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Some of the most powerful investigations into the legacy of slavery have been published in the past decade or so — Nikole Hannah-Jones’ “The 1619 Project” in 2020, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Case for Reparations” in the Atlantic in 2014.
Both pieces, you could argue, are examples of “wokeness,” that is, the awareness of the ways in which systemic racism has warped American life, especially for Black citizens. The concept is so offensive to Republicans like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that he pushed a “Stop W.O.K.E. Act” in 2022 to prohibit schools from teaching the “1619” material because it might make white children feel bad. (The law was declared unconstitutional this year.)
The Black Lives Matter movement, which exploded after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020, is a sterling example of what it means to “stay woke,” and in the very best way.
But the laudable impulses of the era unfortunately evolved into something darker, particularly in the spheres of journalism and academia, two supposed bastions of free speech, where people’s careers were destroyed over perceived ideological and verbal transgressions. The policing of speech became untenable.
The editor of the New York Times editorial pages was forced out for running an essay by Republican U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas arguing the federal government should send troops into cities where rioting and looting were taking place in the aftermath of Floyd’s death.
Evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven felt she had no choice but to leave Harvard after stating what she considered “banal facts about human biology.”
“I have become a poster child for how the growing campus DEI — Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — bureaucracies strangle free speech,” wrote Hooven in the Free Press.
The executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Stan Wischnowski, resigned after an uproar occasioned by the headline “Buildings Matter, Too” on a story about property damage during civil unrest by the paper’s architecture critic. An apology was not enough; a head had to roll.
“Wokeness” had become a parody of itself.
It’s no surprise that some of the very left-wing figures who promoted the most controversial ideas associated with peak woke — defunding the police and the military, abolishing prisons, canceling Thanksgiving, etc. — are now distancing themselves.
As U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, democratic socialist of New York, toys with the idea of a 2028 presidential run, she recently made a splash by renouncing some of the movement’s more extreme ideas, even ones she earlier embraced.
During a television interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl, Ocasio-Cortez even joked about it.
“Woke 1 was crazy,” she told Karl, quoting her friend, New York City Councilman Chi Ossé, also a democratic socialist, who used that phrase in May when he was called out on social media for once posting that the next speaker of the New York City Council should not be a cisgender white man.
As Karl pressed Ocasio-Cortez — “You briefly supported the idea of defunding the police” — she wriggled.
“During this time,” she said, “especially during COVID, there was a huge opening of the Overton window… And I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place.” (The Overton window refers to the range of ideas and policies that are broadly acceptable to the public at any given time.)
Political types and pundits were divided.
Some were offended that she seemed to be laughing off an important struggle.
Some demanded contrition for broken careers and shattered lives.
Some thought it was smart political strategy. GOP pollster Brent Buchanan told Axios that Ocasio-Cortez’s moderation “tells me she’s a good politician, because she’s doing it now instead of next year.”
And Democratic political strategist James Carville, who has been frothing at the mouth for years about the left flank of his party being too “woke,” said Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t need to spend too much time explaining. “She can say: ‘I’m grown,’” Carville said, “and people understand that.”
As “woke” became an albatross for the left, it has been weaponized by the right to the point of absurdity. Novelist Francine Prose wrote in the Guardian that she avoids the word because the far right uses it “to mock and discredit anyone who supports racial justice, economic equality, universal health care.”
In the Trump administration, “woke” has become a catch-all insult. In January, for example, a spokesman for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced an overhaul of Stars and Stripes, the U.S. military’s vaunted independent news source, to eliminate “woke distractions that siphon morale.”
Last week, Stars and Stripes’ longtime publisher Max Lederer quit in frustration. The paper’s ombudsman, whose job was to guarantee its independence, had long since been fired by the Pentagon.
Now, it appears, instead of breaking top-notch stories about, say, the terrible supply shortages and mental health crises aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln during its record-breaking deployment in the Middle East, the publication will become an outlet for news releases and other pablum from the Department of Defense.
God forbid our soldiers and sailors should read about how the Pentagon mishandles traumatic brain injuries, how toxic mold flourishes in base housing or how some military families rely on food stamps to feed their kids.
If those are “woke distractions,” please give us more.
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The column portrays the original meaning of “woke” as a necessary awakening to systemic racism, citing landmark journalism such as the 1619 Project and essays on reparations, and praises Black Lives Matter as an example of “staying woke” in the best sense by highlighting police violence and entrenched racial inequality.
At the same time, the piece contends that the post-2020 “peak woke” era in media and academia mutated into something punitive and intolerant, where speech was aggressively policed and careers were derailed over perceived ideological or verbal infractions, turning institutions that should prize open debate into environments governed by fear of denunciation.
To illustrate this overreach, the article argues that high‑profile controversies became emblematic of a broader pattern: the New York Times opinion editor’s ouster after publishing Sen. Tom Cotton’s “send in the troops” essay, the forced departure of a Harvard biologist for restating basic facts about sex and biology, and the resignation of the Philadelphia Inquirer’s top editor after staff outrage over the “Buildings Matter, Too” headline, all of which the column frames as examples of disproportionate punishment where apologies were deemed insufficient.
