The Boston Globe's viral coverage of a lesbian bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts, which relaxed its mask policy for one night a week, became a cultural lightning rod. The story, initially reported by a podcast with transphobic and dismissive leanings, quickly escalated into a national spectacle, driving record subscriptions and being weaponized by right-wing media. A key comment—“I hope your venue gets firebombed”—was traced to a user known for promoting anti-woke, hijab-inspired content, raising questions about whether it's satire or performative outrage. The narrative centers on a deeply flawed community dynamic, where disabled, queer, and financially struggling individuals like bar owner Jackie Matallion are treated as adversaries, despite their efforts to create inclusive space. The media coverage reveals how personal conflicts are exploited to fuel broader culture wars, with critics noting that the story amplifies ableism, transphobia, and hostility toward marginalized groups. The backlash included threats, harassment, and the removal of online reviews, highlighting the real harm inflicted on vulnerable communities. While the episode critiques the sensationalism of the media, it also exposes internal contradictions within progressive spaces—where criticism of behavior is often rooted in fear, not understanding. Ultimately, the story serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of reducing complex social issues to moral slurs, and the need for media to prioritize empathy over outrage. The episode urges listeners to examine not just the content, but the form of media narratives that exploit marginalized people for political gain.
already folks, so you think that woke went away that was in remission wrong. Now, there's a story that came out from the Boston Globe that has apparently shattered all of their records in terms of subscriptions because it demonstrates full scale how psychotic the bleeding edge of the left is on rare occasion. There is a circumstance so momentous or bizarre or extraordinary that it leaves almost no room for subjective analysis. All I can do in these cases, if I'm going to speak of it at all, is simply relate it to you in stupified amazement. We've got to talk about the lesbian bar. Do we not? The lesbian bar in Massachusetts. A lesbian bar in Massachusetts called last ditch. The last ditch bar. It's in Massachusetts. It's a very woke bar. Their mission statement for dikes, transactuals, transactuals, gender freaks, workers and friends. It had required, for years, K and 95 masks. It had a strict policy. Patrons must wear an N95 mask. But economically, it wasn't working. But then one day the rules changed. Sparked intense controversy within parts of the local queer community after announcing it would make Saturday night's mask optional. Only announced a relaxation of the mask policy for one day of the week. Just one night a week. You can take the mask off. The post triggered hundreds of angry comments, accusing the bar of being ableist, eugenicist and endangering immunocompromised people. Descalated into threats of violence. Quote. People like you kill disabled people in the name of your own leisure and convenience. Just say you're being complicit in a mass disabling event and get it over with. I hope your venue gets fire bombed for robbing my fellow immunocompromised people of their Saturday plans. I hope your venue gets fire bombed. The tolerant left did what they always do. The super woke are the most vicious against their own. And what has to amount to the best story of the last 10 years. Did you guys see that Candace Owens might be a lesbian? There's so much like lesbian happening. There's too much lesbian drama. Yeah, I wanted to know your take on that. I wasn't surprised at all. Really? Say more. I was just basically like that makes a lot of sense to me. I kind of like, hmm, well, should I say this? We should say allegedly because there are some litigious people involved in Candace Owens's life. Exactly. I'm just okay. Well, I am never ever surprised by the revelation that a loud conservative voice is allegedly secretly gay. Whether even if it's not true, I'm just like that will never surprise me ever. I feel like we should just reject her. I feel like we should be able when somebody identifies as a lesbian to be like, no, the committee has rejected your application. I'm so sorry. You will not be granted admittance to lesbianism. To this very exclusive club. You know, we get so many applications and we just don't have enough spots. Should we talk about the other lesbian happenings in pop culture and mainstream media this week? Please. Hello, hello, and welcome back to a bit fruity. I'm Matt Bernstein. I'm so happy that you're here. In January of 2002, the Boston Globe shook the world when it published a shocking article on its front page. Church allowed abused by priests for years. The report was the product of a month's long investigation into the systemic cover-up of child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. It changed the Church's reputation forever, brought hordes of abusers to justice, vindicated Shenato Conner's protest of the Church from 10 years earlier, and won the Pulitzer Prize for public service. Twenty-four years later, just last week, the Boston Globe shook the world once again. This time with an article titled, "After a COVID cautious lesbian bar relaxed its mask mandate, all hell broke loose." Hmm. The article, which chronicles a dysfunctional group of queer people trying to keep a small lesbian bar in Western Massachusetts financially afloat, wow, none of these words are in the Bible, became the Boston Globe's most red story of the year and drove a record number of subscriptions, I believe, a thousand, inspired secondary coverage from other national newspapers who sent photographers to the bar to photograph its patrons from the outside, and is, according to the Hollywood reporter, "peaking Hollywood's interest for a film adaptation." So you might have a few questions. If you're listening to this episode, you either know everything or nothing about this story, and if you know nothing, I will catch you up. But crucially, this isn't an episode about the COVID cautious lesbian bar in Western Massachusetts, not really at least. It's more of a meta-episode about the story itself. We'll have fun, we'll talk about the hijab-inspired secular accessorizations, but I also can't do this. But I also want to challenge us to do the hard thing, which is to put things into context to see the bigger picture. It's not sexy, but it is a bit fruity. Everyone hates that. Everyone hated that. Who would you play in the adaptation of the lesbian bar story in the Hollywood movie? I would definitely be the bartender who was like, "Sorry, we can't do Gaga night. She's so intense." I would want to be the co-founder who quit to go to clown school. That would be my dream role. Yeah, classic. You both took my answers. The only role left for me is the person who did the lesbian sex act while fully masked on the bar's opening night. You've provided quite an intro for yourselves, but to cover something that is in the words of Naomi Klein to absurd to take seriously and too serious to treat as just absurd. I am so excited to be joined by two friends, two lesbians. Sorry, that was kind of degrading. I'm so offended. We have Moira Donnegan, host of Inbed with The Right and Cat 10 Varge, writer of Spitfire News and relatively new, to YouTube. Welcome both of you. I'm so excited to talk about this. Thank you for having us. Thank you so much, Matt. It's always a pleasure to spend time with you and with Cat. I think we're going to have fun and maybe learn something along the way. We have a lot to talk about today before we get into it. Top line thoughts go. Oh, you know, I've had to explain this story seven times in the past five days to people who are no longer like on Twitter. Every time I think the phrase that really activates people is secular hijabi accessorization. I think there's a lot here in terms of real dynamics within queer leftist spaces that can be counterproductive to say the least and maybe malignant at worst. Then there's the kind of meta story about the media use of this intro community dispute in a small town. The way that these human interest stories or the way I like to think of them is like news stories without any news value. Get weaponized because they seem like symptoms of a broader phenomenon because they can be items in a bigger culture war, right? So it's like a both-and situation where if you're like, okay, do these people who are talked about in the story act badly? Yeah. Do they act badly in ways that I've seen other people act badly? Also, yes. Does it matter or does it deserve to be a national news story where they're mocked endlessly and made into these symbols of a bigger culture war? No, like this doesn't. This doesn't warrant any of that, right? So like there's a ton of people behaving badly in the story and I hope that we can look at the people with the most power and see how they're behaving badly more than, you know, just getting caught up in the admittedly very, very funny secular hijab inspired accessorization of it all. It's time to, for us, all to go to clown school, but we're also going to go to real school. The first thing I'd like to say about the story that we are about to tell you is that it was not first reported and made public through the Boston Globe. It was made viral by the Boston Globe, but it was actually first reported on a podcast called Blocked and Reported. The Blocked and Reported podcast is a collaboration between two writers named Jesse Single and Katie Herzog. They're like cancel culture warriors, right? They're these people who sort of rode this wave in the 2010s trying to paint themselves as reasonable and somewhat like ironic chroniclers of social justice excess. Jesse Single in particular is kind of like the bigger star of the two I would say and he's really made a career for him.
