If the left wants to build a mass movement that appeals to millions, we first have to address the tiny, vocal minority in our ranks holding all of us back.

In late September, the Boston Globe’s Annalisa Quinn published an excellent piece of local journalism about the Last Ditch Bar and Arts Venue, a Covid-conscious lesbian bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts. The article went mega-viral, with Semafor media reporter Max Tani tweeting that the article generated more than 1,000 paid subscriptions in a single day. According to an internal message to staff, the article was already “by far our best performing story of the year” and was “on pace to shatter all sorts of Globe records.” 

The article spread like wildfire on social media partially because right-wing influencers used it as an extreme example of hyper-woke politics gone too far. But it also clearly haunted many on the left, with many posting their personal experiences of seeing movement organizing be consistently derailed by narcissistic, neurotic, anti-social personalities who hijack leftist spaces by making them about their own petty personal grievances.

How a Few Bad Apples Can Ruin an Essential Leftist Space

Quinn’s full article about the Last Ditch is well worth your time. But to recap, the controversy started when the venue announced in an August 31 social media post that, “with love,” it was changing its masking policy from mandatory to optional for one night a week. Quinn noted that as of September 2026, Greenfield hadn’t had any new confirmed Covid-19 cases in two months.

The post prompted strong backlash from the Pioneer Valley community, with several angry patrons accusing Jackie Matellian, the last remaining co-founder, of everything from ableism, racism, and even eugenicism. The other two co-founders, Asa Rosario and Sage Territo, had stepped back from their roles.

“I don’t even 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,” one commenter wrote on Instagram. “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.’”

Other commenters slammed the mask-optional night as a “mass-disabling event” and that Matellian was “no better than a fascist.” In an effort to repair the damage, Matellian held a 3.5 hour meeting that had trained mediators in hand, one of whom was a licensed therapist. At one point, that mediator asked participants in the meeting expressing grievances if they were able to remove themselves from “places of righteousness.” 

Participants attending virtually on Zoom responded by pointing out that as a licensed therapist, that mediator was a “mandated reporter” who could feasibly have someone hospitalized against their will, making her presence “wildly unsafe.” A Black performer and artist who goes by Soe Noire — who told the Globe he identified as a gender-expansive lesbian and used he/him pronouns — was also participating virtually. After the meeting, Noire reportedly spent hours on Instagram bashing Matellian for shedding “WHITE THEY THEM TEARS” and accused their establishment of not being a “safe environment.” He also complained that Matellian was “not interested in revolutionary praxis.”

Matellian explained to the meeting that their credit score was in the gutter, and that they had been financially ruined in an effort to keep the Last Ditch open. They reportedly hadn’t been paying themself, had been working four jobs, and even living out of their truck for months, while their staff were content to work for tips in an effort to keep the establishment from closing. 

Matellian is also apparently on the hook for paying back the $50,000 loan they and their two co-founders took out to open the bar, and the building’s landlord had given them an ultimatum of paying back $3,900 in back rent owed by September 28th. They had gone out of their way to make the Last Ditch a safe haven for both the LGBTQ+ community and the homeless, made it clear that police were not welcome there, and even waived the bar’s cover charge for people who were unable to pay.

Noire responded in the Zoom chat by observing that Matellian had used their time to “spill tears and center your feelings,” adding: “this is incredibly racist and deflecting behavior.” When Quinn reached out to Noire for comment a few days after the meeting, he stood by his comments, and said he was “not going to give grace” to people “spreading rhetoric that can and will get people hurt.” When asked to elaborate, Noire pointed to the bar’s official Instagram account liking comments from people who supported the mask-optional rule.

How Delusional Narcissists Kill Leftist Organizing

The Globe’s article is a fantastic example of in-depth high-quality local journalism. But its report on the Last Ditch also represents a microcosm of the nature of leftist organizing. As someone who’s been in leftist spaces for more than 15 years since before the Occupy movement, I’ve seen countless examples of people like Soe Noire hijack meetings for organizing direct action and building working-class solidarity to turn them into shouting matches over perceived microaggressions.

Some of the people behind the dysfunction at those meetings may have been intentional saboteurs. In 1944, during the height of World War II, the predecessor to the CIA wrote a handbook on how citizens sympathetic to the Allies could disrupt meetings of Axis-affiliated groups. This included insisting that everything be done through “channels,” making lengthy speeches about irrelevant and unrelated topics, “haggling over precise wordings” of previous meeting minutes, and other disruptive tactics. It’s highly likely that people active in leftist spaces during the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam protests also had to deal with trained saboteurs at their own meetings.

But what happened with the Last Ditch is different. The left’s biggest strength is that we strive to be accommodating to all marginalized people in a society that unfortunately centers white, male, heterosexual, and cisgender people. This is critical when attempting to build a mass movement that has the power to shape politics and culture. 

But our desire to accommodate can also be our Achilles heel. Too often, leftists are pressured to stay silent when a small handful of people addicted to the agency granted them by virtue of them being in a leftist space use their marginalized status to bully everyone else into submission. In one of the many conversations that unfolded in response to the Globe article, writer Timothy Faust observed: “A lotta folks ostracized elsewhere want to be considerate and nice; unfortunately, there’s a small but lethal number of people who see that as a prime opportunity to abuse their goodwill. Lots of us have the scars!”

