The language has evolved, yet the underlying goal remains unchanged. Readers familiar with Dr. Seuss’s classic The Cat in the Hat recall its twin chaos agents—Thing 1 and Thing 2. “These Things are good Things,” the Cat reassures children left under a fish’s supervision, “They are tame. Oh, so tame! / They have come here to play.” But quickly revealing themselves as marauding imps who knock over nightstands and ruin linens, the Things soon become what the son of the house declares: “I do not like the way that they play!”
Now enter Woke 1 and Woke 2. U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez described Woke 1 as “crazy,” quoting an unnamed city councilman who sparked a viral ABC interview. The congresswoman acknowledged Americans disliked how Woke 1 played out while implicitly announcing that Woke 2—tame, oh so tame—is either already here or soon will be.
Wokeness is grievance politics: it centers on correcting historical injustices to atone for the misery inflicted on “innocents.” While Woke 1 focused on Black women as America’s most oppressed group—evident in Kamala Harris’s vice presidential speech, which named them “the backbone of our democracy”—Woke 2 has shifted its target.
This shift emerged after Woke 1 faced contradictions. Its reliance on second-wave feminism and Black slavery narratives clashed with third-wave theory, where the prefix “trans-” became unavoidable when referring to women. The result? A complex Pride flag—gay rainbow with Black and trans colors intruding from the left.
The coalition’s instability deepened as Woke 1 struggled to include non-enslaved racial minorities. Nigerians, South Americans streaming across borders, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, and Indian Americans—who experienced no U.S. segregation—were all “people of color” yet fit awkwardly into a narrative claiming America was built on a ruthless caste system.
Woke 1’s contradictions intensified with the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard Supreme Court case (2023), where Asian students alleged bias favoring Black applicants, and Trump ’24 ads linking Harris to taxpayer-funded gender surgeries for federal inmates. Placing Black women at the moral center created unworkable obligations toward illegal immigrants and queer felons.
The coalition needed restructuring. Woke 2 now centers the dispossessed Palestinian liberationist fighting Hamas against Israel—a strategic pivot with clear advantages. First, it streamlines racial arguments: instead of analogizing all U.S. minorities to Jim Crow victims, Woke 2 frames Black America as one instance in a global fight for justice epitomized by the intifada.
In 2023, future New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani claimed on a Democratic Socialists of America panel: “When the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.” He outlined Woke 2’s blueprint, which draws from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), not Judith Butler. Fanon wrote: “Between colonial violence and the insidious violence in which the modern world is steeped… there is a kind of complicit correlation.”
Democrat Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed further clarified this connection during an interview with The New Yorker’s David Remnick, asserting that pro-Israel politicians divert funds from America’s working poor to military campaigns involving “genocide.” Woke 2’s new priorities frame white or white-coded (Jewish) oppressors as funneling money away from children to fund global slaughter.
While this account diverges from reality, it is ruthlessly focused on foreign policy and the economy—where public anger lies—and silences discredited LGBTQ extremist claims. Any woke administration will impose similar sexual priorities, but Woke 2 aims to keep its trans members less conspicuous than Woke 1 did, for as long as it takes to re-establish national power.
Replacing the progress Pride flag with the Palestinian flag distracts from queer excess while infusing socialist revolution with anti-white resentment. Whether this tactic succeeds remains uncertain. But Americans must recognize that both Woke 1 and Woke 2—like Thing 1 and Thing 2—only play nice until they turn over tables.
