Hook, line and sinker

Posted on: Friday, 2026-09-25

Category: Meta

I would usually refrain from commenting on social media discourse on short notice. The last few days, however, have been an especially glaring example of a truly horrifying pattern - though not a new one, by any stretch. It seemed like a good occasion to put some analysis tools and prevention advice in writing, that I fear I will need to deploy time and time again.

Content warnings: note that this piece will discuss semi-organic hate movements, in particular racism and anti-Black hatred alongside ableism and notably the constant ridiculing of covid precautions. I will be drawing parallels to the hate campaign that murdered Jason Arday.

Have some context

A high-profile anti-trans pundit published a podcast about a trans-friendly lesbian bar somewhere in Massachusetts. About a week later, the Boston Globe published an article about the same bar. The writer happens to follow the who's who of anti-trans pundits on Twitter, which is likely not a coincidence. I won't link to any of it.

The article is ragebait. It's about a bar that still mandates masks. It frames the bar's decision to make masks optional one night a week as a return to reason. Paired with custom web design that opens the piece with a flood of angry comments about said decision, the whole thing is engineered to make you think anyone still taking covid precautions in 2026 is insane, unreasonable, and a bully.

(You get one guess as to why I feel compelled to write about this)

The piece is a masterwork of stripping context out so it can make people look unreasonable. We will not know and we should not know whether anyone involved was being unreasonable because we do not have enough context, and we should not have that context. It's a trans-friendly masks-required lesbian bar in Massachusetts. For the vast majority of us, it's not our circus.

What is very much my circus is the way people took that piece as permission to be ableist, racist assholes.

Dirtbag left

I have personally seen the article being shared with, broadly, two types of commentary. One type was "Oh my god get the popcorn this is the best drama of the year". The other was "This is everything wrong with the left / queer spaces and why we keep losing". Both of those, sometimes using those exact words, are really denouncing "the excesses of woke" and "purity politics dividing us".

In case you don't know: "woke" was originally coined by African-Americans, as a description of the state of "awakening" to the reality of racial injustice. Just read Wikipedia. The term has been ripped away from its roots, diluted, denounced and mocked, including by the left. The ongoing arguments about whether "Woke 1 went too far" - aka those Black liberation protests and calls for police abolition in 2020 were too much - are profoundly racist and specifically anti-Black.

What's being denounced is, somehow, excessive progressive demands. We could argue about many things, especially concrete concerns about how to get things done with too few people and too little power and too little money, about tactics and how to rally people to our side when learning takes time. But the tone here is that it was ridiculous to ever demand better.

This is ghastly. Covid precautions are, in that regard, an easy wedge - because much of the left has moved on and is out of touch with cold hard facts, it is trivial to paint those of us who still give a fuck as unreasonable in the most literal sense. To them, we're beyond reason, we're insane. And nobody ever needs to listen to the Mad.

Much of this commentariat is trans and highly sophisticated when it comes to analyzing how fearmongering uses us to radicalize cis people. Have you considered that our opponents might also be using disabled people and Black people to radicalize you?

Immunize

Rather than use my personal context and knowledge, which made it easy to spot how utterly fucked the article was, I'll walk you through a close reading of a specific sentence fragment early on: "what commenters consider an ongoing pandemic (Greenfield hasn’t reported any COVID cases in more than two months)".

Let's ask a few questions:

Who are those "commenters"? Why is this word being used? Are we talking about community members who are regulars at the bar?
Why would those commenters consider the pandemic to be ongoing? What would need to be true for that to be, or not be, the case?
How large is Greenfield? Because the number of expected cases will depend on that, obviously.
Wait, two months? Hasn't covid been over for years? What a strangely specific number to choose.
What does it mean to report cases? Wait, isn't there a whole bunch of coverage about US institutions dismantling disease reporting?
Why are those two sentences being juxtaposed like this? What does this turn of phrase want me to believe?

When I ask those questions, my conclusion is that the writer wants the reader to take away that people who would not have supported the struggling bar anyway are being irrational harpies. Because covid is over, precautions are unnecessary, and a few bullies are imposing their delusions on a local business which is now risking closure because of them.

This sentence primes you to read the entire piece in this mode: assume that the "commenters" are external, insane, and cruel. It specifically deploys this tactic towards a named Black person (who uses he/him pronouns) as follows:

Pair every comment from him with making a white person uncomfortable;
Stress that he refused to show up in person, and to provide further free labor;
Specifically frame him as having caused the white bar owner to cry, then being cruel about those tears.

Remember that you have no context to know whether or not this Black person was being excessive. You cannot take sides. It is not your circus. The piece however does want you to take a side: it wants you to see him as unreasonable. The piece preys on your pre-existing prejudice - we've all got some of that - to make you hate a Black disability advocate you had never heard about until five minutes ago.

This is not about some lesbian bar in Massachusetts. It's about resisting this kind of manipulation, about a vital skill more of the online left urgently needs to develop. Because this shit gets people killed.

Black Lives Matter

Jason Arday was a professor at Cambridge in England. Jason Arday was a Black man. Jason Arday is dead. He died by suicide after white supremacist academics and media all too happy to hunt Black people for sports systematically destroyed his reputation. The method used will be familiar to many people who live primarily online: it is that of harassment forums that keep a scoreboard of deaths.

I should not know Jason Arday's name and neither should you, unless you are part of the narrow academic sphere he worked in. We should not have opinions about his integrity, about allegations of plagiarism, about whether he truly ran 30 marathons in 35 days (he did), about whether he was beloved by his students (he was).

Jason Arday should still be alive. Those articles want you to forget that, they want you to forget that we're talking about people. They want you to fail to interrogate why you are even being told about any of this. Steven Trasher puts it well: "Dare to step into these spaces," they warn, "dare to take some of the resources we've been hoarding, and this could happen to you, too."

They are trying it again in France right now. Thélyson Orélien, a Black writer whose novel C'était ça ou mourir is nominated for prestigious literary prizes, is being accused of using AI. The accusation comes from a Twitter account with 92 followers ran by a pro-AI Figaro right-wing pundit who used the laughably unreliable AI tool Pangram to make his claim. The Figaro itself proudly printed all this. None of it should ever have gotten traction. The accusation made the front page of allegedly-left-wing paper Libération.

The Boston Globe piece, by funneling easily-baited outrage at continued covid precautions by abled leftists towards a named Black person, is a remarkably disgusting example of how ableism and anti-Blackness operate in concert. I am white, and wish to tread with care when drawing links between those two mechanisms: but cases like this make it clear that there is a shared monstering strategy at work. It will, as always, primarily hurt those who live in the center of the Venn diagram.

Refuse to play. Refuse gossip and outrage. Focus instead on care, on non-voyeuristic curiosity, and on justice. Because otherwise, the worst people on Earth are going to keep getting away with murder.

Have some context

Dirtbag left

Immunize

Black Lives Matter

Further reading