Phil Labonte, Jake Munro, Brian Graupner, and Kellen Leeson argue that "woke" ideology has infected goth, punk, and metal scenes, transforming authentic rebellion into political conformity. They contrast historical underground commitment with modern digital commodification, citing Brian Graupner's cancellation after liking a tweet and the removal of his "Libertarian Goth" track from Reddit. The hosts critique gatekeeping based on ideology rather than musical knowledge, noting how youth radicalization since 2019 destroyed non-partisan community spaces. Ultimately, they advocate for movements like "Goths Against Cancel Culture" to restore artistic integrity against corporate co-option and leftist gatekeeping. [Automatically generated summary]
People are saying this a lot because of the election of Donald Trump and what seems to be a shift in the culture, but it is our opinion that woke is not dead.
The monster is still alive and it still has a massive influence, particularly in counterculture areas.
So joining us today to talk about that.
Oh, actually, you know what?
We have to do a sponsor, right?
Okay, so we're going to shoot to the sponsor and then we're going to come back and talk about that.
So like I said before, you know, there is a common refrain that you're hearing that woke is dead, that people are tired of it.
And I don't know if that's actually the truth.
And so I'd be interested in hearing, particularly in counterculture spaces, right?
Like I feel like that's where kind of woke really started to get its legs under itself is in counterculture spaces, in places online when there used to be an underground.
I'm strongly of the opinion there is no longer an underground, that the underground is based, the idea of an underground is basically been vaporized because of the internet.
It used to be where you'd have to go and find things.
Like you have to actually physically go to a place to interact with people that have counterculture ideas or that in a space that you consider the underground.
Now it's just a few clicks away.
But the idea that woke is actually done is something that I, like I said, I would push back against.
And I think that you guys probably agree, but I'd like to hear you guys, your opinion and your experience.
I mean, that stuff was relatively inoffensive when you really, it's all superficial, you know, like these piercings can be taken out, tattoos can be removed.
But of course, now with the woke movement, there has been a far more permanent addition to a lot of the ideologies, which is obviously the gender ideologies that has been introduced, which I think mainly is the largest contention people have in mainstream with woke culture.
And there's no small amount of that in alternative subcultures at the moment.
But yes, it is shifting out of mainstream.
And there definitely is a fight, like, you know, here on the mainstream.
There's mainstream voices.
But me and Brian here are the sort of the alternative voices that sort of contest the woke ideology because wokeness is by its very operation a form of conformity.
And alternative and countercultures are meant to renounce any form of conformity.
And we're just trying to reform the subcultures the best we can, despite the noise, Brian.
The opposing the rules are sort of assigned when you, I don't know, elect to go down this darkened path, like sign up at your local hot topic or whatever.
Hot topic really was kind of like the first the first thing where people were like, oh, wait a minute, maybe this is mainstream.
And again, and I bring up the mall, right?
Like the mall was in the United States, at least, and I think that it's probably different in the UK, but not significantly because the cultures have shared so much in common for at least as long as the U.S. has been a country.
The fact that you can go to the mall and see what is popular, what is cool, see what is also mainstream.
And hot topic had become, and still probably is, kind of the corporatist, superficial demonstration of the quote-unquote underground subculture.
I mean, yeah, that it was a weird thing to be, like, hot topic was sort of like, I mean, it's the whole thing shifted, I think, when the logo changed from the flaming thing to the block letters that they have now.
But yeah, I mean, I only brought up hot topic just because it was sort of this weird incursion into what was such an underground thing.
And it would just abut the edge of what's really subversive.
But even then, I mean, I don't Recall like getting signing off on a set of beliefs just because I like to listen to Suicide Commando or something like that.
Like, well, you like this band, so you must believe that.
I think that the fact, I think this speaks to the idea that we kind of touched on before that the underground used to be more than just window dressing.
And I think that when you put it, once you get the imagery and the style into your major mall outlets, that kind of shows that it's no longer underground.
I mean, so when I was growing up, when I was a kid, and this is going back a long time, but like I had to go to a specific store that was half an hour from my house.
And I'm 14, 15 years old, so I had to get a ride from mom, you know, if I wanted to listen to death metal bands, right?
If I wanted to find the latest release from whatever European death metal band, I had to go to this place called the Music Outlet.
And if I went down there, you couldn't just open it up and listen to it.
You had to go ahead and look at the cover and be like, ooh, this one looks cool.
Well, you know, to perfectly sort of confirm what you said there about social media sort of ruining the underground, the mall was sort of this place where social interaction sort of reigned supreme.
And I don't know if you've ever met any alternative kids.
They're the most non-confrontational types of people.
So, you know, you could go to the mall back in the 90s and the early 2000s, you know, pre, you know, social media being the prevalent way for people to communicate.
And you could maybe have some conflicting ideologies with someone, but you're not going to bring this up because that was not an argument and that's horrible, right?
That's the worst thing ever.
