When I tried to appeal, the manager, a black man, shrugged and said, “I’m not offended, but … this is just the way things are now.” He didn’t expand on what he meant by the word “this” — because wokeness was the great force animating culture and politics in the decade roughly between 2013 and 2023. Most progressives couldn’t or wouldn’t even name it back then. But they lived by it. And had word spread about my verbal misstep, I could have been ruined.

So it was infuriating to hear Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez try to laugh off — giggle off, really — what she now calls the “Woke One” era and pretend it was all a Covid fever dream.

On ABC’s This Week on Sunday, Jonathan Karl asked AOC about Francesca Hong, the Democratic Socialists of America activist running for governor of Wisconsin. In 2020, Hong tweeted that she backed “defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police,” and that “police exist to uphold white supremacy.” Hong has also called for canceling Thanksgiving: “Should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed indigenous folx and women, so be it.” AOC chuckled in response and reached for a line she’d picked up from a New York City councilman: “Woke One was crazy.”

Sorry, but this non-admission-slash-admission is incredibly weak tea. Though woke has now been largely quarantined to Bluesky, indie coffee shops flying the Pride Progress flag, and experimental theater companies, it wasn’t always this way. 

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The Me Decade — 50 years later

By Ryan Zickgraf

For a decade, a highly online horde of academics, journalists, techies, and activists operated like America’s unelected HR regime — a petty administrative state with a mob of reactive nerds attached. They were authoritarian, coercive, and sustained by the threat that anyone who failed to master an ever-expanding vocabulary could be publicly humiliated, professionally ruined, or expelled from polite society. Latinx one year, Latine the next: choose the wrong suffix, and HR might open a case file.

Ironically, the AOCs of the world wanted to abolish the uniformed police, even as they behaved like a secret police defending the tenets of hyper-progressivism. Were you a white guy wearing a sombrero on Halloween? You’re guilty of a hate crime. A scientist wearing a shirt covered in cartoon women? Made to weep on camera. Wait, you’re not putting your pronouns in your email bio — what kind of an asshole are you? 

Careers were destroyed, reputations vaporized, and institutions bullied into submission, often over transgressions so slight that nobody outside the movement’s tribunal could explain what crime had actually occurred. 

Worst of all, for those of us on the Left: Woke One was politically disastrous. It handed MAGA a decade of free material and discredited the Bernie-era proposition that universalist class politics could be popular politics. 

Woke One offered a stark binary choice: identity politics or fascism. The writer Sam Kriss has described the function of the thing better than anyone: wokeness gave the ruling class a way to justify its position without ever mentioning the wage relation, swapping exploitation for “a vast mishmash of various forms of prejudice, hatred, and exclusion, which could be embodied in entirely ordinary words, hand gestures, or sometimes large and inert rocks.”

The Left is now confronting the specter of woke, but not because of a true internal reckoning; it’s only because the movement’s political candidates are getting cross-examined by the news media in this year’s elections about the things they said and did not that long ago. 

Facing such scrutiny, Hong went on a podcast and produced one of the great non-sentences of the cycle: “My views have only become stronger in that I’m serious about public safety and I will not abolish the police.” Stronger! She has grown so radical she now supports the police. Give her another two years, and she will become a police chief herself.

At the height of the madness, Cea Weaver, who today serves as Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s rental-housing czar, posted that “private property including and kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy.” Doorstepped earlier this year by the New York Post about her mother’s $1.4 million mansion in Nashville, Weaver burst into tears. She has since said that she regrets “some” of it. 

Somewhere in there is a lesson about what it feels like to become a stranger’s content, one the movement she helped build could once have explained to her at length, and for free. Darializa Avila Chevalier, who knocked off five-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat with Mamdani’s backing, had a whole deleted account’s worth: abolish the police, prisons and borders, and seize the landlords. Mamdani said he hadn’t seen the posts before endorsing her, and that her views had evolved.

He’d know. In June 2020, he tweeted that the NYPD is “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety”; that November, two days after winning his Assembly seat, he posted: “Queer liberation means defund the police.” Then he ran for mayor on rent and buses and childcare, apologized for the language, and called himself “a candidate who is not fixed in time.” To quote Kamala Harris, who stumbled on her own woke-era statements: You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?

AOC is now trying to explain the woke era away as a symptom of something like Covid cabin fever. You see, lockdown opened the Overton window, in AOC’s telling, and suddenly the Left entertained “any and every policy” that might improve society. Those debates were “quite fruitful,” she said, but candidates would not use the same rhetoric now. Voters should judge Hong by what she says today: she will not abolish the police; what was once “aspirational” is no longer primary — Thanksgiving is actually Hong’s favorite holiday!

