Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani were spotted giggling together Friday morning while families mourned at Ground Zero as the names of 9/11 victims were read.
Cameras at the 9/11 memorial in New York City cut from a young man crying in front of the names listed at the 9/11 memorial to a shot of AOC and Mamdani as they laughed together during the somber event.
Numerous 9/11 victims&#8217; families had previously urged the giggling mayor to stay away from the memorial on the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans. City, state, and U.S. officials, including Vice President JD Vance, gathered at Ground Zero for the annual memorial service.
AOC and Mamdani were blasted after the clip of them laughing spread on social media.
&#8220;How the hell do you laugh while the names of those murdered on 9/11 are being read aloud? Why would you do so?&#8221; <a href="https://x.com/tedcruz/status/2098449419544756332">said</a> Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).
&#8220;After thousands of families of victims of terror beg Mamdani not to show up, he stands there and laughs while families weep. This is NYC’s Mayor,&#8221; <a href="https://x.com/InnaVernikov/status/2098448965154886112">said</a> Republican NYC Councilwoman Inna Vernikov.
Commentator Meghan McCain <a href="https://x.com/MeghanMcCain/status/2098439370822873228">added</a>, &#8220;Why the f*ck are these two laughing?!?&#8221;
Mamdani has made multiple callous remarks about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. On Thursday night, Mamdani released a statement on the attacks that failed to mention that radical Muslims killed thousands of Americans in a terrorist attack. Instead, he made the horrific events seem no different than a natural disaster.
&#8220;Today, I attended a memorial mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, led by Archbishop Ronald A. Hicks, in honor of those who died on 9/11,&#8221; Mamdani wrote on Thursday night. &#8220;25 years ago, we bore witness to unimaginable suffering. But New Yorkers met that moment with a spirit of love, sacrifice, and solidarity that guided us forward. As we remember those we lost, let us continue to take refuge in one another. Let us recommit to the work of building a better city — one that is worthy of the legacy they left.&#8221;
On Friday morning — after major backlash for his previous statement — Mamdani released another statement, in which he wrote, &#8220;25 years ago, terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people, including 2,753 New Yorkers.&#8221;
Earlier this week, Mamdani brushed aside concerns from former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Governor George Pataki and said he would attend the 9/11 memorial ceremony. The backlash over Mamdani&#8217;s attendance has been fueled in large part by Mamdani’s chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem, who previously served as a defense lawyer for Ahmed al-Darbi, an al Qaeda operative held at Guantanamo Bay whose brother-in-law helped hijack the plane that struck the Pentagon, The Daily Wire previously <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/mamdani-to-attend-9-11-ceremony-despite-awkward-ties-to-terrorist-sympathizers">reported</a>.
The Muslim mayor has also <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/zohran-mamdanis-islamophobia-speech-echoes-famous-norm-macdonald-joke">sparked outrage</a> with comments about &#8220;Islamophobia&#8221; that Muslims faced after the 9/11 attacks.
“I want to speak to the memory of my aunt, who stopped taking the subway after September 11th because she did not feel safe in her hijab,” Mamdani said last October.
“Growing up in the shadow of 9/11, I have known what it means to live with an undercurrent of suspicion in this city,” he continued, adding, “To be Muslim in New York is to expect indignity, but indignity does not make us distinct. There are many New Yorkers who face it. It is the tolerance of that indignity that does.”
Ocasio-Cortez has her own history of controversy over 9/11. In 2019, the leftist defended her fellow Squad member, Muslim Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), when Omar said of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, &#8220;Some people did something.&#8221; AOC claimed the backlash to Omar&#8217;s comment was &#8220;incitement of violence against progressive women of color.&#8221;

AOC/Mamdani

Disgusting Moment AOC And Mamdani Laugh During Most Somber Part Of 9/11 Memorial

alexandria ocasio-cortez

new york city

politics

september 11 attacks

ted cruz

zohran mamdani

Leftist Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) are peddling claims of a &#8220;modern-day lynching&#8221; epidemic, ignoring official police reports and state autopsies that show some of the tragic deaths were actually suicides.
Pressley kick-started the panic on social media, writing that &#8220;black folks are being found hanged&#8221; and comparing the deaths to Jim Crow-era &#8220;strange fruit hanging from trees.&#8221;
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Black folks are being found hanged in America.
This is a national crisis and we CANNOT stand by while strange fruit hangs from trees across the country.
We&#39;re demanding a federal investigation NOW so we can stop modern-day lynchings. <a href="https://t.co/IfiRiYOMNC">https://t.co/IfiRiYOMNC</a>
&mdash; Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (@RepPressley) <a href="https://x.com/RepPressley/status/2098122677424640000?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 10, 2026</a></blockquote>
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AOC quickly jumped on the bandwagon, boasting about backing Pressley’s demand for a federal probe while writing: &#8220;This year, there have already been 10 reported hangings of Black people in the U.S. I’m proud to have signed onto @RepPressley&#8217;s letter to address these widespread modern-day lynchings and put a stop to this racial terror.&#8221;
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This year, there have already been 10 reported hangings of Black people in the U.S.
I’m proud to have signed onto <a href="https://x.com/RepPressley?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@RepPressley</a> ‘s letter to address these widespread modern-day lynchings and put a stop to this racial terror. <a href="https://t.co/ISo20mbLyg">https://t.co/ISo20mbLyg</a>
— Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@RepAOC) <a href="https://x.com/RepAOC/status/2098170460013834536?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 10, 2026</a></blockquote>
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There’s just one glaring problem: law enforcement, medical examiners, and independent tracking data say it&#8217;s simply not true. And the Democratic lawmakers&#8217; posts were hit with brutal community notes on X.
&#8220;Most high-profile cases of Black people found hanging in 2025-26 were ruled suicides by medical examiners and police, with no evidence of foul play. One remains a homicide probe. Framing as modern-day lynchings is not supported by official findings,&#8221; the X community note reads.
In many cases cited by activists and online rumor mills, authorities have consistently found zero evidence of foul play. Medical examiners, local police, and even the FBI have repeatedly ruled the tragic deaths as self-inflicted suicides rather than hate-fueled homicides.
Following the 2020 death of Robert Fuller in California, investigators <a href="https://www.pressreader.com/usa/los-angeles-times/20200710/281758451583427">confirmed</a> suicide. Subsequent deaths, including a <a href="https://apnews.com/article/mississippi-hanging-delta-state-university-black-student-7e4e6ee1d347e920a81658af25443d8d">Delta State University student</a> in late 2025 and 2026 incidents in Georgia and Florida, led to the same conclusion.
Following the death of 21-year-old Kyle Bassinga in Georgia, Cobb County Police Chief Dan Ferrell <a href="https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/cobb-leaders-address-park-death-monday-press-conference">urged the public</a> to stick to facts over social media hysteria, confirming there were &#8220;no indicators&#8221; anyone else was involved.
To&#8217;Nea Nicole Miller was found dead near Gwen Cherry Park in Miami on June 18. Miami-Dade Sheriff&#8217;s Office ruled it an <a href="https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0NtNnuexovH41Yp5AY2zbR3c1Zb2cRGBRuxB4YU8oEyBuijEy9P7VmCrFBiRJM16pl&amp;id=61571449030566">apparent suicide</a> with no evidence of foul play. Jerard &#8220;Jay&#8221; Jackson was found dead in Michigan on June 30. Michigan State police <a href="https://oceanacountypress.com/2026/06/30/police-id-body-found-near-bike-trail-as-missing-electric-forest-festival-attendee/">said</a> it appeared he died by suicide with no indication of foul play.
<a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8904650/">Public health data</a> shows that hanging is tragically the leading method in suicides among black youth.
While independent trackers count anywhere from seven to 10 public hanging deaths over the past year, police and coroners note the majority were clear-cut suicides. But that hasn&#8217;t stopped AOC and the Squad from ignoring the cold, hard facts to push a narrative.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)

