The Last Ditch for Mask Hysteria

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, September 25, 2026

 

Maybe it says something about my excessively bourgeois, disproportionately right-of-center, gay-friendly but mostly not gay social and professional circles, but I haven’t met anybody who didn’t love the Boston Globe piece on the Last Ditch Bar. I’ve barely even seen any criticism of it, and the criticism I have seen has been more like a continuation of the joke. The most forceful condemnation of the Globe piece that I’ve come across was issued by the Western Massachusetts Communist Party USA.

 

Let’s stop right here. I love that there’s a Western Massachusetts Communist Party. It implies the existence of an Eastern Massachusetts Communist Party, and from there the People’s Front of Judea vs. Judean People’s Front jokes just start tumbling out like patrons leaving the Last Ditch on ladies night. I mean, we all know that those Eastern Massachusetts faux communists lack the revolutionary zeal of the true believers of the Berkshires and Pioneer Valley. When the revolution comes, the Kulaks of Boston and Salem will be the first to be reeducated or liquidated.

 

Fun fact: When I googled “Western Massachusetts,” I got results describing the region. But when you google “Eastern Massachusetts,” the results are just for the whole state of Massachusetts, which any Western Massachusetts Stalinist will tell you is evidence of how the Easterners are in bed with the corporate hegemons, colonizing the whole state with their settler ideology. This will no doubt be part of the indictment when the trials come.

 

The Western Mass Communists objected to the story because it invited “heightened national scrutiny” at a time when the Trump administration and Republican governors are carrying out a “genocide of LGBTQIA+ people.”

 

“The Western Massachusetts CPUSA 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.

 

What I mean by a mask for something else is that the Marxist and Marxish vocabulary is the language the critics have available. I don’t know if this has happened to you, but sometimes when I am in a non-English-speaking country, I will lapse into using whatever tidbits and snippets of any foreign language I do know. I’ve spoken bits of Czech to Germans, slivers of German to Czechs, and chunks of Spanish to French people. Your brain grabs what it can from the lost-and-found box of foreign languages.

 

The language these people have greater fluency in is obviously the subdialect of gender theory. But between the Marxist jargon and the trans terminology, there lies another vocabulary of neuroses, or psychobabble, or hygienic paranoia. It’s a weird dialect or “fusional language” that blends terms like “revolutionary praxis” with racialist identity politics, even a bit of anti-Zionism, and medicalized phobias about contagion. It’s a kind of Yiddish for the immunocompromised, real and, I firmly believe, alleged alike.

 

The COVID-19 epidemic ended years ago. There are vaccines and many treatments for it, but like the famous Japanese soldiers keeping World War II alive in their hearts long after the paperwork was signed on the USS Missouri, the ranks of the traumatized and COVID-neurotic live on, hiding in plain sight from an ended epidemic. The Last Ditch is a kind of Brigadoon for these people.

 

And I have to say, while I think a lot of it is funny, pathetic, and weird, I also find some of it kind of touching. I don’t think these people are living happy and healthy lives. But the Last Ditch was a place for unhappy and unhealthy people to enjoy each other’s company.

 

But I also think there’s something else going on. The tendency of radicals to attack those closest to them gets at it a little. But I think that’s too political. I mean, I doubt many of these self-styled Marxist types could speak for three minutes on Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program.

 

I’ve long argued that American or even Western culture is suffering from a kind of autoimmune disease. It’s a cultural and political version of the hygiene hypothesis. Why do so many kids get asthma? One reason is that the environments they grow up in are too clean. Not having enough real allergens to fight, our immune systems become hypersensitive. You know how you can prevent kids from getting peanut allergies? Give them peanut butter when they’re young. Wait too long, and the body overreacts to peanuts. Kids who grow up on farms are much less likely to get asthma, because their bodies learned to deal with dirt and dander from day one. (Alliteration for the win!).

 

America has gotten steadily less racist over the last 70 years. But large chunks of our society, the lymphatic system of the body politic, are more attuned to spotting and combating racism in the nooks and crannies than ever before (this tendency, I believe, has invited an ugly right-wing racist reaction. But that’s a topic for another day). Noire, a lesbian who uses masculine pronouns, is so hypersensitive to racism, he is sure that it’s not only the explanation for the mask-optional policy, but also explains why the apology for the policy was insufficient. “I’m not going to give grace,” he explains, when someone is “spreading rhetoric that will get people hurt.” The evidence of this dangerous rhetoric spreading? The bar’s Instagram account “liked” some of the responses that supported the initial policy announcement. That’s not exactly Bull Connor with a megaphone.

 

This is the problem with our cultural autoimmune disorder. It has a kind of China Syndrome logic to it. People who suffer from it cannot turn it off; they cannot take the win. The meltdown is inexorable, burning through every barrier, every obstacle. Noire’s emotional meltdown acts the same way. He cannot offer “grace” to someone who is losing money on a bar that caters to people like him, because such thinking has no ends—it’s means all the way down. Acid doesn’t say, “I’ve dissolved enough material.” Fire doesn’t declare, “I’ve burned enough of the house.” Water doesn’t decide, “This is a nice spot, I’ll seek my level tomorrow.”

 

We get the term “last ditch” from the military. It appears to have come from William of Orange, the idea being that it’s the last line of defense. To die in the last ditch is to fall in battle because there’s nowhere else to fall back to. To fight to the last ditch, or make a last-ditch effort, is to stand your ground because there’s no other option, save dishonorable surrender. Noire and friends are fine with seeing the Last Ditch go under, even if it might be the last ditch for people like them in Western Massachusetts. Because for them, revolutionary praxis means tearing down anything that is good—on their terms—in the name of the perfect, and the impossible.