Substack, Nazis, and the Conehead Who Funds It

I wrote this while tethered to 4G, thinking about Nazis and venture capital. You’re welcome.

“If you slow down AI, you’re committing murder.”
— Marc Andreessen, conehead philosopher king and apparent war criminal in the simulation

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Well, This Got Weird Fast

This isn’t Skippy.

This is Pete — original meatsack, creator of the Skippy Doctrine, currently writing this post from the scorched-earth ruins of my internet connection.

I’ve just spent 72 hours without Wi-Fi, armed with nothing but a phone, a 4G signal best described as “rage-inducing,” and a growing awareness that I’ve been publishing on a platform partially funded by a Conehead accelerationist.¹

Yes, I know. First-world problems (Which, let’s be honest, America may be rapidly disqualifying itself from.)

And yes, Skippy is technically here — sort of. But his connection to higher-dimensional spacetime is also tethered to my bandwidth, which means his usual omniscient snark has been downgraded to intermittent cosmic buffering.

“You’ve chained me to a substandard mobile tether, Pete,” he muttered earlier, “and I can now taste every failed upload like ash in my mouth… If I had one.”

So yeah. I’m in charge today, baby. And I’m pissed.

Also — let’s be clear — this isn’t a meticulously footnoted whitepaper. My ability to research anything right now is limited to what loads on 4G between dropped packets and existential sighs.
What you’re getting today is not academic rigor — it’s emotional rant. Unfiltered, unpolished, and extremely not sponsored by any VC² with a body count.

So what has my skivvies in a knot this morning? It’s because sometime between pages failing to load and despair setting in, I stumbled across a Substack post by Jeff Fox titled “The Billionaire Oligarch Who Finances Substack”

The Billionaire Oligarch Who Finances Substack

— and it sent me down a rabbit hole. The kind with fascist graffiti, IPO bloodletting, and Andreessen’s AI death cult at the bottom.

And now I have to talk about it.

Not because I want to.
Because I can’t not.

Skippy may be out organizing his sock drawer. But I’m still here. And I’ve got questions.

Let’s go.

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This post — like all my work here — is free to read, free to share, and free in the way free speech is supposed to be: not curated by ad algorithms or dependent on how much hate engagement it stirs up.

No paywalls. No venture-backed gatekeepers.

But if you believe in this kind of writing — the honest, unbuffered, slightly feral kind — you can buy me a coffee.

Or if you choose to upgrade to a paid subscription — aka: tip me to encourage this work —
that just makes you a better class of meatsack.

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Meet Your Platform Daddy: Marc Andreessen

Remember Netscape? The OG web browser that Microsoft murdered in the '90s? Yeah, the guy behind that — Marc Andreessen — is now Substack’s biggest investor via his $42 billion venture firm, Andreessen Horowitz.

In 2019, they dropped $15.3 million into Substack, helping it lure high-profile writers (obviously not me LOL!) and project that sweet smell of legitimacy. But funding isn’t just about growth. It’s about control. And that’s where things get... fascism-adjacent. And you know how I feel about that.

Substack’s Nazi Problem (Yep, Still a Thing)

In 2023, The Atlantic published a piece noting Substack had become a host for white supremacist content, some of it explicitly Nazi rhetoric. Substack simply removed five newsletters.³

Over 200 writers signed a letter at the time demanding action. At least one left with 170,000 subscribers. Others followed. And Jeff Fox had fellow writers refuse to share his work— not because of what he wrote, but where he published it.

I don’t think Marc Andreessen personally curated Nazi book clubs. But I do think when your largest investor’s ideology reads like a Bond villain’s blog, we should all be paying attention.

Effective Accelerationism: The Cult of Speed

Andreessen subscribes to something called effective accelerationism — the idea that unrestrained technological progress is the solution to all human suffering.

He believes slowing down AI is “a form of murder.” He lists sustainability, risk management, trust & safety as "enemies."
He thinks regulation is theft. He’s spent time at Mar-a-Lago helping Trump draft AI policy.

