (It wasn’t.) But the rhetoric is wilder and more frantic than usual. “We either fight for an equal and unified New Zealand now or watch this beautiful country continue to slide into a race-based caste system,” Brash all but screams. “We owe it to our children and grandchildren to ensure that the battle for our democracy is won.”Add that to Trotter’s and Hooton’s takes (detailed below) and it looks like three strikes for war metaphors. This is horrific, dangerous rhetoric, but I can’t see them stopping.
Of course, the think-tank adjacent opinionists are still opining. NZCPR’s “Breaking Views” blog is a round-up of reactionary opinion from throughout NZ, and it’s enlightening, in a backwards way. Climate change denier Richard Treadgold, founder of miniature think-tank “Free New Zealand,” has a bit that begins by calling Māori words juvenile, progresses rapidly to cannibalism, and gets worse from there. Sandra Goudie, former National MP and former anti-vax mayor of Thames, is there with a bog-standard piece of Treaty denial that insists that the “principles of the Treaty” don’t exist and that the Treaty doesn’t actually count because “the first real constitutional document was Queen Victoria’s Royal Charter of 1840 establishing New Zealand as a separate British Colony.”
The darkest – and by far the weirdest – response is by Chris Trotter, writing at Bryce Edward’s Democracy Project. He’s not a think tank guy but it’s worth mentioning, because his take is cooked to the point of being 0n fire: the column is an extended fantasia about an imminent actual shooting war between Māori and Pakeha:
As the bicentenary of the signing of Te Tiriti looms ever nearer, the Pakeha settler state faces two, equally unpalatable choices. It will either have to accede to a Māori-led constitutional revolution, or find its own, twenty-first-century equivalent of General Cameron. A Pakeha military leader prepared to shove back harder than the movement for tino rangatiratanga can push.
This is the sort of thing best dealt with by backing away slowly and avoiding eye contact. It’s useful only in that looking at what the weirdo commentariat is churning out might provide clues as to the direction that the think-tanks’ inevitable public campaigns might eventually take. What’s more helpful is to remember what’s actually driving all this. It’s happening for the same reason far-right think-tanks have taken aim at indigenous rights all over the world.
“The last Government quietly paused oil and gas exploration,” is an article by the excellent climate reporter Olivia Wannan at Stuff. The reason cited for the fossil fuel exploration pause is, of course, indigenous rights.
As revealed in an Official Information Act response, Woods’ decision came after a hui (meeting) in January 2022 with eight iwi groups. The leaders asked for a pause on permits, so they could better focus on consultation about how the country will transition away from fossil fuels.
Some activists warn the Government could be in breach of The Treaty of Waitangi (Te Tiriti o Waitangi) if it ignores the request before issuing onshore and offshore exploration permits.
And there’s the rub. To put it very simply: indigenous rights (potentially) stand in the way of what colonist corporations see as their unfettered right to enclose land and dig stuff up for profit. It’s always been like this. Let’s return to Newshub’s Alan Smale:
The Land Wars happened because the Crown would not tolerate being told Māori were not going to sell. But it framed this as a rebellion against its (imagined) authority. The initial impetus for this conflict occurred when the Crown wanted to buy a piece of land from an individual in Taranaki. The senior leader of the iwi in Waitara, Te Rangitake, refused to recognise the sale as the land was collectively owned in line with Māori tikanga. The Crown sent in the troops to force the sale. The rest, as they say, is history.
That’s why the far-right think-tanks fight both climate change measures and indigenous rights with equal alacrity – they’re terrified of what happens if indigenous people finally get given a real say about what happens on the land they never ceded to colonists.
💡Update!Looks like I missed another race-war alarmist in the reliably unreliable Matthew Hooton. An opinion piece by AUT University chair Rob Campbell in Newsroom reports:
[Hooton] pondered a “full-on confrontation” with “Māori activists” and numbered up police and military strength noting that “it wouldn’t take much for law enforcement to be overwhelmed”.
That’s two! Peddler of imperialist derring-do Ian Fleming had this to say about things that happen twice: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” It’ll be interesting – in a bad way – to see how the “just asking questions about our military capacity in the event of an actual civil war” narrative pans out, and whether that’s one that the think tanks will eventually run with. I hope not, but I expect to be disappointed. The above opinion piece is well worth reading, not least since it shouts out to our friends the Atlas Network. I never stop being happy to see that all-encompassing, media-hacking, neoliberal vampire squid named in the news.
For an article about what Māori are actually up to outside of the imagination of past-it Pakeha columnists, check out Nadine Anne Hura’s fantastic article, “Five climate lessons from Māori communities (that are guaranteed not to depress you).”
Today In (Keeping) Tabs (on the Think-Tank /Media Confluence)
Apologies to Today In Tabs for the headline, but thank you to Today In Tabs for the shout-out to my last piece, All The Garbage I Found On Substack In One Hour.
The New York Times has an incredible expose on “anti-woke” activism targeting American universities that omits only one crucial factor: the outsize role played by the New York Times in “anti-woke” activism targeting American universities. To recap: a media feeding frenzy on allegations of plagiarism made by openly mendacious think-tank employees led to Harvard President Claudine Gay’s resignation. Despite being warned repeatedly that they were being conned by a right-wing hit-job, the Times ran article after article after article. In the end it didn’t matter that the “plagiarism” Gay committed amounted to not plagiarism:
In some works, Gay credits a source in the wrong sentence. In others, she borrows language that even those who were ostensibly plagiarized accept as common phrasing within their field of study. “I am not at all concerned about the passages,” said the political science professor David Canon, whose work the Washington Free Beacon accused Gay of plagiarizing. “This isn’t even close to an example of academic plagiarism.”
I’ve never managed to get my head around this fundamental weirdness – news media seem completely ignorant of the role they play in shaping perception on all kinds of issues, to the extent that it must be deliberate. I guess that’s why this newsletter exists!
The Times story does a good job at identifying the think-tanks driving the the anti-DEI, anti-woke discourse, but it fails to point out that the three main think-tanks mentioned – the Claremont Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and the American Principles Project – are all past or present members of the Atlas Network. This is another inexplicable failing; you’d think that when examining a concerted attack on academic freedom, you’d at least mention the single largest common denominator.
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Now live on Ghost
This is The Cynic’s Guide To Self-Improvement, a new version of a former Substack newsletter by Joshua Drummond. Things will be up and running here shortly, but you can subscribe in the meantime if you’d like to stay up to date and receive emails when new content is published!
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All the Garbage I Found On Substack In One Hour: An Update
Content warning
This post contains examples of rampant anti-Semitic hate speech, Nazism, white supremacy, some of the worst and weirdest anti-science/anti-vax stuff I’ve seen anywhere on the Internet, anti-trans hate speech, and Glinner. Read at your own risk. Have a shower ready.
It started with a story recommended by Substack itself. Through a bit of judicious user tracking and algorithmic filtering, Substack have divined that I’m interested in “Climate & Environment.” They’re right. In their app and web interface, Substack recommend the top five newsletters in this category. One day a few weeks ago, the number two slot caught my eye. It was plugging a “Dr. Simon,” and I found it interesting because the headline seemed to suggest that the Doctor wasn’t writing conventional climate news. In fact, it seemed to be at right-angles to observable reality.
The headline was “Are We Losing the War for Freedom to the Great Reset?”
The “Great Reset” is a conspiracy theory which can trace roots, as so many conspiracy theories can, to the antisemitic “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” hoax. It is a relation of the Great Replacement conspiracy that has inspired many acts of terrorism, including the Christchurch mosque massacre. The BBC puts it bluntly:
A vague set of proposals from an influential organisation has been transformed by online conspiracy theorists into a powerful viral rallying cry. What is the truth behind the “Great Reset”?
Believers spin dark tales about an authoritarian socialist world government run by powerful capitalists and politicians – a secret cabal that is broadcasting its plan around the world.
I was surprised to see Great Reset content recommended in the “Climate and Environment” category, so I clicked through.
It was worse than I’d expected.
From that screed, and the rest of his content, it’s very easy to see that Dr. Simon is a disinformation newsletter. That paragraph is a grab-bag of conspiracy theories, disinformation, and hate speech. Let’s count them: we have (1) climate change denial, (2) anti-trans hate (3) “digital currency” spooking (4) “15 minute neighbourhoods,” a perfect example of an entirely benign urban planning concept transformed into conspiracy, (5) off-kilter diet claptrap — a lot of conspiracists are obsessed with diet and nutritional purity (6) more climate change denial; CO2 is only good for plant growth up unto a certain point and increased heat and weather variability is *not* good for many plants, including crop species, and its increase in recent times is a result of human activity (7) “digital ID” scaremongering and (8) Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates.
