Yes, Woke 1.0 was crazy. Everyone involved should apologise

August 20, 2026 — 3:00am

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“Woke 1.0 was crazy,” progressive Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said this month.

Given Ocasio-Cortez’s own record – she previously insisted that some groups “have no choice but to riot,” called for defunding the police and “prison abolition” and used the demeaning term “menstruating person” to describe a woman – the crazy that she speaks of was also her own.

Good on Ocasio-Cortez for acknowledging mistakes. Now can we have some accountability for the vast damage that Woke 1.0 did, not to mention the damage that Woke 2.0 continues to do?

Wokeness, as it commonly came to be known at the start of this decade, wasn’t just an Orwellian linguistic fad or a tedious set of corporate training sessions in cultural sensitivity or wacky policy ideas about addressing racial and socioeconomic inequities. As it was experienced by those on the wrong end of it, it was a system of enforced ideological conformity, policed by social bullying and institutional coercion (or cravenness), which........

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