During an interview on ABC News, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said that “Woke 1 was crazy” when trying to defend Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong. ABC News’ Jonathan Karl asked about Hong’s previous statements about abolishing the police and that Americans should “cancel Thanksgiving.”
“My understanding is that — is that Francesca Hong has made clear her present stances to her electorate,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “She’s moved away from it, and I have a local city councilman that has this saying, ‘Woke 1 was crazy.'”
But AOC’s use of “Woke 1” is revealing. Nobody numbers something unless she expects another version. World War I did not get its numerical attribution until World War II followed it. And so by numbering the left’s woke ideological escapades, AOC is not declaring Woke 1 as dead, but rather describing it as though it’s the first installment. And “Woke 2” won’t be less radical than Woke 1 either — it’s just going to be accompanied by better PR.
The left has learned that apologizing for its most radical slogans is helpful. It learned that burying its left-wing policy underneath claims of “affordability” and appeals to “working people” is pragmatic. It learned that candidates can and should insist that they’ve had a change of heart about everything they openly believed in a few years earlier without ever having to explain why those beliefs were wrong.
But none of these lessons require candidates to actually become less woke in philosophy or principle. It just requires them to better market and hide it.
Woke 1 was a massive political movement that sought to abolish police and prisons, allow men in women’s sports, destroy historical monuments, and cancel anyone who questioned or objected to it. Woke 1 adherents cast America as irredeemably racist and our institutions as irredeemably oppressive.
Hong herself embraced this “Woke 1” era. In 2020 she said defunding law enforcement was only the “first step towards abolishing the police.” She said Thanksgiving celebrated “colonialism” and was “the original superspreader event that killed indigenous folx and women.”
Of course now that Hong wants to govern a swing state, Thanksgiving is actually now her “favorite holiday.” She says she does not support defunding the police, and also claims she no longer believes in abolishing the Senate despite tweeting in support of such a proposal.
And sure, maybe Hong had some kind of epiphany that led to this transformation at the convenient moment when her old beliefs became problematic in her race. But she hasn’t given any explanation for why those positions were wrong and why she fundamentally doesn’t believe them now. Instead, her party is just dismissing them as part of a “crazy” era to avoid accountability and, more importantly, to avoid having to actually go on the record and change its philosophy.
And that’s the lesson from Woke 1. It’s not that the ideology was fundamentally dumb and dangerous; it was merely that advertising that ideology was political suicide. “Defund the police” scares voters, while “cancel Thanksgiving” is repulsive to true Americans. So what the left is doing now is walking back from open support of these policies (while not changing the underlying philosophy that created these positions in the first place) and is instead talking about health care, groceries, housing, and “affordability.” The radicalism is still there, of course, fully on display in Marxist initiatives to reach that “affordability” and housing and health care promise, but it’s not the centerpiece of their campaign.
But that’s what makes Woke 2 more dangerous than Woke 1. Woke 1 advertised its radicalism while Woke 2 will try to soften their radicalism by framing it as candidates merely wanting cheaper housing and food and health care and “affordability.”
Take New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has used “affordability” to peddle his socialist shtick. He sells government-run grocery stores, rent freezes, property theft, free buses, and other items as merely common-sense reforms to help working people. But beneath these “nice”-sounding promises are radical Marxist ideologies that seek to fundamentally upend America.
In a 2020 post on X, Mamdani said it’s time to “seize” luxury condos from “oligarchs.” He later doubled down on this promise, saying, “We will use every single tool at our disposal, including seizing buildings from slumlords, to ensure that each and every New Yorker is given what is their right, a safe place to call their home.”
And while Mamdani’s proposals don’t sound too extreme at first glance to unsuspecting New Yorkers, the underlying class warfare is the goal. Marxist streamer Hasan Piker has explicitly called for violence toward the same landlords Mamdani targets.
Talking about landlords and property owners who leave vacant units instead of renting them out, Piker said: “Yeah, kill them. Kill those motherf–ers. Murder those motherf–ers in the street. … Let the streets soak in their f–ing red capitalist bloods, dude.”
It’s similar rhetoric echoed by Nicolás Vargas, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Vargas threatened in 2022 that if politicians don’t deliver, “We have a large enough constituency in these tenant unions to actually, you know, force with leverage that, you know, if they don’t kind of pass or push … these legislations, that we’ll, you know, kick them out or throw them out in the street and guillotine them.” He has also pushed for a “world without landlords.”
While Mamdani may not have called for violence, his language on affordability legitimizes the Marxist movement he’s part of, whose own members seek violence to achieve the goals Mamdani is legitimizing and normalizing. And that’s what Woke 2 will be about: lead with affordability and concerns for working people, and then use that to wield power against the people your policies target.
Woke 2 will also be more vindictive than Woke 1. During Woke 1, leftists appeared to think their power was endless, which is a partial explanation of why they just kept piling on. But after voters rejected Woke 1 in the 2024 election, leftists learned their power can easily be taken away and, as exhibited by the Trump administration, dismantled. If the left regains power, it will return angrier and more determined to wield government power against the people who rejected it in 2024.
Woke 1 may have bullied Americans into accepting it openly, but Woke 2 will make enemies pay (possibly in blood if socialists have their way) while marching under the banner of “affordability.”
