Oops. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — the Democratic Party’s biggest star and heir apparent — went viral this week following a segment on ABC, in which she was pressed on the now vanquished Francesca Hong’s years-long string of lunatic posting. Our dear Franny, last week’s self-described anti-capitalist frontrunner in Wisconsin’s Democratic primary run for governor, just wanted healthcare!, but was unfortunately also insane. In another life (five or ten minutes ago), she called for abolishing the police, abolishing prisons, abolishing ICE, abolishing the United States Senate, and canceling Thanksgiving on grounds it’s a holiday for genocide. In fact, she seems to hate… every holiday? She also once nearly had a panic attack, or so she said herself, from proximity to “too many old white people.” And look, I’ve been to Old Country Buffet when that fresh fried chicken drops. To some degree, I get it. But virulent, KKK-esque racism just isn’t resonating with “moderates” the way it did in 2020, and Democrats have an election to win.

Ocasio nodded along as Jonathan Karl probed her on the subject of her comrade’s apparent mental derangement, then explained Hong has “moved away” from these positions. She smiled, as if recalling some wild summer night from college, and concluded: “I have a local city councilman that has this saying, ‘Woke 1 was crazy.’” The congresswoman laughed, and Jonathan laughed. America laughed! What a funny thing to say! And a new direction for left-wingers embarrassed about the years-long identitarian hysteria they enshrined into cultural law was forged:

Sure, we lorded over a loosely decentralized global censorship apparatus while cities across the country burned over six months of BLM rioting. And yes, we deplatformed anyone who opposed our views on everything from child sex change operations and Hunter Biden’s laptop — just weeks from the presidential election — to the origin of Covid. But that was, like, so long ago! Girls will be girls. My bad ;)

It was a spectacular deflection. And do I buy it? No, lmao, of course not. Politicians are entitled to change their minds, but unless a politician is able to explain what it was about their old, horrifying ideas they got wrong, we should obviously not just trust them. In the case of Ocasio specifically, no personal examples were even shared. What did she actually get wrong in 2020? Was it her position to defund the police?

This topic was actually raised by Karl, though the DNC’s next presidential nominee instantly pivoted. So what is it? Do we still “need to have a real conversation about decarceration and prison abolition in this country”? What about abolishing ICE? What about mass amnesty for the estimated 20 to 30 million illegal immigrants living in the country? What about chemical castration for little Johnny?

In any case, a refusal on the part of our culture’s worst mall cops from 2020 to really take accountability while petitioning for more power than they’ve ever had before is not really why I found this all so fascinating. For me, it was that inviting little term “Woke 1,” which of course implies the existence of a present-day “Woke 2.”

Now. What the fuck does that mean?

In these early moments of what seems to be the trend, “Woke 2” is mostly just a feeling. The left is ascendant, and young leftists are once again excited. But while “moderate” pundits (de facto spokespeople for the DNC) insist we’re not doing mall cop shit anymore, I regret to inform you the mall cop shit is just, at this point, the air we breathe.

Earlier this year, when Real Housewife Jill Zarin said she didn’t like the Bad Bunny Super Bowl performance, and explained she felt it kind of anti-white, she was immediately fired from her job. “Woke is back,” explained one popular Bravo influencer. A little over a week ago, pop star Tate McRae was embroiled in controversy surrounding her associations… with other people… who had themselves associated with Donald Trump. The most problematic of these associations was, according to Forbes, her boyfriend, the hockey star Jack Hughes, who online leftists spent weeks furiously attacking, as if a virus to healthy tissue, after his team took a call from the president following their victory over Canada.

But that call was only one piece of the puzzle. It seems to me the reason Jack became the focus of controversy was this incredible picture:

Leftism is obsessively focused on aesthetics. Probably that’s because aesthetics are the only real way to communicate with a large mass of people who basically don’t read. And a gorgeous superstar pop sensation blissfully dating a handsome, unapologetically patriotic sports legend who thinks it’s cool to take a call from the president? That’s like 9/11 for people who enjoyed 9/11.

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In the Before Times, leftists would unironically use the phrase “dog whistle” to address communication of some idea or concept non-specifically. Some loathed enemy of the trust fund class might have said people should arrive at work on time, for example. But really, the drooling nepo babies would insist, this man was saying, in coded language only other racists could hear, that black people were lazy. In this way, it became fashionable throughout the wokest years of Woke 1 to punish people for things they allegedly meant, but never actually said.

Still, as unserious as such claims often were, it’s true that information is often, and maybe even mostly, conveyed nonverbally. That’s just style. That’s culture, for the most part. And that’s the battle leftists had been winning for something like fifty years before they fumbled into “cringe.” Somewhere around the time Biden vanished from the presidency in the middle of his term, left-wing activists, and by extension the Democratic Party where left-wing activists mostly lived, became deeply uncool. It is this image, not their policies, that they are now reforming.

The shift in wokeness, from 1 to 2, has less to do with behavior, as many are incorrectly arguing, and as we can plainly see from recent cancellations, or attempts, and more to do with image.