by David Shepard, ©2026
(Aug. 17, 2026) — I can’t think of any politician more associated with wokeness than New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. So, it was with great surprise that I heard her acknowledge that “Woke 1,” as she terms it, was crazy. This admission naturally would lead a curious person to follow up with obvious questions such as what was crazy about it, and has AOC changed her positions since she embraced the woke agenda? Well, she didn’t say, and more significantly she wasn’t asked, so you see she was not doing an interview with a real reporter. Rather, by design, she made her “crazy Woke 1” comment while doing an interview last week with ABC fake news reporter Jonathan Karl.
First, I feel I should explain my contempt for the way Karl handled the interview. When doing an interview, a good reporter, or even a bad reporter, tries to pin the interviewee down. Because an interview is designed to get clarity. If at the end of an interview a politician’s views are less clear, then it was a waste of time, at least from the standpoint of journalism.
In every interview the goal of a reporter is to get answers, and the goal of the politician being interviewed is to avoid answering questions. The politicians want to maintain flexibility; they want to dodge; they don’t want to take a stand. So, the reporter must design every question for clarity, that is, the questions are worded in such a way to force the interviewee to take a position. In short, to pin them down.
In the twenty-minute interview last week, Jonathan Karl did not ask AOC a single reporter competent-level question designed to get an actual answer. Every question that Karl asked was designed to allow her to avoid taking a clear position.
A good example was when Karl mentioned some of the positions in the Democratic Socialists of America platform which includes abolishment of the Senate, Defund the Department of Defense, Close Overseas Military Bases, Abolish Prisons, Grant Amnesty to All Illegal Aliens in the U.S., Public Ownership of the Largest U.S. Corporations, Get Rid of the Supreme Court, among other horrible ideas, but he never asked her what her position on any one of those planks was.
For example, he never asked, “Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, you are a member of the Democratic Socialists of America; do you support the abolishment of the Senate?” He never asked her, “You are a member of the Democratic Socialists of America; do you support public ownership of the largest U.S. corporations?” At one point he did ask her if she “supported any of that,” meaning the DSA platform in general, and she responded with one word: “No.” But that raises the obvious question which Karl didn’t ask: if she doesn’t support any plank in the DSA platform then why is she a member? Would you belong to a party or organization whose platform you disagreed with on every plank? Not likely.
But Karl knows that the people who want to abolish the Senate and give amnesty to illegal aliens might vote for AOC, so he didn’t want to put her into a position of having to express her opposition to those ideas.
At times during the interview Karl helped AOC get her talking points in. He agreed with AOC that “Woke 1” was crazy, and as an example Karl offered, “You briefly supported the ‘Defund the police’ movement.” Yes, that’s right. I remember hearing AOC adamantly say that “Defund the police means defund the police,” but why is Karl telling us that her position on defunding the police has changed? Isn’t it up to her to spell out her positions, and if she changed her views, shouldn’t she be asked why? My guess is Karl didn’t trust her to clarify her position, so he did it for her. How nice!
The main reason for the interview was so AOC could distance herself from the woke ideology of the Marxists. Just as the Wuhan Virus escaped from a lab in China, wokeness escaped from the faculty lounges in our universities, and AOC wants to get some distance from the virus that she championed several years ago. So, she declares in general terms that woke was craziness, but she will avoid specific objections.
And to help her, Karl didn’t even ask what was crazy about it. In fact, after acknowledging that it was a crazy period, AOC proceeded to defend it, saying, “We were trying to be open to any way that was going to get us to a better place.” This is false. Wokeness sought to intimidate people into silence. It sought to label people who disagreed with the Marxists as racists, sexists, homophobic, etc. It sought to cancel out people who spoke out against “settled science.” Karl didn’t point this out. He simply accepted AOC’s benign view that wokeness was an attempt to solve problems and find new solutions.
But if we have already gone through Woke 1, as AOC claims, then what is Woke 2 going to look like? Well, Jonathan Karl didn’t ask her.
But in fairness to Jonathan Karl, despite his uxorious tone, his puppy dog glances at AOC, and his interest in her decision to freeze her eggs, it was not a completely softball interview, because it should be noted that not once during the twenty-minute interview did Karl ask her to name her favorite flavor of ice cream.
David Shephard is a native and very proud Virginian. Raised in Fairfax County, David graduated from George Mason University and majored in Government and Politics. He spent decades in politics, campaign consulting, raising money and lobbying. He is also a longtime conservative blogger writing for numerous blogs. He is also the host of “The Virginia Gentleman Podcast.”
David is the author of Elections Have Consequences, A Cautionary Tale, and his latest book, Norton’s Choice: An Inside Politics Exposé.