“Woke 1 was crazy,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez laughed on an ABC News show, dismissing questions about the radical views of DSA members while implying that they were some sort of past phenomenon we no longer had to address because the page had been turned on the era. “What’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now.”
The DSA is now being co-run by a leader of the Communist Red Star Caucus, its platform calls for abolishing the constitution and its leadership calls for abolishing most of the government.
Communism puts the kibosh on the idea that Woke 2 is any more moderate than Woke 1.
Nevertheless liberal media pundits quickly rushed out to borrow the term and explain that Woke 1 had disappeared and the party’s new embrace of Communists is actually a moderate position.
Never mind the Communists, ‘Woke 1’ never went away. Woke 2, as AOC all but admitted, is just a dodge to explain why DSA candidates shouldn’t have to be asked about their old tweets.
AOC was quoting Councilman Chi Osse’s reply when asked about his past racist comment, “a cis white man should not be the next speaker of the Council” all the way back in 2021.
In 2025, Osse (pictured above) announced he was a socialist and called for ‘Nuremberg trials’ for ICE.
No word on whether that’s Woke 1 or Woke 2, but the difference is only stylistic anyway. Enough people were disgusted by wokeness that they voted Trump. Now AOC wants to repackage wokeness as a new brand much the way that lefties have at times called themselves liberals, progressives, socialists and other names before abandoning them after the public backlash.
Wokeness, a term that long ago became cringe and virtually no leftist has used in years, is just the wrapper. What’s inside it is the same set of abusive and opportunistic radical politics.
The central tenets of Woke 1, that people should be judged by an intersectional category, that equity trumps equality, and that problematic speech should be suppressed never went away. The three categories of woke topics that make AOC and DSAers most uncomfortable, defunding the police, transgenderism, and calls to demolish American history, haven’t gone anywhere either just because Democrats now avoid talking about the unpopular subjects.
Woke 1 was organized around cultural criticism, critical race theory, the BLM riots, and transgender identity politics while Woke 2 is much more oriented around Islamic political organizing, anti-ICE and anti-Israel activism, and Communist revivalism, but those are just different flavors of the radical social media pool of slop. A decade ago it was the turn of the black panther diaper babies and drag queen story hour, now the tankies and the antisemites get their turn. All it means is that Ta-Nehisi Coates went from explaining the evils of 9/11 first responders to explaining the evils of Israel and the ladies who used to go to racial justice lunches at which black women would yell at them about whiteness now go to open borders events to learn to how to ram ICE personnel with their $115,000 Land Rovers.
Woke 2 is just Woke 1 transmuting its cultural victories into political victories. After seizing control over academia and the culture, the same mob is now seizing actual political power.
In Woke 1, people lost their jobs because they had the wrong ideas and popular culture turned into a hideous festival of grotesques. Fast forward to Woke 2, and people are still losing their jobs for having the wrong ideas and popular culture is just as bad. The difference is that the radicals who perpetrated Woke 1 are now taking over cities and moving into Congress.
The primary difference is that Woke 1 was primarily aimed at mobilizing the grievances of radical fringe groups, e.g. black nationalists and transgender men, while Woke 2 is scoring political victories by jumping on the bandwagon of affordability and economic concerns.
No wonder AOC wants to pretend that the new ‘Kitchen Table’ Socialists are a fundamentally different and more mature creature than the activists that were trying to punish college students for wearing sombreros, but they’re no more mature and no less cruel than their old counterparts.
The DSA consists of rich kids with no clue as to what affordability for working class people actually entails. (The recent furor over the $20 burrito in woke right circles demonstrated much the same thing.) Affordability for radicals like Mamdani is just another way of selling socialism without having any more understanding of economics than the Modern Monetary Theory proponents of infinitely printing money did. The recent revelation that a top New York DSAer was living in his daddy’s $1.5 million townhouse while being evicted was perfectly on brand.
Wokesters 2.0 understand people are outraged about the price of basic food staples and they can use that to call for abolishing capitalism. What they’re offering isn’t ‘democratic socialism’, it’s what DSAers are calling a “violent process” for eliminating private enterprise and replacing it with their private dictatorship. Kind of you makes you nostalgic for Woke 1’s race riots.
At least those only caused billions in damages and only led to the deaths of thousands.
Despite AOC’s denials, this exciting new focus on reviving Communism and Marxism hasn’t actually rejected Woke 1’s fetishes. While old school Commies might be suspicious of identity politics, as indeed Sen. Bernie Sanders used to be, he and they long ago bent the knee to Woke 1. Abolishing prisons and police hasn’t been abolished either. Pro-crime officials at every level, governors, mayors and prosecutors, have implemented portions of the agenda through the mass release of criminals from prison, the elimination of bail and diversions for offenders.
And no one has actually sworn off the larger ‘abolition’ agenda. Much like ‘transgender’ athletes, all the old policies and proposals are still in place, they just aren’t discussed during elections.
The only thing crazier than Woke 1 is the idea that AOC can pretend it went away somewhere.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.
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Read my book ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left’ to discover the true origins of the American Left.
“The only thing crazier than Woke 1 is the idea that AOC can pretend it went away somewhere.”
She can pretend all she wants, that’s all she does anyway. If you look up the fine print on her, she was cast in that part. The Dem party in that district put out a casting call & interviewed hundreds of applicants for the shot of challenging the incumbent. She got the gig.
Furthermore she was pretending last week when she froze her eggs. She’s 36yrs old. As I understand it (I’m not a doctor) a pregnancy @ that age is considered a “geriatric” pregnancy. What the hell is she waiting for? She’s not getting any younger. Honestly don’t think she wants kids anyway, it’s all performative art. She apparently dumped her white boyfriend (can’t have that!) so she’s more “pure” (I guess) to the DSA kingmakers.
Bottom Line: with these people everything’s fake.