AOC And Squad Push Fake ‘Lynching’ Panic, Ignore Autopsies Showing What Really Happened

ayanna pressley

misinformation

squad

suicide

Today and tomorrow will mark a historic milestone for the Republican Party: the first-ever midterm election convention, to be held in Dallas. President Donald Trump will headline the event, rightfully tout his accomplishments, and rally his party to hold the line against Democrats in November. But as we think about winning the next election, we also need to think seriously about who will lead the party in the years ahead, especially in Congress.
Young voters hate Congress, and the distaste is bipartisan. Congressional Democrats beat Congressional Republicans in <a href="https://iop.harvard.edu/youth-poll/52nd-edition-spring-2026">approval</a> among voters under 30 by just one point, 26% to 25. Yet the Left enjoys political momentum with this demographic. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has become one of America’s <a href="https://yougov.com/en-us/ratings/politicians">most popular</a> political figures. Zohran Mamdani has popularized socialism among a new generation of voters in New York, while Abdul El-Sayed is trying to build a similar movement in Michigan. The top two candidates <a href="https://www.fec.gov/data/">raising the most money</a> so far this year are Jon Ossoff in Georgia and James Talarico in Texas. They are all millennials.
I fundamentally disagree with the policies and vision these far-left politicians offer. But I’m more than happy to argue with liberals. What disappoints me is watching Republicans criticize them without asking why they have been so successful in the first place, and doing nothing to counter it.
The Left understands that movements need effective messengers. They find young candidates, invest in them, and rally around those who connect with voters. Republicans need to get much better at doing the same.
I say that from experience. I served in President Trump’s first administration and have run for Congress myself. On the campaign trail, some of my most encouraging conversations were with seniors who wanted to see a new generation step forward and lead. That talent exists, but too often our political system makes it unnecessarily difficult for new voices to break through.
Instead, consultants put lipstick on the same old establishment pig, recycling candidates who are part of the very system voters are frustrated with. We forget a fundamental truth: the reason someone runs for office usually tells you a lot about how they will govern.
We should be looking for young, new people motivated by something larger than themselves, people who see public office not as the prize, but as a temporary position of trust. The goal shouldn’t be to manufacture more politicians. It should be to find leaders who would rather accomplish something meaningful than simply become someone important.
Those are the people we need to hear from. The conservatives who can win over younger voters are those who share their concerns: struggling to buy their first homes, start families, build businesses, and achieve the basic milestones that once defined the American Dream. A generation has watched the cost of living rise while the institutions meant to serve them feel increasingly disconnected from their lives.
That vacuum has created an opening for the Democratic Socialists of America. They speak directly to the frustration young Americans are feeling. They tell them the system isn&#8217;t working for you, and we’re the solution. The problem is that their prescription is more of what helped create the disease: bigger government, more spending, more regulation, and more government control.
The irony is that many of the same young people adopting a fashionable hatred of capitalism are surrounded every day by its benefits. They sip lattes from the backseat of an Uber while scrolling social media on an iPhone, all made possible by a free market that lets entrepreneurs take risks, investors to supply capital, and businesses to compete. Precisely because our free-enterprise system is so successful, we often forget how extraordinary its achievements are.
But we cannot take them for granted. President Trump understood this and has pursued an economic agenda to cut taxes and regulation, unleash American energy, encourage investment and manufacturing at home, reduce the size and cost of government, and make it easier for Americans to build, hire and create. It’s a free-market philosophy built around economic freedom, entrepreneurship, strong families, private property, and the opportunity to build a better life through your own work and ingenuity. This is how we show young Americans who feel their dreams slipping away that they can find a path to prosperity without the chains of socialism.
To communicate this message, we do not need to manufacture a “Republican AOC.” But Republicans need to accept that politics has changed and our approach to finding candidates needs to change with it. Younger Americans want leaders who sound like real people and have the courage to say what they believe. They want to know what a candidate is fighting for, not simply what they are fighting against.
To find those people, Republicans should look beyond the traditional political pipeline and take chances on people with different backgrounds and experiences. When someone demonstrates the ability to connect with voters and communicate our values, we should invest in them early through mentorship, infrastructure, training, and fundraising. If we make them spend 20 years climbing the political ladder, or encourage the wrong candidates to run, we shouldn’t be surprised when we end up with a government that feels increasingly inauthentic and disconnected from the people it is supposed to represent.
President Trump understood that millions of voters were desperate for someone who sounded different, fought differently, and was willing to challenge a political establishment they no longer trusted. As the president runs the show in Dallas this week, helping chart the course for the party he transformed, Republicans should remember the power of his example and look for more leaders willing to break the mold.
***
Catalina Lauf is a former Trump administration official, entrepreneur and former Trump-endorsed congressional candidate. She is the author of “Time to Choose.”

Trump voters in Fletcher, North Carolina.

