By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, August 12, 2026
Democrats just needed permission to express their pent-up resentments over the hoops they were
made to jump through during the era Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez derisively referred to as “Woke
1.” The admission by a high priestess of the faith that its more “crazy” tenets
are now apocrypha unleashed a cascade of relieved recriminations, as though
“woke” was something that was done to the Democratic Party.
If the Democratic Party’s most ambitious office-seekers
now see wokeness as a political albatross, that’s good. But not everyone got the memo.
“Superficially, if ‘Paw Patrol’ has politics, they are
clunkily left-wing,” read one of many mind-numbing sentences in The Economist’s dissection of the popular children’s
show. The cartoon dogs who double as first responders are conscientious
environmentalists, support free and fair elections, and are “vaguely leftish”
when it comes to communitarian ideals. And yet, the dogs are nevertheless class
traitors, and they are inculcating in our unsuspecting youth a deference to
authority that greases the skids for fascism.
You see, one of the cartoon dogs is a police officer,
thus rendering the show “pro-police ‘copaganda’” — a sentiment shared by
commentators and academics alike. Indeed, given the apparent lack of executive
oversight, the “Paw Patrol” may even serve as a “sly advert for privatized
state services,” The Economist continued. “It is very tempting to
dismiss the whole debate as killjoy hogwash and culture-war lunacy.” Indeed, it
is.
What a throwback. The item harkens back to peak “Woke 1,”
when seemingly every liberal with a laptop competed with one another to
deconstruct every aspect of American society in pursuit of the kernel of evil
at its nucleus. These cartoon dogs were frequent targets of this mania.
The abstract of a study published in the journal Crime, Media, Culture accused the children’s show of
promoting the “core tenets of neoliberalism” and encouraging “complicity in a
global capitalist system that (re)produces inequalities and causes
environmental harms.” Its plotlines feature “dismaying gender politics are in tune
with the franchise’s gross rightwingery,” The Guardian’s Caspar Salmon wrote of the franchise’s covert boosterism
for “Trumpian individualism, disdain for the state, and capitalist
materialism.”
What felt like a critical mass of social media users
called on the entertainment industry to “defund Paw Patrol” and even to
“euthanize the police dog” — the sort of stuff that was once exclusive to the
confines of America’s mental institutions. “It’s a joke, but it’s also not,” New York Times reporter Amanda Hess conceded. “The
effort to publicize police brutality also means banishing the good-cop
archetype,” she noted. And because “the movement rests on understanding that
cops do plenty of harm,” even small children must be dragooned into it by
depriving them of cultural products that fail to cast American authority
figures in a negative light.
So, yeah, that was “crazy.” But as The Economist
reminds us, it’s still crazy.
If Democrats are as enthusiastic to repudiate wokeness’s
most laughably militant excesses, they should be just as eager to root out the
philosophy’s last redoubts: media and journalism, academia, and — contrary to
the contrived backlash against Paw Patrol — entertainment. If they were
serious, they might heed wokeness’s demand that they “do the work.” They’re
not, though. Perhaps because the Democratic left wants credit for claiming to
have abandoned the toxic brand “woke” while refusing to elaborate on how their
views have evolved or criticizing the philosophy’s true believers.
It’s enough to make you wonder if the newfound critics of
“Woke 1” on the left are entirely sincere.
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