Woke Is Dead ran the title of a bestselling book by the broadcaster Piers Morgan last year.
Many obituaries have been written for the social contagion that arguably reached its apex during the pandemic, when millions were locked in their houses, scrolling social media and getting increasingly furious about Black Lives Matter and other assorted ‘injustices’.
Well, if woke really is dead, no one told the owners of the Last Ditch Bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts. The scruffy establishment, which caters chiefly to lesbians, could be the most woke institution left on Planet Earth.
This week, it has found itself embroiled in a controversy that, as the colloquialism goes, has ‘broken the internet’.
The Boston Globe – the first newspaper to report the story – is set to receive the biggest subscription boost in its history over the viral article, and the initial tweet about the story has been viewed more than 30 million times.
The row has sparked astonishment from figures such as the Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz, as well as incredulity even from The Guardian, plus conservative Fox News and the New York Post.
One online pundit accurately summed up the general public’s response, calling the situation ‘intergalactic woke batcrapitude’.
In particular, the bizarre episode has revealed how a baffling number of Left-wingers, rather like those Japanese soldiers in the jungles of Guam who believed they were still fighting the Second World War long after it had ended, have not updated their worldview in six long years.
If woke really is dead, no one told the owners of the Last Ditch Bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts (pictured)
Pictured: The ‘house rules’ of the lesbian venue Last Ditch Bar which sparked a war in Massachusetts after dropping their face mask mandate
The stern ‘venue norms’ of Last Ditch are plastered over the walls of the basement venue.
‘Racism, Misogynoir [racism directed towards black women], Transmisogyny, Ableism, Transphobia, Homophobia, Lesbophobia, and any other discrimination will not be tolerated,’ declares one of these house rules.
‘No one is permitted to touch anyone, in any way, without getting express, verbal consent,’ ran another – an injunction that even includes touching patrons’ ‘assistive devices’ such as wheelchairs, canes and hearing aids, should they have any.
A third rule proclaims: ‘Nobody will be barred from entry due to lack of funds. Poor and unhoused [sic] people are welcome in the space.’
But it was the requirement that every punter wear a ‘well-fitted KN-95 respirator mask (or better) at all times’ that is perhaps the most surprising.
These are the exceptionally cumbersome and uncomfortable masks designed to prevent the spread of respiratory viruses such as Covid-19.
The bar, which calls the masks ‘safety belts for the face’, specified that the buzz-killing accessories are ‘required when not actively taking a sip of your drink or taking a bite of a snack. Lower, sip, and lift!’
Anyone who fell foul of this stricture would expect to be asked to leave, although they might first be ‘provided with an opportunity to engage in an accountability process’.
The Last Ditch, then, didn’t exactly scream ‘fun night out’. The management’s propensity for making cringingly self-righteous statements on various matters probably didn’t help.
Last September, for example, it announced it was banning all law enforcement from the premises after a police officer pursuing two drugs suspects had briefly come into the bar looking for them.
‘We reserve the right to refuse entry and service to the pigs in all their forms,’ proclaimed the bar on social media, accompanying this act of rebel bravado with a picture of a person throwing a Molotov cocktail.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the bar, which only opened last year, swiftly began running into financial difficulties.
The Last Ditch’s founders – a trio of 20-something housemates that included a drag performer who uses ‘it/its’ pronouns and another who is now training to become a professional clown, both of whom have since left – soon found themselves unable to meet their costs.
Facing closure, the remaining owner, Jackie Matellian, decided to relax the mandatory mask policy for just one night per week.
A month ago, the bar announced this momentous change in a rainbow-coloured Instagram post to its 11,300 followers, saying: ‘It is with love we inform our immunocompromised disabled divas we will be opening Saturday nights as “mask optional”…
‘Our mission is to also make the space work for everyone and everything radical, sometimes that’s being wild!’
The venue owners required every punter to wear a ‘well-fitted KN-95 respirator mask (or better) at all times’
The backlash was immediate, ferocious and highly revealing. No matter that Greenfield hasn’t reported any Covid cases for months, or that the pandemic was officially declared over by the World Health Organisation in 2023. All hell broke loose.
Hundreds of angry comments flooded the bar’s social media accounts, with many calling for a boycott and others threatening violence. The owners were branded ‘eugenicists’ intent on murdering the sick.
One protester (who says she is raising her child, named Cloud, to be ‘gender neutral’) called for the bar to be burnt to the ground, writing: ‘I hope your venue gets firebombed for robbing my fellow immunocompromised people of their Saturday plans just to scrape extra revenue from ablists [sic].’