So the one unifier you had with all those around you was the stuff that made you all happy, the stuff you could all talk about, which was, you know, the clothes and the music and the video games that you're playing at the time because like 2003, 2004, all the video games were edgy as hell.
You had Delph May Cry and you had the Jake Monroe game itself.
Yeah, Delph May Cry 3, the Jake Monroe game itself.
That's right there, me and my brother fighting for eternity.
And you also had Silent Hill, right?
It was like just everything back then with gears of industrial.
Everything back then was like edgy and cool and goth and shit, right?
So you could talk about all this stuff forever.
And then the migration happened, right?
They sort of receded into the safety of their bedrooms.
And now you could have these mall meetups digitally.
So, and whenever you go to social media, because you're no longer confined within a mall, social media has the naturally spreads and can be shared and things can be, you know, and people can grow and people can get followings and stuff like that.
So yeah, I think that was definitely the end of the underground there.
But also, I think Lincoln Park also ruined everything as well.
Don't get me wrong.
I love hybrid theory and all that kind of stuff.
But like when they took new metal mainstream and then corn decided to stop doing it.
Because I like grew up with Lincoln Park, you know, and like that's my idea of like, I want to say heavy metal, but like punk and just that kind of like alt culture.
Which is always the first part of communism, right?
Which is tear it all down and then obviously rebuild and everything, you know, everything for everyone by everybody except the ones who have the money and all the stuff.
Not their stuff.
Everyone else's stuff.
But anarchism was always the first step of communism, which is, you know, destroy the system.
I don't care, bring it all down, and then maybe we'll have something there for everybody after.
The anarchy is actually a cover to bring in the social control that comes with communism, the single-mindedness.
But I don't imagine, or it wasn't my experience that if I talked to anarchists back in the day, that they actually had a coherent ideology beyond tear it all down.
Back in the day when punks were like, oh, you know, I'm an anarchist because F the government, and I just want to get drunk.
They weren't thinking about, okay, F the government, tear it all down so that way we can rebuild.
But no, you're 100% right, man, because this is the difference, and this is what has shifted, culturally speaking, within subcultures over the last couple of decades.
What separates us so definitively is the fact that back then they were artists.
They were expressing themselves.
Now we have activists.
We don't have artists anymore.
And everything is secondary to the ultimately, which is the total reformation in this leftist authoritarian hellscape that they wish to maintain, that they'll never get.
They will be goth music that has a political individual that made something sort of ambiguously like maybe stop war for a bit, maybe.
But because the music itself was not enough to keep people like, you know, me and Brian out of it, they then had to change the stance of the gatekeeping.
Because if the music itself was enough to keep us out, we wouldn't even want to be in it anyway, right?
If the music was like constantly just like, you know, transition your kids, transition your kids, castrate them when they're young.
Well, I just wanted to jump in real quick with what Jake was saying, because this Goths Against Cancel culture group is like, it went from like zero to 16,000 in like a month in terms of membership.
And which got started more or less in my behalf, just to back to going back to what Phil was saying, just because I had some, I mean, this cost me a marriage.
I know you would because the rules are so clear for everyone to follow.
But to follow up on something that Brian was saying there, because this is very important.
And for those of you who are probably watching this wondering, what space is there for people who are conservative or even MAGA or right-wing, whatever.
What space is there in alternative spaces for these kinds of people?
You pointed out that whenever you made the song, Leftism is, what was the word, bad?
And what I realized whenever there was a bunch of conservatives and right-wingers, or even just center-right, even just center libertarians, like people coming in, just being like, oh my God, yeah, like I have to mask this shit, right?
Just so I can enjoy this.
And then you've got leftists saying that goth is political and is leftist by nature.
So I'm like, okay, these two things can't be true at the same time.
Okay.
Because if there's something there that right-wingers can enjoy, then it can't be inherently leftist.
It can't.
You can't have these two things.
And then, of course, I was talking to you about this in the car.
If you take leftism and you strip it of all of this goth aesthetic, what's left?
It's just the politics.
Politics themselves innately are not goth, right?
Liberalism and leftism is not goth by itself.
It is only then made goth by everything else that's added, like the music, the aesthetic, the literature, the architecture, you know, the macabre themes, the taxidermy.
And these things have been enjoyed for decades, right?
And before modern leftism became a thing.
And these were the same themes that these conservatives and right-wingers were finding value in.
And it's like, yeah, it's not liberal.
In fact, it's the rejection of all of these things.
It is the, you know, regardless of the political affiliations of everyone involved, it is the unifying core themes of goth, which are those things that I talked about earlier, you know, like, you know, aesthetic and music and, you know, the scene itself and maintaining the scene.
So factually, it's incorrect that it's leftist and that it's also political.
Because again, these were just created as an extension of the LWA, which is the left-wing authoritarianism that I did a video on, which is very different to any other type of authoritarianism because of the Dark Triad, which is like a psychological triad of really, really horrible personality traits.
