Hong has since backed away from some of those positions as she campaigns for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.
Ocasio-Cortez, who has enthusiastically supported progressive candidates in races across the country, told Karl she has not endorsed Hong.
“My understanding is that… is that Francesca Hong has made clear her present stances to her electorate,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Karl pointed out that Hong has moved away from some of her earlier rhetoric.
That prompted an unusual response from AOC.
“Right, she’s moved away from it. And I have a local city councilman that.. has this saying, ‘woke one was crazy,’” she said.
Karl laughed.
“And I think that what’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now,” Ocasio-Cortez continued.
But the exchange quickly created another problem for the congresswoman.
If candidates should be judged by what they believe today rather than what they advocated several years ago, Karl wanted to know whether Ocasio-Cortez herself had reconsidered some of the positions she championed during the height of the progressive movement.
One obvious example was the “defund the police” campaign that exploded into national politics following the unrest of 2020.
Ocasio-Cortez was one of the most prominent elected Democrats associated with calls for major changes to policing.
When Karl raised the issue, however, she did not offer a straightforward repudiation of her previous stance.
Instead, she characterized the pandemic-era debate surrounding police funding as “fruitful.”
That distinction immediately attracted attention because Ocasio-Cortez appeared willing to describe the broader “woke” period as “crazy” while remaining reluctant to identify which of its major ideas she now believes were actually wrong.
The phrase itself reportedly traces back to New York City Council Member Chi Ossé.
Ossé used similar language in a May 2026 social media post while addressing remarks he had made in 2021. After the ABC interview began circulating online, Ocasio-Cortez tagged the councilman in a post of her own.
The clip quickly spread across social media, where critics accused Democrats of attempting a political rebrand without substantially changing their beliefs.
Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX) delivered one of the sharper responses.
“You don’t get to spend years pushing to fundamentally transform the country, divide it on racial lines, inject DEI into every institution, and then try to brush it off as a minor misunderstanding when your worldview turns out to be extremely unpopular with the American people,” Gill said in response to the clip.
Other conservative commentators made essentially the same argument: calling an earlier political era “crazy” is considerably easier than acknowledging which policies from that era should be abandoned.
Outback contributor Ian Miller took aim at both Ocasio-Cortez and Karl.
“The best part about this is how gleeful Jon Karl is as he and AOC both pretend that any of them have changed their views now that they know that ‘woke”’is unpopular,” Miller posted on X.
Conservative commentator Scott Greer was even more direct.
“They still believe in all the same things from Woke 1. They just wave their hand now and say ‘we’re different’ while still wanting open borders and pretending men can be women,” Greer wrote.
The interview comes as Democrats continue wrestling with how to handle positions adopted by progressive politicians during the political upheaval of the early 2020s.
Ideas once embraced enthusiastically by activists — particularly sweeping police reforms and aggressive progressive cultural policies — have become potential liabilities for candidates attempting to appeal to a broader electorate.
That creates an uncomfortable question for some of the politicians who helped push those debates into the Democratic mainstream.
Were the policies themselves mistaken, or was the problem simply how they were marketed?
Ocasio-Cortez’s interview offered no definitive answer.
Instead, the congresswoman appeared eager to acknowledge that something about the previous “woke” era went too far while avoiding a detailed accounting of precisely what she believes should have been done differently.
And Karl’s question about defunding the police demonstrated why that distinction matters.
Calling “woke one” crazy might earn a laugh during a television interview.
Explaining which beliefs were crazy — and whether you still hold them — is considerably harder.
