Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is apparently ready to laugh about the radical politics she once helped champion.

Appearing Sunday on ABC’s This Week, the New York Democrat was asked about Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong and her history of controversial positions, including calls to abolish prisons and past remarks involving Thanksgiving.

Rather than defend the record head-on, Ocasio-Cortez offered a telling punchline.

“I have a local city councilman that has this saying, ‘Woke 1 was crazy,’” she said, laughing. “And I think that what’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now.”

The problem for Democrats is that voters remember what was said then — particularly when those ideas were promoted as serious policy, not comedy.

Host Jon Karl pressed Ocasio-Cortez on whether the socialist movement had ever gone too far, pointing specifically to her own previous support for the “defund the police” movement.

Her explanation was that much of the rhetoric came during the COVID-19 shutdowns, when Americans were supposedly more receptive to sweeping changes.

“And I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And I actually think that the discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful.”

That is a remarkably convenient way to describe a period when “defund the police” became one of the defining slogans of the American left.

Ocasio-Cortez now argues that the conversation surrounding crime has fundamentally changed.

“I think that when we talk about crime today, it’s fundamentally different than the way that we talked about crime in bringing crime down,” she said, adding that Democrats and Republicans alike should want crime rates as low as possible.

She later acknowledged that “during lockdown, of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.”

And there it is.

The slogans changed. The political climate changed. The candidates changed their messaging. But the consequences of those years did not simply disappear because Democrats decided the rhetoric had become inconvenient.

For years, Americans were told that questioning aggressive anti-police politics was somehow backward or reactionary. Now, with public safety once again a central concern for voters, some Democrats are quietly distancing themselves from the very language that helped define the progressive movement.

Ocasio-Cortez's “Woke 1 was crazy” joke may be funny to Democrats looking for a way out of yesterday's politics. But for Americans who watched these ideas become mainstream political demands, it is a reminder of something much less amusing: the left's radical phase was not a fever dream. They really meant it.

And voters have every right to remember.