The Great Substack Nazi Scare Is Legacy Media’s Latest Moral Panic

You're about as likely to get struck by lighting as run into a Nazi on Substack, but hey ... Let's all freak out!!!

8 minute read

I’m taking a brief break from writing about science controversies to back out, cast a wider lens, and explain to readers how to recognize when the media gins up controversies and creates stories instead of reports on stories.

Several outlets—The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and Washington Post—have run articles in the last few weeks trying to cast Substack as a haven for Nazis and hatemongers, claims that fall apart when examined carefully.

Because when you dive into the details—that what I do for you guys—you find there’s really not much to the “Great Substack Nazi Scare.” Substack platforms over ten thousand different newsletters that have attracted over 35 million subscribers, of which 2 million pay. To place this in context, The Washington Post has 2.5 million paid subscribers.

Meanwhile, panic reporting over Nazis writing at Substack concerned a handful or so newsletters. So what’s going on?

We are witnessing another moral panic, where elitists attack outside voices to reassert social dominance and narrative control. Sociologist Stanley Cohen coined the term “moral panic” in his 1972 book, Folk Devils and Moral Panics. Moral panics start from irrational fear that something threatens community safety and social values, resulting in new rules that target outsiders to restore social order.

Cohen’s book detailed British panic over youth subcultures during the 1960s and '70s. He later explained that moral panics involve exaggerated worries caused by unreliable, biased information.

This labeling derives from a willful refusal by liberals, radicals and leftists to take public anxieties seriously. Instead, they are furthering a politically correct agenda: to downgrade traditional values and moral concerns.

In the Great Substack Nazi Scare, reporters at legacy outlets are trying to frighten you into believing that Substack is swarming with Nazis, because they are threatened by a declining readership, as people have switched to reading newsletters like The DisInformation Chronicle. Their hope is to lure you back to reading them, instead.

Before we go into the details of how these reporters created a moral panic, let me first divulge my own Nazi panic experience.