“Woke 1 was crazy,” grinned Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday as she sought to brush off a question about ideas she endorsed very recently — like “defund the police.”
She’s letting herself and her allies off far too easy.
The excesses of the toxic hyper-leftism that metastasized in so many American institutions — academia, media, sports, law, government, education, entertainment and the corporate world — were a form of illiberal authoritarianism that did deep damage to individuals and to the fabric of American society.
I know, because Woke 1 came for me.
My crime? Advocating for meritocracy in New York City’s public schools.
I was an attorney with the Legal Aid Society during Woke 1’s peak in the summer of 2020.
In my off-hours I was also involved in my children’s public schools, and I’d recently been re-elected by fellow parents to sit on the local Community Education Council.
In that capacity I disagreed with Mayor Bill de Blasio’s efforts to scrap the color-blind SHSAT, the single test used for admissions to NYC’s specialized high schools, based on the specious claim that the test itself was racist — and I had the audacity to say so publicly.
That’s when the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid, a caucus of my former union, the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, chased me out of my job for wrongspeak.
It’s far easier to defend meritocracy in 2026, but in 2020 — the era AOC now wants us all to laugh about — it was career-ending.
BALA published a statement declaring that a public defender “cannot oppose anti-racism and effectively represent Black and Brown people.”
The group went on to say I had “no business having a career in public defense” and “we’re ashamed that she works at the Legal Aid Society” — and my employer amplified the message by re-tweeting it.
That post is still up.
A real knee-slapper, right, Congresswoman?
My public shaming served many purposes.
The Woke 1 practitioners of Ibram X. Kendi–style “anti-racism” wanted me to lose my job: Check.
I was running for City Council at the time, and thanks to their accusations, I was constantly asked to answer for my “racist” education positions: Check.
Even more important, they wanted to make sure everyone else at the Legal Aid Society got the message.
Years later, a former colleague wrote to tell me he was ashamed of his own silence during that period, but had feared losing his job if he spoke up: Check.
Woke 1 was vicious, effective and widespread — and it didn’t just silence public-school parents like me who value great education.
Academics were fired for merely expressing a verboten viewpoint about climate change.
Suggesting that COVID-19 originated in a lab, or that natural immunity negated the need for a vaccine, was sneered at — and cost more than 1,000 New York City workers their jobs.
Reporting that asked whether the surge in youth trans identification might reflect a social contagion made you an immediate outcast in most mainstream media.
Questioning land acknowledgments or the pronouns in someone’s bio invited professional peril for even the most apolitical.
And in a shocking number of cases, totally innocuous behaviors — mispronouncing words, making a misconstrued hand gesture or singing along to a popular song in a way that offended the wokerati — got people fired, shamed or rejected from schools.
All while AOC and other so-called progressives looked the other way.
Today colleges and universities that abandoned the SAT with a bent knee to Woke 1 pieties are bringing it back — because, they can now acknowledge, the test is an effective mechanism to find and sort prospective students.
DEI consultants are looking for different work as the gigs dry up.
Detransitioners are filing lawsuits, and professional athletes and sports associations are suddenly remembering — and saying out loud — that people can’t change their sex.
AOC wants us to forget and forgive what she calls the “crazy” of “Woke 1” so she can pursue a political promotion without having to answer for the harm done, the careers ruined, the lives upended and the deep societal rifts caused by Woke 1’s merciless demand: your acquiescence or your silence.
I want us never to forget the truth about Woke 1.
Instead, we must accurately assess it, catalogue the damage it did, demand accountability from those who led the charge — and build a society that doesn’t cave so quickly when it’s time to say something true but displeasing to the powerful.
Maud Maron is a New York attorney and education advocate.
https://nypost.com/2026/08/13/opinion/i-was-a-victim-of-woke-1-who-wont-let-aoc-laugh-off-her-harm/
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