Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Dismisses Past ‘Defund the Police’ Comments, Jokes ‘Woke 1 Was Crazy’

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez found herself laughing off her own political past this weekend.

Appearing on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, August 9, the New York Democrat, 36, was asked by host Jonathan Karl to weigh in on Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong.

Karl brought up Hong’s history of provocative statements, from calling to cancel Thanksgiving to backing the abolition of prisons, comments that have followed her into a competitive Democratic primary race in Wisconsin. “I have a local city councilman that has this saying, ‘Woke 1 was crazy,'” Ocasio-Cortez joked. “And I think that what’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now.”

Karl didn’t let her off easily, pointing out that Ocasio-Cortez had once championed defunding the police herself, and asked whether the broader socialist movement had crossed a line at some point.

The congresswoman responded by placing many of those past comments in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“And 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,” she said.

She continued, “I think that when we talk about crime today, it’s fundamentally different than the way that we talked about crime in bringing crime down, right? And I think that we all share the goals of having as low a crime rate as possible. I think that during lockdown, of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today. And I’m grateful that these candidates have the opportunity to present who they are to their electorate, and what they’re campaigning on in this moment.”

The moment comes amid a more complicated relationship between Ocasio-Cortez and the democratic socialist movement she rose to prominence within.

The Hill reported that the Democratic Socialists of America once counted her as one of its own, but that backing evaporated in 2024, when the group determined she’d fallen short of its litmus tests, chief among them, a hard line against any Israel funding and open support for boycott and sanctions measures.

A spokesperson for Canary Mission told Fox News Digital in July that an Ocasio-Cortez presidency would still carry outsized influence for the movement, saying it “would give its agenda access to the full power of the executive branch.”