Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is the notion that none of us can truly perceive a world beyond our availability heuristic, which shapes our perception of reality. In simpler terms, Plato imagines that if people are chained in a cave and can only view those shadows, those shadows become their reality. The best pop-cultural manifestation of Plato’s Allegory was The Matrix, where all unfree characters are in a dream-like sleep and have no idea they are living inside a computer programme.The real-life analogy is anyone who consumes so much propaganda that no amount of rationalising, to borrow a line from Dr House, would change their opinion.Perhaps the most extreme version of that is the epochal tale of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier stationed in the Philippines at the fag end of World War II, who “fought” for thirty years and refused to lay down his arms.
Explorer Suzuki (left) and Hiroo Onoda, in February 1974 on Lubang Island. The image was intended to be proof that Onoda was alive.(Upscaled with Canvas)
Once the island was overtaken by Allied forces, Onoda and his comrades escaped into the jungle, where they survived on coconuts, banana peels and stolen rice.While his peers shuffled off their mortal coil, Onoda kept fighting – despite evidence to the contrary, which he dismissed as American propaganda – and it wasn’t till 1974, nearly 30 years after he was sent to fight, that the soldier out of time laid down his arms.One was oddly reminded of Onoda after coming across the Boston ‘lesbian bar story’ that is every product manager’s wet dream: a story published in the Boston Globe that went so viral that it led to thousands of subscriptions for what seemed a rather nondescript story but is an elegant outpost of woke America’s last bastion.For those who don’t monitor the situation online and believe in touching grass, here’s the CliffsNotes version.A lesbian bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts, made a slight change to its Saturday-night mask policy that led to a culture war so elaborate it would have been rejected by South Park for being too obvious.Last Ditch, a lesbian bar on record, is an “aggressively inclusive queer space” where patrons are required to wear KN95 masks in 2026. It turns nobody away for being broke and explicitly welcomes “dykes, transsexuals, gender freaks, workers, and their friends”. All these admirable intentions soon encountered humanity’s oldest ideological opponent: rent.Customers disappeared, staff couldn’t be paid and co-founder Jackie Matellian worked four jobs and lived in her truck for six months while carrying the responsibility for a $50,000 business loan. So, the bar decided to make the smallest concession to Mammon: Saturday nights would be mask-optional.The response is exactly what you would expect if someone replaced a Pride flag with a flag of Israel.
What followed is the perfect living example of what can be called the Toaster F**** Syndrome.For those who don’t know, the theory is simple. Pre-internet, if someone wanted to perform coitus with a piece of electrical equipment and expressed that desire, they would be told by their peers that it was imbecilic to want to f*** a toaster. But post-World Wide Web, when someone expressed that desire, they would find thousands of other individuals who would soon form a community and try and convince everyone that it was the new normal.After the Instagram post, all the toaster f***** were out in full force.Commenters accused the bar of ableism, eugenics and facilitating mass disability. One hoped it would be firebombed. The bar apologised on Instagram, which made it even worse because the apology graphic had no alt-text and was thus ‘triggering’ for visually impaired folks, prompting another round of accusations of ableism.One activist called Soe Noire, who is a lesbian and uses ‘he/him’ pronouns, accused the debt-ridden founder Matellian of producing “White THEY THEM Tears”. The internet did its best, which saw Last Ditch defend Soe Noire, accuse the Globe of “abysmal journalism” and ask everyone to donate to ‘his’ Cash App and Venmo because ‘he’ was being harassed.All this because a lesbian bar decided to relax its mask mandate for one day in 2026.But honestly, Last Ditch Bar sounds appropriately named because it feels like a time capsule, harking back to the good ol’ days of ‘peak woke’ America.Now, historians differ over the year when America hit ‘peak woke’, but most agree it was between 2019 and 2021, when Trump’s first term ended.Fauci’s words on masks and everything else became the gospel truth. Everyone was listening and learning. Suggesting the lab leak theory was plausible was deemed racism. George Floyd was beatified and put on par with Martin Luther King Jr, while Black Lives Matter became the most important religion on earth. The police clearly needed to be defunded.Read: ‘Dr’ Donald Trump, Tylenol, and why Americans don’t trust the ‘science’ anymoreIt