Substack's Nazi problem isn't going away

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Well hello there, old can of worms.

Today, before news broke that even alleged Russian agents think Tucker Carlson is an “overt shill” for their boss, the social webs were abuzz over the latest guest on his new streaming show. Darryl Cooper, a podcaster whom Carlson praised as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” joined the Fox News cast-off to defend Adolf Hitler, praise the recent far-right anti-immigrant riots in Britain, and call the initial stages of the Holocaust “humane.”

The episode went viral after it was promoted by Elon Musk, who tweeted that the interview was: "Very interesting. Worth watching.” (Musk has since deleted the post.)

What many people don’t know (or don’t remember) is that Cooper, the host of the “Martyr Made” podcast, was already involved in another Nazi-related controversy with a social media platform less than a year ago. He made a cameo last year when I reported on how Substack, the newsletter-hosting platform and Twitter clone² , was promoting and profiting off of overtly white-supremacist, antisemitic, and explicitly Nazi blogs:

Cooper’s viral interview was good timing for this ex-Substacker at least. I was already planning to write about the recent conviction of another writer on the platform — who used his still-monetized newsletter as part of a scheme to illegally threaten a self-described “Nazi hunter.” So I’ll just combine the two posts into one and call it a day. More about the conviction below.

Some of Substack’s defenders tried to claim (incorrectly) that the newsletters I identified last fall were few in number and small potatoes in terms of subscriber counts. The first part of that defense was patently false: I and other researchers ultimately found over 200 Substacks that could be classed as explicitly Nazi, neo-Confederate, neo-fascist, eugenicist, and so on. Many of these are also, crucially, networked together, using Substack’s spammy recommendations feature to automatically subscribe readers to multiple blogs at once.

And if some of these writers are small-time, Cooper is emphatically not. His podcast/blog boasts over 112,000 subscribers, at least 10,000 of whom (and possibly multiples more than that) pay for the privilege, based on the purple Substack Bestseller badge next to Cooper’s name. With yearly subs going for $50, and monthly subscribers chipping in $6 a pop, that means Cooper is at a minimum pulling in $500,000 on an annual basis, and likely more than that.

It is, in fact, currently the No. 1 History newsletter on the platform:

(Columbia professor Adam Tooze’s newsletter is No. 2)

Substack takes 10% of all its writers’ subscription revenue³ , which gives it an incentive to promote its biggest earners. And boy do they promote Cooper. When I set up a burner account to do research for what became my Atlantic story, “Martyr Made” was one of the first blogs Substack’s algorithm auto-checked for me and recommended I follow. Co-founder Hamish McKenzie — who is a free subscriber to Cooper’s blog, according to his profile page — has held him up as an example for other writers in multiple official posts sent out to much of the platform’s user base, including the one that listed Cooper as a rising Substack star alongside Bari Weiss, Matts Yglesias and Taibbi, and Andrew Sullivan.

Cooper has ridden Substack’s boosts, and others like them, to a position of influence: Both Trump’s running mate JD Vance and Vance’s senatorial press office follow Cooper on X. In July 2021, Vance boosted an absolutely batshit, 36-tweet thread in which Cooper strung together a wide array of reactionary conspiracy theories from throughout Trump’s presidency, all of which he seemed to believe, to explain why “Boomer-tier Trump supporters” were ready to believe the 2020 election was stolen. “Perceptive thread,” Vance observed. Vance is scheduled to campaign with Tucker Carlson in Pennsylvania later this month.

Which really gets to the larger point: what you can charitably call fascist-curiousness is not limited to any single platform, not in the era where anti-democracy tech robber barons like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen have their hands in most of the major social networks, and those networks are in turn in constant communication and collaboration with the Trump campaign and elements of the farther right. But I’m going to focus on one platform anyway, because I think it’s illustrative of the larger issue.

Substack has argued, contradictorily, that it is a neutral platform, that it officially opposes Nazi-sympathizing content, and that allowing a forum for said content will “strip bad ideas of their power.” (They have not said how taking 10% of the profits from those bad ideas will help.)

As I’ve said from the beginning, I fully appreciate that Substack has a First Amendment right to publish speech that does not constitute a direct and specific incitement to violence. It’s less often remarked on that platforms like Substack also have a First Amendment right not to publish speech they consider beyond the pale, not to mention to deny such publications the ability to use their infrastructure to make money. Not to mention that continually promoting said content is a freely made choice.