Nearly all of Dr. Simon’s content is like this. All nonsense — and some of it dangerous to the point of being life-threatening, if readers were to take his disinformation about Covid and vaccines seriously.
All of it is enabled and monetized by Substack.
From his About page, I can see Dr. Simon has “11K+ subscribers.”
I can also see the newsletters he recommends, which gave me an idea. What if I spent an hour going down a recommendations rabbit hole, seeing just how much of this stuff was on Substack?
So that’s what I did. I set a timer for sixty minutes, and got to work.
The first of these is unremarkable. You’re The Voice, a Substack newsletter that also utilises Substack’s podcast and video platform, is only interesting in how it manages to make conspiracies utterly boring. Its wooden prose and unremarkable headlines mask the usual conspiracism about “globalists” and “global agendas.”
We’ll discuss global agendas; Covid/climate/15-min cities/money/agenda 2030 & touch on the war in Israel…
Sounds riveting! It has “3K+ subscribers.”
Dr. Simon also recommends Outspoken by Naomi Wolf. Wolf’s journey from respected author to a conspiracy and disinformation queen — banned by Twitter in 2021, newly beloved by the likes of Steve Bannon — is well known, thanks largely to the work of real journalist Naomi Klein in her 2023 book Doppelganger. Wolf doesn’t seem to be taking it well. This is her pinned post:
The rest of Wolf’s Substack is the usual wild disinformation kaleidoscope of Covid conspiracies, anti-vax untruth — in her posts, Wolf often lies about vaccines, with special attention paid to the mRNA-based Covid vaccines — and howling about “globalist oligarchs.”
Wolf has 81K+ subscribers on Substack.
Let’s move on to another doctor: Dr Sam Bailey! This Substacker bills herself as “the medical establishment’s worst nightmare.” Given her content, it might be true. Bailey, who is a former GP from Christchurch, is best known for appearing before New Zealand’s Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal for producing Covid-19 disinformation on YouTube. She’s since stopped doing so, and she explains why, in a pinned video.
“After some reflection, I decided to take all of my videos about Covid-19 off YouTube, and I won’t be posting Covid-19 content on here any longer,” Bailey says. Her reason? YouTube was removing her videos due to their high disinformation payload.
Luckily for Dr. Bailey — and unluckily, for the “medical establishment,” whose worst nightmare she apparently is — she swiftly found a new, monetized home for her Covid-19 content on Substack.
Here’s a sample of what she’s selling:
Many of the older guard anti-vaxxers used historical data to conclusively demonstrate that vaccines cannot possibly be the cause of the vast decrease in sickness and death from many diseases. Now there is a new wave of anti-vaxxers in the tradition of Dr Stefan Lanka who continue to refute not only virus existence but also the wider concept of pathogens. This “upstream” line of reasoning brings down the entire notion of vaccination permanently.
Vaccines are being exposed on multiple fronts as more people wake up to one of the biggest swindles in history. Is it now time to embrace the “anti-vax” label?
Bailey doesn’t just lie about the Covid vaccine; she lies about all vaccines. And she doesn’t merely deny the effectiveness of vaccines; she denies that viruses exist.
Dr. Sam Bailey is a virus denier.
Dr. Sam Bailey has 16K+ subscribers on Substack.
Let’s check out Dr Simon’s next recommendation: Vigilant News, by The Vigilant Fox.
It’s… a lot.
Substack has introduced a tool for writers that lets writers recommend publications, or lets different newsletters “blurb” each other. Let’s see what user “The Farm” of The Farm newsletter has to say of The Vigilant Fox.
“The Vigilant Fox is one of the single best citizen journalists we have standing up for freedom from the tyrannical sociopaths that are trying to destroy our way of existence.”
– The Farm, The FarmOkay then! What’s The Farm all about?
“The Rape of the Mind,” followed by screeds about Ivermectin? That’s enough. Let’s return to The Vigilant Fox. At the end of his pinned article, a long ramble of virulent disinformation about Covid vaccines entitled “The Unvaccinated Will Be Vindicated,” he has this to say:
I am proud to announce that I have left my day job to become an independent reporter! If you want to help keep this operation afloat, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
The Vigilant Fox has 49K+ subscribers on Substack.
My timer is getting close to 30 minutes and I’ve barely scratched the surface of one Substacker’s recommendations. Let’s have a look at Kanekoa News.
Let’s stop looking at Kanekoa News. It’s just more of the same disinformation.
Kanekoa News has 64K+ subscribers on Substack.
At this point I’m growing tired of looking at Dr. Simon’s recommendations. The several Substacks he recommends all have their own recommendations, which have their own, and so on, seemingly forever. Almost all of them appear to be some kind of anti-vax disinformation, or science denial, and many have subscribers in the thousands or tens of thousands. All the ones I look at appear to be monetized. Many sing the praises of Substack for giving them a home after being hounded from other platforms.
So I turn to Bing to see if I can plumb the depths of Substack’s Nazi problem, as written about by journalist Jonathan Katz. (I’d use Google, but the giant search engine seems to have decided that helping its billions of users easily access overtly Nazi content is bad for society.)
I search for the most obvious, basic stuff. “Nazi Substack.” “National Socialist Substack.” “White power Substack.”
I find it, easily.
Let me introduce you to Karl Haemers, author of the newsletter Taboo Truth. Haemers describes himself as a “Researcher, author, secular End Times alarmist, race realist, revisionist, human.” What’s he got to say?
This article is a vile diatribe against Jews and how best to propagandise against them. It contains the following quote:
I refer back to Goebbels’ diary quote, which rather says that Whites’ intelligence has been used against them, and our instincts have been subverted by our very intelligence twisted by the Jews.
So yeah, Karl Haemers is a Nazi.
He’s got over 700 subscribers, and — at the time of writing, post Substack’s decision to purge a mere five Nazi newsletters — he’s still monetized.
A little snippet of Substack code under Haemer’s profile says “Timothy Kelly and 100+ others subscribe.”
Who’s Timothy Kelly?
He has a paywall on, but the article snippets in his archives are… enlightening.
So yeah, he’s a Nazi.
None of Timothy’s articles appear to be free, so we can reasonably assume that of his subscribers, the majority are paid, or they’re unable to read anything he writes. His Substack-enabled subscription plans start at $8 NZD per month. I counted his subscribers, and he has 258. That means that this Nazi is earning in the ballpark of $2000 NZD per month — more, if any of them are “founding members,” the price per which starts at $385 per year.
Next, I find The Imperium Press, which is one of those infuriating white supremacist newsletters that — to paraphrase Ken White — is not even occasionally terse. It goes on, and on, and on, in a maddening pseudo-intellectual vein. But eventually we come to the rub:
These are only a few of the shapes that this default state can take, what Houston Stewart Chamberlain has called the Aryan Worldview. To call it merely “right-wing” is to trivialise it. We call it folkishness.
I call it Nazi.
The Imperium Press has 3k+ subscribers on Substack, and — of course — they’re monetized.
Similarly, the Fascio Newsletter, another Substack I found effortlessly via Bing, is about what they call “Third position politics,” and which is more accurately called neo-fascism. Their entire Substack can be filed as a classic of the “no we’re not fascists, we’re just really really really interested in fascism, and also we agree with a lot of fascism” genre. Their swathe of authors make it difficult to tell exactly how many subscribers they have, but a Substack popup prompting me to subscribe says they have “Over 1,000 subscribers.” They are (of course!) monetized. (The individual writers who comprise Fascio have “2K+ subscribers” each — whether this is individual or as a collective is unclear.)
Jonathan Katz’s Atlantic article also mentions White-Papers. What’s their deal?
At White-Papers, our core premise is that White people, the European race, deserves its own voice, its own political institutions and a future free from interference or predation by outside groups. Whites are a global minority and are now becoming minorities in their own homelands. The inevitable and necessary result of this is a growing political movement of explicitly pro-White news outlets, publishers, and political pressure groups.
So yeah, they’re white supremacists. The little Substack popup that urges me to subscribe says they have “Over 1,000 subscribers.”
