Michael Goodwin: ‘Woke’ might be wounded — but the radical left is still infiltrating our politics

The woke fever has broken, and the movement is wounded. But in the spirit of Mark Twain’s line that “reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” ignore any claims that the mob of radical leftists rampaging through our politics has been defeated.

Read more Virginia State University mass shooting suspect caught after police manhunt for perp in campus bloodbath

The impetus for the premature obituaries is a single race in Wisconsin where a wacky socialist squandered a huge lead and lost by a narrow margin to a more-centrist opponent in the Democrats’ primary for governor.

The oddities of the contest are too many to draw comforting conclusions from the outcome. They start with the fact that Francesca Hong, a member of the state assembly, lost by just 3,800 votes despite a history of calling for canceling Thanksgiving and defunding the police.

The victor, a black county executive named David Crowley, had dropped out of the race and then re-entered it. He had the support of just 7 percent in a late poll, but analysts say most undecided voters swung his way in the final days, giving him the nomination by less than half of a percentage point.

So hold the celebrations. Woke is wounded, but very much alive and still capable of doing more damage to America’s cohesion and leading gullible young minds into the weeds of society and the fantasies of revolution.

Like a contagious disease that turns its victims stark raving mad, it was born out of a hatred for Donald Trump after he had the nerve to defeat Hillary Clinton for the Oval Office in 2016.

Sen. Bernie Sanders ran far to the left of Clinton in the Dem primaries, but she controlled the party apparatus.

As the nominee, she played the dirtiest dirty trick ever with the fictional Steele dossier, and had no political heirs after her stunning defeat.

Instead, it was Sanders’ radical platform and energized youthful following that crowned him the godfather of woke.

His most durable and dynamic offspring is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who pulled off a stunning upset in a 2018 congressional primary in Queens, and won the general election.

That might have been the apex of the movement, but it got a huge second wind with the George Floyd killing by Minneapolis police in May of 2020.

The burning, looting and murders that followed were widely excused by Dems and the media as legitimate responses, which helped to birth a movement for racial reparations and defunding police forces across the nation.

The opportunistic Black Lives Matter organization tapped white guilt for millions, but turned out to be mostly a fraud. That and the predictable crime surges following enforcement retreats and loony legal changes helped cool the anti-police fever.

Joe Biden’s presidency was inert, except for his insane open border policy and willingness to play footsie with crime and domestic radicals. His administration tried to racialize every dispute, but proved incompetent at that and in repairing the COVID-ravaged economy.

‘Moved away’

Trump’s comeback triumph in 2024 appeared to herald a fundamental shift to the right, but a year later, the leftists pulled off their biggest coup with the election of Zohran Mamdani as New York City’s mayor.

A Democratic Socialist who had embraced the defund the police mantra and the call to close all prisons, he added another sickening dimension to his tool kit: hating Israel.

He and Ocasio-Cortez, known everywhere as AOC, became the darlings of the movement and put New York in the vanguard of crazy.

Because reality offers a harsh education, Mamdani is having a tough time doing his first job and, as foreign born, is not eligible for the White House.

Read more 47-year-old California dad joins college football team in wild comeback

AOC is a different story: Senator, president — the world seemed to be hers for the taking.

And still could be because she appears to be growing up politically, and in other ways.

Her decision to go public with a video giving herself an injection in the process of freezing her eggs, suggests a new dimension to her public persona, along with the news that she and her boyfriend ended their engagement.

But for my money, the most significant revelation involves her latest views on what it means to be woke.

In an interview with ABC News, she said she and others had “moved away” from statements they made during the COVID madness, especially on cutting police budgets and closing prisons.

She quotes a city councilman as saying that, ‘Woke 1 was crazy’. . . especially during COVID.”

Looking back, she said, “I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place. And I actually think that the discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful.”

Then she acknowledged a new reality: “When we talk about crime today, it’s fundamentally different than the way that we talked about crime . . . I think that we all share in the goals of having as low a crime rate as possible.”

She underscored the point by adding, “rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.”

‘Sellouts’

She’s not alone in coming to that realization. After James Talarico, a flaky Dem running for Senate in Texas, backed away from some of his weird history, a former Biden aide, Yemisi Egbewole, said on CNN that, “Peak woke got weird. It’s OK to say that!”

Mamdani, asked for his views on AOC’s comments, told reporters that “Sometimes what you believe in can change. I’ve made it very clear that I do not believe in defunding the police and I will not be defunding the police.”

Sounding like a conventional official of either party, he added that “to me, delivering critical public safety also looks like working with our police department alongside many other partners.”

He went on to cite record lows in murders and shootings on his watch, saying this “is how we measure public safety.”

Some who remain in the throes of revolution are very unhappy with AOC and Mamdani for moving away from their radical positions.

In a scorching essay, Guardian columnist Derecka Purnell warns that the two New Yorkers “backtracking on the defund movement puts organizers at risk.”

She essentially calls them sellouts who are too comfortable in their positions and doubts their sincerity in the first place. Writing that “Woke 1 represents a political baptism in shallow waters,” she says many people “were swept up in an emotional online conversion toward the radical, romantic rhetoric of defund the police.”

She continues: “I know the power of the feeling of being connected to an idea that can offer relief and salvation” and said the two New Yorkers “appeared at an altar of abolition during a global movement that condemned policing. It was a vibe.”

Read more Socialist NY lawmaker Emily Gallagher says shoplifting for ‘biological need’ is OK

Now she tells us.