AOC is lying about wokeness — she enforced it ruthlessly

Opinion>Opinions - Robby's Radar The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill AOC is lying about wokeness — she enforced it ruthlessly Comments: by Robby Soave, opinion contributor - 08/11/26 1:53 PM ET Comments: Link copied by Robby Soave, opinion contributor - 08/11/26 1:53 PM ET Comments: Link copied

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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) wants to pretend she had nothing to do with wokeness, or what she calls the “Woke 1” era. I say that’s not true and she’s retconning her own starring role in the madness.

Now you may have heard that Ocasio-Cortez raised eyebrows this weekend when she merely shrugged off her previous enthusiasm for electorally toxic far-left cultural positions. “I have a local city councilman who has this saying: ‘Woke 1 was crazy,'” Ocasio-Cortez said, with a laugh.

Woke 1 was crazyyyy
— Chi Ossé (@OsseChi) May 22, 2026

She was referencing a tweet by Chi Ossé, a New York City councilman, who similarly uttered this line in an attempt to explain why he had previously said a “white man should not be the next speaker” of the City Council.

Woke 1 WAS crazyyyy, Madame President https://t.co/pUHA2rtOQ1 pic.twitter.com/ws11dyPY1a
— Chi Ossé (@OsseChi) August 9, 2026

Simply put, this attitude is far too blasé. While it is encouraging that so many progressives have backed away from some — though by no means all — of their really terrible ideas, no one should be so naive as to accept these conversions at face value. Moreover, it is quite deflective of them to act as if “Woke 1” was something bad that just sort of happened — like a hurricane or an earthquake — and they passively accepted it because what else could they do?

In fact, Ocasio-Cortez and Ossé sound a bit like “Anchorman’s” Ron Burgundy issuing his well-quoted lamentation about his team’s outrageously violent, murder-fueled battle royale — “that escalated quickly” — while nonchalantly sipping a beer.

Perhaps Woke 1 involved nothing quite so absurd as Steve Carell killing a guy with a trident, but it was still a fairly crazy time, and importantly, political figures such as AOC did absolutely nothing to try to stop it. She was more than complicit in it.

In 2019, Ocasio-Cortez posted a video criticizing New Yorkers who wanted to grow cauliflower instead of yuca in their community gardens as complicit in colonization.

To be clear, neither cauliflower nor yuca is indigenous to New York. Also in 2022, AOC weighed in on the fight over the gender neutral term “Latinx,” taking fellow Democrats to task for being too quick to abandon their attempts at inclusivity, despite polls consistently showing that large shares of Latin people did not like the term very much and would be less likely to vote for Democrats who used it. And then she said that it was offensive for Secretary of State Marco Rubio to claim cowboy culture originated in Spain; Ocasio-Cortez instead credited “African enslaved peoples” with this contribution.

That clip, in which Ocasio-Cortez reveals she is in desperate need of a history lesson, was from just five months ago.

Now those are just a few colorful examples of Ocasio-Cortez willfully participating in wokeness discourse and militating in favor of the more ridiculous position.

It is true that broader debates about the excesses of wokeness inevitably involve competing definitions of what counts as woke. In the previous decade and prior, people tended to label this thing “political correctness” and mainly focused on irritation at speech-related cultural policing: virtue signaling, the concepts of safe spaces and microaggressions, and cancel culture. But since “political correctness” is clunky and “woke” is just a single syllable — much better for headlines, take it from me — the latter eventually won out.

Wokeness also became associated with far-left policy positions that are not strictly related to culture and speech, such as abolishing the police, borders, and various quasi-democratic aspects of the U.S. government, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College, and so on. The policing issue in particular has become one of the defining aspects of woke overreach, as the killing of George Floyd sparked a backlash against excessive policing that went way too far and mostly became a pretext for far-left activists to do some thought-policing of their own while professional grifters enriched themselves.

It’s certainly fair to conclude that the cultural pendulum has swung back the other way, and note that left-wing media figures, activist students, and social media mobs no longer have nearly as much power to enforce orthodoxy and punish dissenters. Democratic politicians largely attribute their reticence to challenge such forces as one of the reasons they are now thoroughly out of power.

But much like Odysseus referring to his own time period as “our Age of Bronze” in Christoper Nolan’s very successful adaptation, which I did not like,, there’s something a bit too meta about calling it “Woke 1” and saying, well, that’s all over now, and we’d never do it again. Trust us.

At best, Ocasio-Cortez’s newfound ambivalence toward wokeness is a profoundly weak choice, and one that she would clearly eagerly jettison if the pendulum swung back in that direction.

Robby Soave is co-host of The Hill’s commentary show “Rising” and a senior editor for Reason Magazine. This column is an edited transcription of his daily on-air commentary.

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