AOC’s recent comment that “woke 1 was crazyyyy” rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. The problem, as I see it, is that she wasn’t saying “woke was crazy and we should not repeat those mistakes,” but rather “woke was crazy and you can’t hold me responsible for what happened way back five years ago.” At least, that’s how it seemed — I’m deducing meaning from the timbre of her laugh and the number of “y”s in “crazyyyy”.
But if AOC is trying to memory hole past wokeness like it’s an ill-advised Mumford & Sons phase, she’s doing it in a weird way. Since her remark — which was in August — she has repeated virtually every trope that most people now agree was, indeed, crazy with four “y”s. She’s like an ex-alcoholic informing us that she’s a reformed and sober person now while dropping the whiskey shot into an Irish car bomb.
Perhaps the most memorable woke 1 trope was the upgrading of institutional violence against Black people from “problem” to “the defining aspect of American society”. That habit was why at woke 1’s peak, large numbers of left-leaning people overestimated police shootings of Black people by several orders of magnitude. Last month, AOC recreated this logical flaw by tweeting this misrepresentation in response to an initiative by fellow Squad member Ayanna Pressley:
