why I decided to leave substack

For the past few years, my work has been rooted in moral injury. I have written about what happens when people are asked to participate in systems that violate their deepest values. I have written about the wounds we carry when institutions betray the very people they claim to serve. I have written about the cost of silence, the exhaustion of complicity, and the slow spiritual erosion that comes from staying too long in places where something inside us keeps whispering: this is not right.

I've learned that integrity is rarely about whether our choices are big enough to be noticed. It’s about whether they’re stable enough to stand in. And more and more, I'm realizing that standing in integrity means making choices that aren't just inconvenient, but have the capacity to impact my reputation, my financial security, my fragile sense of safety. I know that my choices won't necessarily change the world — but they're part of changing the terms on how I agree to belong in it.

For a while now, I've been uneasy about Substack. I've watched the conversations about moderation, extremism, monetized hate, and the platform's increasingly slippery use of the phrase "free speech." I've read the arguments from people far more visible than I am, people who have wrestled publicly with whether to stay or leave. I’ve struggled with the knowledge that Substack profits from content that promotes white supremacy, misogyny, antisemitism, and other hate-based content, while their governing policy chooses to parse these concepts by limiting enforcement to incitement rather than a categorical ban on this type of content.  

Still, I made the choice to stay.

I told myself, what many of us tell ourselves when we are trying to survive inside compromised systems, that every platform has problems. I told myself that my little corner was different. That this was where my readers knew to find me, that the work I was doing mattered, that leaving would be disruptive, that I could keep doing good from inside a place I was increasingly struggling to defend.

Then Andrew Tate showed up, rocketing to the top of Substack's bestseller and rising rankings with 1.1 million subscribers. This was described by one publication as “a moment that exposed the sameness of the social media business model, where writers cannot fully choose whose content their work sits beside once a platform is optimizing for attention, growth, and monetization.”

For me, this was a moral tipping point.

Not because Tate is the first hateful man to find a microphone. He's not. Not because misogyny began with him. It didn't. Not because Substack alone is responsible for the meanness, cruelty, and dehumanization that now move so freely through our public life. It isn't. But there is a difference between knowing that harm exists and continuing to lend my work, my presence, and my small measure of credibility to an ecosystem that helps make that harm more profitable.

All of this has led me to think about the moral ambition of the platforms we use because a platform is never just a tool. Each platform offers a vision of the world inside it, whether its leaders acknowledge that or not. Its algorithms teach us what kind of speech is rewarded, what kind of harm is tolerable, what kind of attention is worth pursuing, and whose dignity can be treated as collateral damage in the pursuit of growth and under the guise of free speech.

And this is where the conversation about free speech so often gets murky.

Free speech matters. I believe that and went to law school to defend it. I believe in the necessity of provocative ideas, dissenting voices, and the right to challenge power without fear of punishment by the state. But let's be clear. Free speech does not mean that every private platform has a moral obligation to host, monetize, recommend, or most importantly, normalize dehumanization.

Those are choices, usually in service of profit.

There is a difference between speech that unsettles us or makes us uncomfortable, and speech that actively works to demean and diminish people's dignity. There is a difference between disagreement and degradation. Between protecting the conditions for public discourse and pretending that hate speech is just another viewpoint in the marketplace of ideas.

Substack's content guidelines say the platform cannot be used to publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes, and that they prohibit credible threats of physical harm. But that feels like too low of a moral bar. If the only red line we're willing to acknowledge is direct incitement, then we've already agreed to tolerate the slow work of dehumanization until it becomes explicit enough to punish, by which time it's often too late.

That's not neutrality. That's a choice.

I recently had a conversation with a friend about redemption in a world that feels more and more fractured. I believe in redemption. I have to. So much of my work is rooted in the possibility that people, communities, and institutions can change and create something better on the other side of the pain. But redemption isn't the same as amplification. A path back from harm isn't the same as a bestseller badge, a recommendation engine, or a platform's willingness to profit from someone's reach before there has been any meaningful repair. If someone is genuinely changing and wanting to make amends, their choices will carry the weight of repair. Their actions will create the bridge back to trust. But no one is owed immediate credibility simply because they have begun to question the worldview that made them powerful, profitable, or protected.

Tate isn't being held accountable — he's being rewarded with a recommendation engine. That's not redemption. That's amplification. Those of us with privilege confuse these things too easily. We treat skepticism as cruelty, accountability as punishment, and the refusal to normalize harm as a failure of compassion. But compassion without discernment isn't healing. It's often just another way of asking the people who have been harmed to make the road smoother for the people who harmed them.

I studied moral philosophy in college and, honestly, I would never have imagined that Kant would follow me into midlife, into publishing platforms, newsletter migrations, and the ordinary ache of deciding where to place my words. But one aspect of his work I keep coming back to is to treat humanity always as an end, never merely as a means. It sounds simple. But in a world rooted in capitalism, it isn't. Substack's choice to platform and profit from content that dehumanizes women and marginalized communities treats those groups as acceptable collateral in service of "free expression" as an abstract principle. That isn't neutrality. It's a choice to use human beings as a means to an ideological and financial end.

And it's a choice that's becoming a universal position as mainstream media outlets are acquired by billionaires who shape what gets said, what gets amplified, and what gets buried. We're watching the consolidation of narrative power in real time. So when platforms invoke "free speech," it's worth asking: free for whom? Speech costs nothing when you own the microphone.

We're living in a time when so many protections are being rolled back. Women's rights have been treated as negotiable. Voting rights are being hollowed out. The meanness that used to hide in the darkness of back alleys now stands center stage, microphone in hand, calling itself courage.

In such a time, I don't think we have the luxury of treating our choices as merely personal preferences. Where we gather matters. Where we publish matters. What we help normalize matters. The social contract we subscribe to doesn't just exist in the courts and legislatures. It exists in the small agreements we enter every day about whose dignity is negotiable and whose safety is expendable. Free speech has never existed outside of that contract. It has always had a floor. The real question — the one platforms like Substack refuse to answer honestly — is whose humanity are they willing to protect, and whose harm are they willing to rationalize as the cost of openness in a "free society." 

So this is why I decided to leave Substack.

I see this as one small departure. One writer making one moral choice to stay in integrity. It's a choice that changes something in me to stop pretending that staying isn’t hurting anyone.

And maybe that's where integrity begins.

Not with certainty. Not with purity of purpose or with the fantasy that our small choices will save the world. But with the quiet decision to gather what we love, carry it with care, and refuse to build our home on a foundation that asks us to turn away from our humanity and from each other.

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