New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared on ABC last week to bat her eyelashes and giggle about how all that hateful stuff Democrats spouted for years, they didn’t actually mean that… ha ha, just kidding, silly!

Defending Francesca Hong, the soon-to-be (according to polls) Democratic contender for governor of Wisconsin, Ocasio-Cortez said, ‘she has moved away from it’, referring to some of Hong’s extreme identitarian positions, such as abolishing the police and cancelling Thanksgiving.

‘Woke 1 was crazy’, AOC said with a big, shameless smile. The phrase was borrowed from New York City council member Chi Ossé. It seems Chi has picked up on the fact that most ordinary people despise identity politics and so is going for a rebrand. Having previously identified as ‘queer, black, Asian and a “college dropout”’, and having cut his teeth as a BLM activist, he recently tweeted witheringly about Nancy Pelosi and other senior Democrats kneeling for George Floyd.

AOC’s cutesy attempt to wave away this incredibly toxic movement is particularly galling as she herself has been a major amplifier of woke hysteria throughout the years. In November 2020, she attacked Kyle Rittenhouse, a young, white, working-class man who shot two white men in self-defence – including a convicted child molester – at a riot in Wisconsin. AOC said Rittenhouse’s release on bail was due to the ‘protection of white supremacy’ and asked whether he would have been released ‘if he were Muslim’. She also said ‘a core part’ of Trump’s base was composed of ‘racists’ and ‘people who could be susceptible to racist views’.

In 2020, she released a statement about a proposed $1 billion cut to the New York Police Department, complaining that it was not enough. ‘Defunding police means defunding police. It does not mean budget tricks or funny math.’

And who could forget her Christmas-pantomime-level emotionalism when she travelled down to Texas to stand in front of a chicken-wire fence at a migrant facility? Ostensibly, she was protesting against Trump’s immigration policy, but this was really to show off her woke bona fides for voters back in NYC, and she won her primary two days later.

AOC was more than happy to be the poster girl for woke when it benefited her politically, but now she wants us all to know she’s all grown up (and presumably ready to run for president). ‘Millennials are not punk kids anymore’, she said in the ABC interview. ‘We’re grown adults with mortgages and kids.’

Ocasio-Cortez’s backpedalling is a transparent ploy to mask the true extremist nature of the new Democratic Party. Or, more accurately, the rising power centre within the Democratic Party, which is currently to be found in the Democratic Socialists of America. AOC is clearly trying to balance the support she needs from the DSA against the widespread rejection of far-left positions by mainstream America.

‘I believe Democratic Socialists are fundamentally pro-democracy, and we believe in the ballot box’, AOC said. ‘We believe in respecting the outcomes of elections and governing democratically. And ensuring that the ideas and policies that are implemented are won through popular vote and popular opinion.’ She then added that, ‘Guaranteeing health care, raising wages, strengthening the right to a union [are] what we are about’.

That may sound all well and good, but the men and women of the blue-collar classes are not buying it. Time and again, they reject far-left candidates. Just last week, the DSA-aligned candidate in the Michigan race for the US Senate, Abdul El-Sayed, won zero of the 15 counties with the lowest share of college degrees, and owed his narrow victory to the middle-class college grads.

The ‘democratic’ in the DSA is also a misnomer. As the Atlantic noted in 2025, ‘a significant part of the organisation doesn’t share its traditional concept of an electoral path to socialism’. The East Bay DSA published an article by one of its members calling normal electoral campaigning ‘short-sighted’, and that ‘street protests, organising tenants and workers, spreading revolutionary thought’ are much more effective.

Hasan Piker, who campaigned for El-Sayed and is easily the biggest influencer in left-wing politics, also made clear the left’s contempt for the people they purport to defend. In a podcast with the New York Times in April, he said the working classes ‘lack the political education’ and ‘lack the capacity, unfortunately, to engage in some kind of political disruption’.

You would think that, confronted with the evidence that their policies are deeply unpopular with everyone outside their specific demographic, these ‘democratic’ socialists would reconsider. But they are not in the business of serving the public. The DSA is in the business of gaining power.

We cannot let this happen. Woke ideology has done incalculable damage both to individuals who fell foul of its diktats and saw their social and professional lives destroyed, but also – even more damagingly – to working-class political power and even liberalism as a whole. It’s going to be tough for these glib zealots to memory-hole the years and years of extreme statements they have made. The internet never forgets. And neither should we.