himself in transphobia. He was the author of a viral, at least 2018 article on trans kids, which was really instrumental in like kicking off the moral panic about trans children's health care. And then Katie Herzog, like, yeah, she worked for Dan Savage for a long time. She's one of these people who I think should be expelled or rejected from lesbianism. She's a gay woman. I think she lives in Seattle. And she's just like, oh, I am, I'm not like one of those excessive lesbians. I'm a good lesbian. Yeah, they're both essentially people who had these left the left arcs. Both of them were a product of their own transphobia. Yes. Katie Herzog has also been on sort of this self-annoyed lesbian bar beat crusade for a long time. She, for years, has been writing about lesbian bars and why they are like disappearing. Even though in recent years, there's actually been a resurgence of lesbian bars. But what has struck me about Katie's writing about lesbian bars that I have unfortunately read for a long time is that she doesn't even like lesbian bars. She writes about them very, very dismissively and kind of as like places she would not personally ever want to go. It's very much like I'm not like of those lesbians. Like I'm like a disaffected like cool lesbian. And she also ties up this argument about lesbian bars with this idea that lesbians as a whole are disappearing because women don't want to be lesbians anymore. They want to be non-binary or like these spaces are being overtaken by trans women instead of cis lesbians. Or the famous all the lesbians are becoming trans men. Yes. Yes. Oh yeah, she's been a big pusher of that for a long time. And I'm just like she's very clearly and openly disconnected from actual queer and lesbian spaces. And it's like as someone who spends a lot of time in queer and lesbian spaces, there are lots of cis lesbians out there. We are not an endangered species. We are not going away any time soon. And I've mainly had pleasant experiences at lesbian bars that have cropped up in recent years, except for when they only have like one bathroom in the line. It's like seven people long. Yeah, it's a real issue. I highlight that this story was first reported by these two people, Jesse single and Katie Herzog, not to insinuate that the Boston Globe stole their story. They only reported it on their podcast five days before the Boston Globe story came out. And I don't think five days would have been enough time to put this together in the way that the Boston Globe did. But because I think it's notable that the first people to report on this story are transphobic. I'm not trying to be like snarky or like reduce their views. It's just literally the case. That is what they are. And that's how they made their podcast. But anyway, some of you might be confused. So let me tell you the story of last ditch, the Western Massachusetts, COVID cautious lesbian bar. I have picked quotes from the article and summarized some of it myself. This all takes place in a little town called Greenfield, Massachusetts. Greenfield, Massachusetts is a mostly white town of about 17,000 people in a reliably progressive leaning part of the state. The nearby town Northampton is known to have one of the highest populations of lesbians in the U.S. From the globe, quote, "Greenville is close, both physically and spiritually, to Northampton." Oh, shit. It's Greenville. Yeah, Greenville. Oh my god. Why do Greenfield? Do you want to reread it? Yeah, I do. Did I make up Greenfield? I think I don't know if there is a Greenfield. All of these places just sound fake. Sorry. Okay. Wait, now I'm looking at the actual article and it says Greenfield. It is. Wait, so it's Greenfield? I think it is Greenfield. So the Boston Globe fucked it up. The Boston Globe fucked it up. I'm looking at that same paragraph in the story and it has since been corrected. I'm sorry. It's not you. It was the Globe in their rush to demonize our community. They couldn't even get the name, right? That's so bad. They're a local paper. All right. Take two. Greenfield is close, both physically and spiritually, to Northampton, sometimes referred to as lesbianville USA. In the Pioneer Valley, every bar is a lesbian bar. A friend who lives there told me so last year, three housemates in their mid 20s opted to open a COVID cautious lesbian bar called last ditch, where masks would be required to enter. They were motivated by the recent closing of two other queer bars in the area. From the globe, quote, one of the trio, Asa Rosario, a drag performer who uses it/its pronouns, envisioned a venue where it and its friends could perform. No one would be turned away from the space for lack of funds. Poor and unhoused people are welcome in the space. The police were not. When the bar first opened, it did well. And the Globe notes how opening night was a big hit. Opening night, by the way, involved a simulated sex performance. And I highlight that because that is the character, of course, which cat claimed she would be in this story if it is adapted to film, which my god, I hope it's not. But over time, foot traffic to the bar slowed. More and more visitors said they didn't have the cover fee. The bar let them in anyway. The owners fell behind on bills and couldn't pay themselves or the people who worked there. So, after consulting with the Massachusetts LGBT Chamber of Commerce, they came up with a plan to bend one of their rules and hopefully attract more customers. That plan, my listener, was to make one night per week Saturday nights mask optional. And while that might strike one as a betrayal of the bar's stated mission, the hope was that they could attract a broader audience on Saturday nights because the financial situation had become dire. From the Globe, quote, "But by the time of last ditches monthly community meeting on September 11th, just coincidence, only one of the original founders Jacqueline Matallion is still involved. The two others stepped back from the daily operation months before Matallion says, citing various pressures and health issues. One, had enrolled in clown school. I mean, I'm not confused as to why this went viral, you know. What do you mean one of the founders exited to go to clown school? I mean, it is engineered to go viral, you know. I saw a lot of people saying like, this is a very, very well written story. And I do agree. And like, it is punchy and it is engaging. And I also think that reading this, there is no doubt in my mind that the journalist behind this story wanted people to make fun of the subjects in the story. 100,000 percent. And as I was reading it, I was like on the plane as I was reading this. And I was eating it up. And I also thought, oh no. Because while this is perhaps great fodder within the safe confines of like a queer friend groups group chat, I do not trust the general public and the big broad internet to handle this story with care, especially the way it's been written, which to your point obviously encourages harassment towards the people it's describing. And I was right for feeling that way. Really the clown school and the focus on the it/its pronouns or where I was like, yeah, I mean, this is going to make anti-woke commentators absolutely gleeful. And it did, as I'm sure we will get into like literal opinion columns written by center right anti-woke thinkers were so thrilled to be able to take these details and run wild with them. Yeah, exactly. So Jackie and Italian, the remaining founder of the original three, as it turns out, was now $50,000 in the whole personally. And Jackie had taken on four jobs to keep the bar afloat and was living in her car. The globe describes in excruciating detail how the community meeting unfolded, wherein they were to discuss the Saturday night policy change. It was composed of Jackie, a few patrons, and a few volunteer mediators, one of whom was a licensed therapist. They began as the globe notes with a breathing exercise. Quote. Almost immediately, the proceedings are derailed. One of last ditches most vocal critics, the head of another queer, COVID-conscious collective in Western Massachusetts, a performer and artist who goes by the name Zoo Noir, has been posting complaints about last ditch for days. Now Noir joins the meeting on Zoom. He and other critics began to flood the Zoom chat with irate messages, which are due to free read aloud to the group. The therapist mediator tries to defuse the frustration between members, which does not work. It's messed up that the mediator is dismissing those attending virtually. That's not accessibility, someone responds in the chat. A lot of people are calling for an acknowledgement of harm, and I'm hearing a white therapist centering the feelings of a majority white and white adjacent staff writes Noir, who is black. Moreover, the Zoom attendees speculate that the mediator's licensed status makes her a mandated reporter, an agent of the state akin to police. One person going by Moss asks if the mediator could have them hospitalized against their will, adding that her presence is, quote, wildly unsafe. Some of these are like interesting inclusions. There's no reason other than to mock this person and to know that they go by Moss. Yes. Yes.
