OK, so what is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talking about? I read her as talking about a response to the hyper-academic, jargony — in the case of Francesca Hong, maybe we shouldn’t have Thanksgiving — like that kind of stuff? I would say you saw, principally online, the kind of outbidding — people trying to outbid each other in their cultural radicalism in this 2020-2021 period. I think that’s what she’s referring to when she says “Woke 1.0.”

And to the extent that this is a thing, I think it’s entirely appropriate to say, “Yeah, that stuff is silly,” right? There’s a lot of litigation right now of what the 2020-2021 period was to begin with, and I would describe the two sides as well-meaning, but a lot of silly stuff happened versus there was like a mini cultural revolution that happened that harmed real people.

Cottle: Except the real people who got pushed out of jobs, of course.

Bouie: Right, right, right. That what I mean — that harmed real people. So you didn’t ask me to editorialize, but I will editorialize a little bit. Were there people who got unfairly pushed out of jobs? Yes. I still think, even with that, that we need to be careful about describing this — not even “need to be careful” — it is not accurate to describe this as anything like a cultural revolution. That even when you look at people who received unfair treatment, you have to ask yourself as well, were their lives irreparably harmed here? And as unfair as some of the treatment was, this wasn’t a HUAC. There wasn’t a HUAC. There wasn’t a blacklist.

Cottle: And by HUAC, you mean the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Bouie: Yes. And I have a real frustration with the way that no one can seem to talk about this with any kind of, not context, but perspective here. And I have a real frustration with this conversation in this moment, when the current government was literally sending people to foreign prisons. Americans were literally being deported from the country, legal permanent residents.

And so, from where I sit now, to observe this conversation about the excesses of wokeness, while there’s a government that has murdered people on the street and isn’t even investigating the deaths. There is no investigation of the death of Renee Good by the federal government. That’s a thing that’s happening, you know?