A Tour of Substack
I’ve been very curious this week to explore my new home on Substack. I didn’t know much about it before and really am beyond impressed at the vision behind it and the range of voices available. The conceit - and, as far as I can tell, this seems sincere - is to create an alternative internet, back in the direction of the weird, wild web of the ‘90s, longform, individualistic, heterodox. And, at the same time, to avoid certain pernicious tendencies of the internet in the era of monopolistic platforms - to sell out content for advertising and subscribers for data mining and to summarily bounce contributors who violate a latterly-imposed censorship regime. “Over my dead body,” says the Substack chief operating officer of the possibility of ads - and the founders post a very heartening manifesto prioritizing civil liberties and working to repair a ‘broken media ecosystem.’
Having forgone all the obvious ways of making money, though, Substack gives itself a particular kind of financial challenge. Basically, the business model is that the content creators have to be so wonderful that they can attract a loyal readership - and have to be aggressive enough entrepreneurs that they convince some portion of their subscribers to pay them for their work with Substack hauling in a percentage. And, in particular, the marquee writers hired to headline the site have to be willing to work hard enough, and to prioritize their Substack channels, to earn back their somewhat outlandish signing bonuses.
And, from that perspective, what’s on Substack is a bit dispiriting. The sense is of writers posting their b-work or teasing just enough to plug for their books or their shows or their primary sources of income. To me, scrolling around, there’s something very exciting in coming across Patti Smith, Garrison Keillor, Salman Rushdie, all just writing off-the-cuff without production values or mediation. Unfortunately, though, that’s apparently less fun than it might be for somebody like Keillor, who is used to performing for an audience of millions - as opposed to getting ten or twenty likes for a post on Substack - and seems clearly to just be phoning it in and cashing the checks.
Energetically, the real heart of Substack is the anti-woke crowd, journalists who are fed up with how the institutionalized media, their old employers, have caved for Twitter mobs and their own self-censoring mechanisms. And there’s a real rush of adrenaline in Substacks by Bari Weiss, Yascha Mounk, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Loury - the energy of people who’ve been holding it for a long time and are experiencing a thrilling release in being able to speak their minds. This is exactly where I find myself - still a Democrat, still centrist (if that means anything) but at the moment without any real political moorings and just looking to talk it out - so it’s almost more gratifying than I can say, after years of feeling that discourse both on social media and in the established press was hardening into brand messaging and partisan rhetoric, to come across a whole crew of intelligent people writing freely and passionately.
There’s the sense too of leaving class, wandering into detention and hearing what the delinquent crowd has to say for themselves - people like Alex Berenson, Chris Hedges, Robert Malone, who have been booted off their old platforms and, really, have no available publishing forum other than Substack. The New York Times, with dazzling censoriousness, is trying to root them even out of Substack. The Times writes, “Critics say the platform recruits (and therefore endorses) culture war provocateurs and is a hotbed for hate speech and misinformation,” and celebrates the defection of a group of writers protesting Substack’s open content policy, and plugs for Ghost, a rival site for which you pay to post your writing but which includes a convenient “concierge service to help users transition their work from Substack.” I still have no idea how we’ve gotten to this place - how liberal journalists insist not only on censoring themselves but manage to be irate that anybody anywhere is not censoring. For me, a read-through of these probationers is a nice testament for why a completely free forum of exchange is so critical. As discussed below, I don’t agree with Chris Hedges or Jonathan Cook on Ukraine - I personally don’t approve of Hedges’ having worked for the RT - but Hedges is a smart, impassioned writer, a credible journalist, and his heretical stance on the war, already stripped off YouTube, is worth paying attention to.
There’s been precious little in the mainstream press about this story – and it’s worth reading a first-person account like Blake Stone-Banks’ (from the Substack ‘Persuasion’) and trying to grapple with what’s happened here: the Chinese government, over a two-month period, essentially blockading and starving its own largest city for the sake of adherence to a strict zero-Covid policy at a moment when the virus is increasingly non-deadly.