was a time when, if you sent a Slack message that read, “Guys, I am stuck in a lift”, Slack would auto-correct you and point out that “Guys” was gendered language.Across the Atlantic, a fantastical fabulist named Jason Arday became Cambridge’s youngest Black professor because suddenly every institution of note needed to highlight their allegiance to the woke cause, and JK Rowling became the most hated person in the world because she had the audacity to point out that sex was real and that perhaps biological men shouldn’t be allowed into sex-segregated places.The problem was that this particular cultural revolution became the Democratic Party’s wider brand, and the Republicans discovered they could attach the most ridiculous views of blue-haired Karens to the Democratic Party.The warning signs were there for all to see.As Virginia Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger said during a private Democratic caucus call: if Democrats didn’t believe in defunding the police, they needed to stop allowing the phrase to define them.Even as the Dems celebrated Trump’s removal, they were paving the way for his return, alienating normies who didn’t want their children to share bathrooms with people in drag, men to play women’s sports or drag queens in children’s classrooms.The messaging became so bad that voters instead chose the former reality star whose first term had already been the presidential equivalent of a supernova explosion.In 2008, Barack Obama built something extraordinary, a grand coalition for all Americans. Obama won independents, suburban voters, Catholics and large chunks of the political middle. Democrats and Democrat-leaning voters constituted 55% of registered voters in Pew’s measurements that year. Republicans, on the other hand, made up 39%.By the final quarter of 2024, Obama’s great coalition was dead.Gallup found Republicans and Republican-leaning independents ahead of Democrats and Democratic leaners by 47% to 43% among US adults, the high-water mark of a remarkable reversal from the Obama years.Read: How Barack Obama ‘birthed’ Donald Trump and MAGASomewhere along the way, Hope and Change had become Please State Your Pronouns. The voice became shriller and shriller, requiring everyone to have an opinion on everything irrespective of whether it mattered.One became a bigot simply by questioning whether a drag queen should be there in a kid’s class or if a trans artist should promote a product mainly targeting straight men. The Democrats handed the Republicans the culture war on a platter.Read: Jimmy Kimmel ‘cancelled’ – comical or tragic?Trump’s campaign eventually reduced years of this cultural resentment to perhaps the most devastating political advertisement of the 2024 election: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” Famous last words for the Democratic Party and even the world, which continues to pay for a political party’s complete suspension of disbelief in handing the nuclear arsenal and the mantle of leader of the free world to the most craven and explicitly corrupt president of America. His vacillating foreign policy decisions, from random tariffs to meaningless wars, made everyone’s life worse: Americans, America’s allies and America’s enemies.Now, with the midterms approaching, America has shown clear signs of moving on from the woke fever dream.The Economist notes that while “Woke 1” was about identity, race, gender, language and privilege, “Woke 2”, championed by the likes of Zohran Mamdani, is centred on class and economics: wages, rent, housing and things that actually matter to real people. The political question has shifted from “Who are you?” to “What can you afford?”
President Donald Trump and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani depart following a joint news conference at Gracie Mansion, Monday, Sept. 21, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
If “Woke 1” was essentially identity-based social justice, “Woke 2” is class-based economic populism.Read: Why Zohran Mamdani will find it hard to be another Barack ObamaBut the Last Ditch outrage was a reminder of how insane the peak woke era used to be and the culture war that ensued.For what it’s worth, after World War II, Onoda was finally convinced to lay down his arms when his former commanding officer was flown into the Philippines to convince him that the war was indeed over. Perhaps Barack Obama, the last great commanding officer of the troops of Woke America, can make a trip to the Last Ditch bar to convince them that the culture war, and COVID, are over and to lay down the masks.
Onoda surrendering his sword to Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos on 11 March 1974
But there’s a catch.Unlike Onoda, all those involved in the Last Ditch fight have access to the internet. Now the folks chained in Plato’s cave have Wi-Fi and a smartphone that tells them the shadows they see are reality. And no amount of rationalising will convince them otherwise.