And you don't need to be like a psychological scholar.
You know, to your point, Jake, you mentioned how the right tends to be put off by the goth aesthetic, the counterculture aesthetic, the metal music, the heavy industrial stuff.
And I think you do see it now.
If you look, the Gen Z right wing, they're very much dudes in ties, right?
They're going back to that.
There was a time where the major political movers were trying to step away from looking, you know, prim and proper, looking well kept with ties and stuff.
They were trying to look like the everyman, right?
Like maybe it might be, I think it was probably the whole aesthetic, the Brooklyn aesthetic, where you had, you know, dudes with beards and they've got their lattes.
And that used to be, for a time in the early aughts, that was kind of counterculture, right?
Like if you were trying to go into politics or into political spaces, you were still kind of wearing like your normal stuff.
And now there's been a resurgence on the right of people that are, you know, they're always presenting themselves in suit and ties.
So the mistake these people are making is that their perception of these alternative subcultures do not change.
They are absolute and their basis is always going to be left versus right.
But that's not true.
It's a counterculture.
And Celtic counterculture, the very nature of the word, is counter to whatever culture happens to be the most popular at the time.
And as we all know, the reason why we get so much backlash, the reason why there's so much animosity towards people like us saying the things that we say, is because we are the counterculture.
That is the whole point.
And they didn't realize at any point that they became the system.
They became the culture to which we counter to it.
Well, because that actually, that's a good segue to what I wanted to, because we started talking about this in the green room and we were saying how in goth culture and metal and punk, like men would wear dresses, eyeliner you were talking about.
To my understanding, it was because that was a counterculture.
You guys were like a niche part of society.
So it was just like, it is what it is.
But what I wanted to pull up is three of the biggest, some of the biggest athletes in the world right now are openly painting their nails.
We've got Jared McCain right here.
He's a starter for the Philadelphia 76ers.
Caleb Williams, a quarterback for the Chicago Bears, and Israel Adesanya, a multiple champion, UFC fighter.
So we've gotten to the point, I just wanted to talk to you guys about this, is that the biggest athletes in the world, which is like everyone loves sports, right?
This is pop culture.
Is like the mainstream.
And now they're totally embracing what you guys were talking about in the 90s and the early aughts.
I mean, if you look at like the Met Gala, and they invite all the NBA players and they're wearing these skirts and they're black, and the NBA players are like, oh, I can't wear like a bright color, right?
But I think that this is something worth kind of drilling down on.
To your point, Jake, the idea that you could wear whatever you wanted.
And that was really what the counterculture, subculture kind of thing was.
It wasn't a statement about I fit in.
It was, I'm going to do what I want in spite of the fact that the normative culture would look down on this or the normative culture rejects this.
So if that's the case, if it was initially just a rejection, where does that leave people that are looking to express themselves and reject the normal culture when it's like everything is now just window dressing?
Well, I mean, self-expression is, you know, everyone can do that.
It doesn't rely on any political affiliation, right?
So people are just like, well, you can't be conservative in goth because a conservative would never wear a skirt.
But then not every goth was wearing a skirt.
Right.
You had masculine goths, you know, like myself, for example, and then you've got the ones that wanted to wear the skirts.
You could also go as a conservative to a goth club, listen to the music that was about love and romance and death and loss, because that's almost exclusively what they were about.
And in some cases, like The Cure, Getting Lost in the Forest as a Young Boy, and that's it.
That's literally all it's about.
And then you could wear a skirt and listen to these songs that are decidedly apolitical and then go home and say, you know, maybe abortion is not great.
But to the point, as much as it was likely that you would see a guy in a skirt, you would also almost invariably see a dude that was in a black suit with a black shirt and a black tie.
And that imagery has been part of goth and the subculture for as long as I've been aware of it.
And I'm an old guy.
It's like the idea, I can't count how many goth bands I've seen that look like they're dressed up to go to a funeral.
And that's, I mean, that falls right in line with the idea of loss and The themes that goth tends to, you know, tends to explore.
Um, so the idea that you can't be conservative or that you can't dress in a conservative way and go to a goth club, I think that that's just can be dismissed out of hand, right?
It's just ridiculous to think that it's it's this um misconception that uh conservatism is absolute, it is every single ideal at in their extremes at all times.
But of course, we know there's nuance to everything, it is bipartisan, but within you know the left and the right and the center, there are delineations, it's an entire graph, right?
But then it does because whenever you present yourself as like, oh, I don't believe in every conservative value, but maybe this stuff, maybe we should.
So what you were saying about the subcultures themselves are divided on how gender is expressed.
Like Phil was saying there, like metal very much is like, you know, combat pants and leather jacket and a I'm going to kick your ass later kind of look on your face.
But then you did have things like emo and scene and also goth as well, which were androgynous, not feminine.
So you had some women that looked like gigantic dudes, and then you had some men that were frail, timid, tiny little things.