Another accused the bar’s management of trying to ‘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,’ one said. ‘What is truly being WILD is announcing a change of this magnitude in such a cavalier, callous fashion,’ screeched another.
Stunned at the outcry, which came mainly from the bar’s patrons rather than armchair progressives thousands of miles away, Last Ditch posted a craven apology two days later reminiscent of something out of a Soviet show trial.
‘We are sorry for our passive and dismissive tone of our change to the norms and schedule impacting the most intersectional of us,’ grovelled the management. ‘We understand everyone faces different intersections [sic] and we are always working to consider all needs fully.’
But this apology only sparked more pious complaints: Because they hadn’t written the statement in ‘alternative text’ [additional written description suitable for the visually impaired], they were met with renewed accusations of ‘ableism’.
When the bar’s management held its regular ‘community meeting’ earlier this month to address the controversy, the crisis became a farce.
The session – in which heavily masked participants sat in a circle on a floor around a stripper pole – started with a ‘calm breathing exercise’ to quell passions.
However, the three-and-a-half hour summit was swiftly hijacked by the black founder of another ‘Covid-conscious collective’ in western Massachusetts, who lambasted the white therapist running the meeting.
Others attending via Zoom suggested this therapist was an agent of the state who could have them hospitalised, calling her presence ‘wildly unsafe’.
When the bar’s only remaining owner burst into tears after revealing that its financial problems had left her living in her car, owing the landlord nearly £3,000 and struggling to pay off the £38,000 loan she had taken out to launch the business, she was accused of shedding ‘WHITE THEY/THEM TEARS’.
As the extraordinary tale spread like a firestorm across the internet, the initial 442 messages condemning the relaxing of the mask strictures on Last Ditch’s Instagram page were swamped by thousands of others bemoaning the sheer levels of wokery remaining on the Left and expressing astonishment that a mask rule was ever thought necessary in the first place.
Jaron Zhou, a former senior executive at the prediction market website Kalshi, was one of many who wondered if it was all too ridiculous to be true.
‘This legitimately reads like a parody of what people think too woke is like,’ he wrote.
In an updated ‘house rules’ post the bar stated that ‘we will be opening Saturday nights as mask optional to try out typical club nights with themes/hosts/DJs/full capacity’
Even politicians have taken notice. ‘Wow,’ said Senator Ted Cruz, the 2016 presidential contender. ‘I honestly did not know that there was a single place on the planet – in 2026 – that still had an idiotic mask mandate.’
Greenfield itself is liberal even by Massachusetts standards: It was described by the Boston Globe as a town where ‘men in ponytails and KN-95s order hibiscus tea from the coffee shop off the main square’.
But an obsession with forcing everyone to wear respirator masks in 2026 is hardly confined to this muesli-crunching corner of New England.
Mask-wearing, on both sides of the Atlantic, remains a politically loaded issue.
A particular fringe of the hard-Left – known as the ‘Covid-conscious’ or ‘Evermaskers’ – maintain that wearing a mask is a ‘social justice issue’ and that failure to do so is ‘discriminatory’.
So far this year, some 6,000 people have died in America from Covid-related issues. The death toll in Britain is so low that official daily tracking has now ended.
US ‘Evermaskers’ contend that they’re signalling their opposition to Donald Trump’s Right-wing administration and their refusal to accept that the pandemic is over.
American conservatives spent much of 2020-2021 mocking mask mandates. Trump initially refused to wear one and ridiculed others – especially Joe Biden – for doing so.
Many MAGA activists protested against pandemic restrictions, especially obligatory masks, but have since shifted to rejecting other government mandates. The ‘Evermaskers’, however, have not moved on.
While the Last Ditch saga has given America’s conservatives enough to laugh about until Christmas, the Democrats are unlikely to see the funny side.
The Congressional midterm elections are only six weeks away – potentially crippling the rest of the Trump presidency – and the Democrats have been working hard to reassure nervous moderate voters that the party’s activist wing no longer wants to defund the police, abolish prisons and cancel Thanksgiving for being ‘colonialist’.
Even one of the most radical Democrats in Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has fallen into line, recently remarking that Woke 1.0 ‘was crazy’, in a clear attempt to imply the madness of the early 2020s is over.
But if the Last Ditch Bar is anything to go by, Woke 2.0 is very much alive.
