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Essays

Leaving Substack for "Life Under the Word"

Substack’s moderation posture and business model have created recurring controversies about the normalization of far-right content. I am leaving for Ghost, and this post lays out my reasoning.

Keanu Heydari

• 5 min read
Leaving Substack for "Life Under the Word"
Photo by Trent Erwin / Unsplash

Why I Left Substack

I moved my writing from Substack to Ghost because I no longer think Substack’s platform direction is compatible with the kind of public work I am trying to do. This is not a claim that publishing tools are morally pure or that writers can fully control their downstream associations. It is a judgment about incentives. If a platform’s governance choices reliably steer attention toward the far right, then publishing there becomes participation in an ecosystem I do not want to underwrite.

The most salient issue critics cite is straightforward: Substack has repeatedly been reported to host, and to profit from, publications that promote Nazi ideology and adjacent forms of white supremacy and antisemitism. Substack’s business model takes a percentage cut of paid subscriptions, which means the platform’s revenue rises when such newsletters are monetized. This point has been made in major reporting since late 2023 and it has remained a recurring theme in subsequent investigations. 

A second issue is Substack leadership’s public posture toward that controversy. In response to writer pressure, including a widely discussed open letter, Substack defended a permissive approach framed as a free expression principle and resisted broad demonetization. Reporting at the time emphasized that the company took only partial enforcement actions, which left many critics unconvinced that Substack recognized a moral line rather than a reputational risk.  Writers and industry coverage have also described a departure dynamic in which creators left because they perceived a sustained pattern rather than an isolated moderation failure. 

A third issue, and the one that makes “right-wing shift” feel like more than rhetoric, is Substack’s evolution from a newsletter infrastructure into a networked discovery product. Substack explicitly positioned Notes as a short-form feed designed to “drive discovery across Substack,” supported by app distribution and recommendation dynamics.  When a platform builds discovery surfaces, it assumes more responsibility for what it promotes, since users encounter content they did not deliberately seek out. That concern became concrete when Substack apologized for sending push notifications that promoted a Nazi newsletter, an incident widely covered as evidence that extremist content was not merely present but could be operationally amplified. 

A fourth issue is the growth and finance logic now shaping Substack’s priorities. In 2025, Substack raised major funding at a unicorn valuation, with public statements about investing further in product expansion. That funding does not “cause” right-wing content. It does increase pressure to scale engagement and discovery, which is exactly where controversies about amplification and normalization become structurally harder to contain. Critics see the combination of permissive moderation, monetization, and networked discovery as an architecture that predictably benefits political entrepreneurs on the right, including explicit extremists, since outrage and boundary-testing often travel well in feed environments. 

Ghost is not a utopia. It is a different set of tradeoffs that better matches my aims. Ghost is positioned as a publisher-controlled platform for websites with an open-source codebase and a clearer separation between my publication and a centralized “network” that needs to optimize cross-site discovery.  It also has pursued distribution via open protocols such as ActivityPub, which matters to me because it supports portability and reduces dependence on a single company’s feed logic. 

So the move is a refusal of entanglement, not a claim to purity. I am choosing a platform whose incentives are closer to “run your own publication under your own domain,” and farther from “grow the network by monetizing attention wherever it concentrates.” Given what has been reported about Substack’s tolerance of, and profit from, far-right and explicitly Nazi publications, I do not think it is responsible for me to keep building there. 

Life Under the Word

Life Under the Word is a small, deliberate project: a theology blog rooted in the church’s life, written by someone who lives in the overlap of academic research and ecclesial practice. I am a historian and a deacon in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), finishing a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan on Iranian student activism in postwar France. These identities shape the questions I bring to scripture and to the ordinary responsibilities of Christian speech.

The center of gravity here is theological, with Karl Barth and apocalyptic readings of Paul as recurring interlocutors. I read Paul with teachers who take the scandal of grace seriously, including J. Louis Martyn, Beverly Gaventa, and Douglas Campbell, and I keep one eye on the Reformed confessional tradition as a discipline of attention. My interest is in how doctrine governs speech and how the church’s practices can form a credible, non-coercive witness in modern life.

At the same time, my historical work keeps pressing on theology from the side. Researching exile, belonging, power, and human dignity is a kind of training in how to see, and in how to resist moral laziness. It forces the question of what it means to speak truthfully when institutions surveil and when human beings get sorted into the categories that make disposability feel normal. Those pressures show up in scripture too, and I want this site to be honest about that traffic between the archive and the church.

So the guiding claim of Life Under the Word is simple and demanding: theology begins in encounter with God’s self-revelation and becomes responsible speech within the church. God’s Word meets ordinary life, calls communities into being, and requires response. That response is public language, shared worship, habits of attention, patterns of repentance, and forms of solidarity that can withstand the modern temptation to treat faith as branding or outrage as fidelity.

Practically, this means you will find a mix of essays and sermons, along with working notes aimed at conceptual precision and practical usefulness. If you are new here, the easiest way in is through the tags: essays, sermons, devotionals, liturgies, and translations—find these through the links in the navigation menu. You can subscribe by email if you want new posts delivered directly. Most writing will remain free; paid subscriptions are simply a way to support the work and keep it sustainable over time.

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