No, Woke 1 Was Not Crazy |
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No, Woke 1 Was Not Crazy
AOC and others are laughing off 2020 as a wild, isolated moment. None of that is true.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on ABC’s This Week, on August 9, 2026.
It’s far too late now to bemoan how the meaning and sentiment behind “stay woke,” which originally pertained to the recognition of the racist structures that condition Black life in the United States, was stolen from Black Americans and caricatured into the ultimate symbol of political correctness run amok. But that notion of a crazed population seeking to punish anyone who doesn’t bend the knee to the new social rules and demand absurd changes to the social and political world is at the heart of the current discourse around so-called “Woke 1”—a term that is now quickly coming to define the seminal year of 2020, when the Covid pandemic and the murder of George Floyd fueled one of the biggest social justice movements in American history and popularized concepts like abolishing prisons and defunding the police.
The conversation started after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez invoked the phrase in a recent ABC News interview. Asked about Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong’s onetime support for prison abolition and police defunding, Ocasio-Cortez quoted New York City Councilman Chi Ossé’s declaration that “Woke 1 was crazyyyy.” She did say that there had been a “huge opening of the Overton Window” in 2020, and that “the discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful.” But she concluded that “rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.”
Centrists and conservatives immediately pounced—after all, here was one of the most prominent leftists in America seeming to agree with them that the left had gone, well, a little nuts back in 2020. The implication from Ocasio-Cortez and Ossé is obvious: The 2020 protests against police violence and the rhetoric that came from that time produced a kind of frenzy that led people, including themselves, astray. Now, with their heads clear, they’re focused on serious and mature politics.
AOC: I have a local city councilman that has this saying: Woke 1 was crazy…. I think that during especially during covid, I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place. And I actually think that the… pic.twitter.com/VbmvfwJ70A— Acyn (@Acyn) August 9, 2026
AOC: I have a local city councilman that has this saying: Woke 1 was crazy…. I think that during especially during covid, I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place. And I actually think that the… pic.twitter.com/VbmvfwJ70A
The people who stand against the caricature of wokeness will never stop telling you about the evils of its manifestation in elite liberal institutions and political circles. You know what I’m talking about: racial awareness training, pronouns, reading books like White Fragility, land acknowledgements. (Even worse, these people were forced to entertain police abolition and defunding as serious intellectual ideas.)
Not to say that some of these things aren’t annoying. But the irony is that they are........