There’s a story out of Massachusetts that is so completely insane that if I, as a staunch conservative and occasional anti-woke crusader, had been asked to invent the most ridiculous right-wing fever dream about the far left, I could not have come up with anything this good.
In fact, if it hadn’t been reported by the Boston Globe and then covered by the Blocked and Reported podcast—with actual recordings from the Zoom meeting—I’m honestly not sure I would have believed it.
The story centers on Last Ditch, a lesbian/queer bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts. The bar had a strict masking policy, but business wasn’t exactly booming. Eventually, the people running it decided to try making Saturday nights mask-optional. Not mask-free. Not “COVID is fake.” Just one night a week where masks would be optional.
The reaction was astonishing.
One of the early responses reportedly hoped the business would be “firebombed.” Others accused the bar of ableism and even eugenics. Think about that for a second. A struggling lesbian bar decides that customers may choose whether to wear a mask on Saturday night, and somehow we have arrived at eugenics and firebombing.
So the bar apologized.
Problem solved, right?
Of course not. The apology itself was immediately criticized because the social-media post wasn’t adequately accessible to visually impaired people. Now, accessibility and alt text are perfectly legitimate things to care about. But taken as part of this particular sequence—mask-optional Saturday, eugenics, firebombing, apology, apology declared insufficiently accessible—you begin to understand why this story feels like satire written by someone who desperately needs an editor to tell him to tone it down.
Then came the community meeting.
This is where the story achieves something close to perfection. People gathered at the bar, around a stripper pole, wearing N95 masks, and began the meeting with breathing exercises. Yes: masked breathing exercises around a stripper pole at an emergency community meeting about masking.
And somehow it got stranger.
One of the mediators was a mental-health professional, which apparently caused concern among some participants that her presence was “wildly unsafe” because she might have the ability to initiate an involuntary psychiatric hospitalization. Imagine asking for a mediator, getting a mediator, discovering the mediator is actually professionally trained in dealing with people in distress, and then deciding the mediator herself represents a threat.
Meanwhile, Jackie, the person left trying to keep this bar alive, finally poured her heart out. She talked about working multiple jobs, living in her truck for a time, damaging her credit and pouring herself into a business that was nevertheless falling behind on its rent. Whatever you think about her decisions, I found myself feeling some sympathy for her. She seemed exhausted, overwhelmed and genuinely hurt.
The response from one of her critics, Soe Noire, was "“you chose to use your time to spill tears and center your feelings” followed by: “This is incredibly racist and deflecting behavior.”
Later Noire's instagram post included the memorable phrase “WHITE THEY THEM TEARS.”
To me this is where the story stopped being merely funny and became a little sad.
Here was somebody breaking down in front of people who were ostensibly members of the same community, and even her tears could be interpreted as another ideological offense. There seemed to be no exit ramp. Make a mistake: offense. Apologize: inadequate apology. Explain yourself: centering yourself. Cry: problematic tears. Bring in a mediator: unsafe mediator.
After roughly three and a half hours of this, somebody suggested having another meeting. Noire objected to being expected to provide more emotional and physical labor for free and characterized the request as racist. At another point the message was even more succinct: “Pay me.”
Oh, and somewhere in this entire saga, one of the former owners left to attend clown school.
I’m not kidding.
And perhaps the greatest achievement of this story is that going to clown school somehow emerges as one of the more conventional and sensible life choices anybody makes.
It’s easy for me to laugh at all of this. I’m conservative. There are moments in this story that sound like somebody assembled every stereotype conservatives have about extreme progressive politics and put them into a blender. But after the laughter, I actually think there’s a lesson here that is bigger than left versus right.
This is what can happen when ideology becomes more important than friendship, forgiveness, proportionality and basic human grace.
These weren’t conservatives invading a progressive bar to pick a fight. These people were largely allies. They presumably agreed about far more than they disagreed about. Yet their remaining disagreements became so morally charged that people who should have been capable of working together instead began treating one another as adversaries.
That should be a warning to my side, too.
The right has its own extremists, its own antisemites, its own white supremacists, its own purity tests and its own people who seem to believe that anybody who disagrees with them on one issue must therefore be a traitor. Conservatives shouldn’t look at a story like this and simply congratulate ourselves. The human tendency that produced this mess isn’t confined to one ideology.
We need to leave people a path back.
An apology has to be allowed to work sometimes. A person can be wrong without being evil. Somebody can disagree with you without secretly wanting to harm you. Not every mistake reveals some hidden moral corruption. And if someone sincerely says, “I screwed up; I’m sorry,” perhaps our first instinct shouldn’t always be to search their apology for the next prosecutable offense.
I have friends who are much farther to the left politically than I am. I don’t particularly want them to become conservatives. They probably wouldn’t particularly enjoy becoming conservatives anyway. What I would love is for all of us—left and right—to move away from the extremes.
I’d love to see my far-left friends become regular liberals again. They can vote differently than I do. They can disagree with me about Trump, taxes, abortion, immigration, Israel, transgender policy or virtually anything else. We can argue about all of it. What I don’t want is a world in which political assassination becomes something to cheer for, countries or peoples should be wiped away, or disagreement itself becomes evidence that someone is irredeemably evil.
And conservatives have an obligation to reject that kind of thinking when it comes from our own side as well.
Maybe that’s the teachable moment buried underneath this wonderfully bizarre story. Normal people on the left and right don’t have to agree about politics. We just need enough humility to recognize that the person across from us might be wrong without being wicked—and enough self-awareness to recognize that sometimes the person who is wrong might be us.
We should be able to laugh together. We should be able to disagree. We should be able to forgive. We should be able to remain friends.
And perhaps, every once in a while, when the entire room has completely lost its mind, we should have the wisdom to recognize that clown college might actually be the healthiest option.
If this were fiction, I’d say the whole thing was a little too on the nose so to speak. But that’s the problem with reality: sometimes it doesn’t know when to tone down the satire.
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