I Refuse to Share Space With Neo Nazis and White Supremacists

A quick note: For the last year or so, I have written a newsletter on Substack. For a period, I crossposted those here but as the subscriber base for the newsletter grew I stopped doing that. However, due to choices by leadership at Substack, will no longer use the service. However, you can continue to follow the newsletter here.

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I don't have a lot of redlines in my life. But one redline I do have is that if an institution or business says that “Nazis are welcome here” I will take my business elsewhere. In the case of Substack, the leadership of the company has made their choice and now I am making mine. It's not a particularly difficult decision. No, this isn't about freedom of speech; no, it's not about censorship. It's simply my choice.

Here is the statement that necessitated my decision from Hamish McKenzie, co-founder of Substack.

I reject the school of thought that the response to people who would wipe me from existence is some sort of constructive debate in the “marketplace of ideas.”

The Nazi Bar analogy is instructive here: if I found out my favorite bar welcomed Nazis, I would stop going to it. If I found out that a social club I belong to welcomed Nazis, I would stop being a member. I shouldn't even have to explain this, but here we are in the year of our Lord 2023, having to have this silly conversation.

“We’re going to keep Nazis and other white supremacists on our platform because we believe that limiting them is censorship” is a stupid, infantile argument. It's so clownish I'm not going to waste my time explaining.

Here is Chat GPT with a simple breakdown:

Denying monetization and access to services for Neo-Nazis and white supremacists is not a violation of free speech because private companies have the right to set and enforce their own content policies (emphasis added). Free speech protections typically apply to government actions, not private entities

Platforms have the authority to establish guidelines to maintain a safe and inclusive environment, and restricting content that promotes hate speech or violence is within their prerogative. This is not censorship in the legal sense, as individuals are still free to express their views elsewhere on different platforms or through other means.

ChatGPT 3.5: December 22nd, 2023

Choosing to carry and monetize the speech of Neo-Nazis and white supremacists is a commerce choice this company has made and it's a choice that I disagree with, and I'm taking my business elsewhere.

Given that, this will be the last edition of the newsletter sent from Substack. I will spend the next 48 hours transitioning to a different service. I'm trying to figure out if I want to use Buttondown or Ghost. If you have thoughts about either platform, shoot me an email. Both services have drawbacks and are more difficult to use than Substack, but that’s the cost of having taste and boundaries.

There will be a regularly scheduled edition of the newsletter on Sunday. I’ll talk a little about the verdict in the Ellis trial and reviewing the books that I read this year. If you follow the newsletter solely via the Substack App you will lose access to it. But you can get it via your regular email inbox by changing a setting in the app.

Again, you can subscribe to the next iteration of the newsletter here.

The Case for Banning Phones in School

I am generally reluctant to embrace “bans” as a solution to a problem. I think the War on Drugs is/was among the gravest injustices of my lifetime. I believe prohibitions on gambling and sports betting are dumb—who cares if someone wants to put 20 bucks on the Timbers to lose. The current book banning spree conservative culture warriors are pushing is gross and ripped straight out mid-twentieth century European history. I thought the recent congressional hearing and talk about banning Tik Tok was a flashing red light on the US’ slide into both state censorship and stupidity. I could go on.

But given all that, I still think I am down with a ban or more precisely a time, place, and manner restriction on adolescent phone use at school. Because smartphones are a fairly recent innovation, we don't have a ton of long-term research on the topic. But what we do know is bad. Here’s the skinny from the National Library of Medicine:

An observational study showed that spending more than a few hours per week using electronic media correlated negatively with self-reported happiness, life satisfaction and self-esteem, whereas time spent on non-screen activities (in-person social interactions, sports or exercise, print media, homework, religious services, working at a paid job) correlated positively with psychological well-being, among adolescents. Other observational studies have linked spending more than 2 hours a day on social networking sites and personal electronic devices with high rates of suicidality and depressive symptoms among adolescent girls, although youth who sustained high levels of face-to-face socializing were relatively protected against the negative consequences of too much time online.

That part about “in-person social interactions” having a positive impact on well-being is essential. Listen, I am not C. Doleres Tucker and this isn’t a screed about banning kids from the internet. Online connectivity, like cured meats, are gifts from on-high. My life would be fundamentally more poor without the internet and without salami. But I wouldn’t try to subsist on a diet of salami, prosciutto, chorizo, and bacon (and if I did, I hope someone would intervene). That’s basically where I am on this topic. Too many students in too many schools have a diet of laptop screen time in class and social media screen time out of it. Schools should be a place where we encourage prosocial behavior and human interaction. Banning phones on campuses would encourage more of that.

You all felt the same way. Here’s a reply from a reader P.C. that is representative of the feedback that was sent:

FWIW, one of the reasons we chose [redacted: description of school], was because they have a pretty decent social media policy—they have a big board with a bunch of pockets hanging by the door, and on the way into the classroom the kids just drop their phones in.

Boom. Easy peasy for the teachers, now, because there's a very absolute no-mobiles policy, and if you see a kid with their phone in their hands (or on their desk or anything) then it's immediately confiscated and sits in the head's office for at least a day or two (he's notoriously slow to contact parents and arrange a pickup... intentionally) before it goes back.