Call it the Lockdown Alibi, and expect a great deal more of it between now and November. We were all a bit odd during Covid. I made sourdough bread; other people wanted to abolish the carceral state — different strokes, right? 

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Woke 2.0 is here

By Valerie Stivers

But forgiveness usually follows an admission of guilt. What the new DSA-adjacent generation of Democrats wants instead is amnesty without a full accounting for wokeness, its irrationalities and its cruelties. It isn’t clear what “Woke One” includes, which ideas have been abandoned, or why. Is it police and prison abolition? Abolishing borders? The claim that homeownership is white supremacy? Can you at least admit that land acknowledgments make you sound ridiculous? Or that Ibram X. Kendi is Miss Rachel for people with humanities degrees?

This, of course, doesn’t mean every cause associated with Woke One was wrong, or that its critics have been vindicated in everything. The anti-woke Right has produced its own identitarian grotesqueries, and its answer to racial essentialism was apparently to dust off the calipers from the 19th century.

But admission of some guilt on the Left would be nice. Instead, we have gone, in six years, from woke doesn’t exist — it’s just basic decency to: of course it existed, and it was crazy, and also it was 2020, and also can we talk about your high grocery bill? We went straight from denial to nostalgia, skipping the bit where anyone apologizes. 

In 2016, the writer Lauren Duca published a viral Teen Vogue essay arguing that Donald Trump was gaslighting America — training us to distrust our own memory of what he’d said the week before. By that logic, large swaths of the Left have also been gaslighting America for years. It’s now time to say the obvious thing: there was a woke movement, it had a program, they were in it, and it lost. Take it slowly if you need to. 

I know how hard some words are to get out.

Josh (not his real name), a New York public-school teacher, told UnHerd about an assault that happened to him. “I usually hide [the skullcap] under a cap, but my hair was wet,” he said. Thus he was walking down the stairs of a subway stop in Brooklyn, daring to be a visibly practicing Jew, when someone pushed him from behind; the resulting fall left him with a head fracture and gash requiring 18 stitches.

Later, Josh found out that he was hardly alone. Locals said there had been an estimated 30 such attacks in recent weeks. The more recognizable Hasidic Jews, he says, no longer take the subway. “This was one of the guys who keep doing this,” he noted, “but the police now do nothing.” 

Or take the case of 22-year-old Dawood Faisal, who was charged in late July with manslaughter when he allegedly lost control of his car and ran over the Jewish journalist Cara Trager, resulting in her death. Faisal has now also been charged with vandalizing a Jewish-owned bagel shop in Queens. “The fact that this guy did a hate crime … days before means that he could have been apprehended before my mom was killed,” Trager’s daughter told the Forward. 

The deteriorating situation for New York City’s Jews is no accident. It follows years of antisemitic agitation on college campuses and even in high schools, and then the election of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has identified himself, first and foremost, with militant anti-Zionism. By threatening Gotham’s multi-ethnic middle class, and in particular its large Jewish component, this type of violence endangers not just the city’s economy but the very essence of what has made the Big Apple so great for so long.

Assaults at subway stations, particularly in heavily Jewish enclaves in Brooklyn, happen regularly. Overall, despite a drop in violent crime and homicides, hate crimes are up almost 10% since Mamdani took office, with the vast majority directed at Jews. 

That all this is happening in New York, the longtime capital of American Jewry, is shocking to a third-generation, Jewish former New Yorker — me. These attacks are directed at almost every aspect of Jewish life. 

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Can Los Angeles be saved?

By Joel Kotkin

Throw feces at a synagogue here, trash a kosher market there, ransack a bagel shop, ban a Jewish lawmaker from a coffee shop, bar Israeli products from the local food co-op, or, worse, perform a stabbing on a city street in broad daylight. You can even turn Columbia from a heavily Jewish school with thousands of Hebraic alumni and donors to the epicenter of anti-Israel activism and an antisemitic hotbed. 

This is the new Gotham, very different from the old one. The New York I grew up in was home to some 2 million Jews; today, the number is closer to half that many. And given the rising number of antisemitic incidents in the city and the current administration’s lack of concern, it is likely many more will leave.

In his brilliant mayoral campaign, Mamdani won roughly a third of the Jewish vote, although he did poorly among both older people and native New Yorkers — you know, the kind to whom you can’t sell the Brooklyn Bridge. As opposed to the campaign, when he sought, with the help of friendly mainstream media, to tone down his anti-Israel fanaticism, in office Mamdani has been far more explicitly hateful towards Israel, and disdainful of the vast majority of Jews who support it. 

