They were the locals. The liberals. The default subscribers of the bluest-blue corner of the Boston internet — the same crowd that sneers at anyone with opinions right of Mao and would normally never be caught dead questioning a Pride Month initiative. And they questioned the hell out of this one.

The #2 comment overall, 348 upvotes — a poster doing the usual Reddit disclaimer to make sure everyone knows they aren’t one of those far-right Nazis with wrong opinions, then asking what the point of drag-for-kids programming actually is:

180 upvotes, on who the programming is actually for:

136 upvotes, on the BPL programming as misguided LGBTQ acceptance:

117 upvotes, simpler:

94 upvotes, another usual-Reddit-disclaimer-first take — and then the question Mayor Michelle Wu’s administration says is asked in bad faith — whose benefit this is actually for:

The loudest pro-drag-for-kids comment in the entire thread did not, in fact, defend drag for kids. It went after the skeptics. The #3 comment overall, 181 upvotes — not a defense, but a smear of the skeptics as predators:

That smear has been the activist class’s go-to retort against drag-for-kids skeptics for years. 181 upvotes from r/Boston suggests it still moves.

31 upvotes, the same smear in shorter form:

11 upvotes, saying the quiet part out loud:

The most upvoted actual defense — 75 upvotes — came from user jp_slim, “Just JP here,” one of the drag queens scheduled to read at the BPL. It is a defense from a performer with a vested interest, and still well below the skeptics. The skeptics, notably, did not ask whether the books were bad. They asked why the person reading them had to be in drag:

A frame check. r/Boston is the default Boston city subreddit, moderated by volunteers exercising more editorial control over public conversation than most newspaper editors — for a $0.00 salary. The day AI replaces them, half the internet will celebrate.

But the mods aren’t really the story. The culture is. r/Boston is the kind of community where every thread doubles as a credentialing exercise, disagreement gets dogpiled instead of debated, and the whole ecosystem runs on a quiet, smug certainty that the regulars are the smart ones and everyone else is trolling or stupid.

The default register is so progressive that even the skeptics above issued the usual disclaimer first — “I don’t have anything against drag queens,” “I consider myself liberal with my voting history to back myself,” “I’m sorry but I think it’s very weird.” The mandatory throat-clearing required to make sure everyone knows they aren’t one of those far-right Nazis with wrong opinions.

And then the moderators locked the thread. Because of course they did.

There is a bigger pattern here. The same Democratic-leaning posters who used to reflexively defend every progressive-identity initiative have been quietly conceding, for the better part of a year, that the wellness-and-identity wing of the party is not winning anyone elections. Trans athletes in girls’ sports. Biological-male inmates in women’s prisons. Drag queen story hours for kindergartners. These are the issues that show up in every focus group explaining why suburban swing voters have not come back to the Democrats since 2020 — and they are the issues progressive voters themselves no longer feel like dying on the hill for. r/Boston pushing “I really don’t get why ‘let’s have drag queens read stories to kids’ is even a thing” to 348 upvotes is not r/Boston turning conservative. It is r/Boston reading the room.

Some r/Boston regulars are saying it out loud. From a 21-upvote comment in the same thread:

The mayor’s office, the BPL, and Mass NOW — the listed organizing partner on multiple of the events — have not addressed the criticism coming out of r/Boston.

The moderators, meanwhile, just locked the door.