{"id":698,"date":"2026-08-11T07:33:59","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T07:33:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=698"},"modified":"2026-08-11T07:33:59","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T07:33:59","slug":"woke-one-derailed-my-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=698","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Woke One\u2019 derailed my life"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

In 2022, I lost a trivia-hosting gig at a brewery over the word \u201cNicaragua.\u201d No, I wasn\u2019t a shock comic workshopping race material; I was reading a geography question aloud and stumbled over my pronunciation. When I repeated it slowly, a hush washed over half of the room, and management later informed me that people \u201cdidn\u2019t feel safe\u201d with me in the building, as if I were strapped with a bomb, not a guy with a sheet of questions trying to get through Central America.<\/span><\/p>\n

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When I tried to appeal, the manager, a black man, shrugged and said, \u201cI\u2019m not offended, but \u2026 this is just the way things are now.\u201d He didn\u2019t expand on what he meant by the word \u201cthis\u201d \u2014 because wokeness was the great force animating culture and politics in the decade roughly between 2013 and 2023. Most progressives couldn\u2019t or wouldn\u2019t even name it back then. But they lived by it. And had word spread about my verbal misstep, I could have been ruined.<\/span><\/p>\n

So it was infuriating to hear Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez try to laugh off \u2014 giggle off, really \u2014 what she now calls the \u201cWoke One\u201d era and pretend it was all a Covid fever dream.<\/span><\/p>\n

On ABC\u2019s <\/span>This Week <\/span><\/i>on Sunday, Jonathan Karl asked AOC about Francesca Hong, the Democratic Socialists of America activist running for governor of Wisconsin. In 2020, Hong tweeted that she backed \u201cdefunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police,\u201d and that \u201cpolice exist to uphold white supremacy.\u201d Hong has also called for canceling Thanksgiving: \u201cShould have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed indigenous folx and women, so be it.\u201d AOC chuckled in response and reached for a line she\u2019d picked up from a New York City councilman: \u201cWoke One was crazy.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Sorry, but this non-admission-slash-admission is incredibly weak tea. Though woke has now been largely quarantined to Bluesky, indie coffee shops flying the Pride Progress flag, and experimental theater companies, it wasn\u2019t always this way.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For a decade, a highly online horde of academics, journalists, techies, and activists operated like America\u2019s unelected HR regime \u2014 a petty administrative state with a mob of reactive nerds attached. They were authoritarian, coercive, and sustained by the threat that anyone who failed to master an ever-expanding vocabulary could be publicly humiliated, professionally ruined, or expelled from polite society. Latinx one year, Latine the next: choose the wrong suffix, and HR might open a case file.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ironically, the AOCs of the world wanted to abolish the uniformed police, even as they behaved like a secret police defending the tenets of hyper-progressivism. Were you a white guy wearing a sombrero on Halloween? You\u2019re guilty of a hate crime. A scientist wearing a shirt covered in cartoon women? Made to weep on camera. Wait, you\u2019re not putting your pronouns in your email bio \u2014 w<\/span>hat kind of an asshole are you<\/span><\/i>?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Careers were destroyed, reputations vaporized, and institutions bullied into submission, often over transgressions so slight that nobody outside the movement\u2019s tribunal could explain what crime had actually occurred.<\/span><\/p>\n