How The GOP Can Reclaim The American Dream For The Next Generation Of Voters

democratic socialism

donald trump

republican party

young voters

Democrats have a new talking point for the 2026 midterms, and it&#8217;s a doozy: the party wants you to believe the whole 2020-era meltdown (defund the police, kente-cloth photo ops, hyperfixation on gender and sex) was just a weird, isolated fever it caught during lockdown and has since fully recovered from. <a href="https://www.deseret.com/politics/2026/08/12/aoc-says-woke-1-was-crazy/">Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez kicked off the branding exercise on ABC&#8217;s &#8220;This Week&#8221;</a>, borrowing a line from a New York City councilman: &#8220;Woke 1 was crazy.&#8221; Within days, <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/mamdani-shrugs-off-aocswoke-1-comments-critic-says-progressives-cant-absolved-radical-past">New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was echoing the same line at a press conference</a>, insisting &#8220;what you believe can change&#8221; while distancing himself from his own defund-the-police past. It&#8217;s not one congresswoman having a candid moment. It&#8217;s a coordinated cycle-wide message: Woke 1 is dead, don&#8217;t worry about it, just yell about Israel and “Medicare for All.”
Here&#8217;s the problem with the sales pitch: nobody bothered to tell the rest of the party that Woke 1 was supposed to have left the building.
Start with the DNC&#8217;s own leadership circus this year. David Hogg — the Parkland-shooting-survivor-turned-professional-activist the party spent years grooming as the &#8220;future&#8221; — got elected DNC vice chair back in February. Then Oklahoma Democratic operative Kalyn Free filed a complaint arguing the election process <a href="https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/stolen-election-dnc-to-review-vice-chair-david-hoggs-election-victory-amid-race-and-gender-discrimination-allegations/">&#8220;discriminated against three women of color candidates&#8221;</a> by allowing two men to sweep both vice-chair slots. The DNC&#8217;s Credentials Committee agreed, voided the results, and forced a do-over — and Hogg, reading the room, quietly declined to run again. The most prominent young progressive in the party got bumped from his own leadership seat for being insufficiently diverse on the one axis that actually mattered to the people running the process: being white and male. That&#8217;s not a 2020 relic. That happened this year, inside the DNC&#8217;s own headquarters, to the party&#8217;s handpicked golden boy — using the exact same racial-and-gender-box-checking logic Democrats now want to pretend was a temporary lockdown hallucination.
Then there&#8217;s the WNBA, an entire professional sports league that spent the better part of this year unable to answer the single easiest question in sports: what is a woman? After Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham had the audacity to say that biological men shouldn&#8217;t compete against women, <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/outkick-sports/wnba-fight-males-womens-sports-exposes-left-keeps-answering-question-nobody-asked">the league&#8217;s response was weeks of statements about &#8220;hate, abuse, and demonization&#8221;</a> and a major meeting on women… just to come back empty-headed and empty-skulled. When two former NBA players declared for the draft specifically to force the issue, the league quietly ruled them ineligible without ever rewriting a rulebook that still just says &#8220;only players who are women are eligible.&#8221; The reason the WNBA can&#8217;t answer the question isn&#8217;t confusion: <a href="https://townhall.com/news/mattvespa/2026/08/28/the-wnbas-stance-on-transgender-players-just-got-messier-n2682055">the league already let a female player transition to male mid-career and publicly celebrated it at the time</a>. Defining &#8220;woman&#8221; now would mean admitting the gender ideology it embraced circa 2020 already broke its own rules. That&#8217;s not a relic of the past. That&#8217;s a live mess this month, in the exact institutions that never got the memo Woke 1 supposedly ended.
When the Supreme Court&#8217;s Louisiana v. Callais decision gutted the race-based redistricting regime that had propped up dozens of &#8220;safe&#8221; congressional seats, Democratic leadership didn&#8217;t respond like a party that had grown past racial sorting. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries went on national television and accused the Court&#8217;s majority of <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2026/08/17/while-trying-to-avoid-court-packing-question-jeffries-all-but-admits-he-supports-it/">&#8220;unleashing Jim Crow-like tactics&#8221;</a> and doing &#8220;the bidding of extreme MAGA Republicans,&#8221; then <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/supreme-court/4563840/jeffries-threatens-judicial-reform-post-voting-rights-ruling/">declared &#8220;everything should be on the table,&#8221; including &#8220;massive judicial reform&#8221;</a>, to get race-based maps reinstated. Strip away the theater and what he&#8217;s demanding is the restoration of a system explicitly built to sort American voters by skin color. By Ballotpedia&#8217;s own count, <a href="https://spectator.org/the-democrats-may-not-survive-callais-ruling/">148 House seats nationwide — more than half of the entire Democratic caucus — currently exist in their present shape because race, not geography, dictated the lines</a>. The sitting House Minority Leader isn&#8217;t nostalgic for Woke 1&#8217;s racial framework. He&#8217;s actively campaigning to keep it running in 2026.
Woke 1 didn&#8217;t die somewhere between the lockdown and the vaccine rollout, and it isn&#8217;t a cringe-inducing vocabulary word the party has wisely retired. It&#8217;s alive in the DNC&#8217;s own leadership fights, alive in the WNBA locker room, and alive every time the House Minority Leader demands the law keep treating Black voters and white voters as different species who need different maps. Democrats aren&#8217;t running away from Woke 1 this cycle; they&#8217;re just hoping you&#8217;ll laugh along with the branding long enough not to notice they never actually left.
***
The Daily Signal is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect any institutional position for The Daily Signal or its Board of Directors. 
Tony Kinnett is the senior national correspondent for The Daily Signal and host of its flagship nationally syndicated radio/TV show and podcast, &#8220;The Tony Kinnett Cast.&#8221; Follow him on X @TheTonus.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Woke 1 Never Left Because It Is The Left