And people were sort of, you know, dressing all over the place.
So it was androgynous and there definitely is a sense of, you know, we're sort of playing around without the activism being involved.
But as you were saying earlier about a lot of the sort of the new punks of this era sort of wearing shirts and ties.
And what I was saying about that these countercultures are forever shifting to reflect the current culture.
It makes perfect sense in a time where men are not only being disenfranchised, but feminized, that there is a big research, there's like a counterculture of men being more masculine as a form of counterculture.
And I think like the androgynous cultures might have been more susceptible to like this, I think a lot of the feminism way we like rule society today is where cancel culture comes from, is where the activism comes from.
And I almost think like that's why metal, I think it's largely been unaffected by the woke takeover.
Like, I was in the metal community because I didn't fit in other places.
And so the idea of PC in the metal community was always something that I was very against.
And I was making these arguments poorly because I'm a dude in a metal band.
I didn't have any kind of philosophical background.
I hadn't read any philosophy.
I didn't know where the ideas came from.
I didn't know why they spread the way they did.
All I knew was something didn't smell right.
And that's literally why I named the fall of ideals, the record that kind of put all that remains on the map.
I named the fall of ideals.
I named it that because I could smell it in 2005.
I was like, there's something changing in the way that people kind of perceive the stuff that made America a cool country, right?
Like the idea that you can have the freedom of speech, the idea that you can share controversial ideas, stuff that is inherent in countercultures, first of all, but also something that made America what it was.
It's like they're not the kinds of people who win power.
They're not beautiful.
They're not strong leaders.
They're not confident.
And yet they wield all of this online power.
Of course, they're going to be, you know, they're not going to be respectful with it.
They're not going to be responsible.
They're not going to be responsible with this kind of power.
You know, like we've already seen the political violence, which is happening because they don't even know how to lose the power with any dignity because they are losing the power.
And the response has been tragic.
It has been violent.
It's open violence.
They're so confident in their position as the correct ones that they're now openly advocating, gloating about violence they're going to commit and violence they have committed.
I mean, I got, there was a festival in New Jersey and I'd this giant one for industrial music and I joined one of my favorite bands from high school, paint department.
And they found out I joined and the internet went so crazy, we got kicked off.
And where I'm going with this, I got upgraded to racist out of nowhere.
We do this show live in front of a studio, like in front of an audience.
And it's like a debate show when we do that.
And one of the first times we tried to do it, the show almost got canceled because keep in mind, the club that we do it in is a comedy club in the gay district of DC.
Yeah, well, there's definitely like a still a respectful form of the left still out there, but even they, you know, once they find that out, you're rejected entirely.
I mean, prior to the Charlie Kirk shooting, I used to know some trans people who were that were rejected from the trans movement because they didn't agree with all of the radical trans ideology that they, in fact, not even just rejected from it.
They had their trans card revoked by the, yeah, unbelievable.
It was all pre-Charlie Cook, the great reshuffling of Charlie Cook's death.
May he rest in peace.
But there was a trans person that had a contention with the trans movement, and I would talk to them frequently and sort of talk about how they're a sort of rebel in their place.
And unfortunately, after the reshuffling happened, and I was like, I can't believe just because he's talking, Charlie's gone.
And they were like, no, fuck you.
He had to die.
He doesn't think that I should exist.
And I was like, I don't think any of that's true.
And of course, like everything was contextualized in the wake of his death online.
They tried to.
This was the one time that the left had to go mainstream with the shit that they were talking about behind closed doors.
After that, that Serpentuce, the turning point was the name of the song we put out.
And the FBI should go through the comments on it.
It was just the most insane, like, and I know you, and you're saying this crazy, crazy, like, he deserves, like, all the stuff you're saying, but like cartoonishly villainous.
And one of the things that I've noticed about goth is there's always an as the aesthetic quality of it.
It was there was always imagery that was, even though it was melancholy, it was so frequently beautiful women that were, oftentimes they were corpses.
But the reason that that worked, right?
One of my favorite bands when I was young into like doom metal, like slow, sludgy death metal, this band called My Dying Bride.
And I loved the name because that was the saddest thing I could think of, right?
Like you're losing the person that you love, blah, blah, blah.
And the imagery that comes along with that, For people that aren't familiar, all that remains, like the lyrics and stuff are very frequently talking about like emo-y stuff.
We get called an emo metal band because I'm always talking about, or I used to be always talking about like breaking up with girls.
It is something that they aspire to, but have absolutely no interest in trying to achieve whatsoever.
I mean, for example, if you look at all of the biggest alternative people in the sphere who don't ever say a fucking word, by the way, they never say a word.
They just post really pretty pictures.
And they're the ones who get the most likes, right?
They are idealized within their own camps, and this is why they keep their mouth shut.
I will find it funny to remark that when there was the body positivity movement, you had all sorts of gigantic women on here, and the men were still tiny, skinny because who cares, right?
Who cares about men, right?
