The tactic of AOC and her allies to giggle away the 'craziness' of Woke-era abuses should not be tolerated

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., speaks with ABC’s Jonathan Karl on August 9, 2026.Many Democratic Party candidates emerging on what one might call the populist left are finding success in primaries across the country. But most of them have a shared liability: they were fully on board with the worst excesses and abuses of the “peak wokeness” that emerged in the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 killing, enduring and contaminating most of our institutions for several years after.Most of these successful candidates are quite young for elected officials: they are now in their 30s or even late 20s. That means that most of them were indoctrinated and — since they were on the left — essentially forced to spout all the new “woke” jargon and convictions that were manufactured overnight by frenzied mobs.One such candidate is Francesca Hong, a Democrat with a significant polling lead in Wisconsin’s gubernatorial race. It is hard to overstate how much of a woke fanatic she was. Not even the most…