Subsnatched: How the Left Floods Substack to Steal Our Voice
This isn't a migration. It's an invasion.
The media keeps calling Substack a “right-wing haven.” The New York Times used that phrase in 2021 when a wave of journalists defected from legacy outlets to write independently. The Guardian warned that Substack was becoming a platform for "anti-vaxxers, transphobes, and right-wing contrarians." Vox called it a hub for “reactionary influencers.”
That narrative assumes Substack is a pipeline for conservative voices. But the data tells another story.
Substack’s bestseller lists read less like a roll call of conservative thinkers and more like a guest list for MSNBC. Heather Cox Richardson, a progressive historian, is one of the most prominent voices on the platform. Paul Krugman, a New York Times columnist and left-leaning economist, runs his newsletter here. So does Mehdi Hasan, formerly of MSNBC, now helming Zeteo. The MeidasTouch network, a Democratic PAC that funds attack ads, operates Meidas+. Even Democratic politicians like Rep. Jasmine Crockett have appeared on the U.S. Politics leaderboard.
This isn’t a fringe collective. This is the establishment, and they are not losing.
If Substack were truly a ‘conservative haven,’ it wouldn’t be led by the same voices who dominate cable news and Twitter. But that’s what you see. The narrative says one thing. The leaderboards say another.
The Goal is Control
Control isn’t about who gets to speak. It’s about who gets seen.
Substack's discovery system runs on paid subscriptions. That’s what fuels the charts. That’s what decides which voices are elevated and which are buried. And that system has become a weapon.
Take Heather Cox Richardson. Her Letters from an American now has over 1 million subscribers and earns more than $1 million a year. Compare that to the median Substack writer, who makes between $1,000 and $2,000 annually. One institutional voice outweighs hundreds of independent ones combined. That’s not just success. That’s dominance.
And she’s not the only one.
Paul Krugman didn’t come to build from scratch. He brought his New York Times column and a Nobel Prize. Mehdi Hasan imported his MSNBC audience to Zeteo. Meidas+ is run by a political PAC that already spends millions on Democratic campaigns. Representative Jasmine Crockett isn’t a citizen journalist. She’s an active member of Congress with platform-wide visibility.
These aren’t writers trying to grow alongside independent creators. They’re sentinels of the institutional machine, arriving with built-in audiences, donor lists, PR teams, and media coverage. Their success isn’t organic. It’s designed.
When one of these voices lands on Substack, it brings a tidal wave of paid subscriptions. That surge rockets them up the charts, pushing everyone else down, especially those without corporate media backing or deep pockets. The leaderboard doesn’t track impact. It tracks money. And that money is being used to drown people like me.
This isn’t just about earning potential. It’s about survival. The charts are the oxygen. Visibility means new readers, new shares, and new subscriptions. Fall off the list, and you’re invisible. Stay on, and you get discovered. That’s how you build something real here, not through marketing tricks, but by writing truth and hoping enough people see it.
But they don’t want that truth seen.
This is not new. The Soviets didn’t counter Western broadcasts with better arguments. They jammed the signal. In the U.S., segregationists didn’t win debates. They kept the cameras off. And today’s media doesn’t need to lie outright; it just leaves out what doesn’t fit the story. Leave out the race of the suspect. Leave out the looted stores. Leave out the victim’s name. Control doesn’t always mean censorship. Sometimes it just means no one hears you scream.
That’s what’s happening here. The charts are being repurposed. A platform that once promised independence now looks like an extension of the institutions it was supposed to challenge.
And that’s the point. Flood the zone with establishment voices. Make dissent harder to find. Make survival harder to fund. Eventually, those voices just disappear.
And the machine gets the silence it wanted, without ever having to ban a thing.
The Four-Point Playbook
Coordination
When institutional writers promote each other, they create a false sense of momentum. On Substack, entire networks lift one another into the charts. What looks like consensus is often just collusion.
Institutional Push
These players arrive with email lists, media coverage, and political machines. They don’t grow an audience. They import one. That changes the public face of the platform from grassroots to establishment echo chamber.
Artificial Inflation
Paid subscriptions move the charts. That makes them easy to manipulate. Coordinated donor pushes or bundling schemes can launch a newsletter into visibility overnight. What looks like demand is often just engineering.
