AOC shrugs off anything said by leftists in the period before, say, yesterday as irrelevant to judging their suitability for positions of authority.
Because, you know, “Woke One was crazy.” As if people being crazy a year or five ago is no big deal.
Being crazy is, in fact, a big deal. It’s not the same thing as being wrong. Everybody gets it wrong, even if they are smart and exercise good judgment. As long as they acknowledge their mistakes, explain why they made them, and are willing to learn, making a mistake and acknowledging it can actually be a good thing.
You want people who can learn, and we learn from mistakes if we acknowledge them and analyze why we made them.
I don’t blame people who got things wrong during COVID; I blame people who went crazy and imposed their craziness on everybody else, and especially those who insist that they were right all along or were “just doing their best.”
Bull excrement. Half of Democrats wanted concentration camps for the unvaccinated. That is dangerously crazy. They violated constitutional rights, and said they hoped we’d die. They should be excommunicated from society, not because they were wrong, but because they are incapable of exercising even minimal judgment.
There are still people defending Fauci. They don’t belong anywhere near power.
There are few places where tyrannical power and positions of responsibility intersect more frequently than on campuses, and examples abound. K-12 and higher education campuses are filled with petty tyrants who bully students and educators into behaving ridiculously in ways big and small, such as…
Yes, this is real. pic.twitter.com/Ey3QAwwaYM
— Matthew Schmitz (@matthewschmitz) August 10, 2026
In an excellent article on what he calls the “Culture of Fraud,” Christian Parenti drops a turd in Stanford’s punchbowl by revealing how ridiculously woke things got at the school. His point was about how the reigning culture pushed everybody to pretend to survive, which is a good point in itself, but he also revealed how crazy the rules put in place by the petty tyrants motivated by “Woke One” have been.
The culture of fraud at Stanford, in Baker’s account, is as ubiquitous as soot in a nineteenth-century industrial city: on every surface, in every crevice, floating in the air you breathe. An early hint of the problem appears in the “war on fun” that has stripped the soul out of student life. Parties, Baker tells us, are very rare. Fraternity parties seem to happen only one at a time, and like every other party, require approval by the university’s official Party Review Committee. Applications must be submitted by Tuesday if your party is to occur on the weekend. Before entering the festivities, Baker recalls, partygoers had to first recite and agree to a consent policy, followed by a land acknowledgment. (In an apparent concession to the “vibe shift,” Stanford dropped the land acknowledgement in October 2025.)
Baker passes no judgment on these rituals, but a picture emerges of students who draw ethical and political conclusions that are the opposite of what is intended. Many who attend these fraternity parties no doubt think the land acknowledgment is ridiculous. When they recite it, they are in effect spouting lies mandated by university administrators. Regardless of what the administrators think is going on, the real lesson—lie to get ahead—is received.
Forget the “war on fun,” which is another important issue, and in any case is only a war on certain KINDS of fun (no doubt there are classes on how to use sex toys and suchlike). Focus on the micromanagement not just of behavior, but the necessity to profess the right “beliefs.”
Land acknowledgments before parties? Really?
It is, of course, an exercise in arbitrary power. Guaranteed that if a party with Latinx and Afro-centric students failed to acknowledge the stolen land of whatever tribes killed each other on Stanford’s land, nothing would happen. If a bunch of white kids failed to do so, all hell would break loose.
The rules exist to present an opportunity to hurt people, just as most woke rules do. It’s about putting arbitrary power into the hands of some people.
Looking back on the period of Woke One, it’s easy enough to see that some people went crazy, and many people did not. Compare Gavin Newsom during COVID to Ron DeSantis or Brian Kemp, and it is easy to see whose judgment you should be inclined to trust.
It’s not just that Kemp and DeSantis got it right and Newsom got it wrong; it’s that their judgment was good. They didn’t get swept up in the moment.
They thought and exercised decent judgment. They were sober when others were drunk with power.
Crazy is not something you can say “oops” to. It is not forgivable, at least in the sense that you hand the keys to the kingdom to somebody who was demonstrably insane.
Nothing says “principled stance” like needing two different answers six years apart. AOC vs. AOC on defunding the police, side by side. pic.twitter.com/6yr6584bl4
— Sean Hannity 🇺🇸 (@seanhannity) August 10, 2026
Of course, Jonathan Karl nodded along when AOC laughed about how crazy the COVID years were, but that is because he is smitten with AOC and is himself a midwit. The idea that anybody could exercise independent judgment is alien to him; the mob decides.
People in positions of responsibility should be immune from crazy. It seems to be a minimum requirement. If “I was crazy” is your excuse for something, then go be crazy at some random party in a dorm room or fraternity, where it is appropriate.
Just make your land acknowledgment first.
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