There's a phenomenon where when you jump from Substack to Ghost, for example, you get a bunch of unsubscribes because people start to actually receive your newsletter instead of it getting tracked to spam from Substack.

based off conversations I've had with other Substackers that made the move, about 20% of your list on there isn't a real as it looks. It seems like it's largely users who signed up by accident that don't know theyre receiving your emails.

I left after the nazi letter in early 2024. And they don't make it easy to leave. I spent that summer watching my growth totally flatline and thought Garbage Day was basically over. I don't think that anymore. I left Substack with around 65k readers. We're now basically at 100k.

Zohran doesn't speak until later, but he came out to personally escort Hochul off stage after the heckling. Rough stuff lol.

Hochul pronounced "Mamdani" wrong and now the crowd is yelling it back at her. Brutal. She can't get a word out. Huge chants of "tax the rich" at her, as well. She finally broke down and just said, "I can hear you."

My mom found the sauce on Amazon. DM me for deets brother

Best as I can tell, the only thing that can truly "cancel" you politically now is a loss of attention or a loss of money and, thanks to digital platforms, attention is a conversion unit for money. Which, no matter what side you're on, has huge implications for the future of American democracy.

Last I'll say on this is, Platner could fizzle out. It's a long road to the election. But I've seen more than a few writers suggesting we're looking at the rise of a Democratic Tea Party and that feels right to me. And it already seems to be changing how politics works in this country.

This should worry the Democratic establishment, in particular, because if "cancel culture" — again I'm simplifying — doesn't work then voters will expect more radical activism. The calls for a general strike at No Kings Day, for example. Which is something the top of the party seems terrified of.

The rumors that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee were building a press blitz around Platner's very bad and, in my opinion, disqualifying tattoo seem to confirm this. It's what would have worked in 2016 or even maybe 2020. But he's only come out stronger. The landscape has shifted.

Or rather it doesn't change anything meaningfully, what's left? You could argue that perhaps it never did. But activists, journalists, etc., believed it was a key political lever that they could use. And if it is over, then the Platner scandal proves establishment Dems haven't realized it yet.

You could put most of the big liberal political movements of the 2010s under a (simplified) umbrella of "cancel culture." As in, we were using social media to pressure mainstream media and politicians to highlight an issue or a bad actor and change public perception. But if that doesn't "work"...

It makes a certain amount of sense. If we have an uncancellable president, why would anyone else — if they own their own platform, have support from their fans, and don't back down — feel like they need to bow to public pressure? But this has some fascinating implications for liberal politics.