Left-Wing Gatekeeping

Is Conservatism the new Punk Rock? Or is it the old Punk Rock?

I’ve been having some good discussion on Substonk recently about Goth Girls. About why they’re making a comeback, whether or not they’re hot, how they’re being mischaracterized, and about what politics can potentially disqualify someone from being “Goth”. It is one instance of an increasing class of arguments that can be summed up as “Left-Wing Gatekeeping”. We are seeing a lot of changes in the American political left, where things they would defend or denounce to their dying breath 5-10 years ago are now being questioned, but usually for very different reasons than the political right. I will be making a post about the second golden bull that is being smashed after this one, but today we are talking about Gatekeeping.

Gatekeeping was one of the cardinal sins of Trump-45 era Greater Reddit, alongside Being a “Karen” and disrespecting Minecraft. Sometimes these fucking losers would even respond to someone on a completely different website with “r/gatekeeping” (in the same way they would respond with “r/woooosh”). I guess they viewed any form of elitism as intrinsically bad, and it probably reminded them of a certain other hypothetical closed gate that was the talk of American politics every day at the time. It is also because, a lot of the times, the normies who were being denied at the gates of some fanbase were Women, and Redditors are usually giant whiteknighting simps. But during the Coovid-15 era, probably due to the younger generation being more clannish and tribalistic than the Millennials, something changed. Nowadays, Lefties can’t stop dilating over right-wingers liking the same thing they like. “You can’t like this music, it’s actually ancom music!” “You can’t like this fashion, it’s actually anti-racist fashion!” “You can’t like this TV show! It has anti-Fascist themes! Take a heckin’ MEDIA LITERACY classerino ok?”

Often times, the shows or genres they claim are intrinsically left-wing are in-fact not. They use a lot of mental gymnastics in trying to claim that they are. I have heard some people say that Sonic is left-coded because it had environmentalist themes, as if right-wingers are in favor of kidnapping animals (or I guess more analogously, people) and using their life energy to power robot minions of a megalomaniacal scientist. A lot of them say One Piece is left-coded, and I used to think this too, but now I am more skeptical. The Guevara picture in Oda’s drawing room could very easily just be a reference. People who have watched it have never told me the show is seriously political, but people interpret it as such in our hyper-politicized culture. A lot of this is just nostalgic autists wanting to justify still liking stuff for kids, honestly.

I have even seen occasions where people have been exposed for indirectly attributing left-wing quotes to old games that never contained them. They will often portray their favorite characters as having their political opinions despite these characters often being completely apolitical and potentially more right-coded. And yet, these are the same people who get piping mad when a right-winger likes something they like.

The popular example is the Goth and Punk subcultures. The argument Lefties make is basically that Punk is left-wing, and Goth is derivative of Punk, and because of that it is left-wing. Some of them also say Emo and Scene are intrinsically left-wing by this metric, but others who are perhaps more anti-Emo say that Emo is counterrevolutionary which makes me laugh. It’s very stupid but completely typical of Shitlibs to pretend that a bunch of heroin-addicted delinquent teenagers were all deeply and profoundly political, and that they didn’t just pick whatever pissed their parents off the most.

Speaking of picking whatever is most edgy, none of these people ever bring up the fact that Punk wasn’t even unitarily left-wing. Racist, fascist Skinheads and their ilk were heavily influential to the British Punk Rock scene, comprising a large portion of the Oi! subgenre. It was these people who represented the actual proles, not the Left-Wing Punks (who even Marx probably would have identified as lumpenproles). They didn’t care much for poofters, enjoyed football, enjoyed pints, and hated Communists. British Neo-Fascist Punk Rock became known as “Rock Against Communism”, a name I warmly remember as peppering the Alt-Right memes and edits of the early Trump years before I knew exactly where it came from.

I don’t mean to romanticize the Skinheads, I think it’s probably not the sort of crowd who we should be looking to identify with. Many of them were true lowlifes, and this is even more true today. But they did influence Punk, and most of them weren’t exactly PC.

So, it’s pretty clear that Punk was not always unilaterally left-wing, but apparently every genre that descends from it must be? Not exactly very consistent with the Anarchist position on political factions. The other arguments don’t seem to have anything to do with the Gothic aesthetic, which originates in the Victorian period (so, actually pretty right-coded), or with Gothic Rock, which no longer seems to be very associated with Goths. Jim Morrison basically founded the genre and if anyone is listening to him in 2025, it’s probably your very not-Goth dad. Uhh, he was a CIA sleeper cell by the way. Yeah, just gonna throw that in there and not explain further. David Bowie is also sometimes credited with being a pioneer of Gothic Rock, and uhh… Let’s just say he had some interesting political views in his younger years. Robert Smith, the lead member of The Cure, has come out as not a big fan of the politicization of music.