A few quotes from Stone-Banks’ piece:
“Though Shanghai officials announced Pudong was ending its lockdown [on April 1] there was a significant caveat: this was only for sub-districts with zero Covid cases and there were no sub-districts with zero Covid cases. With the rest of Shanghai now in lockdown, no one was free, and no one had any idea when it might end.”
“Nothing made sense about how the lockdown was implemented, and we had nowhere to turn for answers.”
“Our WeChat feeds were filled with videos of protests in the quarantines as well. However, these videos were always quickly censored, often disappearing within seconds of being shared…On April 22, Shanghai briefly overcame the censors when a video titled ‘Voices of April’ was shared over WeChat. Though this video too was quickly blocked, people refused to stop sharing it, reversing the image, altering the color and length, turning the video upside – anything to keep the algorithms from deleting it…Though the next day the video was nowhere to be found on the Chinese internet, it was the first day that my friends in Beijing and other Chinese cities started asking me what was really happening in Shanghai.”
“Several weeks into lockdown a new policy was announced that a single positive PCR test could result in entire floors – and in many cases entire buildings – taken into state quarantine where almost all were guaranteed to contract Covid.”
I’ve never been to China, don’t really know how to analyze this, so I can only sort of deal with it at the level of the media’s reaction. The Shanghai lockdown has been such an obvious human rights abuse, let alone a violation of any notion of civil liberties – and the kind of thing that the Western media would typically cover fervently, but, in my weekly trawling of mainstream publications it’s hard to even spot an article on it, with the obvious explanation of that being that criticism of China’s Covid lockdowns opens the door to criticism of tough Covid protocols across the Western world. And without even getting into a discussion about how the pandemic was handled in the West, it’s worth at least making this point – that the media’s editorialized treatment of anything Covid-related has hamstrung its ability to cover very significant, very far-reaching stories like this one where Covid protocols are deployed by an already repressive regime in a brazen effort to extend total control over its citizens.
It's not that the mainstream media has completely ignored this story, but coverage over the past couple of months paints a very different picture from first-person accounts of people who lived through it. “Shanghai says its Covid outbreak is under control, but many residents remain locked down” was The New York Times’ strikingly fair-and-balanced headline as late as May 17 – or, in early April, “Shanghai defends separating infected children from uninfected parents,” which is a take on the story that Xinhua would more than approve of. Note that The New York Times would absolutely not have headlined a story about the separation of families at the Mexican border with “Trump defends separation of children from parents.” Framing like The New York Times’ allows a reader to believe that the Chinese government is acting more or less rationally and with the community’s welfare in mind in enacting its lockdown – which is a very different thing from an account like Stone-Banks’ or from the quotes of any of the Shanghai residents within The Times’ articles who clearly are taking a very real risk by telling a foreign correspondent that the Chinese government’s policy has been anything but rational or community-minded and has resulted in starvation, food hoarding, and the utter cessation of any civic freedom.
So I’m pretty hawkish on Ukraine, but there is a critique of U.S. involvement that should be taken seriously. Chris Hedges and Jonathan Cook make it from their Substack work release and Jeffrey Sachs makes it on Consortium News.
The argument - in its clearest form - is that whatever we think of the responsibility for the outbreak of the war we should be suspicious of the scale of the United States’ expenditure, $40 billion and counting.
I’ve been developing a painful awareness recently - through reading about Vietnam and talking to people about Iraq/Afghanistan - of how the United States military-industrial complex does its work: the blank checks, the sense of the imminent, permanent emergency, the appropriation that’s passed before anybody can think it through and which fuels the war machine for however many years. And, from that perspective, the Ukraine war, is coming right on cue.
Hedges, who has been through this whole dance before, is completely confident that he knows what’s driving it - “the death spiral of unchecked militarism.” He continues, “Democrat or Republican. It does not matter. War is the raison d'état of the state. Since war is all we do, all proposed solutions are military.” And anybody I know who’s been involved in Iraq or Afghanistan says pretty much exactly the same thing about this new adventure - that it’s mostly about turning on the spigot for the contractors.
