Posted on 08/31/2026 10:13:42 AM PDT by Morgana
All the shopper wanted was to buy a laptop.
Instead, a routine trip to a Best Buy turned into a bizarre confrontation over gender, pronouns and whether a customer should be compelled to address a biological male employee as “ma’am.”
Video of the encounter shows the Best Buy employee, who presented with a distinctly masculine appearance, objecting after the customer referred to the employee as “sir.”
The employee insisted on being addressed as “ma’am.”
The customer wasn't having it.
His position was straightforward: the person standing in front of him appeared to be a man, and he wasn't going to be forced to say something he didn't believe simply because an employee demanded it.
You can argue that mistakes happen and that most decent people aren't deliberately looking to insult a stranger.
But that's not what made this encounter different.
The confrontation represented something much bigger: a “woke” ideology that reached its cultural peak several years ago and somehow transformed ordinary human interactions into ideological minefields.
Today, even progressives have a name for that era: Woke 1.
And apparently Woke 1 “was crazy.”
During a recent ABC News interview, progressive Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez repeated a phrase connected to New York City Councilman Chi Ossé: “Woke 1 was crazy.” The phrase has since exploded.
Woke 1 basically describes the cultural and political environment surrounding the pandemic and the upheaval following George Floyd's death, an era when ideas previously considered fringe suddenly became fashionable.
Defund the police, abolish the police, cancel culture, you name it. Identity politics seemingly injected into everything. And increasingly complicated rules governing what ordinary Americans were permitted to say about race, gender and sexuality.
But now some liberal politicians who embraced that environment are distancing themselves from their old rhetoric.
For example, Wisconsin progressive Francesca Hong declared in 2020, “I support defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police.” She later moved away from those positions. Ocasio-Cortez has likewise said rhetoric from the lockdown era isn't rhetoric progressives would necessarily use today.
The political winds changed.
Perhaps politicians discovered what millions of Americans already knew: telling people that police departments should disappear, prisons should be abolished or that ordinary language must constantly be reconstructed around someone's personal identity was never going to work in the real world.
Which brings us back to Best Buy. The employee in that viral confrontation appears to be living in a cultural moment that much of the country — and increasingly even parts of the political left — has already begun leaving behind.
Yet somehow even that became a cultural confrontation.
That apparent retreat from Woke 1 hasn't escaped the attention of Joe Rogan, who recently challenged politicians who once embraced the “defund the police” movement to explain exactly what changed.
“How far out did you track the consequences of defunding the police?” Rogan asked. “Because I immediately went to… you're gonna have more crime because no one's gonna be able to stop the crime.”
Then he posed perhaps the most important question:
“What did you think defund the police meant? Everyone's gonna, like, eat mushrooms and we're all gonna, like, be flower children? What did you think? Because there's no police around, no one's gonna do crimes?”
Behind Rogan's sarcasm was a legitimate criticism of the Woke 1 era: what was the actual endgame?
His criticism went further. He questioned whether politicians genuinely reconsidered those policies after examining their consequences or simply abandoned them once public opinion turned against them.
“Or have you changed your opinion?” Rogan asked. “And if you did change your opinion, what were you thinking back then?”
That's the question politicians who embraced Woke 1 should have to answer.
Changing your mind isn't necessarily a bad thing. But when the policy involves policing, crime and public safety, Americans deserve more than a catchy phrase acknowledging that things went too far. They deserve an explanation of why those ideas were embraced in the first place.
For several years, Americans who questioned some of these ideas were routinely told they were the unreasonable ones. Now many of the same political circles that entertained those ideas are acknowledging that maybe things went too far.
Woke 1 is dead, but not everyone is up to speed, like the Best Buy employee. But what comes next?
If politicians themselves now acknowledge that Woke 1 went off the rails, what exactly will “Woke 2” look like?
We'll find out soon enough, but hopefully it won’t include defunding police!
Reminds me of what happened to me back in the late 1970s. Stopped a a hamburger shop, placed my order with a cutsy frilly person at the window.
Order came, I paid and said “Thank you Ma’am!”
The Retort was..”HEY! I’M A GUY!”
I looked closely and said...”Sorry. I could not tell!” He definitely looked feminine!
It is getting to the point we call each other COMRADE
Correct.
“What’s in a name?-PJ
That which we call a rose
By any other name would still have a dick.”
I do not shop at Best Buy. I haven’t for a year or two.
The branch manager is not saying a word until Best Buy legal goes through all of it. Best Buy has two issues; 1. If the employee refused to sell the laptop, he broke the law. 2. The employee can try to claim a hostile work environment and hunt for a payout. He's not going to have a claim since calling him "sir" is not offensive, regardless of his opinion toward it.
This is going to cost Best Buy which means they'll roll the costs onto customers.
Thanks
Not sure why anyone would go to Worst Buy in the first place.
About 10 years ago we were trying to buy two laptops at Best Buy in Knoxville. The salesman was blatantly trashing Trump. I hope his supervisor was happy, because we walked out and he didn’t sell two laptops that day.
Best Buy will be wise to kick this fool to the curb
If there is any question at all in my mind (usually there’s some clue) I just don’t use pronouns at all. ‘Thank You’ alone is enough politeness.
Nobody has time to play these stupid games, and these people are usually just waiting for you to say the wrong thing so they can fly off the handle and emote..
Here in the south there is a lot of, “ma’am” and “sir”, and I don’t expect that will stop any time soon. It’s the culture, and I hope it doesn’t change.
Well, as I said, there’s usually an indication in the way a person presents. I’m not suggesting to give up ‘Sir’ and ‘Ma’am’ entirely and for every encounter.
> If there is any question at all in my mind (usually there’s some clue) I just don’t use pronouns at all. <
Good advice. My problem is I’m so conditioned to say “sir” and “ma’am” that it comes out automatically. I probably should work on that.
By the way, I once inadvertently called a tranny “sir” when he/she self-identified as a woman. Sure looked like a guy, though. He/she got upset. But not violent.
Now here’s the kicker. He/she was a Best Buy employee, just like in this story. What’s up with that place?
The problem is the customer was trying to be polite. I have only once gotten “it’s ma’am”, and I just stopped using the honorific for the rest of the conversation. “Yes”, “no”, and “I want a laptop” all work just fine without using “sir/ma’am”.
Yeah
Or they’ll go Full Bud Light Tranny
That only applies to employees and management. Customers can't be sued on hostile work environment grounds.
-PJ
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