democratic national committee

hakeem jeffries

opinion

woke ideology

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I wasn’t trying to desert. As a storyteller and special education (SpEd) teacher, more kid whisperer than liberal hack, I was sickened by my St. Paul, Minnesota bosses at Como Park High School cutting programming for vulnerable kids while blood, fights, and prostitution spread. In one Facebook post on February 29, 2016, about school iPads being used for bullying, drugs, fights, and whoring, I freaked parents out and wrecked my career.
I was patient zero in the oncoming race-plague that peaked with George Floyd’s death and the Summer of Love and ended with millions of dollars of destruction, thousands of reputations ruined, and the cruel deaths of people during what Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez so flippantly referred to as “Woke 1.”
Every year since I started teaching in 1999, the district has poured tax dollars into problems and failed. My boss called kids “scholars” and cut their programming minutes in 2012; cut my minutes; cut adult living skills like learning their Social Security numbers, using deodorant, and riding the bus; administrators dropped them into algebra when they couldn’t subtract, into analyzing “Raisin in the Sun” when they couldn’t read. Kids were bullied, scared, crying at me to do something, and those who didn’t started fights.
I wrote to my boss in 2014 about illegal placement and bullying; she told me to get with it, or she would “find someone who would,” meaning fire me; I wrote to the union and school board in 2015; there was a forest fire coming, and no one smelled the smoke. I wrote to parent social groups. But what parent would speak up for their “special,” slow child?
In a December 2015 SpEd meeting, I heard a colleague tell another that the whole Como Park football team lined up in a train for $10 blowjobs on school property. This was in the midst of Como making TV news too often because of police calls, guns in lockers, and riots.
I found myself caught in a shocking crunch. I asked on Facebook if someone would show me this “school-to-prison pipeline?” I warned parents that we had no recourse with fights, drugs, and “whoring,” and they freaked out. It was horrifying. Rather than confront the truth of my questions, they labeled me a racist and a white supremacist.
Security took my laptop, keys, and badge and marched me to the parking lot, and my life was immediately turned upside down.
Television, radio, and social media went insane. Fox and CBS called. Radio stations asked my brother for my contact information. Friends in Italy asked if I was okay. At home, I shut off the lights and closed the shades. My union lawyer, Meg Luger, called my fiction stories racist, and gagged me. Police offered protection from cars slow-rolling my house. My wife left to care for her dying mom. I had to shop at midnight. Friends and family who first supported me have long since unfriended and blocked me. The only leftist friends remaining I can count on one hand. Meanwhile, conservatives welcomed me despite my liberal leanings.
After 250 applications, I found three more teaching jobs and was fired from each one. At the last school where I worked, a state union leader spotted me in Grand Marais, 250 miles from home, squinted, and said, “I know you from somewhere.” Three weeks later I was fired, despite good job reviews. Minnesota pulled my license in 2019, but though I fought it and got it reinstated, I couldn’t work anymore. I was dead.
I didn’t mean to desert, but I left the Left. Then I wandered the woods eyeing tree branches for rope to hang myself, and might have, were it not for a reticent therapist and a job counselor who said she’d found jobs for paroled murderers and pedophiles.
Now, I’m fine. New York Times reporter Sabrina Tavernise spent over three hours in 2019 buying pizza and interviewing me, but none of it made the paper or The Daily. It’s history; Woke 1.
Except that Chauntyll Allen, the Black Lives Matter leader and school board member who called me racist in 2016, now faces federal felony charges for storming Cities Church during the ICE surge in January, and in June, called for dogs to “piss on white corpses” in “white Christian cemeteries.” When I confronted her last month, she invoked the memories of Melissa Hortman, the former DFL Speaker of the Minnesota House, and her husband Mark, and asked if I hadn’t harassed them, too, before they were murdered.
So, what are we to do when Rep. Ocasio-Cortez appears on ABC’s “This Week” and says, “<a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/6026317-aoc-reflects-on-woke-era/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/6026317-aoc-reflects-on-woke-era/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1788389997119000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2z7ZujSWV18T3abE2ImKxl">Woke 1 was crazy</a>,” laughing off 2020, while she supports the insane policies to <a href="https://ocasio-cortez.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-aoc-34-members-urge-biden-reform-immigration-policies" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://ocasio-cortez.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-aoc-34-members-urge-biden-reform-immigration-policies&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1788389997119000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2jIEkHL6Xc766erCYr8Edn">decriminalize illegal immigration</a>, <a href="https://ocasio-cortez.house.gov/media/in-the-news/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-was-asked-about-defunding-police-and-her-answer-went" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://ocasio-cortez.house.gov/media/in-the-news/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-was-asked-about-defunding-police-and-her-answer-went&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1788389997119000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2jbNeNrLEAp9ajwFpxHT7r">defund police</a>, and <a href="https://youtu.be/VrFALy_NxDk?is=J9PbIJYOHRczScCR" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://youtu.be/VrFALy_NxDk?is%3DJ9PbIJYOHRczScCR&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1788389997119000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3Jk-3q_9sFHfblVZjNtKyo">let kids medically switch genders</a>? It’s not funny to let criminal immigrants walk free, not funny to take cops off the streets in poor neighborhoods, not funny to permanently mutilate healthy girls and boys.
Wokeness was deadly when antiracist lecturer <a href="https://www.hrreporter.com/focus-areas/compensation-and-benefits/school-principal-takes-own-life-after-alleged-bullying-by-anti-racism-trainer/378345" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.hrreporter.com/focus-areas/compensation-and-benefits/school-principal-takes-own-life-after-alleged-bullying-by-anti-racism-trainer/378345&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1788389997119000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1Z4pvNuEdX8rBEZJQ-4ACr">Kike Ojo-Thompson</a> repeatedly mocked liberal Toronto Principal Richard Bilkszto until he leaped to his death off a building ledge. It wasn’t funny when NBC’s Minnesota affiliate Kare 11 News leaked an email to Minneapolis police, got worker <a href="https://libcom.org/article/al-ditty-working-class-hero" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://libcom.org/article/al-ditty-working-class-hero&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1788389997119000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0ls1aikedwXlajjt_x7K-z">Al Ditty fired, and he hung himself</a>. It was not funny when I looked for the right tree branch to hang myself neatly.
In the blink of an eye, my life and the lives of countless others were destroyed by a season of horror and destruction. It bears remembering how “crazy” that time was, and only the foolish or the cruel would rewrite that history to absolve themselves of responsibility.
In 2016 I lost my job, reputation, livelihood, and for a time, my will to live. In 2016, AOC was 26 and pouring drinks. She still should be.
***
Theodore Olson is a writer and former special education teacher living in St. Paul, Minnesota.
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Anti-Racism Protests Held In U.S. Cities Nationwide

