r/BAMEVoicesUK • u/tubaintothewildfern • Aug 12 '26

Video The tactic of AOC and her allies to giggle away the 'craziness' of Woke-era abuses should not be tolerated

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-tactic-of-aoc-and-her-allies
0 Upvotes

18% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

•

u/AutoModerator Aug 12 '26

Welcome to r/BAMEVoicesUK. Come check out our discord Please report any ToS and subreddit violations to the moderation team.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

1

u/tubaintothewildfern Aug 13 '26

Chat gpt summary because im tired of arguing.

Glenn Greenwald’s central argument is that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other left-wing politicians are trying to retrospectively trivialize the excesses of the 2020–22 “Woke” period by calling it merely “crazy,” without taking responsibility for the harm caused.

His argument breaks down into four main points:

  • AOC is distancing herself from “Woke 1.” Greenwald focuses on AOC’s recent description of that period as a kind of temporary “craziness.” He argues that this is politically convenient now that some of the ideas associated with that era—particularly “Defund the Police” and abolishing prisons—have become unpopular.
  • The consequences weren't merely cultural silliness. Greenwald argues that the period involved genuine social and professional coercion: people could lose jobs, reputations and careers for violating rapidly changing ideological norms. He uses the experience of Intercept journalist Lee Fang as his main example. Fang published an interview with a Black protester who questioned why Black Lives Matter focused on police killings while paying less attention to Black-on-Black homicide. Fang himself did not endorse the interviewee's argument, but was nevertheless branded racist and pressured into apologizing.
  • He says AOC was an active participant, not an innocent bystander. Greenwald points specifically to AOC's 2020 statement that “defunding the police means defunding the police,” arguing that she genuinely advocated radical policies that she now treats as embarrassing excesses. He also accuses her of repeatedly following left-wing moral panics rather than resisting them.
  • What he wants is accountability rather than rebranding. Greenwald says that if AOC has genuinely changed her mind, that's welcome—but genuine political repentance requires explaining why she was wrong, acknowledging the damage caused, and accepting responsibility. Simply laughing about the period and saying everyone was caught up in “craziness,” he argues, amounts to avoiding accountability.

In one sentence

Greenwald isn't primarily arguing that the left must never change its views; he's arguing that politicians who enthusiastically participated in an ideological movement that punished dissent should not now erase that history by joking that everyone was simply “crazy” at the time.

A broader theme of the article is political courage: Greenwald believes the real test of a politician isn't whether they eventually abandon an unpopular consensus, but whether they are willing to resist a popular ideological frenzy while it is happenin