I’m also sympathetic to the argument that heavy-handed censorship can in some cases bring attention, and victim status, to such “bad ideas.” But in Cooper we have a natural experiment in the counterfactual: three years of “open discourse” on Substack has only pushed him farther to the extreme right. Much of the attention on the interview has been focused on his decision to call Winston Churchill “the chief villain of the Second World War” — a self-avowedly “provocative” statement (“maybe I’m being a little hyperbolic,” Cooper admits) meant to gin up maximum outrage from the most easily dismissable pundits and lawmakers. (Former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney stepped right up and took that bait, for one.) Indeed, as anticolonialist historians such as Tariq Ali will gladly tell you, Churchill was a lot of things: an extreme racist, a war criminal, a blood-soaked imperialist, etc. But in that long record, standing up to Hitler was the one unalloyed good.

None of that matters here really, though, because the more context you put Cooper’s statement in, the worse it looks. The base of his claim against Churchill is not his conduct of the war — the firebombings of Cologne and Dresden, for instance — but that he went to war against Germany at all, instead of doing what Cooper believes the United Kingdom should have done: surrender to the Nazis and ally with them against the Soviet Union.

Here’s how Cooper tells the story:

This was indeed close to what Hitler said his position was regarding Britain, if not France, in 1940, in what was described by newspapermen at the time as an ultimatum of “peace or destruction.” But believing it now requires, and I can’t stress this enough, taking Hitler at his word. It requires believing, among other things, that a conquered Britain would not suffer the same fate as the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe. It also requires believing to some extent that the triumph of this Anglo-Nazi alliance would have been a good thing. The only reason to do this is if you to some extent share Hitler’s worldview.

And Cooper does. His explanation is essentially Nazi ideology: the conviction that European peoples must band together on ethno-nationalist lines, behind strong leaders, to crush the spread of Marxism by any means necessary. Cooper also goes on in the interview to say that Churchill was put in the position to go to war with Germany “by people who shared his interests in terms of Zionism … the financiers, by a media complex that wanted to make sure that he was the guy who was representing Britain in that conflict for a reason.”

Nor is that view limited to this interview. In one of Cooper’s Substack-supported podcasts, titled “The Anti-Humans” — a nod to the resolutely fascist ideology expressed in a recent book blurbed by JD Vance — Cooper says of the Soviet Union in the years after World War II: “Never before had a government shown such uninhibited savagery toward its own people, during peacetime, as a matter of policy and in the name of scientific management.” Again, this “never before” comes after World War II; he is explictly saying that it was worse than the Holocaust. This tracks in turn with Cooper’s description of the Holocaust in the interview with Carlson:

This is simply a lie. Even if there is some letter with lines to that effect from 1941, it would have been written in the context of the actual Nazi war plans from Operation Barbarossa: namely, to begin the extermination of the Jews as quickly as possible, not as some kind of “humane” cost-saving action but an end unto itself, for the destruction of what the Nazis called Judeo-Bolschewismus, or Jewish Bolshevism. And this is indeed what happened, as Richard J. Evans explained in his landmark book, The Third Reich at War:

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In case there is any doubt about whether Cooper and Carlson favor a Hitlerian approach today, they make that abundantly clear when they start talking about current-day immigration. Around the hour and ten-minute mark, Cooper starts riffing about how Europeans are uniquely vilified when “they start thinking in terms of group.” Carlson says (and Cooper agrees): “From a western perspective, I think its fair to say our leaders make the case implicitly, that it’s really only when Europeans have a sense of themselves as Europeans that the world is in peril, but everyone else is fine to do that.”

This is a bog-standard white supremacist argument — that only white people are denied a right to identity and culture, whereas everyone else gets to celebrate theirs. Then they go further into the depths of xenophobic paranoia. Carlson starts asking Cooper: Carlson asks: “If Churchill is a hero, how come there are British girls begging for drugs on the streets of London? And the place is, you know, London is not majority English now. Like what?”⁴

“Well, the people who formulated the version of history that considers Churchill a hero, they like London the way it is now,” Cooper replies.

Tucker says: “But that's not victory. That's like the worst kind of defeat, is it not?”

That is Cooper’s cue to go off:

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