I Was Patient Zero Of Woke 1 And It Nearly Ended My Life

black lives matter

cancel culture

minneapolis

woke movement

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez must have rehearsed the line she may live to regret.
The New York socialist recently told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl how she remembers the recent past and some of her party’s excesses.
“Woke 1 was crazy,” she said with a sheepish grin, allegedly quoting fellow socialist New York City Councilman Chi Ossé.
Yes, we know. And Hollywood embraced that craziness as much as any institution. So while Ocasio-Cortez hopes to memory hole woke’s political implications, it’s worth revisiting exactly why “woke 1 was crazy” in La La Land.
It crushed the Hollywood brand, hurt the U.S. box office, and coaxed celebrities into betraying their art.
The worst example remains the 2025 “Snow White” debacle. Disney decided to update the classic story, the first animated film in the studio’s history, for a modern audience.
That meant no dwarfs, since casting little people in a major Hollywood movie would be deemed offensive in some quarters. Just ask <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/jan/25/peter-dinklage-disney-remake-snow-white-and-the-seven-dwarfs">little person superstar Peter Dinklage</a>.
But other little-person actors, who struggle to find recurring gigs, raged at the decision. They watched that oh-so-rare Hollywood door slam in their faces.
The story’s “dwarfs” would have become full-sized magical humans, at least according to a viral image that <a href="https://nypost.com/2023/07/18/disney-backtracks-on-politically-correct-snow-white-pics/">Disney unsuccessfully tried to downplay</a>. But the Mouse House quasi-backpedaled, using CGI to create animated dwarves at the last minute.
It wasn’t woke enough to cast someone of Colombian descent in the title role. Rachel Zegler, the film’s leading lady, took it upon herself to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/disneys-snow-white-star-slammed-as-she-continues-bashing-original-film-in-another-resurfaced-video">mock the source material</a>, angering Disney loyalists in the process.
The finished film downplayed the story’s romantic angle because female empowerment, a woke staple, doesn’t require a man for “Happy ever after.”
The result? “Snow White” lost Disney a <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinereid/2026/02/10/disney-loses-170-million-on-snow-white-as-studio-reveals-movie-blew-its-budget/">reported $170 million</a> after it belly-flopped in theaters.
The Black Lives Matter movement spiked in 2020 following George Floyd’s death. Hollywood studios and stars bent over backward to accommodate the far-Left cause, racing to social media to flex their woke platitudes.
That partially explains a cringe-worthy video where famous faces like Aaron Paul, Kristen Bell, Debra Messing and other white actors “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdsmxzaHtSQ">take responsibility</a>” for systemic racism.
They apologized for racial stereotypes, racially-charged jokes and so-called police brutality, even if the facts didn’t line up with their pleas.
“Black people are being slaughtered in the streets,” Julianne Moore said, ignoring how that’s sadly true as black-on-black crime, often in Democrat-run cities like Chicago, and is not a racially-charged development in the vast majority of America.
That BLM fever dream coaxed some artists to censor themselves. Tina Fey of “Saturday Night Live” and “30 Rock” fame once told an interviewer <a href="https://www.phillymag.com/things-to-do/2015/12/21/tina-fey-jokes/">she’s against explaining jokes</a>. That attitude flipped post-Floyd.
Fey instructed streaming platforms to censor four “30 Rock” episodes that had <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-53148316">blackface-like moments.</a>
Desus &amp; Mero, two minority comedians who briefly enjoyed a successful Showtime pairing, admitted they <a href="https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/desus-mero-self-censor-cancel-culture/">self-censored</a> for fear of a woke backlash.
Woke also infected beloved franchises like “Star Wars,” “Doctor Who” and “Star Trek.” The first saga suffered the most, shedding decades of goodwill by incorporating woke elements in “The Last Jedi,” “The Acolyte” (<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2024/06/07/the-acolyte-creators-joke-about-making-gayest-star-wars-series-and-lesbian-r2-d2-angering-right-wing-critics/">the “gayest” title in the saga</a>) and “Solo: A Star Wars Story.”
“Jedi” had female commanders dressing down male heroes like Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) and an income inequality subplot, while “The Acolyte” featured lesbian space witches as central to the story. “Solo” showcased a <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/05/the-soul-of-solo-is-a-droid/560969/">woke droid</a> who prattled on about robot rights.
The fallout? “The Acolyte” earned a swift cancellation, and the most recent “Star Wars” film, “The Mandalorian and Grogu,” became the lowest grossing film in the franchise.
Original films also sank thanks to extreme woke content. Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut, 2019’s “Booksmart,” might go in a time capsule for the most overtly woke comedy. The film featured two high school seniors who dressed like Fidel Castro junkies and pushed endless female empowerment. The box office? A tepid $22 million stateside.
Hollywood tried to reboot the “Charlie’s Angels” IP, but it did it during peak-woke mania. Out went bikini-clad crime fighters, in went social justice warriors marching against The Patriarchy.
“I think women can do anything,” star <a href="https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/charlies-angels-review-2019/">Kristen Stewart says in the film’s opening sequence</a>.  “I want all my options available so I can decide for myself.”
The revived franchise stalled with a paltry $17 million U.S. total.
Woke culture proved so suffocating that even the industry’s biggest stars couldn’t escape it. Lovable Kevin Hart, one of the few bankable movie stars at the time, got picked to host the 2019 Academy Awards telecast. That is, until someone dug up a nearly decade-old comedy routine where he protested his child possibly being gay.
The Outrage Mob did its social media thing, and Hart sheepishly quit the assignment before the <a href="https://variety.com/2018/film/awards/kevin-hart-says-the-film-academy-has-given-him-an-ultimatum-apologize-or-well-find-another-oscars-host-1203083698/">Academy could fire him</a>. The process took 48 hours.
“The Tonight Show’s” Jimmy Fallon endured a woke struggle session on his own program in 2020. A 20-year-old clip “resurfaced” where Fallon donned black makeup to imitate Chris Rock. He begged for forgiveness on-air.
<a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/09/chris-rock-jimmy-fallon-blackface?srsltid=AfmBOoplVWDNM3WKdSdiT8e3oLpXzr-aDQb_-pTfjsw8jlDNGYhc8Yin">Rock later defended Fallon</a>, but only after the humiliating “hostage”-style apology. He likely feared the blowback if he spoke out earlier.
No star was too big to be taken down by the woke mob. Consider A-lister Scarlett Johansson, who briefly signed on to play a trans character in “Rub and Tug.” News of the gig enraged the woke Left, who demanded the role go to an actual trans actor.
Johansson apologized and <a href="https://variety.com/2018/film/news/scarlett-johansson-exit-rub-and-tug-trans-backlash-1202872981/">quit the gig</a>. “Rub and Tug” never got made. Halle Berry similarly signed on for a trans role but swiftly <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/jul/07/halle-berry-drops-out-of-trans-role-after-protests-over-misgendering">quit under similar pressure</a>.
Hollywood has learned some lessons from the Peak Woke era. Movies have less overt progressive messaging than before. Comedians have more room to say what they want, when they want.
Woke remains in the industry’s DNA. Should Ocasio-Cortez’s party come out on top in 2028, the movement might get a Hollywood sequel.
***
Christian Toto is an award-winning journalist, movie critic and editor of <a href="http://www.hollywoodintoto.com/">HollywoodInToto.com</a>. He previously served as associate editor with Breitbart News&#8217; Big Hollywood. He&#8217;s also the host of <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-hollywood-in-toto-podcast-w-christian-toto/id1186449155">The Hollywood in Toto Podcast</a>. Follow him at <a href="https://twitter.com/HollywoodInToto?lang=en">@HollywoodInToto</a>.