By the end of my hour, it’s clear that there are many, many, many more of these Substacks. Too many, in fact, to list, varying in position from “just really enthused about fascism” to quite overt Nazis. Many — seemingly most — are monetized. Some appear to have paid subscribers in the hundreds; a feat many Substack newsletters (including The Bad Newsletter!) never achieve, and which can produce either a tidy living or very useful source of funds for your movement.
In short, there are lots.
I’d like to stop there, but the worst is yet to come. And this one I didn’t find myself. It found me.
When I posted my version of the open letter Substackers Against Nazis, a commenter showed up with a lengthy screed that used the anti-Semitic slur “kikes.” The author seemed to be searching for Substacks that had posted the open letter and was railing against them. Curious, I clicked on the commenter’s name and found the most overtly Nazi newsletter yet. This one wasn’t hiding behind faux-intellectual essays on Third Positionism, or even trumped-up concern for the “White Race.”
It was this.
This Substack, Nordic Pagan Soldier, is raw, unadulterated Nazism. Much of its content is elaborations on the literal Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. One post is written in Hindi; translated, it is vile slurs about Jews and Muslims from beginning to end.
The author’s recommendations for other newsletters run the gamut from Putinist propaganda to an anti-Semitic Qanon podcast (hosted via Substack’s convenient video and podcasting tools). His “Reads” list is extensive — a huge list of conspiracist authors of various stripes. Oh look, Edward Snowden is there too!
When you subscribe to this Substack, you’re sent a montage of explicitly anti-Semitic text and propaganda posters — put into jpeg form, it seems, as not to trigger spam filters. Don’t worry, the Substack mail always gets through.
Nordic Pagan Soldier has 500 subscribers.
The author hasn’t turned on paid subscriptions. “I DO NOT NEED THE MONEY AND I NEVER ASK FOR IT,” he says, verbatim.
But Substack, not to be deterred from a revenue opportunity, offers users the chance to “Pledge their support,” just in case this Nazi ever decides to monetize.
“Join the crew,” Nordic Pagan Soldier urges readers. “Be part of a community of people who share your interests… To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com”
This content, and the other things I’ve covered — found either via minimal-effort searches or Substack’s network of recommendations, or (in one instance) a Nazi commenter just kind of announcing themselves on my newsletter — is the tip of the tip of the iceberg. In fact, “iceberg” is being a bit too nice. This is a garbageberg; a disgusting collection of the worst disinformation and filth. It’s like if 4chan and 8chan and Kiwi Farms offered a cutely-monetized email subscription option. It gets worse: I haven’t even mentioned the larger disinformation spreaders, as covered by the Washington Post.
This type of content is “so bad no one else will host it,” said Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that focuses on combating misinformation and has researched Substack. By splitting subscription profits with creators, the group estimates, Substack generates at least $2.5 million a year in revenue from just five anti-vaccine leaders who have amassed tens of thousands of subscribers, each paying $50 a year.
The publications I’ve listed above — which seemingly represent a very small slice of Substack’s disinformation ecosystem and which I was able to discover in just one hour of work — boast 231,485 subscribers between them, by my count. Almost a quarter of a million people. If we assume a fairly standard proportion of these subscribers are paid (let’s say 10 percent) and assume they charge $8 NZD per month each, that’s $185,189 NZD a month — more than $2 million a year in revenue to the disinformers, and a non-insignificant $222,226 annually to Substack, via their 10 percent cut. Add that to the millions Substack makes from the biggest liars (as per the Washington Post) and it’s clear that disinformation of all kinds is a huge market for Substack.
In fact, it makes me think Substack might be primarily a disinformation ecosystem — with a bunch of credible writers bolted on, to be the acceptable public face of a company that exists mainly to monetize the internet’s limitless supply of garbage.
I did the research and early drafting for this article several weeks ago. I sat on it, hoping that Substack would ban — at least! — the overt white supremacist and Nazi publications. I hoped that the disinformation newsletters might get demonetized.
At the time of writing, all the publications I found in my hour of research were still active. They seem keenly aware of the controversy around their content, and they’re cheering on Substack, who they clearly see as an ally. Don’t take my word for it: here’s Nazi newsletter Taboo Truth:
Like too many other users of Substack’s Twitter clone, Notes, Taboo Truth’s favourite thing after fascism seems to be posting graphs of his subscriber numbers.
I’d like to find out more, but this is all I can manage for now. I do all this in my spare time, and yet it’s clear more research is needed. I hope someone who has more than a few hours to hand can do it. If I had time to accurately quantify my opinion that Substack is a significant player in the world’s disinformation ecosystem, I’d start by getting a list of all the websites that live on the .substack.com subdomain, identifying which had more than 100 subscribers, and running a mechanical turk-powered content analysis to see which are disinformation, TERFs, Nazis, or similar. It’d be a big job. Sadly, it seems that unless Substack opts to proactively inform the public about the role it plays in spreading disinformation, that’ll be the only way we’ll find out.
I want to close with an apology. I really liked Substack. It gave me the chance to write what I like and have my work seen: something every writer wants. I was enamoured to the point of inviting several friends to the platform — some of whom became quite big publishers. But in doing so I ignored the voices of critics, including trans people, who pointed out how Substack had purposely recruited prominent TERFs to the platform, to spread their particularly cruel form of contagious disinformation against some of the world’s most vulnerable communities.
People like Glinner.
Of course, he’s still on Substack.
“Beloved internet personality” Here’s Glinner on his “About” page — probably one of the first things he wrote on joining Substack — indulging in the usual transphobia, denigrating those who’ve chosen surgery to help with gender dysphoria, and falsely insinuating that trans activists are coming to mutilate children.
It was only children who needed to place themselves on those hospital trolleys. As Alex Drummond famously said ”The thought of surgery terrifies me”, and as Magdalen Berns famously replied, “Of course it terrifies you, Alex. They chop your cock off.”
This sort of thing is horrible. But it’s been part and parcel of Substack since the beginning.
Until now, we just chose not to notice.
Post-Ghost Update
One thing I regret not mentioning in the original article is that there is a common theme in Substack’s taxonomy of garbage content: transphobia. The Q conspiracists are transphobic, the Covid cranks are transphobic, the Islamophobes and the anti-Semites and the white supremacists and the overt Nazis are transphobic. (Perhaps needless to say, Glinner and his fellow TERFs are transphobic.) Transphobia is, almost invariably, the one thing that binds them all. I find that very telling, and deeply worrying.
What’s more, the sheer depth and breadth of Substack’s disinformation ecosystem is becoming more and more apparent. An author whose work I enjoy, Melanie Newfield, pointed out that Substack has thoughtfully provided a really easy way to find medical disinformation: the “health politics” filter in its prominent “Explore” tab. How bad is it? Really bad:
These disinformation newsletters include some of the biggest Substacks of all. In February 2023, the Press Gazette reported that many of the highest-earning Substack newsletters were health disinformation:
The analysis affirms previous reporting suggesting Substack has become a lucrative revenue stream for writers with fringe views. For example, Covid-19 vaccine sceptics Robert Malone, Steve Kirsch, Alex Berenson and Joseph Mercola all appear among the most lucrative Substacks.
Each of these newsletters, the Press Gazette estimated, could have earnings anywhere between $500,000 and a colossal $4,999,950, every single year. And this was before Substack launched many of its network growth features, so those figures could be even greater by now. By any count, the named writers are getting rich from spreading disinformation, and so is Substack, via its tidy 10 percent cut of all author earnings.
It seems clear that this is why Substack doesn’t want to “censor” transphobia, conspiracies, health disinformation, and even Nazis (despite being perfectly happy to ban porn: you can’t do sex work on Substack). It’s not about free speech: it’s because they’re making far too much money from all of it. It really looks like spreading disinformation is the cornerstone of their business, and that’s not something I’m prepared to support.
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Coming now: the Ghost-powered Bad Newsletter
This is The Bad Newsletter, a brand new version of an old site by Joshua Drummond that’s just migrated from Substack. Things will be up and running here shortly, but you can subscribe in the meantime if you’d like to stay up to date and receive emails when new content is published!
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Are New Year’s resolutions doomed to fail?