Who gives a shit?
It's mainly women on here, so they're going to want to look at the pretty boys.
Part of the reason why support the scene was, why support the scene was such a big deal and why I am so familiar with industrial and with goth, even though it's not really inside my wheelhouse as a metal dude.
It was because every Sunday night, it didn't matter who was playing.
I was going to the local show because I was supporting the other artists that were local because these are kids that I went to school with.
These are kids that I knew from hanging out at the mall or these are kids that I knew that were doing the exact same thing I was.
They just had a different flavor, right?
They liked industrial or goth or emo or what have you.
And so everybody would go.
If you were in a band, you knew that the same 50 people, if there was only going to be 50 people at the show, because it was a local show and nobody, you know, they were just small bands or whatever, the same 50 people, you could guarantee we're going to be at every single show, whether it was a hardcore band, whether it was goth bands, industrial, whatever it was, because everybody was coming out to support the scene.
And I imagine, and I can't speak, I haven't been to local shows in ages, but I imagine that's not the case anymore.
Because if you have the wrong opinion, word will get around.
I mean, alternative subcultures don't really have the equity to squander whenever it comes to turning people away.
You kind of need as many people in that shit to keep it going.
Because, you know, by definition, they are alternative.
It's underground.
Well, at least it's meant to be.
And you kind of want as many soldiers, so to speak, in that as humanly possible.
So the fact that even the fact that I've just realized now, even the fact that they feel like they have the privilege to turn people away means that they have become such a gluttonous pig of a movement.
They can afford to pick and choose who's even a part of it anymore.
But, you know, it's funny you should mention that because back in the day, there was like back in the 70s with Sex Pistols, whenever they were first on the scene with Vivian Westwood and all that lot, small shows.
And it was like 15, 20 people, the same 15, 20 people every single time.
And even when I was going to a goth club back in Northern Ireland, you'd show up every weekend and it's the same people every single weekend, right?
I can't really talk to what's going on with the scene because as far as I know, the scene, the local scene has died.
But a lot of it has sort of gone online.
And with this online bravery that they get, these keyboard warriors, they become so emboldened, so brazen to then start gatekeeping at the door.
And that's something that's offensive to people, particularly people that happen to be in the smaller bands that aren't getting as big of a piece of the pie.
There's a whole lot of crabs in the bucket, you know, and they're looking to pull you down.
They don't realize that it is just an innate, it's an innate part of humanity is to create a hierarchical order, which is beneficial for anything to continue.
And this is why communism doesn't work, because it completely destroys the natural order of things.
There wasn't enough champagne socialists last time.
Let's get more this time.
But yeah, there's a hierarchy all the time.
It is always established, regardless of whether or not they want to acknowledge it or not.
And within society, they are the sort of less liked because they're just so abrasive as human beings.
And then, I mean, you've met, we've met the collective, we've met the individuals.
There's not really much difference there other than how much power they have over your life.
And so to sort of suffer at the hands of these kinds of people who shouldn't have had this power in the first place.
Don't know how to wield it, right?
This is not a power they should have been given in the first place.
But yeah, the hierarchy within anything is only respected because it suits their motives.
It suits their ideologies.
It's like, this person is the best goth ever, and I'm okay with that because she or he parrots what I'm saying.
And if she continues to say what I think word for word, verbatim, to everybody else, then I will allow them to continue being above me.
And you know as well, like the second that you desync from your platform, the moment that you misalign, morally speaking, with your support network of leftist psychopaths, they destroy you entirely.
So I was talking to you earlier, Phil, about how I completely replaced my entire sort of viewer base after the cancellation attempt I had several years ago.
And what I've discovered, and this is what I'm actually going to be doing a video on real soon, I've got three videos coming up.
One's about Wog.
And okay, so this is actually a goth I bought from home.
We're talking about hierarchy and how beauty is something that Goth has always in part of his imagery, but how the left kind of doesn't really kind of reject that because of the fact that they reject the idea of hierarchy.
I do think that this is something that is worth drilling down on, though.
The fact that the left has kind of embraced goth because it does walk the line, or goth has embraced the left maybe, because it does walk the line with being counterculture enough in imagery.
But the ideas that they share and they believe they can, it's safe to say, oh, well, we want everyone to be nice and we just want people to be nice and accepting.
And that's something that is, you know, like we talked about earlier, it's something that historically has been part of subcultures and counterculture because people that are attracted to these things, usually it's because they've been rejected by the mainstream or they feel like they've been rejected by the mainstream.
So one of the biggest demographics for any of these alternative subcultures, obviously, is youth.
It's the young, the teenagers, the ones who kind of like exploring themselves, self-expression.
And this was always relatively non-partisan, this kind of thing.
I mean, you remember being kids, like the last thing you wanted to fucking talk about was politics.
Right.
Someone would bring it up.
You foresaw the argument.
You're like, you know, I don't want to talk about this.
