I’d Be Very Happy to Never Hear the Words ‘Woke 1 Was Crazyyyyy” Ever Again

We’re also living in a society that is more organized around surveillance than it was just six years ago, which has clearly led to the further criminalization of Black and racialized people, even when the organization at the core of this criminalization isn’t technically a police force. Take the impact of Flock Safety, a U.S. company that has recently been in the news because its network of traffic cameras have been helping U.S. police officers spy on and stalk their exes, conduct inappropriate searches (i.e., related to immigration status or abortion) and, of course, disproportionately target Black and other racialized people. At the same time, ICE is expanding across America at what Wired calls “breakneck speed,” secretly adding new facilities or expanding existing ones in almost every state. Oh, and its officers will soon be outfitted with high-tech gloves that can deliver electric shocks to the people they’re trying to detain—who are, you guessed it, overwhelmingly Black and brown. (Horrifyingly, these gloves have also been purchased by prisons, jails, hospitals and public schools, according to NPR.)

Announcement

‘Woke 1 was crazyyyy’ is a gift to conservative commentators

So: AOC, Ossé, Hong and other progressive politicians walking back their support of abolition is a slap in the face, yes. But it’s also actively detrimental. Already, mainstream media outlets, conservative commentators and all manner of anti-anti-racism grifters are using ‘Woke 1 was crazyyyy’ as a kind of political litmus test. Because what better way to determine whether someone is a ‘serious’ politician in 2026 than by asking them whether they’ve abandoned their previously progressive stances, apparently! That’s what happened with New York City mayor and leftist darling Zohran Mamdani, anyway. Mamdani had previously backed down from his pandemic-era opinion that policing is a scourge, but this week he went even further, telling journalists he felt similarly to AOC. “Sometimes what you believe in can change,” he said in an Aug. 12 press junket. “I know there are some for whom they still believe in that. I’ve made very clear that I do not believe in defunding the police and that to me, delivering critical public safety also looks like working with our police department alongside many other partners.” (… Sigh.)

This doesn’t just feel like a rejection of a voting public that worked so hard to put these politicians in office; it also gives conservatives a credible argument that they’re hypocrites who can’t be trusted. In fact, on that same episode of This Week, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie made this exact argument for me, saying, “I listened really carefully to what Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez said this morning. You know, every position that Scott just laid out, when you presented it to her, she talked about backing off, changing her views, evolving views… there’s two parts to this. It’s what are you talking about and do we trust what you’re saying? And after listening to the congresswoman, why should anyone trust her? The things that she has said previously now, when she senses that she didn’t know what she was talking about and she was out of touch with the American people, and now wants to advance her career, now all of a sudden she’s saying different things. And I have to say, when you played the Francesca Hong part, I can tell you this, the Republican Governors Association is giddy over what will happen on Tuesday because we’re going to hold people like her and the congresswoman to what they’ve said over their careers, not what they’re trying to conveniently evolve into now.”