MAGA is not well on Substack
A rabbit hole I wish mightily that I didn't dive into. Conspiracists and MAGA have huge overlapping Venn diagram, and they seem to believe that the world is against them when their followers flee
The other day, I had something come across my “feed” in the Substack app on my phone. It said (paraphrasing} that Substack was curtailing their reach, and that it was impacting predominantly right wing ‘stacks. This sounded strange to me, because I see a fuck-ton of MAGA shit on my feed, and I get more than a few who wade in to the comments here to shit on things before vanishing into the ether like a KAOS1 agent.
So I saved it so I could read about it and respond. I will not link to it, as I do not want to drive traffic, but I will quote from it2.
The lead picture is the monetization graph:
I will say mine is a flat line since I do not, and never will monetize.
And if you are counting on SS to be your main income, that is drastic.
They then get into some rank punditry:
As an individual committed to uncovering corruption and exposing the truth, I have long relied on Substack as a platform to share my findings and engage with my readers. However, recent developments have left me even more deeply troubled about the future of free speech and journalistic integrity on this once-promising platform.
Over the past two months, I have noticed a disturbing trend: while my overall subscriptions continue to rise, my paid subscriptions are plummeting. Stripe, the payment processor used by Substack, has been failing more subscriptions than ever before. At first, I thought this issue was unique to my account, but after reading Emerald Robinson's article "The Right Way, Substack Has Gone Woke," I realized that this problem is ubiquitous throughout the platform — if you are not left leaning. (emphasis mine).
So, her premise is that if you are not a far left progressive nutjob, you are being actively discriminated against on the platform? Cool story bro.
So, before going deeper, I figured I would go to her front page and see what sort of content she writes…
Hmm, a water truther. Not looking too good. I should add that she definitely is cultivating a Laura Ingraham look here.
Hmm, vaccine truther too.
I am beginning to see a trend here. This appears to be a softer edge on the InfoWars ecosystem, and yes, if you search you will find gems on Chemtrails and other wacky comspiracy staples.
Perhaps the problem isn’t that Substack (or Stripe) aren’t the cause of your issues, but it is the batshit insane twaddle you post. And a lot of people went on rampages subscribing to way too many paid outlets on Substack, and are backing off. I know I am simplifying who I support.
Turns out she’s bellyaching about being reassigned from “Top Politics” to a category on “Health Politics”, and lumped with people like Dr. Mercola3. Because, looking at your front page, and I see more than a little overlap with the kooky antivax shitbird writings.
Of course, she also refers to this other page by Emerald Robinson (not gonna link that, because fuck giving that idiot any traffic referrals). So I went there, and hoo-boy the grievance runs deep. I will note that Emerald Robinson was a white house beat reporter for the eminent outlets Newsmax and OAN.
But she DOES have 58K subscribers. Probably gets a decent amount of coin for her blathering.
And her top story is about how Substack has gone “woke”. Her reasoning? Because as the prior post clipped from Emerald, they got relegated to “health politics”, and that this is some marxist ploy to bury the truth. The richest thing?
Why was this strange move made unilaterally, and without the consent of the re-categorized?
All the better to censor the dissidents and restrict their traffic in an election year — of course.
Meanwhile, the old leaderboard category where most of us previously belonged (“Top U.S. Politics”) has been remade into a smorgasbord of left-wing fools and notorious liars so that the range of opinion has been narrowed to the bandwidth between neo-liberalism and communism.
Gee, I see Bari Weiss, a shitbird if there ever has been one, and I would hardly call her “left”, as she has honed her grift to drain the gullible Right. Also numero quatro is the waste of human skin Matt Taibbi, who really is just Elon Musk’s current favorite ball fondler.
But the others on this list are solid. She of course rants about how Mehdi Hassan has gotten himself to #5. I can answer that for you, he is a fucking phenomenal interviewer, and brought with him an enormous audience that a shitty stringer from OAN and NewsMax has wet dreams about.
She also bitches about Mary Trump… I gotta share this:
These same people also want you to believe that Mary Trump is the 12th most popular Substack author in the world.
Most of the world is blissfully unaware that the disgruntled lesbian wing of Donald Trump’s family tree is even alive.