It may be my naïveté talking, but my countervailing belief is that the United States is not the sole actor in the world, and even the United States can, every so often, find itself on the right side of a conflict. The idea that the United States has been proactively instigating conflict in Ukraine does not jibe with how the Ukrainians themselves view it or how close observers of Putin have tracked his turn to the hard-right through the 2010s. Maybe Hedges and co would view Michael McFaul as an irredeemable stooge of the military-industrial complex, but I found McFaul’s account of his ambassadorship to Russia to be completely compelling and to align with how the Russians I know described a shift Putin took in his third term. In this account, the Obama presidency was very serious and very genuine about the ‘reset’ with Russia. There was a decent understanding with Medvedev and a willingness to respect Russia’s return to prominence as an international power which was not incompatible (this is a point of contention) with the United States’ engagement with an independent civil society within Russian borders. By the time of Putin’s return to the presidency, he was different, claims McFaul. He was convinced that the United States was out to get him and saw every act of the West as symptomatic of a vast anti-Russian conspiracy. “We were dealing with an entirely different interlocutor, one with fixed and flawed ideas about the world in general and the United States in particular,” wrote McFaul. This was experienced by Russia’s democratic opposition, which was now deemed traitorous. And it was noticed by all of Putin’s foreign interlocutors - as epitomized in Angela Merkel’s melancholic 2014 comment that Putin “is in a different world.”
Obama’s ‘reset’ and, for that matter, Trump’s overt anti-Russian appeasement are inconvenient details for the peacenik crowd who prefer to view American foreign policy in monolithic terms, as an unbroken chain of neoconservative perfidiousness. The smoking gun evidence for this conceit is Victoria Nuland’s leaked call from 2014 demonstrating that she and the United States had been actively involved in the makeup of a coalition government to replace Yanukovych - and Sachs, in particular, is flagrantly conspiratorial in seeing Nuland as ‘the neocon operative par excellence’ and representative of a largely family-run cartel that had been steadfastly seeking out war in Ukraine as “the culmination of a 30-year neoconservative project.” I re-listened to that call, which is not a great look for the State Department, but reads far more as the United States looking to have input in government formation in the highly-fluid situation of February 2014 as opposed to the United States acting as the hidden hand running Ukraine. What Nuland is accused of doing here is par for the course for a foreign power looking for regional influence in the midst of civil unrest and is far short of, for instance, the active, premeditated attempt to rig a rival power’s election through troll farms. And the premise that the United States must have no role whatsoever in the internal affairs of Ukraine is predicated on the idea that Ukraine is inherently in Russia’s sphere of influence - which is not at all the perspective of the Ukrainians, as Ukrainians have demonstrated in a series of elections stretching back to before 2014.
But all of that is history. And if the peacenik crowd have an odd tendency to blame everything on Paul Wolfowitz and the progeny of Donald Kagan and to see Vladimir Putin as more or less an innocent, they are right to be concerned that the initial justifications for American intervention in Ukraine may be stretched out by the contractors and the Department of Defense for yet another permanent war. So, as annoying as Jeffrey Sachs is, his diagnosis may be the right, rational way for trying to wind down the war before the U.S.’ military machine cranks into full gear. The outlines of a peace will likely be that Ukraine has to make territorial concessions, including the large swathe of the east that Russia has already taken, in return for Russia’s willingness to let the rest of Ukraine head off in its own direction, as part of the European Union and the West’s security system, likely as a sort of surrogate member of NATO. That’s a very difficult proposition for Zelensky’s government to advance given the horrific injustices of Russia’s persecution of the war, but, to be honest, the reality on the battlefield leaves no real viable alternative. So Russia becomes, in effect, the victor of the 2014 Donbas War, possessor of a large section of Eastern Ukraine and likely Crimea, and Zelensky has to sell the bitter pill to his people with offsetting benefits of fully entering the European economic market - which is the smarter move than dedicating an entire generation to trench-and-artillery warfare. My sense is that Zelensky himself would be willing to do that for, essentially, the right price in terms of economic support, but some time would be needed to convince everyone of the sheer pointlessness of an endless war of attrition in the east. That’s not just or honorable, but it probably is the culmination, and Sachs and co are right that what could ruin this whole delicate balance is the U.S. military complex continuing the war for its own cynical purposes and abetted by a neocon regime change fantasy in which Putin is so weakened by the war that his regime magically collapses from within.