This is also not a new phenomenon: Faust pointed to a 2003 essay by Michael Suileabhain-Wilson called “Five Geek Social Fallacies,” which goes into detail about how people who experienced exclusion in their formative years are uniquely vulnerable to bad actors who exploit their empathy. Suileabhain-Wilson’s first geek social fallacy (GSF1) is “ostracizers are evil,” writing that those who have felt the humiliation of being ostracized are hesitant to do the same to others, “no matter how obnoxious, offensive, or aromatic the prospective excludee may be.”

“As a result, nearly every geek social group of significant size has at least one member that 80% of the members hate, and the remaining 20% merely tolerate. If GSF1 exists in sufficient concentration — and it usually does — it is impossible to expel a person who actively detracts from every social event,” he wrote. “GSF1 protocol permits you not to invite someone you don’t like to a given event, but if someone spills the beans and our hypothetical Cat Piss Man invites himself, there is no recourse. You must put up with him, or you will be an Evil Ostracizer and might as well go out for the football team.”

The 2012 “Missing Stair” essay by the pseudonymous writer Cliff Pervocracy also touched on this phenomenon often seen in leftist spaces. The essay describes how, just as houses will have a staircase with a missing step that everyone knows to leap over, some social circles have a problematic individual that everyone decides is easier to tolerate than to fix. 

“Just about every workplace has that one person who doesn't do their job, but everyone's grown accustomed to picking up their slack. A lot of social groups and families have that one person. The person whose tip you quietly add a couple bucks to. (Maybe more than a couple, after how they talked to the server.) The person you don't bother arguing with when they get off on one of their rants. The person you try really, really hard not to make angry, because they're perfectly nice so long as no one makes them angry,” the essay read.

“I know not all these people can be fixed, and sometimes they can't be escaped either,” the author continued. “But the least you can do is recognize them, and that they are the problem. Stop thinking that your inability to accomodate[sic] them is the problem."

Delusional Narcissists Are Still Exploiting the Pandemic

One slang term for these people is “hall monitor,” like the kids in elementary school who were deputized by teachers and principals to snitch on other kids roaming the hallways without a hall pass. The Covid-19 pandemic made hall monitor behavior that much worse. During the height of the pandemic in March and April of 2020, we were told the best way to preserve public health was to stay home, not work, watch Netflix, and play video games. The lockdowns briefly put the able-bodied and disabled people who are unable to work on equal footing.

It’s completely natural for people in the unenviable position of being unable to earn a living to pine for the equality they experienced when no one was able to work. And it’s understandable that people who are immunocompromised and/or disabled to feel alienated when one of their favorite establishments goes from mandatory masking to mask-optional. That can be interpreted as a loss of power and agency, which will naturally cause people who have been made to feel powerless in their own lives to lash out. That being said, it’s both harmful and unproductive for a queer leftist to accuse the people going out of their way to give you a space to be your own authentic self of being eugenicists simply because of a change in masking policy.

I don’t personally know Soe Noire but I feel confident in saying that he wasn’t wearing a mask before the Covid-19 pandemic, even though the 2018-2019 flu season led to 380,000 hospitalizations and 28,000 deaths according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This is important context, as the American Association of Medical Colleges reported in September that there have been fewer than 6,000 deaths of Covid-19 patients so far in 2026. Those numbers show that masking in the fall of 2026 is a largely performative gesture. 

In response to the Boston Globe article, The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis shared her own experience of dealing with hall monitor leftists in a September 25 article. She argued that the permanent maskers are similar to people who wear MAGA hats or keffiyehs to show their affiliation with the politics associated with both clothing items. Because long Covid disproportionately impacts people of color and the LGBTQ+ community and can cause long-term disability, wearing masks indoors even five years after the vaccines and boosters allowed us to go back to living our lives has become a gesture of solidarity with those communities.

Lewis lamented that social media has “empowered drive-by whinings by sociopaths,” while “progressive politics had allowed them to cloak themselves in righteousness.” 

“What might once have been recognized as narcissism, jealousy, the result of a personality disorder — or just plain boredom — was now transfigured into ‘calling out’ those who had erred,” Lewis wrote. “The people pointing fingers usually did nothing themselves, apart from complaining, which had the happy side effect that they could never be accused of committing an impure act.”

As a leftist who is simultaneously white, male, cisgender, and able-bodied, it’s vital for those in my position to embrace, protect, and stand with members of marginalized communities, especially when they’re under attack by local, state, and federal authorities. But the Boston Globe article makes it clear that it’s just as vital for members of those same communities to ostracize and isolate the people selfishly hijacking leftist spaces. 

Thankfully, this is happening across social media. Even on the leftist platform Bluesky, which Helen Lewis described as the “spiritual home of perma-masking,” popular queer, disabled, and leftist accounts made it clear that people like Soe Noire don’t speak for them.

Bluesky user “doom boy” — who noted that she was a “trans woman who came out in the deep south in 2016” — wrote that “this kind of person is a serious problem for LGBTQ spaces.” She called the Globe’s article “hilarious and insane,” observing that it was “full of the sorts of people you meet all the time in left activism, who combine neuroticism and narcissism to bring down any institution they’re allowed into.”

Hall monitor leftists can also make it easy to forget that the president of the United States and his party that controls both chambers of Congress and the Supreme Court are all going out of their way to use the power of the state to brutalize and erase marginalized groups. It’s more important now than ever before to have a united front that’s invulnerable to sabotage. And if we hope to one day build a mass movement that unites the working class, we need to adopt a zero-tolerance attitude toward the delusional narcissists and hall monitors.

Carl Gibson is a journalist whose work has been published in CNN, USA Today, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, the Louisville Courier-Journal, Barron’s, Business Insider, the Independent, and NPR, among others. Follow him on Bluesky @crgibs.bsky.social.