And then you could continue going on just enjoying the music or the swishy capes or whatever and stuff like that.
Around 2019, there was a radicalization of the youth.
And while the youth were comprising alternative subcultures, they were radicalized at some point.
And that is when the acquisition happened of alternative subcultures, which is why they think it's inherently theirs because they had it in their grasp when they were radicalized.
But of course, a leftist from 1979, 1983 is not the same leftist as they are now.
They would reject them entirely.
It's like it's this rejection that this is reality.
But they're talking about rounding up drug users, rounding up people that are basically destroying society.
And now I can't imagine, I don't think they play, I don't think they play anymore, but if they did, I can't imagine a leftist listening to that song and thinking, yeah, like I imagine they would be horrified, you know?
Well, they're doing, you've seen this already, this delusional takes that we, I think it's like red jumpsuit, red jumpsuit apparatus.
And Haley Williams just came out and pursued the same rhetoric where it's just like, I don't want these people at my shows.
And it's just kind of like, please just lay out just some of the basic foundations on how you're even going to curate the fans that come to your fucking show.
We're experiencing this right now with Brandon Minor.
Shout out on the team.
We were at the Pentagon during just Wednesday and we're interviewing people and we made it to the Daily Show today and they're trashing their appearance.
It's nothing, not the questions they're asking, nothing about who they are as people.
They have to dunk on their appearance because that's all they have.
Because the way they rose to power, they were given it, right?
Because they never earned it, they never achieved it.
There is no stable foundations to the ideologies.
There's nothing that is so immutable about the movement that it could be entered into debates and could wipe the fucking floor with people, right?
There's nothing there like that.
Which is why they don't debate, which is why they always resort to ad hominem, which is why they always resort to using straw man fallacies.
It's because they need to either attack the way you look, and if you're gorgeous, then they will purposefully misrepresent what you're saying in order to make it justified to attack it.
This is why they won't debate.
Because their entire ethos, all their ideology is wrong.
All of it is pure fallacy.
There's no strong foundational structure to the things that they are pushing, politically speaking.
And this is why they shoot you.
This is why they get you fired.
This is why they cancel you.
This is why they're trying to run you out of town.
You can't play shows.
Your fucking wife leaves you.
This is why they do this because they have no respectable way to truly defend their position.
Like we do, because everything we say is based in sound fact and logic.
Sure, there's opinions in there.
Like you can say they're all fuck ugly.
Right?
But even that could be, you know, objective, not subjective.
Yeah, I mean, look, when it comes to beauty standards, as much as the left wants to say that they're somehow created by men and that they're somehow subjective and stuff, it's not.
When a man sees an attractive woman, and you can look at studies that have essentially broken down what men find attractive and stuff, it's always the same.
And it's the same basically from culture to culture.
There's some variation.
Some people like women that are a little more voluptuous than others.
But at the end of the day, narrow waist, a little bit wider hips, fairly symmetrical face, small noses.
These things are what men find attractive.
And that has nothing to do with society's decisions.
This is all based on, I mean, it's based on evolution, honestly.
It's based on the things that evolution has said.
These traits are most likely to provide you with offspring that will be healthy and that will survive.
It's more just what they wish people found attractive them and what people actually biologically have found attractive through evolution and what actually works.
What makes people want to put something in another place, right?
I think, and this is just a conjecture, but her and her co-star, they recently had an interview where they said that they were in some kind of weird name, demisexual, non-monogamous.
Yeah, because it was about the fact that people wanted validation for the way that they were.
But it didn't mean that they actually believed that it was healthy.
Healthy at any size is going away.
It didn't mean that they actually believed that they were beautiful, even though nine out of 10 women will look at the 10th woman and no matter what she looks like, they'll say, oh, you're a 10, you're beautiful.
And that's something that the whatever podcast has shown a light on and made it very clear that women will consistently lie to each other about what they look like, their aesthetics.
And now that you've got things like Gozempic and Munjaro and stuff, the body positivity movement is going away because it has been based on a lie.
And I think that that speaks to a lot of the way that the left kind of frames the world.
It's all them trying to assert what they want into reality as opposed to responding to reality and taking action in their life to taking difficult action in their life to do what they can to better themselves and better their lives.
And you see it with people that are Caleb Hammer, right?
He's a financial YouTuber.
He goes and basically breaks down people's spending and says, you know, this is wrong, this is wrong.
And I mean, he's a little on the coarse side because some people need tough love.
But it's not that people are unable to manage money.
It's not that people are unable to earn money.
Caleb has made it very clear that people make bad decisions and it comes back to their own decisions.
And that's the same thing with people that in the body positivity movement.
It wasn't that they actually believed that they were beautiful at any size.
It was that they didn't want to do the hard things to become smaller.
The people that are people that tend to be poor more often than not, it's not that they are being oppressed by a billionaire or by society.
It's that they make bad money decisions.
They finance burritos from Taco Bell with Huarna.
You know, it's bad decisions.