Soft Cover
Many top newsletters aren’t explicitly political. They talk food, fashion, or wellness. But they still push aligned narratives. Their presence makes the feed look diverse while securing dominance for one side.
The Currency of Survival: Oxygen
Substack isn’t powered by ads or clicks. It’s powered by paid subscriptions. That’s the fuel. That’s the oxygen.
And it determines everything.
The bestseller and U.S. Politics charts are how most readers find new voices. Get on them, and you grow. Miss them, and you vanish. Substack recommends what performs. And what performs is what’s paid.
That’s where the imbalance becomes strategic.
Most Substack writers barely break even. A few rake in millions. And nearly all of the ones at the top have one thing in common: they’re safe. Politically aligned. Institutionally protected. It’s not the best ideas that dominate. It’s the best-funded.
And that creates a feedback loop.
A writer with PAC money, donor lists, or a media spotlight can surge up the charts. That surge drives visibility. Visibility drives more subs. And that cycle makes it harder for dissenters to survive, let alone rise.
This isn’t merit. It’s muscle.
If you can fund a subscription spike, through bundling, donations, or marketing machinery, you dominate. If you can’t, you don’t.
You don’t need to ban anyone. Just build a system where visibility costs money. Then make sure your side has all the money.
The unpopular opinion doesn’t disappear because it lost the argument. It disappears because it couldn’t afford to be heard.
Two Fronts of the War
Conservatives keep fighting the wrong battle.
The first front is visibility. That’s the fight you see. Deplatforming. Bans. Outrage. It gets attention because it’s loud.
But the second front is quieter. And more lethal.
It’s viability. It’s economic suppression. It’s what happens when free speech meets a rigged market.
Substack doesn’t remove your content. It buries it.
If you don’t earn, you don’t rank. If you don’t rank, you’re not found. If you’re not found, you don’t grow.
That’s the slow death.
Substack says it has 35 million subscriptions, but only 2 million are paid. And those are heavily concentrated. The top ten newsletters earn more than the next 1,000 combined. Most are media insiders or political influencers.
The leaderboard doesn’t just reflect reality. It shapes it.
Readers log in. They see the same voices. They assume consensus. That narrows the window of acceptable thought before a single word is read.
You can write the best piece in America. But if it gets 300 views while a donor-backed echo chamber gets 300,000, you’ve already lost.
Substack once promised independence. But now, it’s being colonized. Not through rules, but revenue. Not through bans, but by flooding the field until only one kind of voice remains.
If you’re not willing to fight on both fronts, you’ve already surrendered.
Keeping the Oxygen Flowing
Paid subscriptions are not tips. They’re lifelines.
That’s what keeps dissent alive.
The discovery engine favors what sells. Bestseller charts drive placement, sidebar recommendations, and curated feeds. Drop off that list, and you disappear.
That’s the plan.
Heather Cox Richardson doesn’t just win because she’s popular. She wins because she was boosted into visibility. That visibility now overshadows hundreds of independent voices combined.
There are only 100 slots on the bestseller chart and U.S. Politics page. Every one taken by a PAC, a pundit, or a polished brand means one less for someone like me.
This is scarcity by design.
And for those of us without institutional backing, those subscriptions are the only thing that lets us keep writing.
Every single paid sub is a form of resistance. Every gift subscription is an act of rebellion. Every upgrade is a middle finger to a system built to push us out.
Because the oxygen isn’t free.
They Don’t Want to Win the Argument
They’ll never say they’re trying to silence us. That would be too obvious.
Instead, they call us fringe. Dismiss us as underperforming. Say we’re just not popular enough to matter. But in a rigged system where visibility depends on money and momentum, popularity doesn’t prove truth, it just proves access.
They don’t flood the charts to persuade. They flood it to bury the rest of us. They don’t need to ban me. Just outspend me. They don’t need to disprove me. Just make sure you never see what I wrote.
And yet, I’m still here.
I don’t have billionaire donors. I don’t have a PAC or a cable network to prop me up. What I have is this voice. And readers like you who still believe in truth.
That’s what keeps this alive. Not headlines. Not hype. You.
And look, I don’t want Substack to change the way they operate. The leaderboard system is what it is. In some ways, it’s more honest than the black-box algorithms of big tech. But if this really is a fair fight, then it’s on us to start fighting.