Worst of all, for those of us on the Left: Woke One was politically disastrous. It handed MAGA a decade of free material and discredited the Bernie-era proposition that universalist class politics could be popular politics.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Woke One offered a stark binary choice: identity politics or fascism. The writer Sam Kriss has described the function of the thing better than anyone: wokeness gave the ruling class a way to justify its position without ever mentioning the wage relation, swapping exploitation for \u201ca vast mishmash of various forms of prejudice, hatred, and exclusion, which could be embodied in entirely ordinary words, hand gestures, or sometimes large and inert rocks.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The Left is now confronting the specter of woke, but not because of a true internal reckoning; it\u2019s only because the movement\u2019s political candidates are getting cross-examined by the news media in this year\u2019s elections about the things they said and did not that long ago.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Facing such scrutiny, Hong went on a podcast and produced one of the great non-sentences of the cycle: \u201cMy views have only become stronger in that I\u2019m serious about public safety and I will not abolish the police.\u201d Stronger! She has grown so radical she now supports the police. Give her another two years, and she will become a police chief <\/span>herself<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the height of the madness, Cea Weaver, who today serves as Mayor Zohran Mamdani\u2019s rental-housing czar, posted that \u201cprivate property including and kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy.\u201d Doorstepped earlier this year by the <\/span>New York Post <\/span><\/i>about her mother\u2019s $1.4 million mansion in Nashville, Weaver burst into tears. She has since said that she regrets \u201csome\u201d of it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Somewhere in there is a lesson about what it feels like to become a stranger\u2019s content, one the movement she helped build could once have explained to her at length, and for free. Darializa Avila Chevalier, who knocked off five-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat with Mamdani\u2019s backing, had a whole deleted account\u2019s worth: abolish the police, prisons and borders, and seize the landlords. Mamdani said he hadn\u2019t seen the posts before endorsing her, and that her views had evolved.<\/span><\/p>\n

He\u2019d know. In June 2020, he tweeted that the NYPD is \u201cracist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety\u201d; that November, two days after winning his Assembly seat, he posted: \u201cQueer liberation means defund the police.\u201d Then he ran for mayor on rent and buses and childcare, apologized for the language, and called himself \u201ca candidate who is not fixed in time.\u201d To quote Kamala Harris, who stumbled on her own woke-era statements: <\/span>You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

AOC is now trying to explain the woke era away as a symptom of something like Covid cabin fever. You see, lockdown opened the Overton window, in AOC\u2019s telling, and suddenly<\/span> the Left entertained \u201cany and every policy\u201d that might improve society. Those debates were \u201cquite fruitful,\u201d she said, but candidates would not use the same rhetoric now. Voters should judge Hong by what she says today: she will not abolish the police; what was once \u201caspirational\u201d is no longer primary \u2014 Thanksgiving is actually Hong\u2019s favorite holiday!<\/span><\/p>\n

Call it the Lockdown Alibi, and expect a great deal more of it between now and November. We were all a bit odd during Covid. I made sourdough bread; other people wanted to abolish the carceral state \u2014 different strokes, right?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But forgiveness usually follows an admission of guilt. What the new DSA-adjacent generation of Democrats wants instead is amnesty without a full accounting for wokeness, its irrationalities and its cruelties. It isn\u2019t clear what \u201cWoke One\u201d includes, which ideas have been abandoned, or why. Is it police and prison abolition? Abolishing borders? The claim that homeownership is white supremacy? Can you at least admit that land acknowledgments make you sound ridiculous? Or that Ibram X. Kendi is Miss Rachel for people with humanities degrees?<\/span><\/p>\n

This, of course, doesn\u2019t mean every cause associated with Woke One was wrong, or that its critics have been vindicated in everything. The anti-woke Right has produced its own identitarian grotesqueries, and its answer to racial essentialism was apparently to dust off the calipers from the 19th century.<\/span><\/p>\n

But admission of some guilt on the Left would be nice. Instead, we have gone, in six years, from <\/span>woke doesn\u2019t exist \u2014 it\u2019s just basic decency<\/span><\/i> to: <\/span>of course it existed, and it was crazy, and also it was 2020, and also can we talk about your high grocery bill?<\/span><\/i> We went straight from denial to nostalgia, skipping the bit where anyone apologizes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2016, the writer Lauren Duca published a viral <\/span>Teen Vogue<\/span><\/i> essay arguing that Donald Trump was gaslighting America \u2014 training us to distrust our own memory of what he\u2019d said the week before. By that logic, large swaths of the Left have also been gaslighting America for years. It\u2019s now time to say the obvious thing: there was a woke movement, it had a program, they were in it, and it lost. Take it slowly if you need to.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more Can old-school Malta endure?<\/a><\/p>\n

I know how hard some words are to get out.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2022, I lost a trivia-hosting gig at a brewery over the word \u201cNicaragua.\u201d No, I wasn\u2019t a shock comic workshopping race material; I was reading a geography question aloud and stumbled over my pronunciation. 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