What a Mask Fight at a Lesbian Bar Has to Do with Antizionism

The lesbian-bar story has been ricocheting around the internet because its self-destructiveness is so absurd it reads like satire. If you missed it: a struggling lesbian bar makes one night a week mask-optional. Members of its community accuse the owners of eugenics and complicity in a “mass disabling event.” One commenter hopes the bar gets firebombed.

But staying stuck in the mockery obscures three psychological processes that we are increasingly seeing in radical movements: tiny disagreements become moral storms, counter-evidence doesn’t update their beliefs, and groups begin destroying their own in what I call moral cannibalism.

Tiny disagreements become moral storms. Once a group makes moral purity the standard, it stops judging an act by what it actually does and starts treating it as evidence of what kind of person you are. A lesbian bar that required KN95 masks decided to allow people to go without them one night a week. That produced accusations that the owners were eugenicists, were contributing to a “mass disabling event,” and were killing disabled people. Later, the bar’s Instagram account simply liked comments supporting the mask-optional policy. A critic said those likes amounted to rhetoric that “can and will get people hurt.”

Counter-evidence no longer updates beliefs. When new evidence doesn’t fit our understanding of what is happening, our brains normally update our models, similar to a software update prompted by an error. Ideological beliefs, however, can become resistant to that update. For example, one owner explained that she still considered herself an advocate for disabled people, but the bar was failing and she felt forced to open one night a week to people without masks to bring in more revenue. She had lived in her truck for six months, ruined her credit, worked four jobs, and remained personally responsible for a $50,000 loan. The owners eventually reversed course and apologized. Yet none of this produced much reconsideration of the original moral judgment that they were callously endangering disabled people.

Moral cannibalism. Once the group condemned the owners themselves, every attempt to make amends generated another offense. The owners apologized, but the Instagram card containing the apology lacked alt-text, prompting fresh accusations of ableism. When one owner cried at a community meeting, people mocked her “WHITE THEY THEM TEARS” as “racist and deflecting.” Then the hunt spreads. Then they turned on the therapist who came in to mediate. Because she was a mandated reporter, one participant called her presence “wildly unsafe” and suggested she could be acting as an agent of the state.

People on the right and left both resist evidence that challenges their political beliefs; decades of research on partisan reasoning has documented this bias. Moral cannibalism, however, seems particularly visible right now in parts of the left, including queer activist and antizionist movements.

Scott Wiener rejects AIPAC support, opposes U.S. funding for offensive Israeli military action, and has called Israel’s conduct in Gaza genocide. Yet at San Francisco’s Trans March, protesters demanded that he “redeem” himself, shouted about his “Israeli handlers,” and told him he stopped being queer when he supported Israel. Moral intoxication turns certainty in your own righteousness into permission to turn on members of your own group.

But moral cannibalism demands something more than enforcing the boundaries of a group. The accused must participate in their own demise: confess, apologize, accept the indictment, and surrender the part of themselves the group has condemned. Even then, absolution may never come.

Which brings us back to that little lesbian bar.

“Get out” wasn’t enough for the mob. Neither was confession or apology. They demanded that the owner maintain a policy that was helping drive her deeper into financial ruin, while condemning her for trying to save herself and the bar.

“Destroy yourself.”