Substack gives writers a shot. But it’s up to readers to step up and support the ones worth keeping. If the game is paid subscriptions, then so be it. But most people don’t realize how much that actually matters.
Visibility isn’t automatic. Survival isn’t guaranteed.
This is your wake-up call.
Don’t just scroll. Don’t hit snooze. Don’t tell yourself someone else will do it.
They lit the fire. And now they want you to roll over and pretend it’s only smoke.
They target the loudest voices and call it coincidence. They smear the truth-tellers and call it justice. They assassinate men like Charlie Kirk, and they’re counting on the rest of us to be too afraid, too broke, or too distracted to respond.
I won’t.
But if you want this voice to survive, if you want the message to keep cutting through the noise, it depends entirely on you.
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Because they don’t just want to erase Charlie.
They want to erase anyone who refuses to sleep through what’s happening.
I won’t let that happen.
Will you?
There's some algorithmic diversity in my feed, I've noticed lately. I get a lot of lefty posts interspersed with stuff I'm actually interested in. Not sure if this is meant to encourage more engagement, or a veiled attempt at nudging the narrative.
There's also a slowly growing type of troll farm on the right (particularly on X) that smells to me like a foreign propaganda campaign. The same sort of anti-Israel, anti-America rhetoric, which has gotten more noticeable since Charlie's death. The rumors that he was secretly coerced by Netanyahu, and murdered by Mossad (despite being one of the most effective pro-Israel voices for the very demographic that is most heavily influenced by pro-Palestinian propaganda).
And yet, all this manipulation, some of which is clearly influential (I doubt more than a tiny fraction are actual shills), reeks of flailing desperation. I know you probably don't think so, but it feels to me like the left is rapidly falling from grace, like a prom queen who got caught bullying a deaf girl in the stairwell. It's becoming comical how the American media and lefties on social media still try to leave out details that don't fit their framing, but it's only appeasing their own audience.
Tommy's rally in London is still described by all prominent media outlets and pundits as far right, as if they're racist soccer hooligans, and the attendance is reported as a fraction of what it truly was. But the repetition of lies is growing stale. The pictures tell the truth, while the political class acts like they know their days are numbered.
There's no billion-dollar censorship effort that can hide the fact Charlie's killing was a shot heard round the world, because it's only partly about Charlie's message. The rest of us are tired of the dominant narrative, and we have noticed the globally coordinated attacks on civilization in all Western liberal nations. That's why the left doesn't have their own spontaneous solidarity movement today, like when MLK was assassinated. That's in the distant past, no matter how much they want to ignore their lagging numbers and indulge in virtue signaling.
If the dominant party were able to keep the plates spinning through funding alone, coups and revolutions would never happen. But they do, often suddenly. What changes is that the silent majority realizes how many of us there are, despite how we may present ourselves due to peer pressure. There's still much work to be done, but it feels to me that our enemies are grasping at straws. Calling your opponents racist fascists and implying that violent resistance is the answer when voter turnout goes against you is the last gasp of a dying regime. If cancel culture was still effective, why endorse violence? Tommy made a Herculean effort to encourage good behavior at his rally, which resulted in 25 arrests out of a million-plus crowd. And most of those were from unavoidable clashes with demonstrators who intended to disrupt the festivities but got surrounded.
The bottom line is, the people who matter want change, and they're showing up for it. Politicians and corporate media ignore the rising tide at their own peril. The left has tried to "marginalize" us, as they are fond of saying, but they pushed too far. Yes, we all noticed how they changed the rhetoric from "silence is violence" in 2020 to Mamdani saying "violence is a social construct" now.
George Floyd inspired a Charlie-style global response, but that was more a rebellion due to COVID lockdowns. I consider MLK as the last authentic martyr for the left, because he was preaching universal truth. George Floyd was like Rodney King. There's a difference.
Leftists, globalists, and jihadists have made it clear that they have declared war on the normal people who have to work and raise families, and that's an untenable situation. Even China is failing to control their citizens, despite their Orwellian security apparatus. The organized campaign to destroy Israel has severely weakened those who fund it.
Steven Pinker has long argued that the world is trending toward less violence and more cooperation. Of course, temporary reversals are expected. But what keeps civilization on track is that free societies produce far more creative innovation, and inspire much more organic support, than totalitarian regimes.
Otherwise we'd never have made it this far.