Archiving and Exodus

Now Is Always the Right Time

Dear Readers,

I am writing to tell you that this is my final Substack post. After today, all new work will live at valah.blog, where I have spent quite some time building a new home. I will be transferring the subscriber list at the end of March, so if you prefer not to come along, please feel free to unsubscribe between now and then with no hard feelings. The choice is yours, and one I want you to actively make.

I want to be transparent about why I am moving, because the reasons matter, and I think they may matter to you as well.

When I joined Substack in mid-2024, I did not know about the platform’s Nazi problem. A few months later I did. I don’t remember how or where I learned of it, only that it referred to the Nazi Bar Problem. The comparison is apt: a bar owner who does not actively recruit Nazis but refuses to throw them out is still running a Nazi bar. In November 2023, The Atlantic published an investigation documenting that Substack was not only hosting white supremacist newsletters with explicitly Nazi rhetoric—it was monetizing them¹. The company’s response was categorical: they do not moderate based on ideology. Which is a choice. And choices have consequences.

I rationalized staying because PITT generates no revenue. My content is free because I believe in what I write and do for the betterment of our community, to better inform and engage with those who don’t know, to build bridges where possible, to appeal to other’s humanity, and to be well-informed and forewarned as a community to better counter the hateful rhetoric that harms us so. The network and community here helps to these ends, and Substack makes nothing from my subscribers.

I told myself that my presence here was not funding the platform’s indifference, that this distinction mattered even if it felt tenuous. I told myself I was staying for the community - the network of LGBTQIA+ writers who were also calculating, also waiting, also hoping the platform would choose differently before we had to.

I wrote about this tension in "I Stand Tall with Small," pushing back against Substack’s mechanisms for amplifying large, hateful voices. I stand by that post, those words, and that position. That piece prompted me to set up a self-hosted Ghost instance in the background, but I continued hosting my work here as well, moving slowly while the world moved fast.

But we are not in a moment that permits waiting.

It requires no special insight to see the challenging times we live in right now. White supremacist movements are resurgent across the US, the UK, and in other parts of the world - as is a seemingly global shift towards authoritarianism. In the United States, an explicitly racist and anti-LGBTQIA+ authoritarian regime is killing its citizens, building internment camps, and detaining innocent people. Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance is no longer an abstract philosophical exercise: if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized and destroyed by the intolerant. Furthermore, this is a white people’s problem, we made it, and it is one that white people should be spearheading the opposition to it. The only way for white supremacy and racism to be defeated is for the very same white people to reject, en masse, the very principles, notions, and ideals that lend white supremacists power, the racists room, the bigots comfort.

It is time for us to understand that there is no neutral ground between those who deny any human's dignity and those who defend it - not on trans humanity, not on race, not on immigration status, not on country of birth. Somewhere along the way we gave a collective shrug to the legitimization of white supremacy. Martin Luther King Jr., writing from a Birmingham jail (“Letter from Birmingham Jail” - a personal favorite of mine), called this "collective moral apathy." He was right then. He is right now.

"I'm terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don't think I'm human. And I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means that they have become in themselves moral monsters."

- James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro

We have a clear responsibility: not just to take a stand, but to make that stand costly however we can, in whatever way we can. Whether we are the sand in the gears slowly grinding the machine to a halt, or if we are the monkey wrench (variable spanner to my UK friends) that disrupts it - we should do whatever we can no matter how great or small.

There was a time when being exposed or openly seen as a white supremacist, particularly a neo-Nazi, conferred serious social consequences - refusal, shunning, a visceral rejection that kept this view on the margins. The internet broke that mechanism. Platforms like Substack actively rebuilt it as infrastructure, turning apathy into a monetized feature. We cannot fix Substack's choices. We can choose our own: to leave, to build alternatives, to refuse to cohabitate with those who traffic in dehumanization, to create a new network and community independent of any one platform - to be ungovernable in our defense of humanity and human rights.

To that end, Substack’s “free marketplace of ideas” is not a marketplace, it is a clearinghouse where dehumanization and radicalization is monetized and algorithmically delivered.

In July 2025, Substack sent a push notification to users promoting a Nazi newsletter, complete with a swastika icon in the alert². The newsletter’s content included calls for the eradication of minorities and antisemitic conspiracy theories. The company called it an “error.” But it was not an error in technology—it was an error in judgment, baked into years of refusing to make basic choices about what they would and would not platform. For some users, this was the final push to leave. For me, it confirmed the decision I had already made.

Then, this week, Substack disclosed a security breach³. The company confirmed that an unauthorized third party accessed user data in October 2025—including email addresses, phone numbers, and metadata for approximately 700,000 users⁴. They waited four months to tell us. My email was among them. Again, not catastrophic for me personally—I write behind a veil of anonymity—but it was the final straw. It made leaving a priority rather than something I would get to eventually.