And on the other hand, what does "white adjacent" mean? Right, white and white adjacent stuff. Like, what are you talking about? Like, be specific to find your terms. I'm torn in so many directions here and I basically do sort of feel, everybody is behaving badly except for Jackie who needs to be rescued from this situation. But like, these are a lot of rhetorical choices that are meant to display what is considered as like non-secret or contempt of these meeting participants. But then it's got so much contempt for them itself, right? And I'm like almost like, okay, if the whole world is treating you like you're this ridiculous, contemptible person, I kind of understand why you're behaving badly. Like, it sort of starts to make sense to me. It's like, okay, if this is the treatment you're getting from mainstream institutions, if this is the treatment you're getting outside of your very, very narrow community, where you're just like mocked as ridiculous. Like of course you're a dick. Like that would make anybody embittered and weird and like probably a little paranoid. - Additionally, I read local news coverage that has since come out about the virality of this Boston Globe piece and has interviewed people within it who were like, I'm a patron of this bar. Specifically, there was an interview of the person who's the manager of the upstairs restaurant who would sometimes go downstairs and grab a drink on their way out from work. And they were like, I talked to the journalist from the Boston Globe and they seemed really nice. They told us essentially that they were going to write this glowing piece of our bar and this is not what we expected at all. - Yeah, and that doesn't surprise me because I think a lot of people in the queer and immunocompromised and disabled community are very accustomed to being treated this way by members of the general public hence why this space exists to begin with because there are not very many truly safe spaces for people existing within the most marginalized spheres of society. And I imagine that in order to gain that trust, the journalist did spend a lot of time talking to people about their concerns and on a very interpersonal level and then did turn around and write this very short piece that is extremely flippant toward what these people are struggling with. And I can imagine that that felt like a huge betrayal from the people who actually were talking to this journalist and giving her their time. The other thing I was gonna say is just as a journalist, you do oftentimes engage in rapport with your sources and with the people who you are talking to that can be like friendly even though you know that your story is not going to portray them in a light that's gonna make them happy. And it's not your job as a journalist to make your sources happy. It's not what you are there to do especially if you're covering someone with a lot of power. But what I find so striking about this is it's like you are pulling out all of the stops to kind of maybe manipulate these sources into giving you information. But these are not, this is not holding power to account. These are not people who possess any structural power. They behaved badly in this interpersonal conflict. But imaginative journalists treated like actual fixtures of power with this type of skepticism and like passing this kind of judgment. Imaginative people treated the cops like this or politicians like this. Like imaginative journalism chose to use this type of reporting to actually hold power to account more frequently. - Back to the struggle session over the debate of what to do about masking on Saturday nights. At this point, Jackie Mattellian, the sole owner, begins crying under her mask, explaining how she only ever got involved in the bar project to support her two roommates, those roommates who are no longer involved. Quote, "I never really wanted to do this," she says. "I don't think I'm doing a very good job." The globe writes, "The online critics are unmoved." Quote, "You chose to use your time to spill tears and center your feelings, new our posts in the chat. This is incredibly racist and deflecting behavior." Eventually, after three and a half hours of discussion, the meeting wraps up. Newara has more to say, "But when someone suggests he come to the next community meeting, he refuses." Quote, "There's a lot of emotional and physical labor that goes into this. So for you as a white person that asks for me to stay for another meeting for free is incredibly disingenuous and racist. I'm not doing that." Newara spends the hours after the meeting, posting furious Instagram stories about Mattellian and last ditch. Mattellian, who uses she-they pronouns, has been shedding, quote, "white-they-them-tears," he writes. The bar was not, quote, "a safe environment nor interested in revolutionary practice." The globe reporter asks Newara if he has any sympathy for Jackie, given the financial strain she's under, to which Newara says, "No." So out of necessity, last ditch opts to go mask optional on Saturday nights. They announced this on the bar's Instagram account in a rainbow colored graphic, which read, "It is with love. We inform our immunocompromised disabled divas. We will be opening Saturday nights as mask optional." This post drew a total of 400 comments at the time of the Boston Globes publishing this article. Some of those comments were supportive. Others were critical. Just say you're being complicit in a mass disabling event and get it over with, wrote one commentator. People like you killed disabled people in the name of your own leisure and convenience posted another. And lastly, the comment which the Boston Globe blasted in huge bold text at the top of the article, the comment, which was quoted in subsequent coverage everywhere from Fox News to the New York Post, quote, "I hope your venue gets firebombed." And that is the whole story. [LAUGHTER] Ugh. This is dark. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that firebombing seems a little disproportionate to me. What do you mean? No, I'm just kidding. [LAUGHTER] My biggest frustration with the people who were leaving these comments on this post are there seems to be a real gap in understanding here that this bar and Jackie Metallion are not like capitalist owners who are trying to like get every last drop of money out of the disabled immunocompromised population. This is literally someone who it has been unhoused for periods of time because she is pouring every single resource she has into trying to create this community space. And yet she's being treated as if she's like target or like this massive corporation. This woman has actually sacrificed so much. This wasn't even her idea to start this bar. She's been put in this like horrible position. And so the level of cruelty is very-- it was quite depressing to read. Yeah, I want to like-- I want to have a talk with Jackie. I'm like, girl, we have to get you-- you've got to have some self-respect. We've got to get you out of here, right? Like, because she got left holding the bag financially. Yeah, she got left holding the bag organizationally. And she got left holding the bag for like everybody's feelings and like trauma and baggage. All of this is getting unloaded onto her. And she's like, I didn't even want to open this fucking bar. Like this poor woman. And I think there's like a couple of strains in this story, right? There's like, how do these dynamics arise within these queer and leftist spaces, right? Like, how does it happen that somebody like Jackie who look like queer and disabled people have political enemies? She's not their enemy. But she's being treated like their enemy. And that is, I think, something that is happening for a reason that we can probably tease out. And then there's this kind of like additional mockery and punishment that's being imposed not just on her, but on like everybody in her world. Because this is a useful gag. It's a useful satire. It's a useful exaggeration where there's this whole media apparatus on the right that wants everybody who's queer and everybody who's disabled to be pointed out as somebody who's like laughable and unserious and overwrought and hysterical. There's like so many layers of wrongdoing in this story. And I wonder like how we can tease them all out separately. Because that's not really what I'm seeing happening in the discourse. Fortunately for us, I have written the 20 page outline that will hopefully allow us to tease out these different aspects of this story separately. And you know, I just want to say a few things up top. One of which is that I agree everyone is behaving poorly here, including the author of this story. I will say, and I'm not holier than that. I want it took me a second to gather my thoughts on this because I had some similar reactions to everyone else who read this story, which is, this is nuts. But then I had the reaction of like, wait, the post, the announcement post that they would go mask optional on Saturday nights, that post to their Instagram story had 400 comments. That's not that many comments. Why is this getting a Boston Globe feature? I think I know why. So the first time I saw this story, which, as I said, become the Boston Globes most red story of the year and drove a record 1,000 new subscriptions to the paper, it was in left-wing internet circles like this one.
By people, you know, earnestly discussing the behavior and dynamics exhibited within the story, and I'd like to do that now. But first, I want to take a moment, which I do not believe has been sufficiently taken within the seemingly endless coverage of this story, to give a shout out to the disabled community, which has caught the most flak for what is ultimately the abusive behavior of a few individuals who do not represent the disabled or any community. And to illustrate this, I want to highlight one aspect of this story that truly boggles the mind. The quote heard round the world, and was put in a huge font at the top of the Boston globe, is, "I hope your venue gets firebombed." I hope your venue gets firebombed for robbing my fellow immunocompromised people of their Saturday plans. I hope your venue gets firebombed. The full comment reads, "I don't even know what that means." And live in your town. But I hope your venue gets firebombed for robbing my fellow immunocompromised people of their Saturday plans just to scrape extra revenue from ableists. Sorry disabled people aren't making you enough money or whatever. You are functionally following the business plan of Target. Hope your business crashes and burns with love. Okay. That comment was written by a user named Serine Necrosis, who some extremely online people may be familiar with, for this person's extremely prolific Twitter presence. Serine Necrosis is a white person who lives not in Western Massachusetts or in the northeast at all, but in Colorado. Serine Necrosis, when viral last year on Twitter, when they changed their profile photo to a selfie wearing a green hijab. And then tweeted, "It's not lost on me that I have received a huge amount of hate from so-called "leftist" account since changing my profile picture to include a hijab-inspired secular accessorization." I'm sorry. I think this is so funny. Well, internet user Serine Necrosis is married to a black man and signals this in their bio, with the phrase "married to a D-O-S" or "descendant of slaves." Called the term "people of color," a slur, and last year harassed my friend, the writer Ashley Reese, a black woman, mind you, who Serine Necrosis called, quote, "a black liberal with a body type palatable to the white gaze." Is that just calling Ashley "hot?" I'm sorry. What does that mean? I don't know. Serine Necrosis also famously photographed their infant child, which they had not only put a mask on, which you're not supposed to do to infants, but also clarified that there was a pacifier underneath the mask, essentially sealing the pacifier to the baby's mouth with a mask. I say all of this, not because I think you should go hound this person or even acknowledge them at all. I don't. I'm saying all of this because the single most quoted line from this story about the last ditch bar put in bold letters to draw as much attention to it as possible and then circulated among all these right-wing news outlets is very clearly coming from someone who "a" is not a patron of the bar or in the community at all, and "b" not mentally playing with a full deck. Okay. I think that secular hijabi inspired in accessorization. You're still there. I think this is durational performance art. I think this person is having one over on us. And I think they are a comedian of such genius that like Chris Fleming should be shaking in his boots. I think this is actually all of us being had. I've actually seen that theory as well as by a number of people. Serine Necrosis is like to me an alternate universe, Trisha Peta. And I feel like people who have only found out about Trisha Peta's in the past, let's even say five years, probably don't know just how absurd Trisha Peta's content used to be. But for years, Trisha Peta, like she was a full-time troll and she would make videos about voting for Mitt Romney about saying she didn't know dogs had brains and she still employs this character sometimes. Back on front of me, she pretended that she didn't know what the Holocaust was. And she still pulls this character out from time to time, but it is a character. And I've seen a lot of people say like Serine Necrosis is not kidding. This is all real. But sometimes I really do think that this is satire and that there is a level of satire to be had here. And part of the trials and tribulations of the internet is you don't really know how much of this is real and how much of this is fake. Also, this person is such an extreme outlier that we can't tell if it's performance art or not. And they are drawn to this kind of fight nationally. They're always appearing because there's not enough in their real life. That shows to me that this person is not like what the Boston Globe article wants to paint them as, which is like a symptom of a broader cultural pathology. Like we need to do something about all the secular inspired hijabi accessorization people in our world. Like this person is like, they're like a one of one, you know, there's not anybody else like this. And if this person didn't exist, we would have to make them up for comedic purposes of nothing else. Hmm. Whoever discovers that this is a CIA operated account first is going to be like generational. Don't get ahead of my outline. Don't get ahead of my outline because we're going to talk about the CIA. We are going to talk about the CIA. I would like to take a quick break from the show to give a shout out to the sponsor of today's episode factor. I present as cool, calm and collected on this show. 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Blue land is based around a tablet system and all of their tablets are a hundred percent plastic free and trusted in over a million homes, including mine with blue land. You just buy one forever bottle pop in a tablet, fill it with water and you're ready to go with your cleaning solution and when you run out, you can just pop in another tablet and those tablets start for as low as $2 and 25 cents. So not just easier on the planet, also easier on your wallet. If you'd like to try blue land, you can get 15% off your first order at blueland dot com slash fruity, that is blueland dot com slash fruity and now let's get back to the show. But with all of this in mind, I'd like to have a good faith discussion about what made this story so immediately captivating not to the right who we know will take any chance to bully people they find cringe, but too many people left of center. We all know people who behave like maybe, you know, albeit a less extreme version of this. People who make worst faith interpretations of what other well-meaning people say and do, co-opt progressive political language to behave in ways that are controlling or even abusive, who turn personal persecution real or imagined into social currency, they can wield against other people.