And somehow, breaking that physical connection kind of leads to the kids not being quite so glued to the damn things even OUTSIDE of the classroom.

Reader R.G. added:

 It's for the social-emotional well-being of these kids. My own [redacted info about the gender of RG’s children] get anxiety about having interactions with people when they have business to take care of. We ALL have that anxiety. But because these kids are always on their phones, normal social interactions become HARD because they don't engage with them that often. The more you interact with others, the easier it gets.

Although some folks get squeamish about it, schools are tools and venues of socialization into a culture's norms. The three decisions that I have made that had the biggest impact on my happiness are marrying Hope, taking the plunge to teach overseas, and getting the hell off Twitter. I am still online. Like, obviously I am not writing this on a typewriter like Cormac McCarthy (who sadly we lost this week) but I think getting students off their phones on campus would in the long run have the same positive impact on students.

The Lack of Housing is a Generational Crisis

I've been baffled by the housing market in the United States for my entire adult life. It’s a lesson in unintended policy consequences like no other. While much of the media attention  goes to fluctuations in prices and rising mortgage rates, the deeper issues are those of supply and demand.

On the demand side, we have Millennial home buyers—the largest birth cohort in US history—emerging onto the housing market seeking to buy homes, followed quickly by Gen Z (the oldest members of Gen Z were born in 1997 and are now in their mid 20s). 

Constricting supply, we have a lack of construction of new residential housing, in particular in urban areas where job growth is highest. From the year 2000 until 2021, we went from 120 million housing units to 143 million nationwide, an increase of eighteen percent. But the total nationwide increase isn’t aligned with local demand. Here's Ann Lowrey in The Atlantic on the "underbuilding gap."

The National Association of Realtors compared the issuance of housing permits with the number of jobs created in 174 different metro areas. It found that only 38 metro regions are permitting enough new homes to keep up with job growth; in more than a dozen areas, including New York, the Bay Area, Boston, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Miami, and Chicago, just one new home is getting built for every 20-plus jobs created. The NAR estimates an “underbuilding gap” of as many as 7 million units.

So yes, even though we are building more housing, we’re not building nearly enough where the demand is highest, further driving up costs. Supply is further constrained because the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers are living longer lives—Bismillah on that one—I am stoked to have the elders with us. However, further constricting supply is just plain bad local policy: insanely difficult permitting processes, overuse of single family zoning,  NIMBY-ism (masquerading as historic preservation), and good old-fashioned racism (masquerading as "concerns about preserving neighborhood character").

In Seattle, in my beloved Cascadia, over the last decade there was never a year when new housing growth was even fifty percent as high as job growth, meaning more dollars chasing relatively fewer homes.

Median mortgages and median rents in many housing markets nearly outpace the median monthly income. The old guidance used to be that no one should spend more than 30% of their income on rent or mortgage, anything beyond that was considered to be "rent burdened." But according to Pew in 2020 "46% of American renters spent 30% or more of their income on housing, including 23% who spent at least 50% of their income this way." Sometimes you can run by a stat and not really process it but I think it's important to pause on this one: nearly one quarter of American renters are spending 50% of their income on housing with no relief in sight.

Nowhere is this mess more apparent than in the Bay Area but the problem is likely coming soon to a metro near you. The classical definition of inflation is “too much money chasing too little supply.” This is the situation that has unfolded in the Bay. There’s ample demand because of new arrivals and job growth but because of the factors above, there isn’t enough housing being built, leading to soaring costs. The average new mortgage in San Jose is now a staggering $11,000 per month. This week I read a piece in the San Jose Mercury News that I think is worth quoting a length:

While some people choose to rent—and forgo building home equity—because they don’t plan to stay long-term, others can’t afford a down payment or qualify for a mortgage, a “situation that has become increasingly common due to rising mortgage rates and elevated home prices,” Redfin economist Taylor Marr said in a statement.

Nowhere is that more obvious than in the Bay Area, where deep-pocketed buyers competing for homes amid a severe shortage have sent the median single-family house price soaring to $1.25 million, a 28% jump over the past three years, according to the California Association of Realtors. At the same time, average mortgage rates have doubled to more than 6%, spiking monthly payments by thousands of dollars.

Those rising costs mean that just one in five Bay Area residents can comfortably afford to buy a median-priced, single-family home, according to a recent report by the association. Nationwide, 40% of people can afford a typical home at the national median price of around $371,200.

A 1.25 million dollar median home cost, $11,000 mortgage payments. Those numbers are insane and will only accelerate houselessness.

What’s happening in the Bay is happening in the Puget Sound, with a few years lag. Here’s homesales in Oakland (red) versus Tacoma (blue).

It’s easy to dismiss what’s happening in the Bay as a “California problem” but all the same inputs and many of the same bad policies are in place elsewhere. Above is data from the Saint Louis Federal Reserve. Home prices in Tacoma track the movements in Oakland but we’re headed where prices are there sooner than later. While the recently passed Middle Housing Bill in Washington State is a step in the right direction, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the total demand that’s out here. We are essentially facing the comeuppance from forty years of bad policy and need a generational solution.

But I am not optimistic that we’re going to get one.