'Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ... literally laughed off a movement she had become the poster girl for live on telly. It was in the midst of an ABC News discussion on the excesses of 2020 progressives earlier this month that she shared a saying from a colleague: “Woke 1 was crazy!”
Ocasio-Cortez’s tone is important – masterful, from a political perspective. It’s the indulgent tone of a woman pointing to a 50-year-old picture of herself in stirrup leggings and a batwing jumper. “Wasn’t Eighties fashion crazy!”
Only we’re not talking about statement sleeves here. We’re not talking about a garment you can shrug off and giggle at retrospectively. (Just six years ago, this woman wanted to defund the police). No, we’re talking about a punitive orthodoxy that had a chilling effect on free speech, that encouraged Medieval-style public shamings and cancellations and robbed people of their livelihoods.
We’re talking about a dangerous dogma that – in allowing ideology to outrun evidence in children’s medicine, of all places – encouraged experimentation on six-year-olds. It wilfully put girls and women in danger, made a mockery of women’s sport, prioritised symbolic gestures over practical solutions and turned competitive victimhood into a national sport'