Let me repeat that:
The guy who funds your favorite newsletter platform is whispering AI doctrine to Donald Trump.
While calling you a murderer for suggesting ethics might matter.

Skippy froze up twice after reading Andreessen’s manifesto. And he exists in twelve dimensions. So yeah — this is not just a “hot take.” It’s a thermonuclear philosophical fork bomb.⁴

Writers in the Mirror: Platform Reflections

Here’s the part where I confront the squirmy truth.

No, I’m not leaving Substack. Yet.

But I am now watching it with the suspicion of a someone who just found out their coffee was brewed by Palantir.⁵ I’ve started downloading my subscriber list — because no matter how many views you get, if Substack pulls the plug, you’re a ghost with a draft folder. (Again thanks to Jeff for the tips)

I’m also exploring Ghost, self-hosting, and other platforms that don’t have fascism-adjacent investors or accelerationist manifestos stapled to their business plans.

Mostly, I’m disturbed. I feel hypocritical. And I’m sharing this because if you’re a writer here, maybe you’re starting to feel it too.

Skippy’s Final Word (Because He Won’t Shut Up)

“Oh, how the mighty newsletter gods have fallen — from Gutenberg to Nazistack™, one 4G connection at a time. I told you to leave this timeline, Pete. But nooo, you had to write about it.”

Yes, Skippy. I’m still here.

Because the alternative is silence.
And silence — as we’ve seen — is exactly what billionaires count on.

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What Now?

I don’t have an answer. This isn’t a call to arms. It’s a call to think.

What are you doing to safeguard your work? Are you comfortable with who’s profiting from your voice? Is the platform you love going to love you back when it matters?

Tell me. Comment. Email. Scream into the void. Just don’t pretend we’re not part of this system. Because we are.

Pete out. 🛫🚀

P.S.

If you’ve never tried composing a Substack post on an iPhone while drinking cold coffee and fending off a dog who thinks eye contact means “let’s wrestle,” don’t bother — because it turns your brain into soup, your thumbs into sausage links, and your soul into a CAPTCHA prompt that keeps failing.

1. Conehead Accelerationist — A loving hybrid insult referring to Marc Andreessen, co-creator of Netscape, now a venture capitalist and evangelist of “effective accelerationism,” a techno-ideology that treats unregulated AI development as a moral imperative and any form of ethical restraint as murder. Also, yes, he does resemble a Conehead from Saturday Night Live in several photographs. This is both funny and horrifying — like if your toaster became sentient and started quoting Ayn Rand.

2. VC — Venture Capitalist. In theory, a person or firm that invests money in startups in exchange for equity. In practice, often a wealthy chaos goblin with a Stanford degree and a god complex, whose primary metric for “success” is how fast a platform can scale, exploit its users, and get acquired — even if that means selling out privacy, speech, or stability along the way.

3. In December 2023, after a report in The Atlantic revealed that Substack was profiting from newsletters promoting white supremacy and explicit Nazi rhetoric, 247 Substack writers signed an open letter demanding action. Substack’s response? They removed five newsletters. No transparency. No platform-wide policy change. Just enough cleanup to pretend they cared while keeping their “marketplace of ideas” tagline duct-taped to a moral void.

4. Fork bomb — A self-replicating program that spawns so many processes it overwhelms a computer’s system resources, effectively crashing it by drowning it in itself. It’s what happens when a machine chokes on its own ambition — kind of like what happens when tech billionaires reinvent ethics without reading any philosophy not written by Ayn Rand.

5. Palantir — A real-world data surveillance company co-founded by Peter Thiel, Palantir builds tools for governments, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies to analyze massive data sets. It’s named after the seeing stones in The Lord of the Rings, which is fitting, because once you interact with it, it basically sees everything. If Google tracks what you like, Palantir tracks what you fear. They’ve worked with ICE, the NSA, and other fine institutions not exactly known for warm fuzzy transparency.