“Jurassic World Rebirth” New York Premiere

The Post-Mortem Of Hollywood’s Most Expensive Trend

disney

snow white

star wars

woke culture in hollywood

A word of caution to the Right as the midterms approach: do not run on messages from the Left. The policies of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) base should not be the north star. So, why borrow from their playbook on data centers?
Data centers are good. They are a boon for the economy and essential for national security and quality of life. You are reading this column because of data centers. You can share this article on social media because of data centers. We should support data centers for many reasons.
Energy production. President Trump’s “Ratepayer Protection Plan” does something extraordinary and unprecedented: it allowed tech companies to build power plants.  Never has industry been allowed to act as a utility. If a manufacturing plant enters a town, the mayor cuts the ribbon and touts the new jobs, but there is less focus on the surge in power demand. If a school or hospital is built, the burden falls to the local utility to absorb their energy needs. For the first time, industries needing more power can produce it themselves, benefiting the entire community in the process. This is incredible news for America’s energy workers.
In the words of <a href="https://x.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/2091238662646472856">President Trump</a>, “the data centers now are mandated by me that they build their own electricity, so they&#8217;re not taking it from the grid. It&#8217;s going to lower the cost of electricity.&#8221;
Jobs. Data centers are private construction projects with private financing, not some Keynesian, centrally planned boondoggle like the California high-speed rail to nowhere.  These are hundreds of thousands of construction jobs for American workers, paid with private dollars, buying billions in materials and goods and services from the local community. To quote <a href="https://x.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/2091238662646472856">the president</a>, “If you pick the right location, what it means for a community is jobs and lots of money and lower taxes.”
Tax revenue. Data centers are massive producers of tax revenue. Loudoun County, Virginia, <a href="https://nypost.com/2026/08/19/us-news/virginia-county-expecting-its-data-centers-to-bring-in-1-3b-haul-in-tax-revenue/">hauled in $1.3 billion</a> in tax revenue from data centers with a 30% reduction in local property taxes. Pretty ironic, considering Loudoun is already <a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/slideshows/richest-counties-in-america">considered</a> the richest county in America. In one Louisiana school district, teachers will receive<a href="https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/the-teachers-getting-50-000-bonuses-thanks-to-a-massive-meta-data-center-b4631d05">$50,000</a> bonuses this year, thanks to a Meta data center project.
The Left claims they oppose data centers because of “affordability” and rising electricity prices, yet under Biden, they closed over 100 viable coal and natural gas power plants under the pretext of climate change. In a detailed white paper called “<a href="https://www.powerthefuture.com/report-the-looming-american-electricity-affordability-crisis/">The Looming American Electricity Affordability Crisis</a>,” my organization warned the nascent second Trump administration of the disaster they inherited.
The Left grounds their opposition to data centers on land use. Yet Biden spent tens of billions to purchase farmland for failed wind and solar projects. They turned our farmland into a bird-killing hellscape with intermittent technology purchased with tax dollars from communist China. Not a peep from them about “farmland” or food prices or the threat to rural America.
The Left fights data centers because of the threat to American jobs, yet under Biden, they flooded the country with millions of illegal aliens whose cheap, off-book labor undercut wages for every American worker.
This exposure is why the Left opposes data centers. Their agenda failed: green energy mandates failed the grid, outsourced jobs failed the economy, endless immigration failed the nation. The Left has failed rural America. They collectively now point to data centers as a boogeyman, the culprit of all our economic and social ills, rather than risk the truth of their failures being known.
All that before discussing the threat from Communist China who wants to see all data center construction stop so they can beat America in the AI race and not for some “global community” kumbaya. An <a href="https://www.axios.com/2026/07/17/china-ai-kimi-k3-open-source-anthropic-opus">Axios</a> headline this summer warned that “China just erased America&#8217;s AI lead.” The threat is real.
I haven’t even mentioned property rights. I met a 7th-generation Virginia farmer in tears over the 8-figure check from a data center developer.  Some may say they “sold out,” but they see it as a gift from God, a reward for perseverance, and a sign of American success. The nerve of a governor or a politician to issue a “moratorium” out of political cowardice and deny someone the right to sell their land. That is about as un-American as it can get.
I am not oblivious to the polls. If you believe them, more people want to live next to a <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2026/05/13/people-would-rather-have-nuclear-power-plants-in-their-area-than-ai-data-centers/">nuclear power plant</a> than a data center. The public relations efforts of those supporting data centers have been lackluster, to say the least.
I welcome a robust discussion on data centers. As a farmer in Virginia, the data capital center of the world, I pass <a href="https://nypost.com/2026/08/19/us-news/virginia-county-expecting-its-data-centers-to-bring-in-1-3b-haul-in-tax-revenue/">more than 200 data centers</a> on the way to Washington, D.C.
Politicians need to understand the concerns of their constituents, but do not run from a good issue because the Left pours money into scare tactics and media propaganda for their political advantage. Bernie Sanders has been espousing socialism for half a century, and I wouldn’t trust AOC to pour me a proper pint. They both oppose data centers. Anyone embracing their position is doomed to fail. Anyone using their talking points should have their head examined, and their conservative credentials revoked.
***
Daniel Turner is the founder and executive director of Power The Future, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for American energy jobs. He also runs a sheep and cattle farm in rural Virginia.  Contact him at daniel@powerthefuture.com and follow him on Twitter @DanielTurnerPTF

Data Center Protest

Why Conservatives Shouldn’t Fall For The Left’s Data Center Scare Tactics

bernie sanders

data center

energy policy

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed urged a group of young boys to &#8220;have conversations with all your neighbors&#8221; about the upcoming elections in a video he released Tuesday on social media.
&#8220;All our kids are all our kids,&#8221; El-Sayed wrote in the video&#8217;s <a href="https://x.com/AbdulElSayed/status/2092280307596558448">caption</a>.
The Democratic candidate joined the boys, many of whom wore &#8220;Youth for Abdul&#8221; shirts, on a soccer field and explained how decisions made in Washington would affect their futures.
&#8220;My whole job is to go to Washington, D.C., to try and make laws that are better for you,&#8221; he told the boys. &#8220;That&#8217;s the whole point. So you have better schools, so that you can breathe cleaner air, you can drink cleaner water, so we don&#8217;t go send our money to kill other people instead of keeping it here, to protect you and give you healthcare, to make sure your parents have good jobs, that they have protections from a union.&#8221;
&#8220;The world that we&#8217;re building right now is the world you&#8217;re going to live in a lot longer,&#8221; he continued, adding, &#8220;When you are going out having conversations with all your neighbors and talking about elections and voting, what you&#8217;re asking them to do is build a future that&#8217;s better for you guys.&#8221;
El-Sayed told the children that he wanted them to &#8220;fight for their future&#8221; and promised he would do the same if elected to the Senate in November.
Some social media users objected to El-Sayed&#8217;s &#8220;all our kids&#8221; caption, interpreting it as suggesting that children belong collectively to the broader community, and <a href="https://x.com/CatB99261688/status/2092298658897097204">ripped</a> the Democrat for the lack of diversity in the video.
El-Sayed&#8217;s campaign did not respond to a request for comment from The Daily Wire.
The caption El-Sayed used for the post is similar to a quote from civil rights activist James Baldwin, who <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/notes-house-bondage/">wrote</a> in The Nation in 1980, “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.” Baldwin espoused many socialist ideals and <a href="https://lvdsa.org/2020/07/08/socialist-spotlight-james-baldwin/">argued</a> for socialism to be implemented in the United States.
El-Sayed has attempted to distance himself from socialism throughout his Senate campaign, telling <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/im-not-a-socialist-michigans-mamdani-has-the-lefts-new-playbook-but-doesnt-want-the-new-label">The Daily Wire</a> in February, &#8220;I&#8217;m a scientist. I’m not a socialist.”
Yet many of El-Sayed&#8217;s <a href="https://abdulforsenate.com/priority/money-in-your-pocket/#h-taxing-billionaire-wealth">positions</a> are indistinguishable from socialist ideals, and he has campaigned with democratic socialists, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). He has also joined forces with Marxist streamer Hasan Piker, whom he refuses to disavow even after Piker made <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hasan-piker-delivers-ominous-warning-to-pro-israel-jews">threatening comments</a> warning pro-Israel Jews to stop supporting the country before somebody “takes action” against them.