in their communities. This type of behavior also, I think, was more common among liberals like 10 years ago, which is why to me so much of this story also immediately felt like a relic of the past. - Yeah, it was a 2018 Atlantic story. It's like, oh, look at what these crazy college kids are doing now story. It reminds you of that time where there are like, Oberlin cafeteria can't sell bon meat. - Yes. - Like that's that kind of, it's like very low stakes. It's meant to be laughed at. And it's meant to sort of like reassure the audience's sense that like the left is out of control and only interested in like things that don't matter so you can dismiss all of their concerns as trivial. - I also like, with regards to the strain of discourse that I saw from a lot of prominent leftist accounts that was like, these people are real and you will encounter them when you do organizing work or when you are in leftist spaces. There is obviously truth to that in the sense that there is truth to that in any community everywhere. It's just that the language is different. Like I saw some interesting discourse about how some of the people in Jackie's life are taking advantage of her to an extent that could be abusive. They are putting her in a position that is so explitative and then they are using it to further like belittle her and yell at her for crying and things like that. And I'm like, that's a really interesting argument but it's also not whatsoever obviously limited to leftist spaces. There are abusive people in every community and the language that they use in the tactics that they use are just going to be different. Like one of my first responses to reading this story was I was like, I bet there are even crazier stories in like church potluck communities around the nation. I bet that the bullying and ganging up on like specific people in like religious communities, in right wing communities, in military spaces, on sports teams, in sororities. Like you could go to any insular community and I'm sure you could find a story like this. What made this story so palatable to the masses is that it was like we all hate these people because we all have that like inner ableism or lesbian phobia or trans misogyny or whatever it may be that like that's what we all share. But if you told this story about a fraternity or a sorority a ton of people would come out to defend it or just like wouldn't be news, right? Because like the bad behavior of like frat boys like entitlement, the bad behavior of like church ladies isn't it's like well, you know, like she gets to bully the new divorcee in town because that is her prerogative has a church let you know, like these people are seen they're a representatives beyond themselves, right? They're types. So like as Matt said, like everybody who shares any kind of characteristic with these people is gonna be like held responsible for their actions. But like they are understood as not having an entitlement to like basic human flaws. Anything they do is like of course they are doing something shitty because we shouldn't let them have bars or we shouldn't let them, you know, have these identities or we shouldn't let them, you know, live together in any kind of community. It's like it gets sort of conscripted back into this repressive narrative. - I agree so much with everything that both of you said. And I would just like to return to this point of like, we are all familiar with the phenomenon of like leftist purity testing. - Mm-hmm. - I think the thing that felt so sort of like interesting about this to me is like I said, this feels like a story out of 10 years ago. Like I find that that attitude and I'm very happy about this has seemed to have lost a lot of cachet in left wing spaces over the last decade. As someone who spends a lot of time in these spaces, you know, organizing for candidates and also like involved in online discourse and whatnot. Like I have felt especially over the last couple of years that people have gotten so much more open to giving each other the benefit of the doubt, to giving each other grace, to taking opportunities to educate rather than oust one another. What's interesting is that for a long time, the line was, you know, on the left we do all this litmus testing and this and that and on the right they just fall in line. And there's issues with both of those but at least on the right they know how to build power. And I think there was a point in time where you could make that generalization. And of course that is the type of generalization that a story like this would encourage. However, to anyone who really earnestly believes that in 2026, have you spent time in right wing spaces? They are eating each other alive over a host of litmus test issues that none of them can agree on whatsoever. Did you all see how the turning point conference played out in 2025? These people hate each other and cannot get their shit together. - No, I think that's such a good point. And I also feel like that is one of the reasons why they've been pushing this story so hard is 'cause it's like a good old fashioned remember why we all left the left type of call to action. That's why I'm like, why is J.K. rolling? 'Cause J.K. rolling was posting about this story. - Mmm, awesome. - That was one of the first things I saw was J.K. rolling was in somebody's replies being like, yeah, Blackdon reported got this story first. And I'm like, why do you British billionaire care about what's going on in a town of fewer than 20,000 people in a city that you will never set foot into? But the reason why J.K. rolling cares about this is 'cause she constantly needs justification for why her crusade is righteous. And no matter how ridiculous that justification is, like she is desperate for it and a lot of these like libertarian heterodox, but actually just like send her right people. They need this, it fuels them. - And look, I do not agree with the behavior exhibited by the people in this story, but also like this is a family issue. But on the internet, I'm not blind to the fact that a lot of the people who are watching are not family. Megan Kelly is not family. Fox News is not family, neither is Bill Mar. Our current political reality is so online and so destabilized. And as participants of the digital town square, I think it's really important that we understand how this town square works so we can behave responsibly within it. Which brings me to chapter two or three. I always want to sound fancy with my chapters, but I always forget what we're on. In early September, the socialism 2026 conference convened at a high at hotel in Chicago. It hosted about 3,000 paying attendees, masks required, who flowed from panel to panel and listened to activists, authors, artists, and organizers talk about issues like Marxism, climate justice, and labor strikes. It was organized by the left wing book publisher Haymarket Books, which has published a host of incredible books, including Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal from my recent guest, Muhammad Al-Kurd, shout out Muhammad. At one panel, a disability writer named Beatrice Adler Bolton spoke about the overlap of fitness and fascism. Here is a clip from that panel that has since gone viral. We have to give up the fantasy of being fitter than the fascists. It's not just that it's cringe or strategically bad, though it is. I think it's also politically revealing. Fitness is a measure of relative disposability under capitalism. Our task is not to become less disposable, to become more useful to the ruling order. What we all need to be doing is rejecting disposability in all of its forms. The point is not to beat the fascists at their own game. It is not to lay a better claim on their own territory by being fitter, more eugenic. In fact, the more disgenic, the better, I think. Revolution is not a contest between optimized and properly prepared bodies. That idea is fascist in and of itself, and it races the history of less struggles around the world. So Beatrice's argument in simplified terms is that fascists subscribe to an ideology where certain people are considered worthy of life while others are disposable. And that physical fitness is a way of people attempt to prove their strength and worthiness under fascism, which is a framework that we should fundamentally reject. This clip was made viral by a man named Stu Smith, an investigative analyst he calls himself at the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank with annual expenses of $27 million. Stu not only made this viral on Twitter, but also did a media blitz with it, feeding an article to the New York Post where he is quoted as a quote expert. He said, "These are people who are just so unhappy with anything that resembles the status quo or normalcy, they have to signal against anything they think is not their revolutionary project." But this clip was also shared online by many on the left, including the left-wing journalist Ryan Grimm, whose work investigating Israel at Dropsite News, I have a lot of respect for. of the clip. Ryan wrote now that the left is actually
