Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's viral dismissal of the first wave of progressive excess as simply "crazy" is not a centrist pivot but a strategic rebranding of the same radical project, now built around class warfare instead of identity politics, one media analyst argues.
Ocasio-Cortez appeared on ABC's "This Week" on August 9, where host Jonathan Karl pressed her on Wisconsin state Rep. Francesca Hong's past calls to defund police and abolish prisons. The New York Democrat waved off the concerns with a borrowed phrase: "I have a local city councilman that has this saying, 'Woke 1 was crazy.' And I think that what's important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now." Some media coverage treated the line as evidence that AOC was drifting toward the political center. Pirate Wires editor-in-chief Mike Solana told Fox News Digital the opposite is true.
Solana argues the comment was not a confession but a dodge, a way to acknowledge that the left's recent past was politically toxic without actually renouncing any of the positions that made it so. And behind the rhetorical cleanup, he says, the Democratic Socialists of America are gaining ground faster than most voters realize.
Solana did not hold back about what AOC's remark accomplished. He called it "an incredible obfuscation," noting that while it conceded "there was an era of crazy left-wing views that was not really palatable or correct," it contained "no real admission of guilt."
That distinction matters. AOC has been linked to calls to abolish ICE, defund the police, and grant mass amnesty to illegal immigrants. Solana pointed out that she has not publicly said she no longer holds any of those positions. Instead, the "Woke 1 was crazy" formulation lets her, and candidates she supports, treat the entire period as an expired weather pattern rather than a set of policy commitments that demand accounting.
As Solana put it sarcastically:
"Sure, we lorded over a loosely decentralized global censorship apparatus in service of burning the world down in the era of BLM, but that was, like, so long ago. Oops, my bad, girls will be girls."
Fox News Digital noted that the comment was delivered sarcastically. But the underlying argument is serious: voters are being asked to forget what these politicians championed just a few years ago, with no explanation of what changed or why.
AOC herself offered a partial explanation on ABC, telling Karl that the COVID-19 lockdown era opened the "Overton window" to fringe ideas. "Rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric we would use today," she said, framing the defund movement and prison-abolition talk as products of an unusual political moment rather than sincere ideological commitments. The Washington Examiner reported that the phrase "Woke 1 was crazy" originated with New York City Council member Chi Osse, and AOC adopted it on national television as a way to separate current socialist candidates from their own recent records.
That framing asks voters to accept a generous interpretation: these weren't real beliefs, just pandemic-era loose talk. Solana rejected that reading entirely. "There are all of these things in the era of woke that she's been a part of that she hasn't actually said she no longer believes," he said. "We kind of wrap it all in a neat little bow, which is 'woke one was crazy,' and we move on."
If AOC's comment were simply a retreat from unpopular positions, it might be welcome news. Solana argues it is something else: a pivot from identity-based radicalism to class-based radicalism, with the same institutional ambitions underneath.
In a recent column on Pirate Wires, Solana described what he calls "Woke 2", a phase in which the Democratic left has moved away from racial grievance and toward economic populism aimed at the wealthy. "Things are a little bit less racist and a lot more classist," he told Fox News Digital. "We're doing a class war now; the race war is kind of over. There's room for everyone of every color to eat the rich."
The Democratic Socialists of America provide the organizational backbone for that shift. The DSA, described as the largest socialist political organization in the United States with more than 100,000 members, does not hide its goals. Its platform calls capitalism "a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit." It calls for abolishing the U.S. Senate, expanding the House of Representatives, and establishing public ownership of the largest private companies in the country.
Those are not centrist proposals dressed up in populist language. They are structural demands to remake the American constitutional order.
Solana pointed to the DSA's growing electoral record as evidence that the movement is not fading, it is advancing. "They've won everywhere, from, obviously, New York and [Los Angeles] to Louisville, Kentucky," he said. "Everywhere there is a city, the DSA is ascendant." DSA-backed candidates have defeated more moderate Democrats in states including New York and Colorado, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a prominent democratic socialist, now holds one of the most powerful municipal offices in the country.
As Sen. Ted Cruz has warned, AOC may already be the Democrats' most formidable presidential contender, with Mamdani's rise only strengthening the socialist wing's institutional grip.
The immediate context for AOC's ABC appearance was the Wisconsin gubernatorial race. Francesca Hong, a state representative who had previously called for defunding the police and abolishing prisons, lost the Democratic primary on August 11. Breitbart reported that both AOC and Sen. Bernie Sanders withheld their endorsements from Hong, a notable decision given that both have been vocal champions of DSA-aligned candidates in the past.
AOC told Karl that discourse around crime and policing today is "fundamentally different" from the defund era and urged voters to judge Hong on her current positions rather than her past statements. The New York Post noted that AOC declined to endorse Hong outright, saying her focus was on winning back Congress, a remark that only reinforced speculation about her own national ambitions.
That 2028 presidential buzz has grown steadily louder, and AOC's careful rhetorical repositioning fits a candidate preparing for a national electorate rather than a safe blue district.
Hong's primary defeat might look like a setback for the socialist left. But one lost governor's race in a swing state does not erase the DSA's wins in city halls and state legislatures across the country. Solana's point is that the movement's center of gravity is urban, and in urban America, it is winning.
Solana framed the Democratic Party's internal dynamic as a slow-motion reckoning that moderate Democrats refuse to confront. "As the DSA becomes more ascendant, the centrist Democrats have a choice," he said. "It's like, 'Do we cut them out of our party completely, or do we ourselves moderate, not in the context of America, but in the context of the New Democratic Party?'"
That second option, moderating relative to an increasingly radical party baseline, would mean the "center" of the Democratic Party keeps moving left even as individual politicians claim to be moving right. It is the political equivalent of running on a treadmill: a lot of motion, no actual distance covered.
AOC's own record illustrates the pattern. Her 2018 platform included abolishing ICE, Medicare for All, and sweeping socialist policies backed by the DSA. In 2021, she rejected criticism of "wokeness" entirely, calling the term "a derogatory euphemism for civil rights & justice." Now, in 2026, she borrows a city councilman's quip to laugh off the same era she once championed. National Review characterized the maneuver as revisionism, an attempt to erase a record rather than answer for it.
Solana allowed that politicians can genuinely evolve. "Maybe there are some things there that she no longer believes. It's possible that people, politicians, can evolve on some other topic. In fact, it's great," he said. "But we need to know exactly what position she's evolved on and why."
That is the question AOC has not answered. She has not said she was wrong to call for abolishing ICE. She has not said defunding the police was a mistake. She has not renounced mass amnesty for illegal immigrants. She has said "Woke 1 was crazy", and expects the country to move on.
Fox News Digital reached out to representatives for AOC and to the DSA for comment. Neither responded immediately. As President Trump himself has predicted, AOC is likely to run for president, and her retreat from her own record may be the earliest phase of that campaign.
Meanwhile, the DSA's platform, abolish the Senate, seize private companies, dismantle capitalism, remains posted on its website for anyone willing to read it. The branding changed. The project did not.
Calling the first wave "crazy" costs nothing if you never explain what you'd do differently. And if Solana is right, the second wave is already here, just wearing a different label.