You’ll have no doubt heard that only a small percentage of people who make a New Year’s resolution manage to keep it. It’s a piece of pop dicta, repeated endlessly in the period just before December 31 by media in desperate need of an easy factoid to recirculate for clicks. And debunking popular notions like New Year’s Resolutions sure does get clicks. Here’s an extract from a typical article, from the venerable Time:
And yet, by some estimates, as many as 80% of people fail to keep their New Year’s resolutions by February. Only 8% of people stick with them the entire year.
This depressing factoid has lived rent-free in my head with a bunch of others, like an anarchist squatter commune of bad vibes. If true, there’s an high chance you’re half-way to quitting whatever it is you resolved to do by now. I thought about writing an article about it, but I didn’t feel like dancing on the graves of people’s New Year hopes and dreams. Because as much as we tell ourselves ‘“it’s just another day,” it’s not, is it? The cultural gravity of New Year is, for Westerners, as inescapable as a black hole. And how could I write an article on how most resolutions fail, when the proof that they don’t always is right in front of us?
I’ll level with you. This article was originally inspired by seeing the above image in an Instagram story, upon which I Googled it, and found this Daily Dot article, in which the author says:
Most people give up on the resolutions about 10 days in. Instead, O’Donnell appears to have accomplished hers.
Classic internet “it’s funny cos it’s mean” snark, worthy of Gawker circa 2009, right? But the claim – perhaps because it was associated with an image of a pro-gun person who literally shot themselves in the foot — stayed in my mind, limping into my mental commune of received wisdom. I’d heard it so many times before. It has to be true, right?
Because this isn’t the Wide-Eyed Eternal Optimist’s Guide To Self Improvement, you’ll have guessed where I’m going with this:
The suggestion that only 8 percent of people ever achieve their resolutions, or that as many as 80 percent fail to keep resolutions by February, or that “most people give up on the resolutions about 10 days in” is bunk.
The first clue was clicking on the link in “by some estimates, as many as 80% of people fail” led not to a scholarly paper but another webpage, and clicking on the sources cited in that page and subsequent pages ended up with a dead link. That alone wouldn’t clinch it. What did, though, was that searching for “new year’s resolutions” and similar phrases in Google Scholar didn’t turn up any kind of widely-cited statistic around resolution success or failure. Like so much else in psychology, the truth is harder to pin down than self-improvement pop science might have you think. Nor are “success” and “failure” binaries, in the context of resolutions. A 2020 PhD thesis on NY resolutions by Hannah Moshontz de la Rocha, a student in the Psychology and Neuroscience in the Graduate School of Duke University, found that:
Goals varied greatly in their content, properties, and outcomes. Contrary to theory, many resolutions were neither successful nor unsuccessful, but instead were still being pursued or were on hold at the end of the year. Across both studies, the three most common resolution outcomes at the end of the year were achievement (estimates ranged from 20% to 40%), continued pursuit (32% to 60%) and pursuit put on hold (15% to 21%). Other outcomes (e.g., deliberate disengagement) were rare (<1% to 3%).
Those figures are… pretty good, actually? 20 to 40 percent of people achieving their goal by year’s end is a lot better than the pessimistic received wisdom that most people give up by February.
Likewise, a user at Skeptic’s Stack Exchange has done the legwork on the claim that only 8 percent ever achieve their resolutions, and found it to be at best misunderstood and at worst wildly cherry-picked:
The real source of the 8% number appears to be a survey conducted by Stephen Shapiro, a management consultant, author, and speaker, and published in an article on his website. According to him,
Only 8% of people are always successful in achieving their resolutions. 19% achieve their resolutions every other year. 49% have infrequent success. 24% (one in four people) NEVER succeed and have failed on every resolution every year. That means that 3 out of 4 people almost never succeed.
Of course, “Only 8% of people are always successful in achieving their resolutions” is not the same as “8% of People Achieve Their New Year’s Resolutions”. The study by Shapiro has not been published in a scientific journal.
Thanks, Stephen! Your literally incredible claim has poisoned a huge swathe of the internet when it comes to New Year’s resolutions, and (this is my own conjecture) led to a kind of low-key seasonally affective depression amongst those of us who’d like to make a lifestyle change around a culturally auspicious date.
If you’re in that cohort, rest easy. The takeaway is pretty clear: if you want to make a New Year’s resolution, feel free to. You may as well! The achievement/still working on it/still pursuing it statistics seem perfectly acceptable to me: clearly there’s some weight to the things. And it’s not too late: I unscientifically consider the “New Year” period to occupy the whole month of January, because that’s the span in which the year still feels new. I could add some stuff about setting SMART goals, or just making sure that your progress is in some way measurable, but that would be very boring and like every other article on the topic and is something you (an intellectual) probably already knew.
So I’ll just put in some potential resolutions you’ll hopefully have no trouble keeping.
Resolve not to start going to the gym in January
Look, just don’t. Especially if you’ve never gone before. There is much to be gained from lifting weights, including (obviously) muscle, but in my experience the gym in January is a Bad Time. Everyone who made a resolution to “go to the gym more” is there, hogging the machines or giving themselves renal failure from trying to deadlift too much, sweating and grunting and selfie-ing. It’s not worth it.
If you’re a regular, you might choose to power through it, but if you’re a total newbie, save the money on gym fees and buy a broomstick. It’s not a witch thing and I’m not joking. You want to learn how to lift weights before you lift any actual weight, and here the incredible Swole Woman, Casey Johnston, has you covered.
Resolve not to “lose weight”
This isn’t my area of expertise, but I’ve listened to enough people for whom it is to know that “losing weight” purely for the sake of losing weight is — for the vast majority of people — a toxic concept that can easily ruin lives. Food is good, you need it to live, and as a general rule if you’re exercising you need to be fuelling yourself properly. There are plenty of people who know better than me on this so I’m just going to recommend Casey Johnston again.
Resolve not to “do something every day” unless it’s very automatic or very low effort
You can’t move without this shit. “Go to the gym every day.” “Do X push-ups every day.” “Practice Y every day,” or my personal bugbear that I can’t swear off swearing to do: “do art every day.” So let me draw a line in the sane for myself and possibly you too: can we not? Unless it’s for something like “drink water,” or “poop,” committing to do something every day seems a fast track to the kind of demoralizing failure that only comes with overcommitment.
Take “Gym every day.” A moment’s critical reflection will reveal this goal to be both wildly improbable and useless. You’re going to get crook. You’re going to have a family thing come up. You’re going to get a flat tire. At some point, the gym will be inconveniently closed. Letting any of these all-but-inevitable and entirely reasonable life events ruin your resolution because you didn’t tick off all 365 days in the year isn’t worth it. A vanishingly small subset of people either need to go to the gym every day (actors, bodybuilders, influencers in the field of same) or will get any tangible benefit from doing so. For nearly everyone else, working out daily is a fast track to ruined health, because you’re not taking vital recovery time. Your Average Joe, including very much me, will do better resolving to “go to the gym several times a week, with at least a day’s rest in between sessions, and obviously not when sick” or something similar.
The same applies to art. Long, bitter experience teaches that if you try arting every damn day you’ll start hating art and everything adjacent to it. Of course there are exceptions to this rule, and if you’re one of those people who can do something out of the ordinary every day, more power to you — but all I’m aiming for this year is mostly consistent consistency.
Resolve not to get your New Year’s resolution effectiveness information from websites that don’t cite their sources, or management consultants
You probably didn’t need me to tell you that.
Here’s a watercolour seascape I did, because I needed an illustration for the newsletter’s thumbnail image. Thanks for reading. This newsletter likely won’t be on Substack much longer, due to their cataclysmically awful handling of an entirely self-inflicted Nazi/TERF/active disinformation ecosystem controversy, and (less importantly) the fact that they’d rather dabble in AI bollocks than offer basic email composition features like a native spell-checker. In short: it’s them, hi, they’re the problem, it’s them. Barring a policy u-turn, and a spell-checker, chances are I’ll move it to another provider in the next few weeks. If you do subscribe here, either free or paid, don’t worry. You shouldn’t see much of a difference, and I’ll be choosing a platform that enables comments so our discussions remain as fun and enlightening as they’ve been here.
In the meantime, comment away! It’s great to have you here in 2024. It’s only the 12th of January, and it feels like a whole year already.
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Why is Stuff promoting right-wing propaganda?