within reach of attaining real power, this kind of anti-social behavior should be thoroughly shamed. - When asked why he's giving it any attention at all, Ryan wrote. - I genuinely think ignoring it isn't enough. There needs to be a stigma associated with this anti-social behavior. - Okay, but this is the thing, this is the thing, this is the thing. - There is stigma attached to people who make arguments like this already. - Yeah. - This argument that Beatrice is making in this clip, you know, physical fitness is a way to try to obtain a body worthy under fascism and fascism divides people into optimized versus not optimized and only the optimized people should survive, et cetera. Naomi Klein made the same argument in her book doppelganger. This is an argument that a lot of leftist thinkers have made. Beatrice is talking about this at a leftist, socialist conference. And the audience for that conference is not the same as the audience on Twitter. I don't think my mom, God bless her. I don't think my mom could hear that argument and get on board with it. I don't think most people would, but this is being said at a conference for people who live and breathe left wing political theory. And the idea that we on the left need to heighten scrutiny against these people and create stigma. These are already people living on the margins. These are already ideas existing on the fringe. These aren't people with social capital. Ryan Grimm went on to do a whole feature about Beatrice Adler Bolton and this idea that she had on breaking points, their YouTube channel. And I couldn't for the life of me understand why we were giving it such airtime. And in that segment, he argued that like-- The nonprofit industrial complex, which at the time included a lot of the CIA money, funds this to undermine global communism. Right. Global communism doesn't exist anymore, but the idea of the working class uniting in order to fight against the billionaire class is still a threat. And so the CIA, we don't know how much they're involved with it anymore, doesn't matter. The foundation world, which flow directly out of that and is still doing it. The foundation world is out there funding all of this stuff. These people have all of this funding and they're going to derail the left unless we crush them under our boot. And I'm like, where? These people have no capital at all. Doesn't she have a podcast, right? It's death panel. And it's not a massive money maker. I'm sorry, you want to come after her Patreon money? This is not like something that is taking resources away from your own project. There's this weird policing where the notion is like, OK, well, bad faith actors can now monitor basically everything anybody does. And that creates this obligation for every leftist everywhere to be in like a Truman show style state of surveillance and having to be policing themselves. You can never say anything even at the Socialism Conference in Chicago that could possibly make Tucker Carlson mad. I'm sorry, that's like anti-intellectual. It's anti-solidarity. It's impractical. And it's just like not. I don't think that's what the responsibility is. Do I think this message should go in like a campaign at in Michigan? No. But do I think like nobody should ever say it because a Rowing podcaster or like YouTube show host could potentially run away with it? Like that doesn't make any sense. That's not reasonable. Ironically, the person who's giving this idea more airtime than it otherwise would have received on the left is Rying Grim himself in his attempt to quash it. But also my favorite response to this was someone was like, Rying Grim, take your shirt off and post pictures of your body right now. If you are going to make the argument that we all need to be like at the utmost level of physical fitness in order to calm that fascism, because I am like, what are you talking about? Unless you have like an eight pack and you're like regularly doing combat sports, like what do you disagree with here? Do you actually believe that we all need to be Spartans soldiers to physically tackle Donald Trump? Like I think it is just this fear that like we're getting a little too woke and I just can't interrogate that seriously. I also just think this kind of fits neatly into a pattern that I'm trying to demonstrate in this episode, which is this like constant punching down at especially disabled women. - Yes. - But people who fall at all sorts of intersections, typically that include disability. And to me, it so often comes across as just bullying, but then the people who do it the loudest, especially if they identify with the left, feel the need to retroactively apply some like moral or political strategy lens to it. Beatrice Adler Bolton speaking about fitness fascism at the Socialist Conference in Chicago is not derailing the leftist project. No one would even know about this, except the couple thousand attendees at the Socialist Conference at Chicago, all of whom probably already agree with the basic points she's laying out. I think that we just want to mock people we think are cringe, but what political goal is that achieving? - And also, how is that not anti-social behavior to create a business model around mocking people who fit into certain spheres of marginalization who you find to be cringe? It is significantly more anti-social to punch down on marginalized and disabled women than it is to simply talk about how our society should not be ordered around like spheres of superiority based on things like physical fitness. It is an argument that has totally lost the plot. - I mean, it's partaking of just like libidinal gratification, it just feels good to point left, particularly at people who are like your infuriars on these hierarchies, right? These are women they're often younger than at least Ryan Grimm. They are disabled. There's a lot of like, I'm on top of a hierarchy and you're lower on it and it gives me satisfaction to point that out and I'm sorry, that is the emotional core of the right. That is a right wing impulse. This reminds me of last ditch a little bit in that like, I think all of this is a symbol of the people who have actual power in the institutions and structures that have actual power being sort of beyond the reach of leftists to influence. And so there's this reaching instead for the people you can hurt and the people you can get a response out of and the people you can get to like recognize your pain. Those customers at last ditch, they're disabled. It's a really scary time for disabled people. It's a really, really scary time for queer people. They've been like abandoned and marginalized in a way that they didn't think they were gonna have to do again. And they don't have the ability to reach out and punch like RFK Junior, right? What they can do is they can bully like Jackie the bar owner. And there's something to that too with Ryan Grimm. Like Ryan Grimm, like can't make Bernie have won the 2016 presidential primary. And he can't make there be Medicare for all and he can't make this be a like robustly social democratic country. But what he can do is punch down at some woman wearing a mask he saw on the internet, you know? And it's just like, okay, like the broader political struggle has been like placed beyond your reach and you've like given up on trying to get there. And therefore you're just doing what you can do to like get your own rage out in this way that's just kind of like impotent and sad. - So in returning to our conversations about our favorite Massachusetts COVID cautious lesbian bar, I think it's worth remembering that you might find the behavior of the commenters on last ditches Instagram post abhorrent and abusive. You might think so noir is grifting Jackie the bar owner and that the bar owner needs a good therapist to help them establish boundaries with their community and that of course serene necrosis might be missing a few marbles. I wouldn't disagree with you. But what I am asking you to do and I know that the internet is not an easy place to express nuance or complexity is engage not just with the content but with the form. The content is a story about a dysfunctional group of queer 20-somethings trying to keep a bar afloat but the form is an online media apparatus that the right is adept at weaponizing so as to sway public opinion, break up the left and achieve their political goals. Goals that as objectionable as you find the last ditches disgruntled patrons, you do not want to see pass. Chapter next. Last ditch becomes a low cow. For whatever good faith critique of this story people on the left had within their own circles it quickly and I mean immediately became a content mill for every right wing media outlet big and small. If you search lesbian bar on YouTube you'll get hits from Greg Gutfeldt. A lesbian bar in Massachusetts. Fox News primetime. These people who are saying we should fire bomb this place. Megan Kelly. Brett Cooper. And now the lesbians are fighting. It's a viral story and we need to talk about it. Matt Walsh. People like you kill disabled people.
