The terms started on social media but took off after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told ABC News, “Woke 1 was crazy.”
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When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said “Woke 1 was crazy” on ABC News last week, it led many to wonder what the term means, as well as its purported replacement, Woke 2.
Both terms originated online in memes and viral posts, and they’ve somehow found their way into the vocabularies of elected officials. Here’s what we know about them.
What was Woke 1?
When Ocasio-Cortez said, “Woke 1 was crazy,” she attributed the phrase to New York City councilmember Chi Ossé, who tweeted the term in May. He’s since reposted the clip of Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter, receiving over 7.1 million views.
The congresswoman was speaking about Francesca Hong’s Democratic primary run for Wisconsin governor and past social media comments on the police (“I support defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police,” Hong tweeted in 2020) and a “Cancel Thanksgiving” tweet, both of which she had walked back. (Hong, a democratic socialist, lost the primary to moderate candidate David Crowley on Aug. 11.)
“I had some hot takes, some bad takes on Twitter,” Hong told Politico. “But I’ve evolved, I’ve learned.”
Ocasio-Cortez also implied that Woke 1 included her own previous statements on abolishing the police in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death and amid the Black Lives Matter movement.
USA TODAY columnist Kofi Mframa writes, “The most salient criticism of Woke 1.0 can be found in the clumsy application of those ideas … We opted for virtue signaling.” Mframa references “land acknowledgements at movie theaters” and “infographics and black squares (?) that seldom materialized into actionable change.”
Outlets like the New York Times recently included the #MeToo movement as a Woke 1 phenomenon. Perry Bacon in The New Republic defined Woke 1 as the years 2014-2020, and included the wave of DEI activism, which led to corporate boards and other institutions adding more women and people of color.
But while the term implies that it’s something the Democratic Party should distance itself from, many proponents say it should not be forgotten or ignored, just retooled. “Actually, AOC, Woke 1.0 Did a Lot of Good Things for This Country,” the New Republic headline states.
What’s Woke 2?
Woke 2, or Woke 2.0, has been introduced as the next step for “woke” politics.
“I want Woke 2 to be more productive,” Ossé mentioned on NPR’s “Code Switch” podcast. “I want to secure more wins for Black people, for trans people, for any person who’s dealing with oppression, for any working-class person. I found that in Woke 1, there was a lot of, like, ‘culture war’ stuff, like McDonald’s doing a Black Lives Matter thing … I think there were a lot of identity politics that even I fell into.”
Woke 2 is in part a reaction to President Donald Trump’s victory in 2024 – internet users were using the phrase late that year. It’s also in part a desire on the left to address some unfinished business of Joe Biden’s administration.
Two prominent aspects have emerged: a step back from some aspects of political correctness and identity politics, and a step towards issues like affordability, universal health care and questioning the funding of Israel. Many online associate New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and 2026 Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed with Woke 2.
Samantha Hancox-Li, in an essay for Liberal Currents, argues that Woke 1’s ability to rile up the masses against perceived systemic injustices is what should be kept in Woke 2. The “excavation,” roughly meaning the removal technique of cancel culture, is what should be left behind.
A Wired article in March argued that progressives “fantasize about a resurgent ‘Woke 2,'” and said the term could include anything from the No Kings protests against President Donald Trump to Bad Bunny performing at the Super Bowl and the success of gay hockey romance “Heated Rivalry.”
The terms bubbled up from social media – a viral video shared in November 2024 by TikToker @marytlovely is among the first to reference the divide. “If you thought we were woke before, you done went and woke the beast. Welcome to Woke 2.0!” she says. The video sits at over 24,200 likes.
A few months later, in June 2025, X user @alexbronzini tweeted in all-caps, “WOKE IS BACK BABY. WOKE 2 IS HERE!!!!!” captioning a screenshot of an article about former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander reportedly questioning then-Mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo’s use of the phrase “illegal immigrants.”
One could argue that one of the precedents for Woke 2 was the “dirtbag left,” a subset of podcasts that argue leftist politics while not being afraid of telling a dirty joke about Trump or more centrist Democrats.
Some see Woke 2 as all about the issues, but the term is also used in more unserious posts. In a viral tweet from June, X user @bo_austin_ joked, “They got rid of it during Woke 1, but the camera guy being allowed to pan to gorgeous women at the World Cup is something we’re keeping under Woke 2.”