The mayoral hostility comes in many flavors. It includes refusing to restrict demonstrations around temples, refusing to attend the Israel Day parade, bloviating about arresting Benjamin Netanyahu for “war crimes,” and supporting the candidacy of a Brooklyn democratic district leader who cites such sources as Henry Ford’s The International Jew as a factual guide.

One particular illustration of Mamdani’s disdain for Jews was his appointment of an 18-member judicial advisory commission without a single Jewish member. This is amazing, given that close to half of Gotham’s lawyers are Jews. Judaism is a legalistic religion, whose parsing of the Torah and Talmud has long been excellent training for lawyers and judges.

To be sure, Mamdani is a very effective politician. Already, he has successfully backed three Democratic Socialists of America candidates for Congress and made inroads on the city bureaucracy, turning key segments into jobs programs for his cadres. He has consolidated his power at the expense of the previous, long heavily Jewish, establishment, which stupidly backed Dracula, also known as Andrew Cuomo, as its hope to beat him. 

Now that establishment, Jews and gentiles both, are mostly on the outside looking in, while the mayor hides his hateful politics behind a seemingly permanent benign smile. His election was first and foremost driven by young, college-educated Leftists struggling with mediocre jobs in an impossibly expensive city. In addition to this segment, Mamdani also won the powerful backing of mostly recently arrived Muslims, whose numbers are rapidly equaling those of the Jews.

The surge in hate crimes will likely deepen Jewish hostility to Mamdani, but if there’s any hope for change, it will be resistance to his economic agenda that unsettles his coalition. His assault on small property owners certainly hits many affluent Jews; bashing “greedy Jewish landlords” is a popular meme for Mamdani supporters such as activist Thomas Lopez-Pierre, who compares them to enablers of the Nazis — yes, Jews.

But not all landlords are wealthy, nor are they primarily Jewish. Hasidic and Orthodox communities tend to invest in real estate, but so too do many middle-class New Yorkers. Mamdani’s assault on property owners is also receiving opposition in heavily African-American and Asian areas like Queens. People don’t much appreciate Mamdani’s designated tenant advocate, Cea Weaver, who calls property ownership an instrument of  “white supremacy.”  

This population, whom Marxists might label as “petit bourgeois,” will be increasingly opposed to Mamdani’s socialist economics, unlike the privileged “Lulu Lenins” who are more insulated from it. He is clearly alienating working- and middle-class New Yorkers such as bodega owners, many of whom are minorities, who will soon be competing against city-owned grocery stores. Mamdani’s socialist Mini-Mes will keep shopping at Whole Foods, but for the bodega owners, subsidized city stores will be a matter of business life or death. 

The great irony here is that Mamdani’s South Asian base is also highly entrepreneurial and owns small businesses, including bodegas. Indeed, in capitalistic New York, there should be harmony between Jews and Muslims, both enterprising, family-oriented peoples. American Muslims, notes the Manhattan Institute’s Reihan Salam, may not start as anti-American, but their children’s exposure to academic culture produces young, affluent, educated Leftist cosmopolitans like Hasan Piker and of course Mamdani himself.

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My night in ‘Mamdani-Ville’

By Sohrab Ahmari

Ultimately, only when the ethnic areas begin feeling the pain from Mamdani’s policies can the situation change. The city’s future is now a race between how quickly the economics unravel and how rapidly its mayor chases out the Jews and other kulaks. We have seen such things before, during the Michael Curley era in midcentury Boston or Coleman Young’s disastrous turn as mayor in 1970s Detroit. 

Such divisive politics “work” on one level: a city with fewer middle-income people will be a clear field for the political apparatus, the NGO-industrial complex, and the dependent poor. But this is a tragedy: the Big Apple is not Detroit or Boston, but a great world city that has ambition in its DNA. Even the Lulu Lenins may get tired of diminishing opportunity — growth is hardly a prime DSA objective — as well as an infarcted infrastructure, a tent-city crisis, and high property crime. Perhaps a few years off campus will inject the mayor’s base with a dose of reality.

But if the Jewish population and other elements of the middle class leave, it could foreshadow a  future New York reduced to a playground for the rich and their pampered offspring, government workers, and welfare recipients. Stopping hate crimes — not seeming to wink and nod at it — is one way to keep people like our teachers from looking for the exits.

“You feel like no one will protect us,” Josh told me. “Is it getting worse? Are you kidding me? We used to see the police but now the subways are a no man’s land. People are now looking at Long Island, New Jersey — or Texas, Arizona, or Florida. There’s less reason to stay.”

“I don’t want to bring my kids up here,” he added. “It’s very scary.”