‘Woke One’ Wasn’t Just Crazy — It Was Destructive

By Becket Adams

Tuesday, August 18, 2026

 

We’re living through a real-life attempt to erase the recent past.

 

“Woke One was crazy,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) laughed recently during an appearance on ABC News, approvingly quoting a New York City councilman. “Woke One was crazy. Okay, that’s a truth,” ABC’s Jonathan Karl replied. The anchor then asked whether the left had gone too far during “Woke One,” including with its calls to “defund the police.”

 

This is where Ocasio-Cortez — and many within her ideological cohort, whether it’s writers at Vanity Fair or the New Republic, or New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, or even failed Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong — want you to accept their version of events over your own memory.

 

“I think that during this time and during, especially during Covid, there was a huge opening of the Overton window,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “We were shut down. There was some of the highest unemployment rates that we have seen because of those shutdowns. 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. And I actually think that the discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful.”

 

She added, “I think that when we talk about crime today, it’s fundamentally different than the way that we talked about crime in bringing crime down, right? And I think that we all share in the goals of having as low a crime rate as possible. I think that, you know, during lockdown, of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.”

 

Total nonsense.

 

She’s simply trying to rewrite the record, and it’s as dishonest as it’s brazen. It’s also glaringly obvious what this is: a cleanup effort by someone with aspirations for higher office.

 

Her attempt to blame the “woke” era on pandemic hysteria collides with a simple fact: Anyone who is old enough to argue about this lived through 2020 — and 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014. We remember the pandemic craziness as a continuation of a broader craziness that was already well underway. The term “cancel culture” appeared widely in mainstream media around 2018; “woke” itself gained popular prominence in the early 2010s.

 

Also, “Woke One” was far worse than cabin-fever rhetoric. It was often direct action with real, tangible consequences.

 

As early as 2014, before the pandemic hit the U.S., “Woke One” was JavaScript co-creator Brendan Eich being forced out as CEO of Mozilla after only eleven days because of a $1,000 donation he had made in 2011 to California’s Proposition 8.

 

It was watching a male beat the bricks off a woman in a women’s division and being dared to say you found anything untoward or cruel about it.

 

It was campus lectures across the country being canceled or abruptly ended by the threat or reality of violence from radicalized college students.

 

It was the British government’s agreeing to house male sex offenders who identify as female with actual female prison inmates. It was the insistence that “drag shows” have always been a normalized and beloved part of the everyday American tableau, and that “drag shows” for children were a beautiful and positive development. It was the fanatic promotion of sex-reassignment surgery and procedures for children and teens.

 

It was the entire news media apparatus agreeing that the hand gesture for “okay” is a secret white-supremacist signal, ensnaring bystanders from West Point cadets to firemen in allegations that they were covert racists.

 

It was the effort to cancel Laura Ingalls Wilder and Mark Twain.

 

Then came the pandemic, and “Woke One” was now the effort to cancel Mozart and Flannery O’Connor while removing, dismantling, or toppling monuments to Theodore Roosevelt, the Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra, and Christopher Columbus.

 

It was the Smithsonian Institution listing as “aspects and assumptions” of “whiteness and white culture” in the United States: rugged individualism, respect for authority, politeness, punctuality, competitiveness, the nuclear family, objectivity, the scientific method, self-reliance, and hope.

 

It was Amazon abruptly removing Ryan T. Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment while continuing to sell Mein Kampf. It was Puffin Books scrubbing supposedly problematic words such as “fat” and “ugly” from Roald Dahl’s children’s books, often inserting gentler substitutes of its own choosing. Puffin also replaced terms such as “mothers and fathers” with gender-neutral terms, including “parents” or “families.”

 

It was the Washington Post publishing an opinion piece characterizing as racist the effort to end school closures. The Chicago Teachers Union would also claim, “The push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.”

 

“Woke One” also included the moment during the 2020 Minneapolis riots when a career criminal set fire to a building with a father of five still trapped inside, killing him. The Biden Justice Department handed down a mere ten-year sentence, well below the federal guidelines of 17–20 years. In its sentencing memo, prosecutors cited as justification for the leniency Martin Luther King Jr.’s line that “a riot is the language of the unheard.”

 

It was all of it, before and after Covid-19.

 

It was “microaggressions,” “cultural appropriation,” parades of activists in Handmaid’s Tale costumes, the heckler’s veto, actual violence, “pussy hats,” and mass censorship across major social media networks. Then it was the fast-tracking of obviously unqualified and dangerously incompetent people into positions of real power and authority, often with devastating consequences. It was the “toxic masculinity” of men’s razors, transgender beer, and Land O’ Lakes removing the Native American mascot from its branding (they kept the land, though). It was taking a knee during the national anthem, “fiery but mostly peaceful” riots, looting, “social justice” financial scams, and being told that you were the problem if you didn’t embrace sex clown story hour for children.

 

It was also Ocasio-Cortez condemning the inclusion of Saint Damien of Molokai as one of two figures representing Hawaii in the National Statuary Hall Collection. “This is what patriarchy and white supremacy culture looks like!” she raged in a 2020 video. Saint Damien was a Belgian missionary who died caring for a Hawaiian leper colony, serving the neediest even as his body fell apart to leprosy.

 

“Woke One” was not just Covid-19 hysteria. It was not just rhetoric about making the world a better place. For roughly a decade, beginning in the mid-2010s and slowing only with President Donald Trump’s reelection, liberals and progressives gorged on identitarian excess, making victims of anyone who didn’t share their cravings. Across popular culture, politics, academia, and corporate America, they demanded 100 percent participation in their identitarian gluttony. Anything short of absolute compliance brought swift personal or professional ruin.

 

Lives were ruined, businesses destroyed, industries cowed, sectarian violence applauded, iconoclasm encouraged, excellence denigrated, rioting cheered, looting rationalized, history erased; “social justice” charlatans, junk scientists, and race-hustlers elevated; free expression censored, dissent punished, art and the human experience cheapened, the bodies of sad and confused teenagers experimented upon, intense racial animus incited, and, in certain cases, people were killed.

 

A political faction in this country was given carte blanche to enforce its revolutionary vision on every aspect of modern life, and it did so with ruthless devotion, capturing every major industry and social institution along the way, and with zero regard for the chaos, destruction, and lasting damage it caused.

 

It was an era of godless puritanism; except we know it better as the “woke” era. It was not long ago. It was every bit as bad as you remember. And its champions would prefer you forget the worst parts and the role they played — not from any sense of shame or guilt, naturally, but because the culture has shifted and your remembering might threaten their proximity to power.

 

What — you don’t think they’re actually sorry for what they did, do you?