You can’t erase woke

YOU CAN’T ERASE WOKE. This political season, like the last couple, has featured Democratic candidates not only running for office but running away from things they said from 2019 to 2021.The latest is Francesca Hong, the somewhat loopy front-runner for the Democratic nomination for governor of Wisconsin. In the last few days, Hong has walked back her 2020 call to “cancel Thanksgiving” so the nation can “stop celebrating colonialism.” She has also backed off her 2019 and 2021 calls to “defund then abolish” the police. And she no longer stands by her 2021 call to “abolish the Senate,” which she made when she was angry that senators did not convict President Donald Trump in his second impeachment.Hong spent the weekend before the primary shrugging off her not-so-old outrageous statements. “I had some hot takes, some bad takes on Twitter,” she told reporters. “But I’ve evolved, I’ve learned. I think it’s more dishonest not to learn.” Hong did not address a more fundamental question: Isn’t it a problem that she ever believed those things? Hong was in her early 30s when she expressed the views listed above. Now approaching 40, she has been slow to back away from them, and only under pressure. Isn’t that a problem?The progressive answer to that question came over the weekend from far-left superstar Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). “I have a local city councilman that has this saying: Woke 1 was crazy,” she said with a laugh on ABC News’s This Week Sunday. “And I think that what’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now.”That is what Ocasio-Cortez wants, and what Hong wants, and what lots of other socialists and progressives want, but it is fortunately not the way the political system works. Things a candidate has said in the past, especially in the recent past, mean something. They should face questions about them.Graham Platner, who won the Democratic nomination for Senate in Maine, had a ton of social media posts to run away from. None of them forced him out of the race; that happened only after he was accused of sexual assault. In Michigan, Abdul el Sayed, or Abdulrahman Mohamed el Sayed, as Republicans call him, also had a lot of posts to live down — which he successfully did, winning the Democratic nomination for Senate.Neither candidate faced a particularly adversarial press when it came to those old posts. They were running in Democratic primaries where there were less likely to be impassioned arguments about such views. For el Sayed, and for Hong if she wins, the situation will be different in the general election campaign, where they will be running against Republicans who will be more than happy to point out their statements from a few years ago.Kamala Harris got to experience that in the 2024 presidential race. Remember that Harris ran for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president. She was a terrible candidate and dropped out in December 2019. But she left a record of ridiculous comments that came back to haunt her in 2024.“If there was a bad idea, she embraced it,” this newsletter noted earlier this year. “Green New Deal, Medicare for all, mandatory assault weapon buybacks, amnesty — the whole lot. (Harris also said she was ‘open’ to the idea of packing the Supreme Court.)”Then there was the legendary moment in the 2024 presidential debate in which Trump accused Harris of “wanting to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” Some Harris supporters reacted with outrage — surely Trump was making up a crazy charge like that! But no, Trump was correct. Harris had actually made the pledge in writing in a 2019 questionnaire for the American Civil Liberties Union. Her views from five years earlier hurt her a lot in 2024.Now, Ocasio-Cortez says the important thing is “to assess what a candidate is saying now.” But why not take what that candidate said just a few years ago into account? “I don’t love this idea that nothing anyone said or did in 2019-2020 counts,” tweeted left-leaning writer Matthew Yglesias. “Like it’s fine as a sociological observation, but I want political leaders who keep their heads even in the face of dumb fads.”Francesca Hong did not do that. Abdul el Sayed did not do that. Kamala Harris did not do that. And woke was indeed crazy. So now, it’s entirely reasonable for voters to ask why those candidates believed it so fervently.