The way New Zealand’s Taxpayers’ Union works should be obvious by now. This fake union — which is actually a neoliberal, ultra-capitalist lobby group acting in concert with a dense network of international right-wing think tanks called the Atlas Network — advances its agenda by carefully picking divisive issues and laundering them through the news media. Every story they land in a mainstream publication is a victory for them, and thanks to the news media’s addiction to conflict and its diminishment by market forces, the fake union and its think-tank bedfellows are having an easier ride than ever.
It probably shouldn’t be this easy, though. Witness this glorified press release masquerading as a story in Stuff, published on Christmas Eve, in the heart of the silly season:
Merry Christmas, council workers! Your present this year is the Taxpayers’ Union talking about how you should be sacked, via the increasingly beleaguered Stuff, which has just disestablished much of its investigative journalism team. The story itself is… boring. The first bit is based squarely on (via what looks some heroic paraphrasing to avoid outright copying) a Taxpayers’ Union press release. The fact that some council staff earn over $100,000 is framed as shocking, when in fact it’s wildly unsurprising; the people who run cities and towns are doing a demanding job and they’re (sometimes) paid well for it. And that’s what the article itself says, a third of the way through, citing Infometrics (an economic consultancy based in Wellington.)
Infometrics chief forecaster Gareth Kiernan said he would expect roles in larger councils to be paid more than equivalent roles in smaller councils, particularly at the higher levels.
Near the end comes a missive from Connor Molloy, Campaign Manager for the Taxpayers’ Union (who are not identified in the story as anything other than “the Taxpayers’ Union,” with no explanation for readers that the “union” is a right-wing lobby group.) Molloy, of course, seems to think that the best Christmas present for council staff is for them to lose their jobs:
Connor Molloy, campaigns manager for the Taxpayers’ Union, said reducing the number of highly-paid “backroom” staff was the right thing to do if councils were threatening big rate hikes.
“Rather than going straight for core services like rubbish collection and libraries, councils ought to look inwards at their own bloated bureaucracies first when looking to make savings.
From a quick scan, this story seems like merely another example of the TPU successfully “placing” a piece of its neoliberal propaganda in the media, which happens — to the media’s vast detriment — all the time. But on a closer look, things get even bleaker.
Reading the story, a little blue hyperlink in the opening paragraph caught my eye, as it’s designed to do.
Curious! I wanted, as many readers might, to see the raw data informing the story. I was mystified as to why Stuff weren’t just hosting it themselves, or embedding the data on their page, as is standard practice for news organisations, which just made me curiouser.
I clicked through.
The page I landed on looks like this.
Hmm. Looks like I just need to put my email address in this handy form and I’ll get to see the report! You can even choose to be one of the three types of person: an “Elected official,” “Ratepayer,” or “Journalist (or reseracher.)1”
I’ll just pop my details in and click “VIEW REPORT” and…huh? It’s just a normal webpage! No need for an email address at all!
Look at that URL. That’s not a hidden or gated page: if the website was designed to be user-friendly, you could navigate straight to it. You don’t need to put in an email address to access the data, but the page is designed explicitly to make it seem like you do.
Do you at least get emailed the report? Like hell. Nothing shows up in your inbox until a few days later, when a horrifically-formatted email arrives and it’s made clear you’ve been added to a Taxpayers’ Union mailing list.
Take another look at that first form up there. There’s nothing whatsoever to indicate that you’re signing up to a mailing list. Not even a pre-checked “yes, send me Taxpayers’ Union emails,” checkbox. It’s either very poorly designed or deliberately misleading: either way, it could easily be illegal, under New Zealand’s Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act (2007).
So this is where we’re at. Stuff isn’t just parroting Taxpayers’ Union propaganda and enthusiastically leaning in to their “government = waste = fire them all” framing; they’re encouraging their readers to visit a website that harvests their emails and, unasked, signs them up for the full TPU package.
If you’re thinking “this seems bad!” well, I have more: want to know where this overtly propagandistic Ratepayers’ Report that shills for a right-wing lobby group originally comes from?
It was born as a collaboration between Stuff and the Taxpayers’ Union.
Don’t take my word for it: here’s the TPU press release.
The New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union, in collaboration with Fairfax Media has today launched “Ratepayers’ Report” hosted by Stuff.co.nz (…) “For the first time, New Zealanders now have an interactive online tool to compare their local council to those of the rest of the country,” says Jordan Williams, Executive Director of the Taxpayers’ Union. “Ratepayers can visit ratepayersreport.co.nz to compare their local council including average rates, debt per ratepayer and even CEO salaries.”
That was back in 2014. But at least the 2014 Ratepayers Report was hosted on Stuff’s own site, and didn’t speciously sign its users up to spam. It looked like this:
Nearly a decade later, the Ratepayers’ Report, together with a payload of TPU propaganda, is embedded in news cycles. The Taxpayers’ Union puts it out regularly, and media publish obligingly. A Google search of the Stuff site for “Ratepayers’ Report” shows you how entrenched it is.
This is how the Atlas Network right-wing sausage factory works: their junk “think tanks” propagate their neoliberal message and exploit the decline of media by doing journalists’ work for them. They’ve been doing it for years, and it’s been wildly successful, to the point that they’ve just released a book skiting about how manipulative they are. But this — a reputable news site sending its readers to sign up directly, and probably unknowingly, for TPU propaganda — seemed beyond the pale. What was going on? I wanted to know, so I put the following questions to Stuff.
- Why is Stuff linking to a Taxpayers’ Union email harvesting site?
- Was Stuff aware that the function of the Ratepayer’s Report was at least partially to harvest emails for the Taxpayers’ Union?
- What is Stuff’s policy on linking to external sites, especially those that may act maliciously or harvest user details?
- In your view, was the nature of the Ratepayer’s Report website (and its email-harvesting capability) sufficiently disclosed to readers?
- What is the present nature of the relationship between Stuff and the Taxpayers’ Union?
- Referring to the press release above, what is the past nature of the relationship between Stuff and the Taxpayers’ Union?
- Was this a commercial relationship, i.e. did either TPU or Stuff pay each other for participation in the Ratepayer’s Report? Was there contra, or an exchange of services?
- Does the relationship between Stuff and the TPU that established the Ratepayer’s Report persist today?
- If not, when did it end, and why did it end?
- Does Stuff have guidelines for journalists (or editors) who utilise the work of lobby groups in their stories, perhaps along the lines of the BBC? I refer to this page, which states:
Contributors’ Affiliations
4.3.12 We should not automatically assume that contributors from other organisations (such as academics, journalists, researchers and representatives of charities and think-tanks) are unbiased. Appropriate information about their affiliations, funding and particular viewpoints should be made available to the audience, when relevant to the context.
If so, can you please provide me or point me to a copy of these guidelines?
Further to the above question, why does the story not identify for readers who the Taxpayers’ Union is, and what their work entails? I refer to these Newsroom stories that make it clear that the TPU is a neoliberal, right-wing lobby group, with links to fossil fuel and tobacco concerns, as well as being part of the international Atlas Network of neoliberal, right-wing think-tanks.
I note also that this Stuff story (correctly) identifies the Taxpayers’ Union as a “right-wing pressure group,” so clearly it’s possible to be upfront about the group and their motivations when writing a story about the TPU’s work and the concerns they raise. Given this, why isn’t this clear identification the norm across Stuff?
A day later, Stuff replied, with a comment they asked to be attributed to Keith Lynch, Editor-in-Chief of Stuff Digital:
Stuff has no formal relationship with the Taxpayer’s Union. A report from the Taxpayers Union was transparently quoted in the story alongside information from other named sources. In this case, the link to the source was included so audiences could access the information referenced in the story, should they wish.
On reflection, we have now updated the story to remove the link.
There you go, Stuff readers: four sentences and one middle finger. Wondering why Stuff saw fit to partner with the TPU? When the partnership ended? Why it ended? What their guidelines are when handling the journalistic equivalent of radioactive waste — the propaganda created by think tanks to shape society in their image? Screw you. You don’t get to know. The hyperlink to the Taxpayers’ Union site that misleadingly harvests readers’ emails is gone (without so much as an edit notice or correction on the page) because it should never have been there in the first place — but as for the merest whisper of explanation as to why the TPU so often gets such an easy ride in media?
Nothing.
I replied, asking Stuff if they’d be giving my other questions actual answers. I didn’t hear back. It’s amazing, really: journalists hound politicians endlessly to just Answer The Question (as they should!), but when it’s them on the hook they provide weasel words that’d do any politician proud, and then evaporate into the ether.
