There are two big points to make about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) suggestion that “Woke 1 was crazy.”
The first is that “Woke 1” inexorably suggests Woke 2 is on the way or already here. As with software, later versions of woke will be more sophisticated, but unlike software updates, the advances of woke will not be improvements.
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Woke 1 promoted violence rebranded as speech while suppressing non-approved speech as violence, ruined lives and businesses with “cancelation,” rewrote history, and, among much more, assaulted our understanding of what it means to be male or female. None of these has been disavowed, and they will all be in Woke 2 with new features if Republicans lose the White House in 2028.
New features advocated by AOC and platoons of socialists who’ve just won election and will enter Congress next year include destroying the Constitution, Senate, presidency, Supreme Court, police, immigration controls, and much else. These are in the official manifesto of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which AOC is a member in good standing. They seem pretty crazy. The idea of Woke 2 heading our way is not reassuring.
The second big takeaway from AOC’s laughing dismissal of what was said and done during Woke 1 is that the Left avoids talking about the past. This fits the perceptive joke about communists that, for them, the future is bright and certain, but the past is difficult and has to be changed.
Dismissing Woke 1 with a chuckle deliberately deflects discussion of the past horrors of leftism — and that’s what AOC did. But it isn’t how accountability works. In politics, we judge people’s actions, not their idealism. Any fool can promise free stuff in Shangri-La, which is why politicians do so. But what have they done in practice? It’s upon this that we should judge them.
Democrats denounced Republican efforts last month to delve into Dr. Anthony Fauci’s deceitful and self-serving conduct during the COVID-19 pandemic. The party of the Left and its media handmaidens suggested that combing through the past amounts to a vendetta and distracts from the necessary work of ensuring that we never again do what we did in 2020. But if there’s a sure way of repeating wrongs, it’s by ignoring past wrongs and letting their perpetrators skate free.
Democrats, socialists, and the wider Left don’t want to look back because actual events give the lie to their theories and promises. They pretend real socialism hasn’t been tried before. That’s a lot easier than advocating their policies that extinguish freedom while keeping in mind socialism’s record of destruction, immiseration, and murder.
CEUTA INVASION — NOTHINGBURGER OR OUTRAGE?
Remember when Hillary Clinton testified to Congress and objected to being asked about what led to the 2012 debacle at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans were murdered by a mob? She did what Democrats do. Instead of answering legitimate questions, she notoriously retorted with a question of her own: “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
The truth of the past makes all the difference. It’s what tells us what people will do in the future. It allows us to judge. Woke 1 was awful. Woke 2 will come and won’t be pretty if Democrats regain power. Let’s look back and decide whether that’s a good idea or not.
