Editor’s note: Woke 1 was crazyyyy

Confronted last month with an eyebrow-raising tweet of his from 2021, New York City Council Member Chi Ossé gave the perfect dismissal: “Woke 1 was crazyyyy.”

By “Woke 1,” of course, the Gen Z socialist was referring to the social phenomenon that peaked in the COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter summer of 2020 and flamed out soon after retired cop Eric Adams became the mayor. Think of performative racial consciousness, calls to defund the police and heavy use of the word “problematic.”

The core ideas haven’t disappeared in New York politics, but they’re less widespread and the presentation is different. In 2021, Ossé was tweeting, “A cis white man should not be the next speaker of the Council.” In 2026, Ossé was shrugging, and maybe cringing, tacitly acknowledging he wouldn’t say it today without explicitly denouncing his past words. 

That’s a skill Zohran Mamdani honed as he sought to defend his 2025 citywide mayoral candidate self from his 2020 Assembly candidate self. And that’s a skill that Darializa Avila Chevalier is honing right now, in real time, as Holly Pretsky writes in this week’s cover profile of the uptown socialist insurgent. She was “a millennial with an internet connection,” and she would say things differently now.

Clearly, enough voters were willing to forgive Mamdani for calling the New York City Police Department racist and anti-queer in the summer of 2020. Wasn’t every Democrat left of then-City Council Member Bob Holden doing the same? Of course, Mamdani’s mayoral campaign was also building on a base that didn’t need to forgive him, because they agreed with him. 

That’s a base that included Avila Chevalier who was, for lack of a better term, even more woke than DSA. Can she unseat progressive-in-Washington, moderate-back-home Espaillat? This race is crazyyyy.