So, instead of this, they’ll say some stupid unfalsifiable shit like “the Goth subculture is associated with Queerness” or “Gothic fashion transgresses certain gender norms” (doesn’t all unorthodox fashion, to an extent?) and it’s this very gay form of argumentation where a community containing certain elements is taken to mean that toleration of these elements is an integral element of it. They do the same thing with ancient Rome. “Rome was a diverse place, therefore cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism was an integral Roman value!”

I say all this, and I don’t even really like Goths. I think goth girls are not very attractive. I don't know where anyone got the idea that goth girls spit on you and step on your balls. They were never portrayed this way in my childhood, more as depressed cynics and loners. Normgroids see someone wearing all black and assume they’re a dominatrix. Modern “Goths” (if you can even call them that) are especially unattractive. They’ve swapped the heroin out for birth control and antidepressants, which has caused many of them to balloon in size. Is there anything nastier than some tubby Goth girl’s gut hanging out of the bottom of her poorly tightened corset, stretchmarks protruding?

There are some genres which the left would have to give up if they actually took any of this seriously. Most obviously, Metal, which has always been associated with Neo-Nazi occult shit. But this is mostly a way for them to get wacists out of their hobbies. You see the exact same pattern in media/literature. Just a decade ago, Redditors would blow their lid if you “gatekept” a video game, or a movie, or some comic book or manga series based on something as neutral and objective as whether or not they had completed the piece of media in question. Today, liking a franchise is thought to mean being in complete ideological alignment with the person who made it. If you aren’t then you must lack media literacy. You must not know that the author disagrees with you, or you must not know that some character is supposed to be bad, or flawed. I have seriously seen some of these people get mad at glorification of the empire from Star Wars as “media illiteracy”, as if anyone in the entire fucking world with 46 chromosomes went into Star Wars thinking that the George Lucas wanted you to root for the Empire. Everyone knows that The Boys is written by shitlibs. Everyone knows that American Psycho is a satire of Yuppies. People like the characters that the author made to criticize them because they disagree with the author. You see Liberals do this all the time as well, but because it is usually for very old works nobody considers it “Media Illiteracy”. Sometimes they do it with Satan. More often you see it with mythological figures — Medusa, Grendel, Prometheus, Loki… I just recently saw a flock of bookworms talking about “what if Polyphemus was actually le GOOD guy, becuz… The Greks ate his animals an shiet”…

Sometimes they’ll just make shit up based on their own personal headcanon. I’ve heard a few say that LOTR is left-leaning because of its negative portrayal of Industrialization, but aside from the fact that Tolkien was a conservative Catholic this is very much not the case. The Bagginses are super Bourgeois, and the final major storyline (the Scouring of the Shire) is a not-so-subtle parody of post-war Britain. Saruman isn’t an oil tycoon, he’s Clement Attlee.

The most exemplary case of this “media literacy” garbage is the Warhammer 40K stuff. Shitlibs, based on pretty much nothing, believe that Warhammer is some sort of grand political allegory, with a deep message. And because of that, if you support the Empire you are not a true fan. I don’t play Warhammer, and I know many of my subscribers either play the tabletop or some of the related media, or just like the lore. But from what I understand, pretty much every fraction is kind of over the top in their mannerisms. Because, you know… It’s a FANTASY RPG??? It’s supposed to be entertaining. Do you think that Nintendo was trying to sell Monarchism when it made Mario, or Zelda? No, because it’s just a game. You can like heroes who operate within an ideal monarchical or feudal setting without believing such an ideology is a good approach to the real world. In the recent past people used to be able to root for this. But shitlibs believe that art is mainly a form of communication, that beauty is derived from how cleverly a piece spreads a message about the world. “All art is Political” is true insofar as all art has a subject that exists in a political context, but it is not true that the object of said art is political. See one of my old posts on this topic:

Very few conservatives believe this in the same way, because most art produced within the past 70 or so years has been made by the political left, and yet some of it is very good even if it has bad messages. My favorite TV show is the Sopranos, even though I would consider certain overarching messages of the Sopranos to be subversive and misguided, because it tells an extremely compelling story and uses extremely captivating imagery to do so. Most of the genres they are defending were made without a focus on politics, a lot of the actual messages of certain shows are more introspective. But hyperpolitical people externalize these introspective messages, just like they excuse their personal shortcomings or struggles by maintaining the identity of the victim. A thing can’t just be about the human condition, or loneliness, or love, it has to be about Anti-Fascism or breaking gender norms or celebrating the poor.

So to put it briefly, most of the cases of Left-wing gatekeeping are very stupid and hypocritical. That being said… Do I consider it a bad thing? No, not really. A lot of this stuff (ex: The Boys) is slop and a lot of the shitlib genres being gatekept are tasteless and cringey. Shitlibs can have Punk, I don’t care. They can have Goth too.