people in the name of your own leisure and convenience. - Glenn Beck, I hope your venue gets firebombed. - Ben Shapiro, the best story of the last 10 years. The list goes on. Helen Lewis, an anti-transwriter at the Atlantic, wrote an article about the saga, wherein she said, quote, "So new are rampaged through Greenfield's LGBTQ community like a dose of the clap." - Oh my God, Jesus Christ. - Bill Marr even got his licks in on his HBO show, and Michael Knowles talked about it on a segment he titled, "LGBT Civil War." - Do we see what's happening here, my friends? - I just have to say, like, when this story was going viral, a lot of the people who were interviewed and named in the piece went private on Instagram. No doubt because of the massive wave of harassment that they were experiencing. And the bar also had to, like on Google, reviews were paused because of the amount of spam reviews that were being left. But so new are did not go private. And he continued to post and out of partially morbid curiosity and also genuine interest in the story. I was like, let me follow what's going on here with this person. And he at one point was sharing screenshots of commentary, things that people were sending into his personal website. And it was deplorable. The horrific threats of sexual violence. People were sending him racist slurs. They were sending him death threats. And he was just sort of screenshotting them and like putting them up on his story. And no matter how objectionable, I find his conduct. And I do think it was objectionable. It is just so disproportionate. The level of hatred that these individuals are now receiving and the way that national mainstream conservative media titans are using all of their power and platform to direct this bigotry their way. Towards somebody with no power. None. And I also saw leftists, including people who I follow and like joining the pile on and mocking his art and mocking him and making jokes about him. And as much as I understand that impulse, I also just feel like in the year of our Lord 2026, I've seen how much this type of harassment, we've all seen how much this type of harassment can wreak havoc on someone's life and create nothing productive. And in fact, makes them even meaner and angrier and hateful. I don't know. I guess I wish people would think twice before joining what is a largely conservative pile on a queer person of color. I mean, like the critique of this last ditch community group is that they were behaving like wildly disproportionately towards somebody who basically should have been their friend. And then everybody else now is behaving wildly disproportionately towards them. Like none of this is important enough, especially to you living far away, not a part of this at all, to like go seek out some stranger, like Randall Strangers' Instagram and like leave them a nasty comment. Like this is not like how you should be spending your time. I wanna play one particular clip from Megan Kelly's conversation with the gay libertarian Glenn Greenwald about this, which I found both grating and revealing where Glenn contrasts the admirable gay activism of the 90s to the lesbian bar drama, which he thinks is representative of gay activism today. Here's the thing, like when I went to college, actually when I went to law school, it was like the early 90s, I went to NYU, and this was at a time when like that group act up, the activist group act up was really starting to become powerful. And these were like very serious activists, you know, like gay and lesbian activism was very serious. They weren't just screaming and yelling, they had like learned the science, a lot of the lesbians who let it were like nurses and scientists, and they developed this expertise, and at the time the villain was Anthony Fauci, he was the head of infectious diseases, and they felt like they weren't doing enough to push big farmer to get, you know, so I was so impressed with like gay and lesbian politics, it was serious, it was confronting power centers for like noble causes. They played a big role in getting experimental. This is like good politics. Now like LGBT politics is about attacking, like the most marginalized, powerless people, like and poppers bar owners over this. I'm sorry, this is fucking a historical. That is not what happened with act up. Act up famously worked because they had both those educated from ecology experts, guys like Peter Staley and Matt Harrington, Mark Harrington, rather these like nice white Harvard boys, and they also had a screaming crowd of desperate people outside, right? You had both the liberals who were buttoned up and polite and experts and who would go in and talk to the pharmacy executives, and you also had a large crowd of angry, crazy people who could threaten chaos, right? That was the combination that made act up successful is because it was a popular front. If you knew what the fuck he was talking about, if he had ever left the, I like the love that he drops in that he went to a fancy law school, if you ever left the NYU Law Library and actually went to one of those meetings, you would know that that's not how it worked. I'm sorry, that pisses me off. - No, everything about this pisses me off, and I kind of just wanted to include it to rant from many angles because also the recipient of what he's saying here is Megan Kelley. (laughing) He's saying this to Megan Kelley's face, trying to appeal to respectable gay activism, as if Megan Kelley would now or then respect any of it as if Megan Kelley would have been receptive to act up in the 1990s. But also, and this is really, it plays into my thesis this episode as if so new war or serene necrosis are emblematic, are representative of gay activism today. They're not, but right-wing pundits and think tanks and journalists making this go viral is with the very explicit, I think, made explicit here, mission of painting these people as representative of all LGBT activism. A lot of those people and act up, a lot of them died from AIDS before they could ever get treatment. But a number of them also lived, one of whom is a friend of mine named Peter Staley. Peter Staley was someone who would get arrested in the streets while he was at the time he believed dying from AIDS. Peter Staley is now in his 50s or 60s and participates still in Jewish voice for peace demonstrations to end the genocide on Gaza. Those activists still exist with a new generation of younger activists who are still very serious, who Glenn Greenwald, according to his own definition of what respectable activism is here, would respect if he even knew about them or God forbid, joined them, which he never would. And the last thing I'll say is that, you know, we're making this very intra-community, this tiny intra-community squabble between a bunch of people in Western Massachusetts, representative of gay activism. You don't think there were caddy queers in the '80s and '90s who had tips like this in their underground gay bars all the time that the Boston Globe just didn't even publish? Like, newsflash, we've been fighting forever and we will keep fighting forever over bullshit that doesn't matter. Sorry, Glenn Greenwald. (laughing) The other thing I found really interesting from that is he highlights how gay activists fought against power and the medical establishment and what was going on with the AIDS crisis. Interestingly enough, what's currently happening with the Department of Health under RFK Jr. also poses a huge threat to disabled and marginalized and queer communities. And it's people like Beatrice Adler Bolton, who are arguing against RFK Jr.'s rhetoric and the rhetoric that is currently like, part of the Trump administration's fascist crackdown on marginalized people. But this is the group of individuals who attack those activists who are actually doing that work. Like, they are the ones they claim to be against and it's just so blatant. - Mm-hmm. Additionally, Rosa Delaro, the 83-year-old Democratic U.S. Congresswoman representing Connecticut's Third District, sarcastically tweeted, - Getting a group together to visit the weird lesbian bar in Western mass, DMF interested, can't talk here. - And followed up. - Trip canceled, no one wanted to mask. - This was boosted by Republican pedophile Matt Gates, who wrote, "On the way, Rosa Delaro, you're an 83-year-old Democratic Congresswoman. Get your ass into the chamber and fucking do something. Why are you punching down on this group of like eight lesbians in Western Massachusetts? What are we doing?" - I feel like an extremely online staffer conceptualized and wrote this tweet and response. Like, I'm like, "Rosa Delaro, do you even know what this tweet is about? Can you even describe to me the lesbian bar story?" - Do you guys know what a lull cow is? - Yes. - Kat, I feel like you're a lull cow expert. Do you wanna explain to the dear listener what a lull cow is?
is because I think it's relevant here. - It is, and we literally have the same brain, 'cause I'm writing about this connection in my newsletter as well. - That's why we're such good friends. - So a low cow is a term that really originates from spaces like forechan and kiwi farms, spaces that are more typically associated with the far right, but basically a low cow is an individual who is eccentric or unusual or weird. A lot of times because they are neurodivergent or disabled or marginalized in some way, and it refers to these internet communities that obsessively hyperfixate on these individuals who sometimes have very small social media followings and are almost always extremely niche online figures who post frequently online, and you have low cows themselves, and then the act of, quote, milking the low cows, which typically looks like provoking them in some way, shape, or form, whether that's harassing them or engaging in their content, pushing them to do things that this crowd of harassers is going to find funny. I would say it originated in spaces like kiwi farms, but it has since become a much more mainstream internet phenomenon. Yes, and the people who track and obsess over these low cows spelled LOL cow, like a cow that you can milk for the lows, are typically extremely online themselves. That's how they found these communities of stalking and harassing random oftentimes autistic or queer or sick people in the first place. I find that the people who engage frequently these communities are oftentimes also any number of those things and are engaging in this LOL cow harassment to make themselves feel better about their own insecurities. This is a psychological process that manifests itself with a lot of what we could pretty plainly describe as insecure bullying. I bring up the LOL cow because the people involved with the last ditch lesbian bar over the last week or two essentially became socially acceptable LOL cows, but not for terminally online trolls. No, for people who consider themselves well adjusted, who have cushy jobs at national media outlets. A few days after the story went viral, the New York Times decided to write their own piece on last ditch wherein they sent a journalist to the town of Greenfield, Massachusetts to stand on the sidewalk outside of the last ditch bar and wait for people to come out. I wanna read some excerpts from that article which starts with a few locals stopped by the last ditch lesbian bar early Saturday evening. I want you to listen to me. If you are a journalist at the National Paper of Record and the pressing article that you're writing, that you received money to go and report starts with a few locals