And that's something that the left totally rejects because they don't like the idea of having better outcomes from better.
Again, this is one of the double speak, like the misnomers they use in order to glorify their movements because it wasn't body positive.
It wasn't like people who were in great shape were also being commended and respected.
It was just them exclusively.
And then once the means to simplify the path between looking like a bore and then looking gorgeous and fitting into all your clothes and feeling good about yourself the first time, because a drug came along, a magic pill, they were like, hell yes.
It was the most ironic thing.
Like we were just like, how do we stop the fat positivity movement?
How can we end this destructive thing?
How can we do this?
How, how, how?
This is so insane.
There's so many people here.
They're causing so much damage.
And then it turns out they destroyed it themselves.
The theme of like every, if you ever watch one of those documentaries on people getting out of like Scientology, like the one thing that they all have in common is, I thought I was the only one and I was walking around this big fake plastic smile.
Yeah, to your point, Callan, I don't see people feeling like or expressing that they feel like they were lied to.
I don't feel like people are saying that they feel victimized.
They are putting the people that have done the thing to get skinnier.
They're saying, well, they were liars.
So the people that were in the body positivity movement that didn't take the drugs or what have you, the people that looked up to Lizzo or Amy Schumer.
I just want to make sure it's Goths Against Cancel Culture on Facebook.
Because of all these wonderful people, if we can make such a massive graphic shift like this, right?
If we can get the sort of line graph of Goth going from liberal to back to the center, if the power is taken away from being an outspoken big-mouth leftist, if that is no longer cool, if that's no longer getting you likes on Instagram, if that's no longer getting you high fives at the Antifa meetups, they'll drop it themselves.
So we were talking about, you guys were mentioning the Goths Against Canceled Culture Facebook group, and it's had significant growth in the past, how long?
So I guess the question I have then is, do you think that this kind of because I mean, goth and metal music, industrial music, like they're definitely still subcultures.
I mean, metal's probably, well, I'm not sure that goth and metal are comparable.
Yeah, well, the point that I'm making is they're not as underground as industrial, I would say.
I think industrial music probably still is.
You know, you've got nine-inch nails that, you know, arguably people might say is industrial or basic and industrial, but there's not a lot of bands that kind of play around in that space the way that there are bands that play around in the goth and the metal space.
And so I would say that goth and metal are more mainstream.
But the point that I'm making is the movement, right?
The movement from the left to the right, the increase in your Discord, the increase in the Goths Against Cancel Culture Facebook group, that kind of stuff, if it's 16,000, 20,000, as much as it's great growth, it's not enough to reach a critical mass.
And I'm wondering if you guys feel like there is that kind of energy where you could reach a critical mass to really kind of start to shape the underground, or do you think that it's still going to be a long slog?
Because again, a lot of people is one thing, but to shape, have enough to really shape the underground, shape the way that people think, that's a different animal.
And I'm wondering how you guys feel about whether or not it's actually something that's going to have a lasting impact and actually start to really shape the overall opinions.
Well, I was telling Brian this last night in the hotel.
The fact that we're even here means that we're approaching something that could be considered critical mass.
This has been so isolated for so long, and they get to play around with it, and they get to do and say whatever they want.
They get to make the rules.
I don't play by the rules, right?
Ironically, I am a rebel.
I am a punk within this alternative subculture.
I'm causing such a stir.
And the fact that we're getting to this point now, and we're here talking to you on this platform, and we're able to sort of bring to light the sort of authoritarianism that has existed with alternative subcultures, and the support that this could potentially garner means that the 16,000 that has existed while it's been an underground movement this entire time, even beyond this podcast, even with you know, beyond with the videos that I'm going to be doing,
it's only pointing to the fact that trending-wise, this is going to continue.
No, I mean, it's into that point, it's gotten to the point where even if we didn't have the festival that we're planning and the compilation that we're coming out with, because yeah, we're trying to get what you're talking about, Phil, that critical mass.
Yeah, so that's something that I'm interested in hearing a little bit more about.
So when people think of goth, a lot of times they think it's just music.
But there's a lot of different types of art in the goth kind of world.
So whether you're talking about, you know, we're talking about imagery, so you've got a lot of people that are photographers that, especially nowadays with using Photoshop to merge images and stuff that they can take, take the cathedral in Cologne and put that in a picture that you took in your backyard or what have you.
Or you're talking about artists and stuff.
Do you think that there's the kind of crossover from the music area into other aspects?
Because I know that the goth stuff, especially when you're talking about imagery, it's not, I imagine, and I'm not a visual artist, but I imagine it's hard to inject the politics into that kind of visual art and have it still live in the goth sphere.
Do you think that there's the same kind of crossover there?
Well, this has been something that has been quite ambiguous within the alternative goth subculture for quite some time.
There was always this misinterpretation that gothic does not equal goth.
Now, this is the kind of discussions that I'm open to having, right?
