I actively skip stuff that’s on substack just like I do medium and blogger. Maybe there’s good stuff on there but it’s usually a by-word for slop. I figure if anyone has anything that interesting to say they’d make the effort and put it up on something more serious looking.
> Substack sent a push alert encouraging users to subscribe to a Nazi newsletter that claimed Jewish people are a sickness and that we must eradicate minorities to build a “White homeland.” […] The newsletter's logo is a swastika and it has pushed Holocaust denialism along with news and opinion content for the 'White Nationalist Community.' […] Substack is primarily funded by Andreessen Horowitz, a firm whose founders have pushed extreme far right rhetoric.
Your source is Taylor Lorenz, on her own Substack (with a custom domain). She apparently wasn't bothered enough to disassociate with the service. This is someone who makes claims like "Substack is primarily funded by Andreessen Horowitz, a firm whose founders have pushed extreme far right rhetoric." (Something which Wikipedia editors would be tripping over each other to evidence if it were true, but their article says nothing about it.)
There is nothing to demonstrate the claim that Substack "continues, proudly" to host such content, nor that they were ever "proud" of it. A cursory inspection shows that while the "facing" page for the group in question still loads, the underlying profile and content are all gone.
It is a known tactic of agitators to post objectionable (or even highly illegal) content on distribution networks (or in communities) they dislike and then try to get media attention attributing it to the network/community rather than themselves.
One of the first newsy types to report this particular issue, but certainly not the only one. See https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/substacks-nazi-p..., which quotes a press release from Substack. Arguably, my source is therefore Substack themselves, via Ars Technica.
> Something which Wikipedia editors would be tripping over each other to evidence if it were true, but their article says nothing about it.
Actually, this information is on Wikipedia. There's one NYT link on the Andreessen Horowitz article, and several paragraphs on Marc Andreessen's. I don't know enough about US politics to know whether all this adds up to "extreme far right rhetoric" (and I'd rather not debate that here), but there's definitely extreme, and right-wing, political advocacy described in Marc Andreessen's article. I have not confirmed whether the claims in the Wikipedia article are correct; if you dispute them, then please let me know as a courtesy (I like having accurate knowledge), then take it up with the Wikipedia editors.
> There is nothing to demonstrate the claim that Substack "continues, proudly" to host such content,
But they do continue to host it. This has been a problem for years (see e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-e..., https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s...). Do you need an article from last month? Or do I need to link you to a Nazi blog directly? They are not very hard to find: just type "site:substack.com" followed by some keywords. It took me 20 seconds to find one called "White Free Press", with such wonderful articles as "David Lane and the Foundations of His Racial Ideology", "The Contemporary Conceptual Framework of the White Ethnostate", and "The Immutable Animosity: blacts [sic] hate White People, and Nothing Can Change It".
> It is a known tactic of agitators […]
Quoting the Ars Technica article:
> Of those accounts created in February, only the Substack account is still online, which Fisher-Birch suggested likely sends a message to Nazi groups that their Substack content is “less likely to be removed than other platforms.” At least one Terrorgram-adjacent white supremacist account that Fisher-Birch found in March 2024 confirmed that Substack was viewed as a back-up to Telegram because it was that much more reliable to post content there.
> “Groups that want to recruit members or build a neo-fascist counter-culture see Substack as a way to get their message out,” Fisher-Birch told Ars.
I don't think "this is all some kind of contrived false flag operation" is a particularly likely explanation.
> There's one NYT link on the Andreessen Horowitz article
I see no mention of the far right in the article; the only NYT source with "right" in the title that I can find is "The Tech Right Gets Its Own Phyllis Schlafly", but this is only being used to cite Boyle investing in some aerospace/miltech companies.
As for Marc, we're at multiple layers of guilt by association now, but even so I don't see what's extreme about anything attributed to him in his own article. In fact, it all looks to me like stuff that I'd expect a very large percentage of Americans to find agreeable.
> But they do continue to host it.
FWIW, I consider that the actual literal Nazis were a step beyond typical contemporary American white supremacists. Regardless, this is still a goalpost shift. Note that the headline of your own source explicitly describes Substack as having offered an apology, which is the opposite of how you respond when you're proud of what you're accused of.
> I see no mention of the far right in the article
I see no mention of the far right in Taylor Lorenz's article. I do see mentions of Donald Trump, DOGE, and the Republican party in the NYT article cited in the "Politics" section. As I understand, these entities are considered "right-wing" in US terms, and many of their actions would certainly be considered "extreme". ("Extreme" is somewhat subjective, so for the sake of foreshortening this argument, I'll set it at the objective threshold of ten thousand dead children.)
> "The Tech Right […]", but this is only being used to cite Boyle
So, you found a source describing Katherine Boyle, in her capacity as manager of Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism fund, as right-wing. This seems to support Taylor Lorenz's claim.
> but even so I don't see what's extreme about anything attributed to [Marc Andreessen] in his own article.
Aside from working for DOGE, and strongly supporting cryptocurrency and AI, I would agree with your expectation that a large percentage of Americans would find his views agreeable: I would expect slightly under half the US population. These views are not so popular internationally.
As a reminder: I would rather not debate this here. TFA is an article about Substack, not Andreessen Horowitz's political leanings: we should be discussing Substack, not its investor.
> FWIW, I consider that the actual literal Nazis were a step beyond typical contemporary American white supremacists.
To start with, the Nazis were much, much tamer. For example, the Nazis neither owned, whipped, nor branded people in 1924, whereas the second KKK had only just started to fracture at that point. It was only once the Nazis got control of the state apparatus that they got really bad: the Night of Broken Glass, Aktion T4, the invasion of Poland, the Holocaust…. Adolf Hitler (claimed to have) modelled parts of the Nazi regime on American white supremacist practices.
The Nazi party started with the recruitment of Nazis. By the time they were an organised fascist paramilitary capable of attempting a coup (1922–1923), it was almost too late to stop them.
> Note that the headline of your own source explicitly describes Substack as having offered an apology,
A qualified apology, of the form: "We're sorry if our policies lead to the systematic platforming of white supremacist hatemongers, and of course the active promotion of this neo-Nazi organisation by our computer systems was a one-off mistake, but we won't change our policies: if we don't give Nazis a voice, then they'll say even worse things!" That's not really an apology: it's a "we're sorry for the bad press we're experiencing".
By "contemporary" I meant contemporary to today, since those are the people who would potentially be doing these Substacks. I guess that was the wrong word.
It is, because the people currently defamed as Nazis have had ample opportunity to bring such a thing about, and they are clearly not doing so. Every aspect of the ideological comparison is a stretch.
> The Immutable Animosity: blacts [sic] hate White People, and Nothing Can Change It
Not in any aspect comparable to a Nazi. Gotcha. Hey, out of interest, have you read Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler? Here's a bit of Ludwig Lore's translation, Chapter 2:
> The great mass of people could be saved, even if only by the utmost sacrifice of time and patience. But no Jew could ever be freed from his opinion.
(I'm not sure whether you're seriously arguing that bloggers have the capacity to construct offshore death camps to which they deport "undesirables", or the power to unilaterally and militarily invade Poland, and the fact they haven't done so reflects well upon their characters; so I'll not attempt to refute that point until it is clarified.)