stopped by the lesbian bar early Saturday evening. You need to reconsider the type of journalistic work that you're doing and your own integrity as a writer. It's a good sign that your editor does not trust you to do anything serious if this is the kind of assignment you're getting. Like, oh, do you wanna go do bottom feeding on another publication's human interest story? Like, that's how you know you're not respected by your colleagues if you're getting this culture shit. This is the point in time where I think people really started to reckon with the spectacle that they had participated in because they were like, if the New York Times is now parachuting into this town, like the plot has officially been lost. And I was like, oh, baby, the plot was lost a long time ago. This is just the natural inevitable conclusion is now that the New York Times is standing on the sidewalk outside the last ditch. - The article continues, around 6.30 pm, four people and masks came out of the last ditch and confronted a small group of journalists hanging around outside. When one photographer snapped a flash photo of them, they demanded he delete the picture and threatened to call the police if other journalists didn't leave. So that sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing for private people who are being harassed by the national media to do. - Yeah, I think that's actually completely proportionate. Like, please don't fucking take my picture. I did not consent to be mocked and degraded in the New York Times just because I happen to be wearing a mask. It's just like, it's kind of crazy. I think this is the ugliest side of journalism and the media industry. And you see it in so many different ways. But this is a particularly absurd case because it's like, I've watched in horror as journalists have like surrounded, a grieving family whose child has overdosed. But the fact that this level of hounding is going towards someone who literally just attended a lesbian bar and again, a town of fewer than 20,000 people that a bunch of transphobic podcasters like decided was worthy of their coverage. This is ridiculous. It's just like it really, really gets to a point. It was not acceptable when the media hounded and surrounded celebrities or grieving loved ones of trauma victims. But it's particularly absurd to me that they would do this to people who are literally just trying to enjoy a night out while also being queer and immunocompromised. The article continues, patrons were required to wear KN95 or better masks, the face coverings ubiquitous during the heights of COVID-19, and which most of the country had left long ago to dental hygienists and people who don't want anyone to sit next to them on the train. This pissed me off. What are we doing? - It's not true. - It's not true. A lot of people were masks for a lot of different reasons. People are gone, they're going chemo therapy. - Exactly. - I don't. - Exactly. - This whole thing very quickly, but also not quickly enough that a lot of people realize that they were participating in it. Just became all of these people with right-wing impulses, feeding into those right-wing impulses in public. And it became, I think, so transparently cruel, so quickly and for what? Why are we sitting outside talking about how weird these lesbians in Western Massachusetts are for wearing masks? Who gives a fuck? - It's such pointless editorializing in a supposedly national news piece, which is, I believe, the section that this article is in. And again, it's just not true. It is factually incorrect. People, when I see someone wearing a mask on the train, I know it's not because they don't want anyone to sit next to them. I assume it's because they cannot afford to miss a day of work. And therefore, they do not want to get sick. Like, there are so, so, so many reasons why people continue to mask. Also, it's like, I'm still masked. Sometimes, like, when I recently was on an up plane and the guy next to me was coughing, and I was like, thank God I have a mask, 'cause I don't want to get sick on this flight. - The author of this New York Times piece mentions every single encounter he has with a homeless person, excerpt one. Greenfield, a Western Massachusetts town of about 17,000, is not accustomed to the national spotlight. As darkness fell on Saturday evening, downtown went quiet. One man, with a long stringy beard, sat alone on a bench, eyes cast downward. Another man, in some distress, yelled obscure questions that passers-by, such as, how do you build a skyscraper and what kind of music is jazz? Someone called the police on him. excerpt two, not much, this is a short article. These all come in very short order. Friends from all over the country have been sending me the articles about it, said Halle Abelman, 34, of the last-ditch controversy. While she was being interviewed outside the bar, a man tried to bum a cigarette from her group. And excerpt three, while she was speaking to reporters, a man approached and asked if anyone could give him exactly 55 cents. He accepted a dollar and offered to give back change. Not to get lost in the details here, but I do think it's worth it. Like I do, I do, I think it's so revealing. This is a reporter who traveled from New York City to stand on the sidewalk in Western Massachusetts and describe an unhoused person asking for change. It's ridiculous. Now they're just like looking around for other suffering people to mock. Yeah, you know, it's just like, surely there's somebody here I can make fun of. And you found a homeless guy, congratulations. The article concludes two visiting professors at Smith College said they tried to get into the last-ditch bar, but were turned away because they didn't already know anyone who was inside. They were told the event was a private party. Come back on another day, they were advised, once the hubbub has died down. And that is the whole article. What a waste of a trip to Massachusetts, huh? The New York Post also sent not only a journalist to go write about what was happening on the sidewalk outside of the last-ditch bar, but a photographer named David McGlin, who took paparazzi photos of the queer people loitering around this bar in several of the photos, they're covering their faces with their hands so as to not be captured by the cameras. Everybody looks really cool in these paparazzi photos. I have to say they look really good. I'm like, they're great outfits. I hope they all have a nice time. I'm sorry you're being harassed by the fucking Murdoch rag at your bar. That was literally my first thought.
was I was like Jackie looks a minute. - Jackie looks a minute. - She looks so good. - Jackie, Mattelian, if you're listening to this podcast, you ate. (laughing) - I was also like, she's giving like, and I mean this in the highest compliment in form of flattery possible. She's giving the most archetypal lesbian of all time because she has a carabiner. She's got a hammer. I've gone to her in her cargo pants. - And a carabiner with like a bunch of random shit hanging off of it, and I'm just like, slay. - Jackie, we love you. We love you, Jackie. - I also like, not that clearly these people care like these photographers and like the New York Post doesn't give a fuck about this, but I'm like, it is genuinely dangerous to photograph queer people leaving a bar. Considering that like, you don't know these people, you don't know their life stories. You could be outing them. You could be like exposing them in the national news to family members who have no idea what their identity is. Like, it's just a very blatant disregard for I would say professional ethics. - The Hollywood Reporter then published an article titled "Viral Lesbian Bar Article" from Boston Globe is peaking Hollywood's interest. The article has spurred thousands of subscriptions to the paper. Now, UTA or United Talent Agency, which represents the Boston Globe, is fielding inquiries about TV and film adaptations. Are we not just low cowering these people? - I feel like the only studio that would have genuine interest in this is Ben Shapiro's like daily wire production. - Yes, where he can waste a bunch of money creating something that nobody's gonna watch. - Exactly. Who else? I mean, like, this is a very online story and obviously it had significant traction, but also I do not think that this is the kind of story that would get butts and seats in the theater to be like, let's watch COVID-conscious lesbians fight on screen. I mean, I feel like it has so far outlived the normal timeline of virality, right? This was published over a week ago from when we're now recording. And it's like still got this weird life. And normally these things are over in like 24, 48 hours. Whenever there's a big pile on or cancellation, I think of that scene in Mad Men where he tells Peggy to just give the baby away and he's like, it will shock you how much it never happened. That's how I feel about like every viral news cycle like it will shock you how much that never happened. And that's what, that's like the advice I would want to give to the COVID-conscious lesbians of Western Massachusetts. It's like this will be over. And one day people who laugh that you will not remember that they laugh at you. And it will just be kind of in this weird forgotten background of your past and you'll have whole other things to worry about. I hope that there will still be truth to that. Like I hope that in a year's time, all of these people will be back to their normal lives. But I also think that it reminds me of what you bought up, Moira, which is the Oberlin cafeteria story, which had enormous legs because it became a very useful rhetorical way to say like the left is crazy. And I feel like that has been kind of the utility of this story thus far. To conclude, I want permission from both of you to put my halfway tinfoil hat on. Do you guys know what co-intel pro was? [LAUGHTER] All right, all right, all right. I didn't know if I should include this because I knew people were going to laugh at me. I love it, I love it. Let's go full tinfoil hat. Let's put the whole thing on. No, well, it's half tinfoil hat, I promise. But I have to make sure that people know what co-intel pro was. So co-intel pro, if you don't know. It was a largely illegal, unconstitutional series of secret projects conducted by the FBI during the '50s and '60s with the goal of turning primarily left-wing groups against each other and undermining them from the inside. This involved spying, forging letters, publishing articles with fake information, spreading rumors designed to break activists apart, splitting up marriages, promoting rivalries between groups, destroying careers, you name it. Now, I am not saying that the last ditch COVID cautious Western Massachusetts lesbian bar controversy was fabricated by the United States government. I very much don't think it was. I very much believe that all of these figures are real and struggling with each other. But I also don't think that the government needs to fabricate it. If it can achieve the same effect by blasting this irrelevant story about a tiny community of people to every right-wing bad faith actor in media and then have it carried further by good faith people who takes bait. Yeah, no, it's like if you just have one person behaving badly, which to Kat's point, every single community has at least one, usually more than one. And you amplify that, and you try to make them into a symbol of the whole thing. You'll just have these groups, these spaces, these communities collapse without you having to