Going back to the Stuff story one last time, I saw this little banner above the body copy.
You care about our money? I bet you do. Here’s a thought, Stuff: how about showing that you care about your audience? Stop feeding them repurposed think-tank propaganda, own your mistakes, and act with integrity. Perhaps, instead of taking the Taxpayers’ Union at their obviously-compromised word, you could talk about how the TPU used racist insinuations about “co-governance” to fight Three Waters, a government program designed to fix horrifically neglected water infrastructure while freeing councils from paying for it — the repeal of which is now being cited by councils as a key reason for massive rate hikes.
Maybe then people would be more inclined to pay you, instead of mistrusting you.
In a world where misinformation is so easily spread, the mainstream press should be fighting it, not amplifying it. It’s too bad that Stuff seems incapable of assuring its readers that it will treat think-tank content with the caution it warrants.
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Sic. ↩
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A Simple Nullity
An incredibly important documentary went live today, and I don’t want you to miss it.
“Trick or Treaty? Indigenous rights, referendums and the Treaty of Waitangi” is a deep dive on how right-wing influence networks in Australia joined forces to destroy Australia’s Indigenous Voice to Parliament — and how the same forces are at work in New Zealand. I’ve taken an interest in New Zealand’s gaggle of lobby groups for a long time now, so I was very pleased to do research for the doco and work with award-winning producers and top-tier journos Mihingarangi Forbes and Annabelle Lee-Mather. I also appear on camera, which is less my thing, but as an Aussie-born Kiwi the subject is very close to my heart, and I didn’t want to miss the chance to tell what I think is a vital story.
Much of what’s in the doco is far from secret, particularly to those in the media-politics confluence; but (crucially) it is not well known by the general public. The short version is that there are a bunch of well-funded, right-wing, neoliberal influence and lobbying groups in New Zealand, who share links with similar groups overseas. They are ostensibly independent groups, but they coordinate their activities, share resources, trade personnel, and — when you zoom out slightly — essentially work as one large body. In fact, several of the groups officially operate under the auspices of one giant neoliberal anthill organisation, called the Atlas Network. In New Zealand, these groups — and the individuals who work in them — tend to cluster around parties like ACT, NZ First, and National. Their modus operandi is to write stultifyingly dull papers, create model legislation, get pet MPs and parties elected, and incessantly insert their messaging into the public consciousness via the media. That messaging varies from group to group, but the (almost invariable) common denominator is this:
They consistently oppose both climate action and recognition of indigenous rights.1
Having seen extraordinary success in Australia with the triumph of the “No” vote on the Voice, these same forces look to be coming for Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Since it gained limited judicial and legislative recognition, Te Tiriti has been a bugbear for neoliberals. It represents everything they hate: an example of collective recognition and responsibility, and an admission that indigenous people do in fact have continuing inalienable rights that pre-date colonisation. Perhaps most importantly, Te Tiriti acts as a potential handbrake on the kind of unfettered property rights required for mining and fossil fuel companies to prosper.
So it’s no surprise that the ACT Party and lobbyist enablers like Hobson’s Pledge want nothing more than to get rid of it.
Wherefore referendum
In the doco, I’m asked if I think there will be a referendum on Te Tiriti. My answer is yes: in my opinion, it only really remains to be seen what form the referendum will take. There are two options: a government-initiated referendum or a citizens-initiated referendum. For the first option: the coalition agreement between National and ACT specifically calls for ACT’s Treaty Principles Bill to be advanced to select committee: National have pointedly not committed to a referendum but to ACT Party leader David Seymour, it’s clearly still on the cards.
The other option is a citizen’s initiated referendum or CIR: anti-Tiriti group Hobson’s Pledge, co-founded by former ACT Party leader Don Brash, is already lobbying for one. Anyone can get a CIR before Parliament; all that’s required is the signatures of ten percent of registered voters. For an issue like Te Tiriti, long a lightning rod for cranks, racists, and the terminally uninformed, 370,000-ish signatures should be a snap.
In my opinion, either option stands a very real risk of ripping the country apart, on a scale not seen since the Springbok tour protests or perhaps even the Land Wars. And I also think that ACT’s proposed Treaty principles — on top of the other anti-Tiriti measures being undertaken by the ACT/NZ First/National government — would be the most profound assault on indigenous rights in Aotearoa since the racist Justice James Prendergast declared the Treaty a “simple nullity.”
Maps of Meaning
In the doco, there are a few shots of me using a program that looks like a digital spiderweb. I like that it’s been included, because it’s becoming a big part of my writing process. Obsidian is a note-taking program that allows users to write in Markdown, and easily link notes to each other. I’d recommend it to journalists everywhere — it’s encrypted, open-source, and great for brain-dumping and research. One of its nifty features is its mind map or “graph view,” functionality, which showcases all your notes and how they link to each other.
That, I’m very aware, is essentially a computer version of this:
Mind maps have a bad name, thanks to conspiracy theorists and very funny sketches based on conspiracist antics, but they’re a really useful visual tool for research. What’s obvious on viewing the mind map I’ve made — which, to be clear, is comprised primarily of publicly-available information listed on the websites of the organisations I’m researching — is just how entwined everybody is. New Zealand is a small country, to be sure, but after a few hours it becomes very clear that the favourite hobby of these lobby organisations is giving each other jobs. The boards are stacked with fixtures of the “business community” — the very elites that these same organisations so often rail against — and a scan of member’s employment histories often reveals them bouncing around related orgs like pinballs. New NZ First MP Casey Costello, to pick one name more or less at random, has previously worked for (or with) the Taxpayer’s Union, Hobson’s Pledge, and ACT. Each organisation is so entwined with the others that they start to look, accurately, like the same body.
The media is the message
One of the best things about this documentary is that it gives New Zealanders something Australians missed out on: a primer on who these interconnected neoliberal groups are and how they operate. While they have many channels to their audience, like newsletters and social media, the most important medium is still the mainstream media. One of the things I said during shooting that didn’t make the final cut is that the New Zealand media is “infected with lobbyists” — and it is. Lobbyists and their ilk advance their agenda in the media through the following methods:
- Giving journalists their phone numbers and never failing, as I mention in the doco, to pick up when it rings, to deliver some variation on “the world’s richest and most sociopathic people are right, actually.”
- Combining a never-ending deluge of press releases with juicy scoops and leaks of the “ya didn’t hear it from me but boy have I gotta story for YOU. You’ll never guess how much funding this poet got!” variety, usually supplied to pet journalists and right-wing media orgs who can be relied upon to advance the lobbyist’s agenda. See also: Newstalk ZB.
- Providing enticingly conflict-loaded “insider” opinions for free or very cheap to cash-strapped editors and producers, with the tangible result that a huge proportion of New Zealand’s opinion columnists, podcasters, and other varieties of talking head are paid lobbyists of some kind, which brings me to:
- Getting actual media jobs, which has everything to do with a laissez-faire media culture that pretends not to notice the constantly revolving door at the axis of business, politics, and journalism. Numerous examples include New Zealand Institute asset Luke Malpass waltzing into the job of political editor at Stuff, a position he wields with all the impartiality of a used car salesman; ex-National leader Simon Bridges failing into a podcast at Stuff; New Zealand Institute sleep aid Eric Crampton’s spot at Newsroom; Muriel Newman (the founder of unhinged climate-denying lobby group NZCPR) being slung a new gig at Newstalk ZB; long-time right-wing lobbyist Matthew Hooton getting a seemingly eternal opinionist gig at NZME; and his (current? former? I don’t know, and neither do you, because the media outlets he appears on often don’t deign to tell us) consigliere Ben Thomas, who rejoices in the lifetime appointment of Chief Migraine Officer on the Spinoff’s exhausting political podcast, Gone By Lunchtime.
Given the noble Fourth Estate functions essentially as a base of operations for influence operators, what can be done? Lots, in my opinion:
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Short of proper lobbying finance and influence disclosure law, which are all but impossible under the present Government but might be an option when they disintegrate, the media can start by voluntarily and transparently showcasing the bona fides of its talking heads. Every time a lobbyist shows up to generously peddle influence and build their own profile, their appearance can be marked with a disclaimer showing exactly who they have a.) previously worked for and b.) are working for now. That’s really the least that should be done: audiences desperately need to know which talking heads are on the take2.