Democratic Senate Candidate Abdul El-Sayed Holds Primary Night Event In Detroit

El-Sayed Enlists Children To Spread Political Message: ‘All Our Kids Are All Our Kids’

2026 midterm election

abdul el-sayed

michigan senate race

Piker Propaganda

Who Is Behind The Rapid Rise Of The DSA?

democratic socialists of america

hasan piker

socialism

Socialist Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has completed her egg-freezing journey, complaining of “big” bloating as she wrapped up a process she has said gives her more control over her personal and political life.
“When they said that the bloating the day after the procedure was real, they meant it was real. I&#8217;ve heard that it can peak up to three to four days after the procedure, so I might wake up tomorrow, and it could be even bigger than this. But we&#8217;re working with what we got,” AOC said in a <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DcXi5mroEzn/">‘Day-15’ Instagram post</a> documenting her journey. 
“One of the reasons why the bloat is so big is because of the trigger shot that you receive before your procedure,” she added. “Basically, what your trigger shot does is that it puts your ovaries into overdrive, and it tells your ovaries it is time to ovulate like, big time.
Earlier this month, AOC announced <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/aoc-freezes-her-eggs-after-telling-others-to-question-having-kids">she was freezing her eggs</a> and filmed herself injecting hormones into her stomach, describing the decision as a “privileged” opportunity to gain more control as she weighs a possible 2028 presidential run. 
“Normally, I keep my private life quite private. But I have made the decision to freeze my eggs. And I want to share this because I was weighing it for a very long time, and there isn’t a ton out there, and it can feel very daunting,” she said at the time. “I am aware there is, very strangely, a political ‘risk’ or ‘tax’ that could come with sharing this information.” 
The 36-year-old, who is childless, described to her millions of followers the “reflective mood” she has been in recently and the pressures that ultimately led to her decision.
“There’s also this flip side where you have to then grow up in the public eye, in a time that most people usually get to grow more privately,” she lamented. “And when you get elected later in life, you’ve made all of your mistakes in private. You’ve learned. You’ve grown in private. But when you get elected in public, and when you’re young, you have to do all of that in public.”
The move generated national headlines and injected motherhood into the political discourse, prompting some White House officials to warn that attacks on the self-described democratic socialist could alienate female voters ahead of the November elections, <a href="https://www.axios.com/2026/08/11/aoc-egg-freezing-white-house">according to Axios.</a> 
AOC, who was first elected to Congress at age 29, said she is documenting her fertility journey to help educate women about what she described as a lack of awareness surrounding women’s health, including puberty, pregnancy, and menopause.
Her decision to preserve her fertility also marks a notable shift in tone for the Bronx leftist, who has long championed feminist causes, including abortion-on-demand, while previously suggesting that young people reconsider having children because of climate change.
“Our planet is going to hit disaster if we don’t turn this ship around, and so it’s basically like, there’s a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/ocasio-cortez-people-maybe-shouldnt-reproduce-due-ryan-saavedra">February 2019 Instagram live video</a>. “And it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question, you know, ‘Is it okay to still have children?’”
A woman’s fertility is closely tied to the number and quality of eggs in her ovaries, with age playing a major role in egg quality. Research has found that fertility declines significantly with age, with women in their mid-30s generally having lower chances of conceiving than women in their 20s, according to <a href="https://www.trianglen.dk/en/about-fertility/female-infertility/egg-quality-and-female-age">Trianglen Fertility Clinic</a>.
By the late 30s, fertility declines further, and after 41 years, egg quality declines rapidly. On Saturday night, AOC said she has so far avoided significant pain and that bloating has been her biggest symptom.
“So I might be looking like this for a little bit. I will say–I do feel very lucky in my process. Tylenol and ibuprofen have made a lot of the discomfort very manageable, and so my biggest symptom is the bloating. But I&#8217;m not in any huge pain right now,” AOC said. 
“It&#8217;s possible that this belly hasn&#8217;t even peaked yet. So we&#8217;ll wake up tomorrow and see what we&#8217;re working with today,” she added. “I&#8217;m really focused on recovery.

House Votes 6/11/26

AOC Completes Egg-Freezing Journey, Complains About Bloating

2028 presidential election

egg freezing

women's health

Democrats have decided they need to use thirst traps in order to win the midterm elections. Now you may be asking yourself, “What’s a thirst trap?” or “What’s an election?” or “Who is that woman in bed next to me and why is there blood everywhere?” Because that’s the sort of audience I attract. And to be honest, I can only answer some of those questions.
A thirst trap is a social media post with a photo or video designed to catch your attention by showing you something attractive and sexy. And Democrats are looking for sexually attractive candidates to catch your attention and make you think, wow, it’s so hot the way they pretend to be socialists who would only destroy our economy to hide the fact they’re actually Islamists who want to murder us all.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/andrew-klavan-show-ep-1292"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-974735 size-full" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Klavan-watch-now.jpg" alt="" width="1800" height="300" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Klavan-watch-now.jpg 1800w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Klavan-watch-now-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Klavan-watch-now-1024x171.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Klavan-watch-now-768x128.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Klavan-watch-now-1536x256.jpg 1536w" sizes=" (max-width: 1800px) 100vw, 1800px" /></a>
For instance, Democrats feel if muscular Michigan Senate candidate and terrorist sympathizer Abdul El-Sayed hits the campaign trail wearing tight t-shirts, he might attract the kind of women who would otherwise forget to vote because they’re too busy writing love letters to Luigi Mangione.
Or maybe spindly little Georgia Senate Candidate Jon Ossoff could give speeches in an open-neck shirt to attract large muscular homosexuals who were recently released from prison and are looking for a new b*tch. Or Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might appear dressed in a bizarrely low-cut nun’s habit entirely made of latex while carrying a whip and a lighted cigarette — or maybe that was just a dream I had. Then I woke up screaming, thinking I’d voted for AOC. Brrrr.
Anyway, in a series of tests funded by the Democratic National Committee, potential female voters were shown a picture of El-Sayed flexing his biceps, followed by a picture of Senator Chuck Schumer trying to stand up straight and pretend he still has a soul. The women were then asked:
<blockquote>Would you be willing to destroy 250 years of American liberty and prosperity for fifteen minutes of having El-Sayed tear off your burka while you scream &#8216;Take me, take me, you steaming hunk of Islamist garbage,&#8217; or would you prefer to just go on and on in your drab day to day life where every evening your daydreams are shattered when Chuck Schumer comes through the door calling out, &#8216;Hi, Honey, I’m home,&#8217; until every dream you ever had of romance and adventure withers and dies?</blockquote>
In 68% of the cases, the female Democrats said they would gladly vote for the handsome El-Sayed as long as he promised to bring back the patriarchy, which actually, now that they think about it, was kind of great.
The Democrats then wanted to test pictures of attractive female candidates on potential male voters. Unfortunately, I’d already made an AOC joke, and every other female Democrat either looks like a used boot or has a mouth on her that makes you want to become a celibate monk in a religious retreat run by a nun wearing the low-cut latex habit she got from the old AOC joke.
Finally, desperate to find a pretty Democrat woman for their study, the DNC showed male voters a photograph of Krystal Ball, the Democrat beauty whose 2010 Virginia congressional campaign ended in scandal when pictures surfaced of her dressed in a sexy Santa outfit while wrapping her lips around a sex toy strapped to the nose of her then-husband. Ninety-five percent of the men said they would gladly vote for the catastrophe of socialism if they could just become a sex toy strapped to the nose of Krystal Ball’s former husband, even if only in their imaginations. In fact, some of the male voters said they might even vote for communism if Chuck Schumer would just stop coming through their wife’s door, calling out, “Hi, Honey, I’m home.”
But the Democrats’ obsession with finding attractive candidates is not just a reflection of their shallow and perverted notion of sexuality with its propensity for meaningless, fetishistic hookups. Democrat leaders feel that if they can enlist candidates with a youthful, vibrant aura, it will return them to their glory days when voters were swept away by the sex appeal of Barack Obama because he destroyed the American health care system with such macho vitality, you could almost believe he was straight.