So some people would say that, yes, goth is the music-based subculture.
Me personally, I think it's the themes that inspired those goth bands that is what goth subculture is.
The bands just happen to be a big part of it.
It's not the part of it.
And my justification for that is the fact that Goth basically, for purists out there, goth basically lasted from like 1978, maybe with The Scream by Susie and the Banshees, maybe 1978, Sam Sergey.
Like it basically is film and cinema was the inspirations for a lot of the Doors stuff, which inspired the original sort of gothic rock movement at the end of the 70s.
This is undeniable, like cinema, film, like literally, it's all there.
And so, right, it's this kind of indelible crossover because those are like the people you hung out with if you were in the cool alt world and weren't, you know, I had him on my show and Politics Never Came Up.
Terry Bogard says, Terry Bogardo says, my hot topic at the time was a thrift store.
All I needed was five bucks to make my own individual look for a month.
Hop Topic was a poser store to me.
And that's, I mean, I think that that's something that a lot of people in the underground kind of felt when you first saw Hot Topic pop up, you were corporatized, not touching that.
I mean, so for us, I was by the when Hot Topics started to go around, I was kind of, I was like pushing 30.
So for me, it was like, well, I guess so, you know, whatever.
I had lost the desire for the exclusivity that I had when I was a teenager, right?
Like, because when I was a kid in the 90s, I was like, this is mine.
This is ours.
You guys can't take it.
You know, like, we were very protective of it.
By the time I was kind of 30, I was like, well, you know, I guess this is all right.
You know, it didn't, I didn't find it so repulsive.
I was never like the kind of dude that would wear hot topic clothes.
I was never a dude that looked like I was all that punk rock.
very much just i was i grew up with metallica so it was like yeah you were the ripped skinny jeans You got jeans, jeans in a t-shirt, and that was what you wore.
I mean, obviously he was the guy that everyone knew about because they got signed right after they got Brian.
But yeah, I was on the Somber Eyes to the Sky record.
And I remember I saw them.
They had another singer.
And right now his name escapes me and I feel bad about it.
And I'd been friends with Matt, the guitar player, because my old death metal band, Perpetual Doom, and his old band, Exhumed, Exhumed Massachusetts because there was an Exhumed from California at the time, too.
We'd played a bunch of shows together and became buddies.
And I saw their band and I was like, that's what I want to do.
And there's a lot of crossover between Shadows Fall, All That Remains, Kill Switch Engage, the bands that kind of came from that area.
I played in a band with Adam and Joel, band called Aftershock for a little while before All That Remains got our start.
So there's a lot of that, the incestuous stuff going on.
Actually, John Donay was in Aftershock before I played that.
These reality nine communists are the reason I quit the music industry.
Look, I don't blame you.
You know, there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of pressure if you step out of line.
I caught, there was a lot of people that I was, you know, friendly with.
And when I stepped out of line, they were publicly making the statements denouncing me.
And I'm like, they're, you know, dudes that like, when you were hanging out, you know, in private before everybody had a smartphone in their pocket, before social media, said some of the most atrociously abhorrent things, made some of the jokes that you'd just be like, whoa, nowadays, you know, they, if the word got out, they'd be canceled.
And then they're like sending emails and making public statements.
Phil shouldn't say this.
And I'm like, I know you.
I know what you said.
I remember the things that you said.
So it's, it's, it's, it was, especially like early teens for the music industry, like right around the Tumblr kind of spilling into the regular world.
The victimhood as a currency is something that's, you know, something that the left has really made a they made a profit with it, definitely, but they've, they've also made it making victimhood social currency where they're beyond weaponizing it.
I was fortunate enough to play the original CBGBs, but whoa, cool.
I'm an old guy.
I'm an old guy.
Damn, Phil.
Actually, I think we played twice.
But anyways, Peter Delete Deleterious says there's a sick punk band from Staten Island, New York City called Gamma Ghouls, who were the only band in New York City to play during COVID with zero restrictions.
There'll be a lot of times where I'll post something on X about all that remains and some hardcore kid or metal kid that's totally, you know, brain rotted with the virus or the politically correct culture is spouting about how much I'm whatever the buzzword of the day is.
You know, let's see.
We got a couple more.
Let's see.
Dark Shadows says, as a 21-year-old Gen Z conservative musician, thank you guys for standing up for us.
All my friends feel like we're unheard in today's music scene.
You're not unheard, you know, and there are bands and people out there.
A lot of bands try to avoid this kind of topic, and I don't blame them.
Like Jake was saying, the most popular goths are on Instagram are people that don't ever touch this stuff.
And a lot of times that's the smart thing to do.
But just because you don't hear people that are affirming your opinions doesn't mean they're not out there.
So keep that in mind.
Let's see.
Fire and Flesh Music says we're a metal band from South Dakota.
F woke support bands like us on Spotify.
Oh, yeah.
And then Schmidt 1013 says, any love for Christ, for Christ analog on the panel.