Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has dismissed controversial past statements by progressive candidates as belonging to a "Woke 1" era that is "crazy," a characterization that has drawn sharp criticism from conservatives.
During an appearance on ABC's "This Week," Ocasio-Cortez was asked about remarks made by Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong, who has previously called for abolishing prisons and canceling Thanksgiving. Ocasio-Cortez responded by laughing and stating, "I have a local city councilman that has this saying, 'Woke 1 was crazy.' And I think that what’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now."
This response quickly prompted backlash from conservative figures. Tim Graham, Executive Editor of NewsBusters at the Media Research Center, told Fox News Digital that it is "desperate to claim that you can't hold a politician accountable for something wacky they said less than six years ago." Graham noted that Hong had also spoken against Valentine's Day, the Fourth of July, and Halloween, and found Christmas "triggering."
"Once a radical Democrat wins a primary, the party strategists are going to try to make their candidate sound more moderate to voters who don't pay a lot of attention to politics," Graham added. "So they will try to claim outrageous statements are already out of context and out of date, even if they're not."
Jesse Arm, Vice President and Pollster at the Manhattan Institute, questioned which views from the "Woke 1" era Ocasio-Cortez and her allies believed were actually problematic. He listed examples such as "Sex-change operations for children? Biological men in women’s sports? Race-based discrimination in hiring and admissions? Decriminalizing theft? Refusing to prosecute repeat offenders? Open borders? Debt forgiveness? Banning private health insurance?"
"The problem is that they haven’t renounced any of it — and they don’t intend to," Arm stated. "After voters delivered a pretty decisive rejection of the ideological excesses of early 2020s, many leftist politicians now attempt to laugh off the era as ‘crazy’ without acknowledging their own role in it or identifying which of their substantive positions they now reject."
Arm also pointed to Ocasio-Cortez's own past statements on climate change, recalling that in 2019 she had suggested the world would end in 12 years. He contrasted this with her current discussions of starting a family in the 2030s, suggesting that politicians who made such pronouncements should acknowledge their potential harm.
Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, commented on social media that politicians do not get to "spend years pushing to fundamentally transform the country, divide it on racial lines, inject DEI into every institution, and then try to brush it off as a minor misunderstanding when your worldview turns out to be extremely unpopular with the American people."
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis stated, "We waged war on woke because ultimately woke represented a war on truth. Now, we have a prominent leftist acknowledging that Florida was right to reject the woke mind virus."
Conservative commentator Ryan James Girdusky quipped that "'Woke 1 was crazy' [is] a new cop out for insane positions held as recently as yesterday."