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Bravo, Substack. I shared this piece with my social media followers today, prefaced by the following note:

"If you've ever wondered about the deeper reasons why I've been singing the praises of Substack, the platform I use to publish my music newsletter, I recommend you read this.

"Substack is serving the public interest by helping to empower journalists to speak truth, even in the face of pushback from those in power. This is what can happen when writers are financially backed by direct-subscription publishing models.

"Whatever you may think about the specifics of the situation with this particular writer, it's clear that Substack is standing with those who care about freedom of the press, and that's worthy of praise."

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The lunatic left keeps spewing "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom of consequences", yet whenever they say something beyond the pale (like Luke O'Neil supporting outright harassment and terrorizing innocent people for the sin of "wrongthink"), they immediately start crying like a baby, when they have to face the consequences of their actions and are being punished for doing horrible things.

Luke O'Neil doesn't deserve sympathy, he needs to be forced to pay the iron price for calling inciting harassment and essentially, political violence. If Luke was a conservative, no one would be supporting his crap and I'm sure you would have banned him from being allowed to even WRITE on Substack. But because he's a lunatic liberal who thinks even normal middle of the road liberal democrats are the devil for the sin of saying "maybe we shouldn't terrorize and advocate terrorizing government officials off the clock and that doing so is going to get someone killed/make it impossible for us to reunify the country post-Trump"? He gets a free pass AND everyone calling him a "martyr", when in truth he talked beyond the pale crap and advocated harassment and violence and he was given a public spanking for doing bad.

Would you spout such a defense if it was Tim Poole or Matt Taibbi, liberals who have spent the last two years calling out the Luke O'Neil for spewing treasonous conspiracies and calling for violence being committed against anyone not left of Trotsky and Stalin, if they being attacked? Hell, would you even defend a Ben Shapiro, Steven Crowder, Gavin McInnes, Anne Coulter, Tucker Carslon, or any other conservative who the O'Neils of the world are calling on to be harassed, stalked, and terrorized for the sin of "wrongthink"?

You care about freedom of speech? How about getting rid of the rigged "top post" list and bring back real time posting of articles, since monsters like O'Neil and other non-mainstream lunatic lefties make up 99% of the "Top Posts" section; effectively creating an artificial reality where they are the only people that Substack cares to promote and create the illusion they are the only people actually involved in the website. Hell, most people don't want to read O'Neil's garbage but it keeps being shoved into our faces by Substack using your "mystery algorithm" which at this point amounts to you guys cherry picking WHICH newsletters are "Substack Approved" and making it 100% IMPOSSIBLE to find anything else except the lunatic left dribble that helped get Trump elected. that normal sane lefties like myself and the other half of the country, have ZERO interest in. Especially since we can't even post on O'Neil's blog to basically refute his calls for targeted harassment, let alone REPORT HIM for advocating targeted harassment that he openly WANTS to end in someone being harmed for the sin of "wrongthink".

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