“Woke Is Dead” was the title of a bestselling book published by broadcaster Piers Morgan last year.
Since then, numerous obituaries have been written for the social movement that arguably peaked during the pandemic, when millions were confined to their homes, scrolling through social media and growing increasingly angry over Black Lives Matter and other perceived injustices.
Yet if woke culture has truly died, nobody appears to have told the owners of the Last Ditch Bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts. The scruffy venue, which primarily serves lesbians, may be among the most uncompromisingly progressive institutions still standing.
This week, the bar became the centre of a controversy that, in the language of the internet, has “broken the internet”.
The Boston Globe, the first newspaper to report the story, is expected to receive its biggest subscription boost in history from the viral coverage. The original post about the controversy has been viewed more than 30 million times.
The dispute has drawn astonished reactions from figures including Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz, while even The Guardian, Fox News and the New York Post have expressed disbelief at what unfolded.
One online commentator captured the public reaction by describing the episode as “intergalactic woke batcrapitude”.
More broadly, the episode has highlighted how many people on the Left appear to have retained a worldview formed six years ago, much like Japanese soldiers in the jungles of Guam who continued fighting the Second World War long after the conflict had ended.
If woke culture has truly died, nobody told the owners of the Last Ditch Bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts, pictured here.
The “house rules” at lesbian venue Last Ditch Bar triggered a Massachusetts controversy after the establishment dropped its face-mask requirement.
The basement venue displays its strict “venue norms” prominently across the walls.
One set of house rules states: “Racism, Misogynoir [racism directed towards black women], Transmisogyny, Ableism, Transphobia, Homophobia, Lesbophobia, and any other discrimination will not be tolerated.”
Another says: “No one is permitted to touch anyone, in any way, without getting express, verbal consent.” The rule also covers patrons’ “assistive devices”, including wheelchairs, canes and hearing aids.
A third declares: “Nobody will be barred from entry due to lack of funds. Poor and unhoused [sic] people are welcome in the space.”
But the rule that attracted perhaps the most attention required every customer to wear a “well-fitted KN-95 respirator mask (or better)” at all times.
The masks are designed to reduce the transmission of respiratory viruses, including Covid-19, but are often regarded as cumbersome and uncomfortable.
Calling them “safety belts for the face”, the bar said masks were required whenever customers were not actively drinking or eating: “Lower, sip, and lift!”
Anyone who failed to follow the rule could be asked to leave, although staff might first offer them “an opportunity to engage in an accountability process”.
The policy did little to suggest a conventional night out, and the management’s strongly worded public statements on other issues may have added to the controversy.
Last September, for instance, the bar announced that all law-enforcement officers would be prohibited from entering after a police officer briefly came inside while pursuing two suspected drug offenders.
‘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.