I cannot ask you to cross the threshold of a Nazi bar to find my work. I cannot pretend that my lack of revenue contribution sanitizes my presence, or that content moderation is a technical debate rather than a moral one. The rationalizations stop working. I complete the migration I started too slowly, or I accept what kind of bar this is.

What changes: New writing will live at valah.blog. My Q&A section has evolved into a proper wiki at wiki.valah.blog. And last month, I built four standalone tools - resources that live outside any platform’s walls:

• iscisaslur.info — A reference on why “cis” is a straightforward descriptor, not a slur, countering the manufactured grievance used to police trans language.

• terfisntaslur.com — A deconstruction of the propaganda site TERFisaSlur.com, exposing the logical fallacies, cherry-picked evidence, and manipulative tactics used to construct the narrative that “TERF is a slur” and that trans people are violent or threatening.

• didshecheat.org — A direct rebuttal to claims that trans women have competitive advantages in sports, presenting peer-reviewed research and debunking the methodology behind anti-trans athletic monitoring sites.

• isrogdreal.org — A simple redirect to my ROGD wiki article - a solid refutation of the pseudoscientific “rapid onset gender dysphoria” construct.

What doesn’t change: Everything I have published here will remain as an archive, with clear pointers directing readers to the new site. The content has always been free, and it always will be. Your subscription transfers automatically; if you prefer it didn’t, please unsubscribe now.

If you write on Substack and have been considering whether your presence aligns with your values: I encourage you to examine that question seriously. I recognize that constraints differ - some are locked into contracts, dependent on specific features, or anchored to communities that haven’t yet left or fractured. I am not judging those who cannot leave or choose not to. But if you are able, I highly encourage you to do so. Migration is technically straightforward, and for those who earn from your publication, you will likely earn more: Substack takes 10% of revenue forever, while a self-hosted Ghost instance runs roughly $5–15/month plus email infrastructure (around $0.50 per 1,000 emails via Mailgun). Unless you are moving with fewer than 50 paid subscribers at $10/month, Ghost pays for itself.

Migration resources:

• Ghost’s official Substack importer handles content and subscribers directly

• Molly White’s self-hosting walkthrough covers the edge cases and technical details

• Read Only Memo’s guide for Mailgun and Cloudflare configuration

• Ghost(Pro) hands-on migration service for annual plans

Not a migration source, but a lovely chat regarding digital sovereignty that acted as a bit of a catalyst for this post, and one I recommend you watch/listen:

digital sovereignty

The technical advantage is real. Ghost’s Mastodon integration threads directly to the fediverse (and Bluesky, via a technology bridge), distributing reach across networks rather than trapping it in one algorithm, but the primary advantage is architectural. Consider that this fills a gap that Substack had some unique claim to: notes and the twitter-like social engagement. Mastodon and Bluesky fill this gap while also broadening your reach beyond what Substack provides within its walled garden. But this architectural advantage extends beyond just technological; consider when Substack pushes swastikas to phones and waits four months to admit it lost your data, the distinction between neutrality and complicity collapses.

Some will say “now is not the time”- a common historical rebuttal and call for moderation and patience, but one I argue means that not only have they not read “Letters From a Birmingham Jail” but if they did, they did not listen with an open mind nor where they willing to learn to what it teaches. To which I point to Baldwin, who replied:

"We cannot be expected to wait passively for our liberation while the world passes by" - James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

NOW IS ALWAYS THE RIGHT TIME TO STAND FOR EQUALITY AND JUSTICE.

Not just this pivotal sociopolitical movement we are being faced with today. Not just the forced remigration effort underway, the whitewashing and historical revisionism, the forced trans exodus, or the renewed attacks on gay rights. Every moment. Every second of every minute of every hour of every day is the right time to stand for equality and justice for all.

Our liberation is collective, or it is nothing.

Thank you for reading, whether you joined me yesterday or eighteen months ago, or if choose to continue to do so. Your comments, feedback, chats, and engagement mean the world to me, and I hope to see it continue.

Find the work at valah.blog.
Find the references at wiki.valah.blog.
Use the links as rhetorical tools: iscisaslur.info · terfisntaslur.com · didshecheat.org · isrogdreal.org.

—PITT

1. Katz, J. M. (2023, November 28). Substack has a Nazi problem. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-extremism-nazi-white-supremacy-newsletters/676156/

2. Substack apologizes for sending a push alert promoting a Nazi blog. (2025, July 29). Nieman Lab. https://www.niemanlab.org/reading/substack-sent-a-push-alert-promoting-a-nazi-blog/

3. Substack discloses security incident after hacker leaks data. (2026, February 5). SecurityWeek. https://www.securityweek.com/substack-discloses-security-incident-after-hacker-leaks-data/

4. Substack confirms breach exposed 700K user emails and phone numbers. (2026, February 5). WinBuzzer. https://winbuzzer.com/2026/02/05/substack-data-breach-exposed-700k-users-emails-phone-numbers-xcxwbn/