Wow, that ad hominem is just cringe.
I swear these people find the boogey man in every falling leaf, never realizing that maybe, just maybe their schtick is a niche and that you hit a ceiling, or that you finally went too far and people are just not that into you.
Joyce Vance? Dan Rather? Robert Reich? Judd Legum? Steve Schmidt?
Who are they kidding? The entire category now appears to be manipulated. Heavily manipulated. It’s a list of whores for the Biden regime (with the exception of Matt Taibbi) all the way down. The problem should be obvious: Joe Biden is the least popular tyrant to ever illegally occupy the White House according to public polling data. So how’s it possible that his third-rate chorus of shills are so popular that they dominate Substack?
Who did Substack hire to “organize” their platform: Michelle Obama?
It sure seems that way.
I really don’t know what to say. You bitch about how enfeebled Biden is, and then you place him at the center of a conspiracy so 5th dimensional chess that it has to be bad.
Look, I have my problems with Substack. The fact that they are fine with antisemites and white nationalist/NAZIs monetizing and splitting those C-notes with the company, how some truly fucking awful people have been able to build newsletters that generate millions of dollars in profit every year. How it really is a social media network regardless of how many times the founders say they are just neutral publishers.
But I have also found a great audience here who truly seems to like what I write, listen to the music I recommend, and in general be awesome human beings.
Thanks!
I will leave you with the text from one of the comments on one of the posts I looked at:
I’m afraid your doom-predicting commenters are right. The people accomplishing the takeover of this country are listening to demons, who are far cleverer than humans. They are sniffing victory. Of the last election, Biden bragged that the best voter fraud organization ever was in place. Many thousands of citizens in many states have done sterling work to clean up voter rolls and control mail-in ballots, but I fear that the vote fraud network is even more extensive than it was four years ago. Now Biden is saying that the polls are wrong. They aren’t, but he’s prepping us for what he thinks is his inevitable victory.
Christians need to be begging God for deliverance. I don’t think it can happen without His intervention. Abraham interceded for Sodom, asking at the end for God to spare it if He found only ten righteous people in it, and God agreed. True followers of Jesus may not be many by percentage in this country, but we are many in numbers. Please, dear God, deliver us from these demonic machinations and spare this country, that many might turn to you and that we can continue to worship you freely.
This is why I am depressed about the coming election. Far too many people like this who live in la-la land. This isn’t a good place anymore.
Editing to add this image. I scrolled to the bottom of Emerald’s page, and it had these articles for teasers to get me to subscribe:
Luciferase? For reals? No fucking wonder why you are relegated to the kooks in Health Politics.
See what I did there?
It is Reinette Senum’s Foghorn Express if you want to torture yourself.
If you do any dabbling in and around the vaccine cranks, Mercola is a name that will resonate. A thorough charlatan who has made bank peddling bullshit and misinformation, skating libel and liability for the garbage he promotes.
I just read most of Emerald Robinson’s Substack post entitled, “What is Luciferase?”
I was curious because I used this wondrous and harmless enzyme Luciferase, derived from fireflies, in the laboratory in the 1970s. Luciferase can be used to tag microscopic and submicroscopic objects to allow one to follow the location of these objects in the course of scientific research. This enzyme cannot by itself create light. But it can catalyze the creation of light if it is furnished with its two substrates, Luciferin and ATP. Because there is no Luciferin the human body, even if there were any residual Luciferase in vaccines, it could not create light in the absence of Luciferin.
My feeling is that either Emerald Robinson, herself is mentally deranged paranoid schizophrenic, or she’s just maliciously throwing around technical buzzwords that she’s tripped over, but that she clearly does not understand. The comments following her post on Luciferase demonstrate that she was successful in her goal of frightening people. Her goal may be to foment hysterical fear amongst clinically paranoid conspiracy theory followers. What a malicious person she is.
Thank you for writing this. I know supposedly "intelligent people" who spout this nonsense and get all butthurt when I routinely dismiss their unprovable claims by asking for... evidence.
There is always an excuse for why such evidence is unavailable and then the segue into lack of evidence being proof of perfidy.
You see Terrance Howard on Joe Rogan? Another pair of grifting idiots.