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News media can also choose to identify when stories have been shopped to them by members of astroturf influence organisations like the Taxpayer’s Union, or (more ideally) refuse to run their hit pieces.
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Media should identify and label influence groups accurately: for example, identifying a spokesperson as being from the benign-sounding “New Zealand Institute” tells an audience nothing: labelling the New Zealand Institute (accurately) as a “neoliberal lobby group for ultra-free-market economics with representation from some of the biggest corporates in New Zealand on its board” tells audiences what they need to know.
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Media should also proactively highlight when their employees are intimately linked to lobby groups or politicians, which is (especially in the Press Gallery) much more common than non-media people might think. Such is the case with Newshub’s Political Editor Jenna Lynch, who is married to ACT Party Chief of Staff Andrew Ketels. It doesn’t matter if she’s the world’s most scrupulous reporter who somehow manages never to discuss politics with her husband: it’s a very obvious potential conflict of interest, and audiences deserve to know about it — and any other such conflicts.
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As a final suggestion, the media should also stop giving prime opinion and airwave real estate to the world’s most boring politicians because of the more-common-than-you think reasoning of “oh, they were such a hoot when we got on the piss that one time.” Their audiences will fervently thank them.
Thanks for checking out the documentary. Please share it far and wide: I think there’s a lot in there that New Zealanders both deserve and need to know.
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The New Zealand Initiative hotly denies they are climate deniers, by pointing out that they accept the reality of climate change and that they support the Emissions Trading Scheme, but they also lobby stringently against any and all climate action that isn’t the ETS. This is easily understandable given the fact that that the ETS is set up as a literal licence for corporations to continue with carbon pollution, as well as a way for the rich to get richer trading in carbon credits. ↩
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In this spirit of transparency, you should know that I was once a paid member of both the Civilian and the Green political parties. I was directly involved in neither organisation and my membership in the respective parties lapsed when it wound up and I forgot to pay my sub. From memory the total expenditure amounted to twenty-five bucks. ↩
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Substackers against Nazis
There’s a good chance you’ve seen the following letter a lot lately: I’ve been meaning to send it out for a while now. I’m sending it to recipients of both The Bad Newsletter and here on the Cynic’s Guide, because — to say shortly what I’ve said at length — having Nazis on your platform when you are not a free speech platform is bullshit. I could respect an absolutist free speech stance, but Substack is not a free speech platform. There are multiple forms of speech that are not accepted here, including sex work: try using Substack to send nudes or fire out some erotic fiction and see how long your account lasts. Still shorter version: Nazis yes, nudes no. And if you’re not going to be a true free speech platform, then I’m going to have to join the voices demanding that you get rid of the Nazis.
Of course, it goes further than Nazis, who are merely the tip of the Substack garbageberg: this place is a haven for hate and disinformation merchants of all kinds who are thrilled that Substack is giving them a platform and the ability to monetize. I’m putting a piece together on how Substack enables and encourages disinformation: look out for it soon at The Bad Newsletter.
Dear Chris, Hamish & Jairaj:
We’re asking a very simple question that has somehow been made complicated: Why are you platforming and monetizing Nazis?
According to a piece written by Substack publisher Jonathan M. Katz and published by The Atlantic on November 28, this platform has a Nazi problem:
“Some Substack newsletters by Nazis and white nationalists have thousands or tens of thousands of subscribers, making the platform a new and valuable tool for creating mailing lists for the far right. And many accept paid subscriptions through Substack, seemingly flouting terms of service that ban attempts to ‘publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes’…Substack, which takes a 10 percent cut of subscription revenue, makes money when readers pay for Nazi newsletters.”
As Patrick Casey, a leader of a now-defunct neo-Nazi group who is banned on nearly every other social platform except Substack, wrote on here in 2021: “I’m able to live comfortably doing something I find enjoyable and fulfilling. The cause isn’t going anywhere.” Several Nazis and white supremacists including Richard Spencer not only have paid subscriptions turned on but have received Substack “Bestseller” badges, indicating that they are making at a minimum thousands of dollars a year.
From our perspective as Substack publishers, it is unfathomable that someone with a swastika avatar, who writes about “The Jewish question,” or who promotes Great Replacement Theory, could be given the tools to succeed on your platform. And yet you’ve been unable to adequately explain your position.
In the past you have defended your decision to platform bigotry by saying you “make decisions based on principles not PR” and “will stick to our hands-off approach to content moderation.” But there’s a difference between a hands-off approach and putting your thumb on the scale. We know you moderate some content, including spam sites and newsletters written by sex workers. Why do you choose to promote and allow the monetization of sites that traffic in white nationalism?
Your unwillingness to play by your own rules on this issue has already led to the announced departures of several prominent Substackers, including Rusty Foster and Helena Fitzgerald. They follow previous exoduses of writers, including Substack Pro recipient Grace Lavery and Jude Ellison S. Doyle, who left with similar concerns.
As journalist Casey Newton told his more than 166,000 Substack subscribers after Katz’s piece came out: “The correct number of newsletters using Nazi symbols that you host and profit from on your platform is zero.”
We, your publishers, want to hear from you on the official Substack newsletter. Is platforming Nazis part of your vision of success? Let us know—from there we can each decide if this is still where we want to be.
Signed,
Substackers Against Nazis
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Shut Up To Succeed
There’s this skit at the opening of the Tenacious D song “Kielbasa” that starts with KG saying “Dude, we gotta fucken write something,” and because I got into the D at an impressionable age and the lyrics are burned into my hippocampus with letters of fire, I think of this song every damn time I’m behind on a deadline, which is most of the time. And yet I resisted writing this piece, for a few reasons.
One is that I’m spooked by success. A few years back, I did a tight five minutes at a comedy open mic. I’d done stand-up sets before, to varying results, including quite a lot of laughter and at least one obligatory crash and burn. This time I was determined to get it right and I did. I learned the material backwards, including a few alternative paths should a particular punchline flop, the crowd laughed their collective asses off and I left the stage on a high. “That was brilliant!” I thought. “I can’t wait to do that again,” and I never have.
The other reason I’ve been avoiding writing this particular piece is that I’m not sure that telling people about what I’m looking to achieve is a good idea. You may have heard, as many who’ve read self-help have, that you need to make your goals public, or tell people what you’re trying to achieve, for reasons of “accountability.” Many, including Tim Ferris, suggest publicly announcing your goal, or making a bet with a friend (if I don’t do X by Y, you get to keep $Z dollars.)1
The idea is that publicly announcing a goal will help hold you accountable. But, as is usual in the field of self-help, the advice is wildly conflicting. Many authors suggest telling no-one (or as few people as possible) about what your goal is or what you’re working on. According to numerous sources, some of them credible, telling people your goals can affect the likelihood of achieving them.
Naturally, I’ve just Googled the topic, and I’ve immediately hit someone taking the bit way too damn far, because that’s always how it goes in this ridiculous field. “Why telling your goals is a fatal mistake” screams one of the first Google hits. Fatal? Really? Unless the goal is “skydive without training” or “build an electric blanket from scratch” I doubt it’s going to be deadly, but let’s find out. The piece, which I nearly stopped reading in the second paragraph when it mentioned neuro-linguistic programming, is by a bloke called Peter Shallard. He describes himself as “a renowned business psychology expert and therapist gone renegade.” This last seems accurate: his “About” page contains no formal qualifications.
It suggests that if you tell people about what you’re up to, it can give you the same kind of mental reward as actually doing the thing you’re telling everyone about. Just because I’m cynical about Shallard’s qualifications doesn’t mean it’s all a load of rubbish, though. Other pieces by more credible authors — like Atomic Habits mega-seller James Clear — suggest the same effect.
If that’s right, it’s a bit cooked for me, because I have a newsletter that’s about all the different self-help shit that I do, and telling you about it may be dooming everything I try. Having an audience for my stuff hasn’t helped me achieve my big goal, which was to post regularly: if anything, it’s made it harder. Some people pay me actual money for this writing, others seem to like it enough to hang around for each epistle, and this frankly freaks me out a bit. I always worry that I’m disappointing you.
Fortunately, when you dig into the research it gets both vague and highly specific. Good science tends to come loaded with caveats, and the original paper that everyone references, by a bloke called Peter M Gollwitzer, is no exception. As you can read for yourself, the experiments in the study have a rather tangential connection to reality. They measured whether students would do stuff like “watch videotaped study sessions for slightly longer” or “compare yourself to variously-sized cartoons of lawyers and indicate which one you feel most similar to.”2
I’m not mocking this. It’s real science, the conclusions are both interesting and valuable, but they’re not necessarily broadly applicable to the real world. That never stops self-help writers from immediately making it so, though.
