WASHINGTON — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. dismissed past controversial comments by socialist candidates, including her own, during an interview on ABC's "This Week" Sunday.
Ocasio-Cortez quoted a local New York City councilman who called the period "Woke 1 was crazy," laughing as she invoked the phrase to describe when many of those statements were made.
Host Jonathan Karl asked Ocasio-Cortez about Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong, who had called for Thanksgiving to be canceled and for prisons to be abolished. Hong, seeking the Democratic nomination, has since sought to walk back some of those earlier positions.
Karl also pressed Ocasio-Cortez on her past support for defunding the police. The congresswoman said many of those comments emerged during the height of COVID shutdowns, when "the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place."
She said that while discussions from that period were "quite fruitful," the rhetoric used then is not what politicians "would use today," and that voters should judge candidates on what they are saying now.
Karl asked whether the socialist movement had gone "too far" with certain positions, pointing out that the national program for the Democratic Socialists of America still lists abolishing the police as a policy.
Ocasio-Cortez said she is a member of the New York City chapter of the DSA, not the national organization, and does not agree with all of the national group's positions.
The exchange reflects a strategic shift among some progressive Democrats who are facing electoral pressure to moderate or clarify past positions that could become political liabilities. Candidates like Hong, seeking broader party support, are moving to distance themselves from earlier statements. Ocasio-Cortez's "Woke 1" framing gives them a ready argument: that the COVID years were an experimental moment, distinct from where they stand now.