The piece suggests that an expanding diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy on campuses and in newsrooms came to “strangle” free speech, turning “wokeness” into a caricature of itself and fueling the sense that a once‑idealistic movement had devolved into a demand that “a head had to roll” after almost any misstep.
The article then uses Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent ABC interview, in which the congresswoman laughed and quoted a local council member’s line that “Woke 1 was crazy,” as a symbol of prominent left‑wing figures backing away from the most controversial slogans of that period, including calls to defund the police, abolish prisons and even cancel Thanksgiving, rhetoric she now casts as a product of a COVID‑era Overton window in which “any and every policy” was up for discussion[2][4][6][12].
The column notes that reactions to this pivot have been sharply divided, with some activists offended that the early‑2020s struggles are being shrugged off, while political professionals see a calculated repositioning: coverage in outlets such as Axios and The Hill emphasizes that moderating on “woke” issues could help Ocasio-Cortez appeal to a broader electorate if a 2028 presidential run materializes, and one Republican pollster is cited describing the recalibration as evidence of shrewd timing[1][7][8].
In quoting Democratic strategist James Carville’s view that Ocasio-Cortez can simply say “I’m grown” and move on, the article suggests that a certain amount of ideological evolution is both inevitable and acceptable, implying that the left can acknowledge “Woke 1” excesses without abandoning its core commitments to racial justice and economic equality.
Finally, the piece argues that even as “woke” became a political albatross for Democrats, the right has opportunistically weaponized the term into a catch‑all slur for everything from racial‑justice curricula to LGBTQ inclusion, pointing to efforts by the Trump‑era Pentagon to purge “woke distractions” from Stars and Stripes and warning that recasting independent reporting on military failures as mere “woke” content risks turning a watchdog outlet into a mouthpiece for official propaganda—an outcome the column insists would deprive service members and the public of crucial scrutiny of issues like unsafe housing, mental health crises and poverty in military families[1][12].
Different views on the topic
From the left, a prominent critique in The Intercept argues that describing “Woke 1” as “crazy” erases the legitimacy of the mass, multiracial protests that followed the murder of George Floyd and diminishes the seriousness of demands to fundamentally rethink policing; the piece contends there was “nothing crazy” about tens of millions of people marching against racist violence and that laughing off that period accepts a right‑wing narrative that those movements simply “went too far”[9].
Another progressive perspective, described in a Boston Globe analysis, holds that Ocasio-Cortez is not truly repudiating the underlying ideas of the early Trump and COVID years—such as reimagining public safety or challenging carceral systems—but rather acknowledging that certain slogans and terms, including “defund the police” and “Latinx,” proved politically toxic, suggesting that the debates themselves were “quite fruitful” even if the rhetoric needs to change[6].
A further internal‑left critique comes from commentary that emphasizes material outcomes over language, arguing that the focus on whether “Woke 1” rhetoric was off‑putting risks obscuring how structural racism, economic precarity and aggressive policing shaped that era; articles in outlets like Slate stress that while slogans such as “defund the police” may have been unpopular, their rapid collapse also reflected intense institutional resistance and media framing, not simply activist excess or irrationality[11].
Centrist and liberal commentators also challenge the idea that Democrats can simply laugh off the period: an analysis in The Atlantic argues that the party must grapple with the specific ways “Woke 1” positions on policing, crime and cultural issues alienated swing voters, warning that a glib “that was crazy” line risks signaling a lack of seriousness about public safety and social disorder that many voters still associate with that time[8].
A CNN analysis describes Ocasio-Cortez’s Overton‑window explanation as a “bad” or incomplete account of why such positions were embraced, suggesting that attributing radical rhetoric to the unusual circumstances of lockdown avoids a direct reckoning with the substance of proposals like defunding police departments and underestimates how those messages continue to shape perceptions of Democrats’ priorities[2].
From the right, conservative commentators in Fox News coverage strongly reject any attempt to reframe “Woke 1” as a passing phase, arguing that progressive policies and rhetoric caused enduring damage by increasing social division, undermining confidence in law enforcement and embedding DEI agendas across institutions; these voices insist that politicians who pushed those ideas cannot now dismiss them as youthful excess without accountability for what critics describe as “destruction caused by woke activists”[3][5][10][12].
Those conservative critiques further contend that slogans such as defunding the police and abolishing prisons emboldened criminals, demoralized officers and contributed to spikes in violent crime in some cities, and they accuse Democrats of trying to memory‑hole unpopular positions once polls showed the broader public recoiled from them, framing Ocasio-Cortez’s “Woke 1 was crazy” remark as evidence of political opportunism rather than genuine reflection[3][5][11][12].
A USA Today opinion column offers a more even‑handed but still critical view of the entire “woke” discourse, arguing that the term once signaled vigilance against injustice but has since been hollowed out by overuse and weaponization; the piece criticizes early “woke” cancel culture as clumsy and overly punitive while simultaneously faulting Republicans for adopting similar tactics by targeting books, drag shows, public media and DEI programs, concluding that both sides now wield “woke” primarily as a cultural cudgel rather than a meaningful guide to policy or morality[12].
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