10 August 2026 - 6:50pm
Yesterday, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared on ABC’s This Week with Jonathan Karl. During their discussion, Karl asked her about Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong’s unearthed past comments, including those saying that Thanksgiving should be cancelled. After initially sidestepping the question, AOC argued that Hong had “moved away” from those past views. She then added, with a chuckle: “I have a local city councilman who has this saying, ‘Woke 1 was crazy.’”
Ocasio-Cortez’s comments reflect a new shift from many Democrats today: embarrassed by what are now widely viewed as clear excesses of that time, it’s best to just laugh at how silly things were back then and wash their hands of it. The problem, as many have noted in response to her comments, is that there were serious, far-reaching consequences from that period, and many who supported them have never fully reckoned with why they were so bad.
Though there was a moment in 2020 when it appeared America was set to have long overdue national conversations about topics such as police tactics and racial inequality, activist overreach and a sense of moral panic from many supporters — including national Democrats such as Ocasio-Cortez — precipitated far more sweeping changes. They began trampling on anyone who got in their way, or whom they deemed to have made an irredeemable moral transgression.
Around the summer of 2020, when the “Great Awokening” arguably reached its apex, social-media mobs began hunting for heretics and succeeded in pressuring employers to sack them. Examples of those targeted include Democratic data guru David Shor, black Harvard economist Roland Fryer, New York Times Covid reporter Donald McNeil Jr, reporter Alexi McCammond, food columnist Alison Roman, and Gina Carano. Then there were the everyday Americans who unwittingly found themselves at the mercy of mobs, such as the owner of a Mediterranean grocery store in Minneapolis, an electrical worker from San Diego, a high-school cheerleader from Virginia, and scores of college professors.
But it wasn’t just the culture that was affected by these seismic changes. Many in the Democratic Party itself, including Ocasio-Cortez, began to embrace extreme policies and ideas, often at the behest of activists, that even at the time were far out of step with most Americans. This included support for open borders, defunding the police, reparations for slavery, allowing convicted felons to vote from prison, and race-conscious discrimination. Even today, the formal party apparatus clings to rituals such as land acknowledgements.
This is just a sampling from that era: there is much, much, much more. American life irreparably changed as a result of all this, and there is evidence that the backlash to it helped to power Donald Trump’s return and victory in 2024. This raises the question: does AOC even remember the things she’s dismissing as a “crazy” time?
Most Democrats want to move on from that era, but that will be hard to do without a true reckoning. It’s all well and good for Ocasio-Cortez and others to concede that there was real overreach during that time, but if they want to regain the trust of voters who were repelled by the Left, they would be wise to provide clearer answers. What, specifically, do they think was “crazy”? Was it simply, as Ocasio-Cortez suggests in the interview, dumb rhetoric? Or were there problems with the actual ideas being proposed? Moreover, why, when so many people opposed these ideas at the time, were she and other progressives so susceptible to them? Did that demonstrate poor judgement?
Without offering answers to these questions, it remains unclear whether Ocasio-Cortez, who may be eying a 2028 presidential run, actually understands what people were so upset about. Without an honest reckoning, she risks following in the footsteps of the Democrats’ previous nominee, Kamala Harris, who tried and failed to leave her past controversial positions in the rearview mirror, while never fully accounting for why she adopted them in the first place. Future presidential aspirants would do well to offer voters more than “haha, wow, that was crazy, right guys?”
