I can't help but feeling a little bit of deja vu.
After living through the hell Democrats imposed on us during COVID — aided and abetted by their friends in the media — the tone suddenly shifted a couple of years ago, with the Democrats and their media allies essentially saying, "Whoops our bad!" On October 31, 2022, The Atlantic wanted to "declare a pandemic amnesty" kicking off a spate of stories that amounted to little more than "please to hold us accountable for ruining your lives."
Now the Democrats are doing it again, but this time with the insanity of the woke years. At the end of August, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told ABC News' "This Week" that "Woke 1 was crazy." It was a transparent and lame attempt to brush aside a Soviet-esque era in American history where the Left made persecuting their political opponents for "microaggressions" and other thought crimes part of our everyday life.
Caught up in that mess were guys like Emmanuel Cafferty, the Mexican-American who worked for San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&). In June 2020, Cafferty made the unforgivable error of cracking his knuckles with his arm hanging outside of his work truck. A random stranger contacted SDG&E and complained Cafferty made the "white power" symbol. Cafferty was fired.
Earlier this month, the Portland Trailblazers hired and quickly fired Braiden Bell, who was going to be a play-by-play announcer. Some jerks dug up posts that Bell made when he was 15 years old — he's now almost 30. His posts were considered "racist and misogynistic."
Woke 1 was crazy, y'all.
It's also not over. The Baltimore Rock Opera Society ousted a white woman because she wore cornrows at the Burning Man festival.
Baltimore Rock Opera Society boots white boss after she sports cornrows at Burning Man https://t.co/BJCChafk3C pic.twitter.com/39KlKLv2ky
— New York Post (@nypost) October 2, 2026
Kelly Carnes was fired September 23 after a video of her with the hairstyle surfaced. Carnes said she wore her hair that way because of the weather and conditions at burning man, but for some, the braids were "cultural appropriation."
Gee. There's that vague term rearing its ugly head again.
I'm old enough to remember when the Left wanted us to "celebrate diversity" and embrace other cultures. But when they realized they couldn't have power and control if we all just got along, the Left came up with the idea of "cultural appropriation" — the idea you can't create, use, look like, or in any way be perceived as using something from another culture.
Of course, such restrictions do not apply to all the cultural stuff white people created. Other races and cultures can use that as much as they want. In fact, the Left goes out of its way to destroy white culture by calling it "white supremacist" and listing behaviors like timeliness, hard work, and polite manners "racist." By destroying white culture, they can say there's nothing there to "appropriate," I suppose.
This is also not new. In 2017, Kooks Burritos in Portland was forced to close down because its owners — white women Kali Wilgus and Liz Connelly — had the audacity to learn tortilla making techniques from Mexican women. They too were accused of "cultural appropriation" and forced to shutter their business.
What AOC tried, and failed, to do was declare a culture war amnesty. To pretend that Woke 1 was over and we've moved on. We haven't, of course. People are still getting fired for things they said more than a decade ago, still getting fired for wearing their hair in ways that offend perpetually aggrieved and terminally online leftists who need real jobs and hobbies. And as I've predicted, Woke 2.0 — which is coming, it's only a question of when — will make Woke 1 seem like a picnic.