DNC Pivots To Tactical Thirst Traps To Make Socialism Look Sexy

chuck schumer

jon ossoff

satire

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) handed her party a problem it spent Sunday morning refusing to answer when she laughed off a slate of far-left policy positions as the excesses of &#8220;Woke 1.&#8221;
Two of the biggest Sunday shows put Ocasio-Cortez&#8217;s remark to Democratic guests as a loyalty test, and both guests gave a near-identical non-answer. NBC&#8217;s Kristen Welker and CNN&#8217;s Jake Tapper each raised it on &#8220;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EukfmKkYwS4">Meet the Press</a>&#8221; and &#8220;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCBVnEyVdwQ">State of the Union</a>,&#8221; respectively.
Welker put the question to Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) directly, quoting Ocasio-Cortez and asking whether he agreed.
&#8220;She said &#8216;Woke 1 was crazy,&#8217; effectively suggesting some progressive views just went too far in the 2020s,&#8221; Welker said. &#8220;Do you agree with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that Woke 1 was crazy?&#8221;
&#8220;Well, I don&#8217;t know what these labels mean,&#8221; Khanna replied, immediately pivoting to a recitation of his own record: &#8220;I&#8217;ll tell you what I&#8217;ve always stood for. I have never been for defunding police.&#8221; He went on to volunteer that he has &#8220;called for abolishing ICE.&#8221;
Welker followed up by asking about Francesca Hong — the Madison democratic socialist who narrowly lost Wisconsin&#8217;s Democratic gubernatorial primary on Tuesday — and the resurfaced post in which she called for getting rid of Thanksgiving. &#8220;Did that kind of rhetoric hurt the progressive cause?&#8221; she asked.
Khanna refused to give an inch. &#8220;I really feel bad for what happened to Francesca. And I know it&#8217;s fashionable to distance yourself. I am not,&#8221; he said. &#8220;I was proud to endorse her and she&#8217;s far more than the caricature that was presented.&#8221;
Notably, Ocasio-Cortez herself never endorsed Hong. Asked in the same ABC News <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFwAnMLBSOw">interview</a> that produced the &#8220;Woke 1&#8221; line whether she would, she said her focus was &#8220;winning back the Congress&#8221; — putting her in line with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and the national Democratic Socialists of America, all of whom stayed out. Khanna did not.
On &#8220;State of the Union,&#8221; Tapper raised an almost identical line of questioning with Gov. Wes Moore (D-MD), referencing Ocasio-Cortez&#8217;s comments and pressing Moore for his view.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Democrat Governor of Maryland Wes Moore plays dumb when asked if Democrats went too far by calling to defund the police:
“I said I don’t know what woke 1 is, but frankly I don&#8217;t know what woke 2 or woke 3 is either.&#8221; <a href="https://t.co/PFVN265qYw">pic.twitter.com/PFVN265qYw</a>
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) <a href="https://x.com/RNCResearch/status/2088985603874463944?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 16, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.x.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
&#8220;Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seems to have acknowledged the overreach of the 2020 era of progressivism last week. She said, quote, &#8216;Woke 1 was crazy,'&#8221; Tapper said. &#8220;You were asked about that. You said you didn&#8217;t know what Woke 1 was. So I&#8217;ve been trying to figure out how to ask this question. There&#8217;s no official definition. I think Woke 1 generally refers to what are now viewed as excesses of the progressive movement — defund the police, a far-left view of the world that views the world in terms of only oppressor and oppressee, language policing, holiday policing, cancel culture positions that turned off a lot of middle-of-the-road voters. What is your take on that era, even if that wasn&#8217;t part of how you ran or thought or governed — and what does the Democratic Party need to do if they hope to win outside of blue states and congressional districts?&#8221;
Moore took a position almost identical to Khanna&#8217;s, replying, &#8220;Well, it&#8217;s funny, it&#8217;s true — I said I don&#8217;t know what Woke 1 is, but frankly, I don&#8217;t know what Woke 2 or Woke 3 is either.&#8221; Moore then pivoted to gas prices, recounting a conversation with a woman at a Delmarva Shorebirds game who told him she can&#8217;t afford to drive to her doctor&#8217;s appointments. Tapper did not follow up.
Ocasio-Cortez <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/aoc-has-an-excuse-for-the-lefts-most-radical-woke-1-era">further popularized the phrase</a> during an August 9 appearance on ABC&#8217;s &#8220;This Week,&#8221; where she too was attempting to put some distance between herself and the less popular policies of the far left. Anchor Jonathan Karl had asked her about Hong&#8217;s record. The line wasn&#8217;t hers: she borrowed it from New York City Councilman Chi Ossé, a fellow socialist who deployed it in May while explaining away his own 2021 <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/09/nyregion/nyc-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-freezing-eggs.html">declaration</a> that &#8220;a cis white man should not be the next speaker of the Council.&#8221;
“I have a local city councilman that has this saying, ‘Woke 1 was crazy,&#8217;” Ocasio-Cortez <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFwAnMLBSOw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">told Karl</a> during an interview. “What’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now.”
She went on to blame the pandemic for the era&#8217;s excesses while insisting the debates it produced were worthwhile.
&#8220;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,&#8221; she said.

Maryland Gov. Moore And Utah Gov. Cox Speak At National Press Club On Bipartisanship

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