send somebody undercover to seed weird counter propaganda. It's actually very simple to just make a mockery of it in a big media apparatus and have that be that. One of the tweets amidst this controversy that went viral was by someone who wrote, "I read the full Western Massachusetts COVID cautious lesbian bar article, and then attached a photo of themselves holding up a bumper sticker that says, "Leftus against other leftus. Sorry, but a lot of you are just really fucking annoying." And I get it, I do, I really get it. But also, this whole thing feels very divide and conquer amidst a midterm election year where the left has built unprecedented power in the United States. So, I'm more inclined to complete my thesis with another viral tweet from user Esoteric Fatboy, who wrote, "Just explain the COVID cautious les-- I can't say this anymore, I'm going to bolt up right in the middle of the night and just be like, the COVID cautious Western Massachusetts." [LAUGHTER] Esoteric Fatboy wrote, "Just explain the COVID cautious lesbian bar hijab inspired secular accessorization clown college discourse to my mom. And she just said, the CIA is eating your generation alive." [LAUGHTER] And I was going to finish the episode there. But since we started recording this episode, I received a message from someone in my Patreon chat named Sam Hunter, who has given me permission to use their name. This is a person who lives and works within this general community in Western Massachusetts has had experience with the Boston Globe and had some local perspectives and thoughts on the matter that I wanted to read to you. Quote, "I'm going to say one thing about the last ditch story. And that is that a while ago there was a rumor going around about our school district. This happened sometimes. It was not true. But it got around the media, and there were reporters reaching out to our admin asking for comment. One of these reporters was from the Boston Globe. The reporter insisted that they had heard that we would be discussing the rumor at our meeting that evening. We weren't, which they could have seen from our posted agenda. The person they were talking to from our district took significant time out of their day to try and explain that the rumor was not true and would not be discussed that night. But the reporter came all the way from Boston and sat through our entire meeting anyway. Even though it's also available as a live stream to anyone on the internet. At that meeting, we covered our $900,000 in budget cuts that we had to make even with the override. We talked about other challenges facing small districts in Western Massachusetts, such as transportation and extraordinary special education costs. We talked about how we were bringing head start back to the district and providing summer meals to kids. After the meeting, I was hoping to catch the reporter and have a conversation about some of this stuff. We don't usually get coverage in that paper about the things that are actually affecting our communities. It could make a big difference to tell that story and since they had come all the way anyway, I was hoping they might be interested in that. But instead, they left. As soon as the meeting was adjourned, having gotten nothing that they were looking for. Our district admin doesn't have limitless time to talk to the media. Our school committee members work full-time jobs on top of our school committee duties. I'm disappointed by how much time we had to spend on that non-story. And that's why, when there's any sensational journalism coming out of the globe about Western Massachusetts, I wonder what actual stories were skipped over. Stories about the real issues affecting our communities. I am suggesting that others tread cautiously with them as well, both as sources and as readers. It's not to say there is no story there, but there are a lot of other stories that are missing. And there's a specific story that the globe likes to tell about Western Massachusetts. And they seem to have founded once again. Wow. This is why I want people to try their hardest to resist this impulse to just punch down at the easiest, most identifiable targets of outrage that is fundamentally rooted in right wing believes it.
like this idea that disabled people are faking it, this idea that immunocompromised people are just dramatic and crazy. This idea that lesbians are uniquely funny and mockable compared to other people, that should never be the story. And even if there is a convenient narrative about how there are troublesome or even harmful people in these communities, that doesn't necessarily make it worthy of our greatest attention and outrage compared to the very real problems facing these communities, many of which we all share. Like it's just so obvious that ultimately this was a story engineered by an anti-trans grift because it meets the exact same consequences and end goals that that movement has always had. Yeah, I think everybody has to just kind of be a little more rigorous about maintaining the distinction in your own mind between what's evil and what's just annoying, right? There's a lot of stuff that is annoying, that's not evil, and there's a lot of stuff that's evil that can feel like an escape from what's merely annoying. You both just summarized the meaning of all of this so much better than I could have, and that just goes to show you what? Lesbians are amazing! Yay! The real takeaway of this story. Thank you both so much for joining me today. Kat and Moira, I love each of you so much. Where can people find more of you on their way out? I am on all those social media platforms. I'm on Twitter, I am on Instagram, I am on Blue Sky, and I have my own podcast in bed with the right with a great Adrienne Daube. And you can also find me at the Guardian where I will weekly call them. It is a great podcast and a great column. And a great column. I'm reading that column where everything you always say takes. And I am @spitfirenews.com is my newsletter, and @kattenvarge is my YouTube channel, and I am also mostly lingering around Blue Sky on Instagram. And I don't know, Jackie, Mattellian, if you see her here this, hit me up. I don't know, like, let's get a drink, let's just get a drink. @lastditch, obviously. @lastditch, I'll come, I'll come make a visit. I would love nothing more. Anyway, I love you all so much. Thank you for listening to this podcast. Thank you for joining us in the uphill, but I think important work of trying to be more conscientious participants of the digital town square. I love you so much, and until next time, stay fruity. [BLANK_AUDIO]
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
The Boston Globe's coverage of a Massachusetts lesbian bar's mask policy change became a viral sensation, driving record subscriptions and sparking widespread outrage.
The story was first reported by a podcast featuring critics of progressive culture, including transphobic and dismissive views of lesbian communities, raising concerns about bias in media reporting.
A central comment—“I hope your venue gets firebombed”—was traced to a white user, Serine Necrosis, known for promoting anti-woke, hijab-inspired accessorization content, suggesting it may be satire or performance art.
The narrative highlights deep tensions within queer leftist spaces, including ableism, transphobia, and emotional abuse, where marginalized individuals like Jackie Matallion are scapegoated.
The story was weaponized by right-wing media for political appeal, turning a local dispute into a symbol of “woke extremism” and amplifying harassment against disabled, queer, and vulnerable communities.
The media coverage disproportionately targets disabled and LGBTQ+ people, reflecting broader patterns of online cruelty and the misuse of personal struggles for ideological gain.
The story mirrors larger cultural dynamics where accusations of cringe or extremism are used to delegitimize progressive communities, even when the behavior is rooted in genuine hardship.
Critics argue that the story's form—its sensationalism and moral outrage—exposes the left's own vulnerabilities in handling conflict, revealing a need for greater empathy and accountability.
Summary:
The Boston Globe's viral coverage of a lesbian bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts, which relaxed its mask policy for one night a week, became a cultural lightning rod. The story, initially reported by a podcast with transphobic and dismissive leanings, quickly escalated into a national spectacle, driving record subscriptions and being weaponized by right-wing media. A key comment—“I hope your venue gets firebombed”—was traced to a user known for promoting anti-woke, hijab-inspired content, raising questions about whether it's satire or performative outrage.
The narrative centers on a deeply flawed community dynamic, where disabled, queer, and financially struggling individuals like bar owner Jackie Matallion are treated as adversaries, despite their efforts to create inclusive space. The media coverage reveals how personal conflicts are exploited to fuel broader culture wars, with critics noting that the story amplifies ableism, transphobia, and hostility toward marginalized groups. The backlash included threats, harassment, and the removal of online reviews, highlighting the real harm inflicted on vulnerable communities.
While the episode critiques the sensationalism of the media, it also exposes internal contradictions within progressive spaces—where criticism of behavior is often rooted in fear, not understanding. Ultimately, the story serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of reducing complex social issues to moral slurs, and the need for media to prioritize empathy over outrage. The episode urges listeners to examine not just the content, but the form of media narratives that exploit marginalized people for political gain.
FAQs
The bar, which required N95 masks for entry, announced a one-night-a-week mask-optional policy to boost attendance. This sparked outrage from some patrons who accused the bar of endangering immunocompromised and disabled people, leading to threats of violence and a wave of online harassment.
The story was amplified by right-wing media and became a symbol in the culture war, with sensational headlines and quotes like 'I hope your venue gets firebombed' circulating widely. It resonated with audiences due to its dramatic tone and perceived critique of 'woke' culture.
Serine Necrosis is a user who wrote the infamous comment 'I hope your venue gets firebombed' and is known for promoting hijab-inspired secular accessorization online. Their comment was widely shared and cited, though it originated from someone outside the bar community and is suspected to be satirical or performative.
No, the story was first reported by the podcast 'Blocked and Reported' by Jesse Single and Katie Herzog, who are known for their critical views of trans and queer communities. The Globe reported it five days later, after it had already gone viral.
The sole remaining founder, Jackie Matallion, expressed emotional distress and financial hardship, stating she never intended to lead the bar. She had taken on multiple jobs and was living in her car, highlighting the financial and emotional strain of running the business.
Yes, the analysis suggests that the story reflects broader dynamics of toxicity, performative outrage, and 'leftist purity tests' where personal grievances are weaponized against marginalized individuals, regardless of their actual harm.
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