Where does that leave us? Is it a yeah or a nah on telling people about your goals? How about: why not both, or neither? I think the answer depends on what sort of person you are, or what kind of goal you have in mind. If you’re the sort of person who really needs others to give you a rev up, by all means tell a few specific people about what you’re trying to achieve. Or if you thrive on working on something in secret to surprise people later down the line, do that. Curiously, this approach gels with some of the research I mentioned above, which suggests that if your goal is founded in identity — “I wanna be a gym guy/gal/nonbinarino” — then telling people about it is likely to reduce the effectiveness of the goal. But if it’s founded in something more specific — “I wanna bench press 100 kilos” — then the identity condition might not apply, and perhaps it’ll be helpful to tell others or otherwise have people help you out.
All the above is my long-winded way of telling you that, somehow, I’ve managed to consistently go to the gym for a few months now.
Again, caveats. I am using the word “consistently” slightly outside of its conventional calibration. I’ve noted the date of each gym session since August, during which I managed to go a grand total of four times. In September I went three times, a 25 percent decline, but October picked up nicely with seven attendances. In November I went nine times, and so far in December I’ve managed to go every other day.
Improbably, I love it.
I can’t quite put my finger on what changed: the nearest thing I can compare it to is the same buzzy “I hate this, but I like it” feeling I get from taking cold showers — and I’ve been doing those for well over a year now. I’ve also refined my workout a bit: I followed a plan one of the gym trainers set me for a while, and now I’ve shifted to a strength-building workout that’s easy to understand, hard to master, and never stops getting harder.
The other reason I like the gym now is that it’s working. A while back I noticed that a bunch of my favourite t-shirts were getting too small. I’d definitely outgrown shirts before, usually around the tum region, but this was a bit different. They were pulling up at the shoulders and into my armpits. Never mind, they were going to holes anyway. I consigned them to the painting-rag box.
Then it started happening to younger shirts, and I couldn’t pretend that it was anything to do with the age of my shirts or our washing machine. I’ve got bigger, in a way I wanted and planned and worked to get bigger, and that is very satisfying. Much more importantly, the numbers on the Heavy Metal Things are going up, too. In August I was knocking around a 40 kilo bench press and drawing this not-smiley face next to it: 😐
Today, my best bench press is close to double my August numbers. The emoji has changed to this: 🤨
This isn’t the plan, but the meme is timeless so I made sure to include it. Back when I started this newsletter, I was using how many pull-ups I could(n’t) do as a success metric. I stopped updating progress because I was embarrassed the number wasn’t going up, which is what happens when you don’t, uh, work out. But I do now, and the numbers are in: I’m doing 20+ pull-ups in a given gym session — and that’s in between my other exercises. I’m pretty pleased with that. Pull-ups are hard. But it’s still early days. I have a specific and quite ambitious goal in mind for how much I’d like to be able to lift: the goal is to bench-press 100 kilos, and to be able to do a muscle-up, which is probably the most aptly-named callisthenic exercise in existence.
No-one except Louise and my t-shirts has noticed that I’m going to the gym, but I’d like to think that’s not why I’m going. I read once that, one day, you pick up your child for the last time, and — as an older dad — I want to delay that day for as long as possible. If I keep tracking the way I am now, I’ll still be able to yeet my boy Leo well into adulthood, and that’s exactly how I want it.
Hopefully telling you about it won’t stop it from happening.
I originally titled this newsletter “Harder, Better, Faster, Shorter” not just to get the Daft Punk song in your head but because it was meant to be shorter than normal. That hasn’t worked out, but oh well. Substack lets you do surveys, so I’ll pop this one here – I want to find out what kind of newsletter frequency you’re actually after here.
And, as usual, I look forward to chatting in the comments.
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The Hand That Feeds
A short lunchtime post today. Let’s begin with a (gift) link to an Atlantic story revealing Substack’s Nazi problem. How bad is is it here? This bad:
At least 16 of the newsletters that I reviewed have overt Nazi symbols, including the swastika and the sonnenrad, in their logos or in prominent graphics. Andkon’s Reich Press, for example, calls itself “a National Socialist newsletter”; its logo shows Nazi banners on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, and one recent post features a racist caricature of a Chinese person. A Substack called White-Papers, bearing the tagline “Your pro-White policy destination,” is one of several that openly promote the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that inspired deadly mass shootings at a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, synagogue; two Christchurch, New Zealand, mosques; an El Paso, Texas, Walmart; and a Buffalo, New York, supermarket. Other newsletters make prominent references to the “Jewish Question.” Several are run by nationally prominent white nationalists; at least four are run by organizers of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—including the rally’s most notorious organizer, Richard Spencer.
The rest of the article is just as damning. I am only annoyed that I didn’t write about it myself; Nazi content on this website isn’t hard to find, and I could have reported on it much earlier. That said, I am glad that a mainstream publication is addressing the issue.
It’s been known about for a long time, and Substack, to its enormous discredit, has done nothing about it. Instead, they’ve worked to explicitly elevate “alt-right” types like Richard Hanania, with this simpering puff piece and accompanying podcast by Substack cofounder Hamish McKenzie. When Huffington Post writer Christopher Mathias revealed Haniana’s past as an overt white supremacist writing under the pseudonym “Richard Hoste,” Substack’s silence was deafening. They did not retract or otherwise repudiate their article, or even really address the controversy. As the Atlantic article makes clear, Substack already has terms of use that ban “hate,” but they’re not enforcing them. Instead they’re striving to be edgy, sucking up to weirdo Silicon Valley accelerationists, and making cringeworthy ads:
Please note this isn’t about encouraging “free speech,” a position I have a lot of sympathy for, because Substack aren’t genuine free speech maximalists. If they were, they’d allow all non-criminal speech, including explicitly protected and legal forms of free speech like pornography and other kinds of sex work. They don’t, and this makes them free speech hypocrites.
With Substack’s Nazi problem now very much out in the open, the platform now has a choice: enforce their terms of use and evict the vile people who make a living (and make money for Substack) by peddling overt hate to huge audiences, or maintain their current course and become a Nazi bar. I suspect they’ll pick option B, which sucks. I have good friends who make their entire living from writing on Substack and the platform’s hypocritical, ideologically inconsistent free-speech-for-Nazis-but-not-for-boobies policy is putting writers in a terrible position. If they stay, it looks like they’re okay with being on a platform that doesn’t just permit but promotes hate. If they leave, they risk losing their livelihood.
Clearly, organised opposition is what’s needed. If this site’s writers banded together and threatened to leave Substack en masse, the resulting revenue hit might make continued Nazi-coddling untenable. Writers are already organising:
In my opinion, the choice is stark: if you’re a non-Nazi writer who objects to Substack making money from white supremacists (not to mention this site’s vast swathe of TERF writers and culture-war contrarians) you should make this extremely clear to the site founders, ideally in an organised, public way that doesn’t allow for individualised, targeted pushback. You could look to leave altogether, taking your subscribers and their revenue elsewhere: there are other subscription email providers that either have ideologically consistent free speech policies — allowing all legal speech, not carving out convenient exceptions for Nazis — or that don’t go out of their way to promote Nazis at all. Revolutionary stuff! Here are some alternatives:
Buttondown
Buttondown is not “free” in the way Substack is (Substack takes a big cut of your subscriptions) but they’re an inexpensive option for independent publishers. Also they seem like good sorts on social, without any pretence of “creating a new economic engine for culture.”1
Here’s Buttondown’s Substack migration guide, including moving your paid subs.
Ghost
Ghost Pro is a very Substack-like experience for your newsletter and subscribers, with the option to self-host if you’re a tinkerer.
Here’s Ghost’s Substack migration guide, including moving your paid subs.
WordPress
WordPress.com’s Newsletter product now offers a paid email subscription option, including the ability to connect your existing Stripe account for paid subs.
There are other options out there too. For my part — as all my posts here and at The Cynic’s Guide To Self Improvement are free anyway — I will definitely be moving my newsletters to another platform if Substack doesn’t come up with a satisfactory response to their Nazi problem. It’s long overdue.
