It’s desperation time for the Democrats, so they’re playing down to their audience and asking the following question: Who ya gonna believe — us, or your lyin’ eyes?

The answer will determine the outcome of November’s midterm elections, and thus whether Hakeem Jeffries or Mike Johnson is speaker of the House, and whether Donald Trump’s final two years will be spent cementing his MAGA agenda or warding off endless subpoenas, investigations, and at least one more impeachment.

Which is why Sandy Cortez and her fellow Democrats are yuk-yukking about those crazy days of yore, those “Woke 1” days when they were telling illegals to surge to our southern border, and defunding the police, and green-lighting retail theft under $950, and giving black people space to riot, and arbitrarily ordering us to wear useless face diapers, and forcing experimental vaccines on perfectly healthy young people, and locking down schools and businesses and whole cities and states, and calling for price controls, and encouraging men to compete against women in sports.

Woke 1 WAS crazyyyy, Madame President https://t.co/pUHA2rtOQ1 pic.twitter.com/ws11dyPY1a

— Chi Ossé (@OsseChi) August 9, 2026

On the one hand, it’s easy to understand why AOC and the rest of them want you to forget about these things — or, rather, why they want Democrat voters and independents to forget about these things: To a one, these statist solutions were demonstrably awful ideas.

But the Democrats’ problem is twofold: They not only want us to forget about the very recent past, which is Woke 1; they also want us not to worry about the coming Democratic Socialist future, which is Woke 2.

To their credit, the Democratic Socialists aren’t hiding their agenda. They’ve published it right here for all the world to see. And to show you what a swell guy I am, I’ve waded through the entire platform so you don’t have to. Here’s just a sampling of what they’re proposing in their own words:

Establish paid family leave for all workers, a 32-hour work week with full pay and benefits. … Guarantee universal healthcare at no cost to individuals, including … gender-affirming care. … Enact reparations … disempower police unions, and redirect funding to public services as steps towards fully abolishing the police and prison system which protects the rich and jails the poor. … Defund the Department of War. End all foreign wars and close overseas military bases. … End ICE detention and deportations and punish federal agents’ brutality. Legalize migration, grant amnesty for all immigrants regardless of status, provide a path to citizenship for all permanent residents, and end visa caps and quotas. … Abolish the Electoral College. Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress. … Implement proportional representation and ranked choice voting in all elections, and abolish the Senate. … Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries.

This, folks, is where all the energy is on the Left. It’s an electorally poisonous platform, though, so would-be Speaker Hakeem Jeffries is running away from it as fast as he can.

“I don’t support the DSA agenda,” Jeffries said on “Meet the Press” yesterday. “Now, you’re going to have individual members who have been elected in Democratic primaries and, if they are elected in the general in November, will be part of the House Democratic Caucus. It’s going to be a broad caucus. There will be progressives. There will be New Dems. There will be Blue Dogs.”

Blue Dogs? Yeah, right. In 2008, the Democrats’ center-left Blue Dog coalition had more than 50 members. In today’s Democrat caucus, that number is around 10. Let’s face it: The Democrat Party isn’t getting progressively better; it’s getting progressively worse.

“What I’m excited about,” Jeffries continued, “are the candidates who are running to flip seats in November, to deliver us a majority that pushes back against Donald Trump’s extremism and moves the country in the right direction.”

What, exactly, that “right” direction is, no one seems to know. Jeffries and his fellow Democrats have nothing to offer, and their Democratic Socialist brethren have only repulsiveness and ruin to offer. This much is certain, though: They don’t want to talk about it. And they don’t want their voters to talk about it.

Writing for the New Republic, Melissa Gira Grant calls out AOC, Jeffries, and their fellow opportunistic Democrats for their intellectual cowardice:

Rather than enter headfirst into a legitimate political struggle with the candidates to their left, rather than have a fight over substantive differences, some Democrats have instead decided to pin their problems on the rhetorical—hence the turn on “woke.” What started as s**tposting — “Woke 1.0” etc.— is being used as a tool with which to discipline the left. It is depressing to see elected officials who have benefited from this leftward shift, including Ocasio-Cortez, indulge that nonsense.

Indeed, it seems like only yesterday when AOC was the darling of the woke Left. She and Hakeem, though, have an election to win. So they’ll take the Democratic Socialist money and leech off their enthusiasm, but he’d just as soon keep them and their policies locked in the basement … at least until Wednesday, November 4.