Authored by Glenn Greenwald via greenwald.substack.com,Many Democratic Party candidates emerging on what one might call the populist left are finding success in primaries across the country. But most of them have a shared liability: they were fully on board with the worst excesses and abuses of the "peak wokeness" that emerged in the wake of George Floyd's 2020 killing, enduring and contaminating most of our institutions for several years after.Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., speaks with ABC’s Jonathan Karl on August 9, 2026.Most of these successful candidates are quite young for elected officials: they are now in their 30s or even late 20s. That means that most of them were indoctrinated and - since they were on the left - essentially forced to spout all the new "woke" jargon and convictions that were manufactured overnight by frenzied mobs.One such candidate is Francesca Hong, a Democrat with a significant polling lead in Wisconsin's gubernatorial race. It is hard to overstate how much of a woke fanatic she was. Not even the most cringe and manifestly deranged views from that era evaded her advocacy. They are all there.The one the national media has latched onto was various tweets and Zoom meetings where she seems to have expressed opposition to the beloved American holiday Thanksgiving, because it "makes some folks very uncomfortable." (Just as a side note, one of the most abominable linguistic aberrations imposed by woke warriors is the seemingly amiable but in fact grating and aggressively ideological use of the word "folks" or "folx" to replace "people.") That most of these movements were driven by legitimate or at least reasonable policy concerns does not excuse the resulting fanaticism, excesses, and authoritarian posture used to punish those who questioned them.Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York is one of this populist-left movement's senior leaders, and she was also a driving force behind some of the worst woke excesses. She's the one whom most of that movement wants to see run for president, and Kalshi's predictive market consistently ranks her as a leading candidate:AOC, on Sunday, went on ABC's morning news program with Jonathan Karl, where she was asked about some of Hong's statements, including her call for "abolishing prisons" and "[defunding] the police," policies and phrases that have proven to be deeply unpopular. AOC, who herself aggressively advocated those policies, sought to laughingly dismiss this all as just some momentary, harmless frenzy of "craziness" that never really meant much and that everyone has all just agreed to move beyond:WATCH: ABC's Jon Karl lobs a Francesca Hong softball at AOC. AOC dances around the question, asserts that "Woke One was crazy"- brought about by Covid causing a "huge opening of the Overtone Window."