It’s kind of a house rule for this Substack to not talk about Trump unless it’s really necessary. The Cassidy Hutchinson testimony seems to cross that threshold - tipping the balance for certain lawyerly types that there is a case to be made in indicting Trump.
On a human level, of course, the Hutchinson testimony was very moving - the clear sense that Hutchinson had been a true MAGA believer (here she is dancing the YMCA at a 2020 campaign rally), that she was thrilled to have the job she did, and was genuinely shocked to realize that people she admired, Meadows and Trump, not only were unmoved by the assault on the Capitol but were actively provoking it. There’s something very powerful, in 2022, seeing anybody even close to choking up over the words ‘unpatriotic’ or ‘un-American.”
Unfortunately, the nostalgic invocations of John Dean are all likely misplaced - they assume some sort of unified body politic that can be swayed by a public spectacle. The reality now is that the public can’t even find common ground over a televised attack against Congress and the sitting Vice President, so forget about consensus in the Monday morning quarterbacking. Right-wing media is completely ignoring Hutchinson. The National Review’s cutting analysis, for instance, is to complain about the camera angles in the footage of Hutchinson’s committee testimony. The extent of Fox News’ insight is to, for some reason, compare her to the Hindenburg disaster.
Still, it’s a moment for the Never Trumpers - and there’s a very brief window, as Liz Cheney seems fully to understand, in which it’s possible to put together a criminal case against Trump before he returns in 2024 and starts sticking heads on spikes. I don’t think there’s any real alternative. There has to be a case in there - call it politically motivated, take the risk of further alienating the right, but there’s simply no way that an orchestrated attack against Congress by a sitting president isn’t an indictable offense.
In terms of the legal next steps, the imminent question is whether the Secret Service agents back Hutchinson’s account. The Secret Service claims that the January 6th Committee hasn’t attempted to interview its personnel despite having made it clear that all members of the Secret Service are available for questioning. It’s a little bit difficult to know what to make of that. Fox News cites an unnamed source to claim that the Secret Service agents quoted by Hutchinson would contradict her testimony if under oath, but Engel, the primary secret service agent in question had already substantially corroborated Hutchinson’s story although described it very drily and apparently did not mention the wheel-grabbing incident. What’s obvious is that it’s an incredibly delicate issue for the Secret Service, which, on January 6th, may well have had more on its mind than just the physical safety of its client. The obvious way to talk about all of this is that the president attempted to carry out a coup. Certain elements of the security apparatus seemed willing to facilitate him - notably the generals leading the DC National Guard. Others - Mike Pence, Mark Milley, with a degree of heroism that really needs to be acknowledged - stuck by their constitutional duties or, really, in Milley’s case, violated the letter of the law for the spirit of it, inserting himself at a higher level of the chain of command in an attempt to fend off Trump. Milley was clearly engaged in a counter-coup and same apparently goes for the Secret Service, which may have had its reasons to not drive Trump to the Capitol other than concern for his well-being. Trump did have a point - the arms-carrying insurgents were his people, they were not there to shoot him - and Hutchinson’s testimony casts into relief an aspect of the Secret Service’s real responsibilities, that as a Praetorian Guard it’s responsible not just for protecting the president but for restraining him, keeping him from violating his oath of office - for which there may be hell to pay for the Service should Trump return in 2024.
Awesome!