JONAH GOLDBERG: The Last Ditch for Mask Hysteria.
“The Western Massachusetts [Communist Party USA] rejects the use of conflicts among LGBTQIA+ people and organizations as a tool of division by the extreme right,” the statement said. “We reaffirm our solidarity with all those struggling against the genocide of transgender people.”
Okay, like whatever. But here’s the thing. Or a thing. Or something. The people profiled in the story aren’t mobilizing and protesting against Donald Trump or Republican governors. They’re tearing down a lesbian bar opened to be a safe haven for “dykes, transsexuals, gender freaks, workers, and their friends.” It even welcomes the “poor and unhoused” and serves them for free when necessary. The only condition: You had to wear a KN-95—or higher filtration—mask.
Because the bar was struggling financially—who could’ve guessed that serving people for free was not a great business model?—its operators announced, very politely, that they were going to go mask-optional on Saturday nights. A fierce backlash ensued. One patron replied, “I hope you get firebombed for robbing my fellow immunocompromised people of their Saturday plans just to scrape extra revenue from ablists[sic].”
Now, call me a cis-heteronormative, sellout-to-neoliberalism-and-patriarchal-values square, but I kinda think this is overkill.
One of the central themes of communist history, and radicalism generally, is the tendency to tear down the groups, institutions, tribes, whatever, closest to you. Who were the first victims of the Jacobin Reign of Terror? Their fellow revolutionaries, the Girondins. Long before the Nazis turned on the Jews, they first turned on the leadership of the SA, aka the Brownshirts. Stalin’s Terror mostly liquidated fellow Communists. In the 1960s, the new left disliked conservatives and Republicans, but they hated liberals and moderate Democrats. The radical jabronis of the new right hate the Reaganites and Bushies, maybe not more than they hate the left, but they dedicate a lot more time and energy to them.
I think there’s a lot of this kind of dynamic in the riot of dysfunction chronicled by the Globe. But the more interesting thing to me is how the ideological rhetoric the angry patrons of the Last Ditch deployed is really a mask for something else. For instance, Soe Noire, the stage name of a leading critic of the bar and the head of another “Queer COVID-conscious collective in Western Massachusetts,” hurls all sorts of ideological buzz phrases at the bar’s proprietor during a struggle session. Noire accuses the owner of shedding “WHITE THEY THEM TEARS” and accuses the Last Ditch of not being “a safe environment nor interested in revolutionary praxis.”
If your irreducible requirement for a good bar is that it be dedicated to “revolutionary praxis,” you might end up drinking alone more than you want. That’s late capitalism for you.
Read the whole thing. The surprise that the struggle session over the Last Ditch and its perma-marked barflies went viral is vaguely reminiscent of the reaction to Leonard Bernstein’s infamous fundraising party for the members of the Black Panthers being tried by the state of New York for terrorism-related charges, which Tom Wolfe memorialized in his legendary1970 article for New York magazine, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s.” After its publication, all of the participants were surprised at just how weird they looked to everyday Americans when the spotlight was shown on them.
But why did the left-leaning Boston Globe of all publications write up the story of the Last Ditch? At NRO, Jeffrey Blehar adds: Beleaguered Lesbian Bar Hits Potential Jackpot.
This story perfectly embodies and makes human a dynamic they’ve been living through for 20 years. Armand Domalewski, a YIMBY San Francisco progressive (which is to say, not leftist enough for many activists in the city) put it perfectly last night: “The reason this lesbian bar story went so viral is that basically every left wing person in America has personally experienced some version of this story in their life over the course of the last decade and is really goddam sick of it.”
If these bar owners are smart, they’ll manage to turn all of this new attention into a profit. (Rosa DeLauro, the famously blue-haired crone/representative from nearby Connecticut, proposed a solidarity trip over the state border on Twitter, which is honestly kind of touching.) But chances are they’re not all that smart, because — in a development no professional comedy writer in modern times would have been daring enough to script — at least one of them has already dropped out of the entire rotten, debt-ridden commitment . . . to instead attend clown school. Good writers would consider themselves too sophisticated to write on-the-nose, audience-pandering slop like that. Or the detail where one patron mused about how to save the Last Ditch, proposing a Lady Gaga–themed dance night: “Gaga is canceled,” she says. “Gaga is Zionist.” But the Boston Globe didn’t have to invent the comedic absurdities; they only had to report on them.
There’s likely no way someone writing fiction could invent a story this crazy. At Spiked, Jenny Holland writes: That lesbian Covid-conscious bar is beyond a satirist’s wildest dreams.
Another attendee, a person by the name of Yams – a ‘gender fluid, racially ambiguous, black biracial, a mom, low income’ – offered some real talk: ‘Nobody is owed comfort on land in which rape and pillage has happened.’
Not surprisingly, Soe Noire features heavily in the struggle session as well. ‘I’m rescinding all my monetary support from now on’, ‘he’ (she) huffs. And then issues the demand: ‘Pay me.’
There is not a single comedian or satirist on Earth who could come up with a better parody of woke. Yet however much we might laugh, this lunatic fringe is not exactly fringe any longer. The obsessions these ladies demonstrate – with disability, with Covid, with queerness – have made their way into the bloodstream of the body politic through an increasingly influential Democratic Socialists of America and an increasingly radicalised cohort of downwardly mobile, overeducated and unemployable children of elites. It was only two weeks ago that I was writing about the socialist conference that damned GLP-1s, fitness and even healthcare as fascist. And yet, here we are, once again.
These people take themselves very seriously. We should take them seriously as well.
In the 1970s, liberal satirists could poke fun at their fellow leftists. A thinly disguised Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army were an important plot point in Paddy Chayefsky’s Network. In 2026 though, the Last Ditch is a Saturday Night Live sketch begging to happen, but likely no writer on the show will touch this story.
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