Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is one of the leaders of the socialist movement that’s gaining power inside the Democratic Party.
That means Ocasio-Cortez is getting put on the spot to answer for the left’s growing radicalism.
And AOC said four words that will set off massive alarm bells when you hear them.
Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate Francesa Wong is the left’s summer of 2020 woke socialism taken ot the extreme.
Wong is under fire for past comments calling for the abolition of prisons and for banning the Thanksgiving Day holiday because it symbolized colonialism and white supremacy.
In an interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl, Ocasio-Cortez brushed off questions about Wong’s tweets about “Woke 1” just being a crazy phase Democrats went through in 2020, like college kids who dye their hair or change their fashion style.
“Woke 1 was crazy,” Ocasio-Cortez stated.
Ocasio-Cortez excused the woke mania that gripped the left, which Democrats have never shaken, as just a phase where liberals were willing to experiment with different policy ideas.
“During this time, and especially during Covid, there was a huge opening of the Overton window… and I think the doors were really opened in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place,” Ocasio-Cortez added. “And I actually think the discussions that were had at that time were quite fruitful.”
Ocasio-Cortez then falsely claimed Democrats moved past woke.
“During lockdown, of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric we would use today,” Ocasio-Cortez added.
The whole time, Ocasio-Cortez played woke for laughs, and Karl chuckled right along with her.
AOC on Francesca Hong’s old tweets calling for abolishing prisons and the police:
“Woke 1 was crazy.” pic.twitter.com/OuqYhSwtbk
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 9, 2026
But if Karl were doing his job as a journalist, he would have asked Ocasio-Cortez several questions.
If Woke 1 was 2020, what does Woke 2 look like?
If Ocasio-Cortez thought Woke 1 went too far, what lessons did she and other Democrats learn from the mistake?
If Ocasio-Cortez thinks Woke 1 was just a “phase,” why did she endorse candidates like Abdul El-Sayed, who embraces defunding the police and called football the embodiment of “toxic masculinity?”
Karl also could have asked Ocasio-Cortez why she echoed Hong’s call to abolish prisons.
“Mass incarceration is our American reality. It is a system whose logic evolved from the same lineage as Jim Crow, American apartheid, & slavery. To end it, we have to change. That means we need to have a real conversation about decarceration & prison abolition in this country,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on X in 2019.
Karl asked none of these questions because the media wants to help Democrats handwave away Woke 1 because they know that the second Democrats take power, they will impose an even more totalitarian Woke 2 on America.
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