Ocasio-Cortez on Hong positions: ‘Woke 1 was crazy’

There is a strange, almost quantum property to the word “woke” these days: the more precisely you try to measure it, the more it changes. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, asked about Francesca Hong’s past stances on ABC’s "This Week," reportedly shrugged via a city council member’s appraisal: “Woke 1 was crazy.” Not “the positions were wrong” or “I disagree,” but a nested citation of craziness—a quotation within a quotation, as if dismissing someone by pointing at their place in a now-canceled franchise. What makes this weirdly fascinating is the gravitational pull of “cancel Thanksgiving” as a political flag. It doesn’t matter whether Hong ever seriously proposed outlawing turkey or merely critiqued the holiday’s mythology. In the current media ecosystem, a phrase like that goes supernova. It outshines policy platforms, drowns nuance, and forces every other politician to either orbit around it or dodge its blast radius. Ocasio-Cortez’s response—distancing herself with a dismissive meme-adjacent phrase—is a survival strategy in a political universe where one sentence can define a candidacy faster than any voting record. There’s a deeper irony here: “Woke 1 was crazy” is itself the language of the culture war’s sequel-brained logic. We’ve moved from debating ideas to rating them like TV seasons. The first season of a candidate’s old tweets binge-watches poorly, so everyone scrambles to declare themselves part of a better, saner reboot. But the very act of describing someone as “Woke 1” reifies the thing you’re trying to escape. You can’t acknowledge “woke” without giving it power. Source: [The Hill article](https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/6020350-ocasio-cortez-hong-woke-remarks/)