Leftists such as Ocasio-Cortez may be laughing off what they call the excesses of “Woke 1,” but they are already trotting out “Woke 2.”

This is all calculated. It has a lot to do with electoral positioning, in no way amounts to a mea culpa, and lets guilty parties off the hook. The Great Awokening, or that period that encompassed the better part of two decades but peaked in 2019-2021, led to real human suffering and nearly accomplished its aim of regime change in America.

Some people, particularly in the sex-change industrial complex, but also those who took foreign money to overthrow the American system, should face a reckoning in terms of fines and prison time.

People in positions of real power made lasting decisions due to the woke hysteria. They appointed leaders still in charge of important places, such as the Smithsonian Institution, and are acting according to the instructions they received then. In other words, they are ruining these institutions.

For a reckoning to be real, these people need to be fired. And again, yes, I do mean the Smithsonian, but obviously not just there.

A reckoning is needed in the media, too. In 2020, journalists routinely referred to the hysteria all around us as a “racial reckoning.” Instead of quoting the founders of Black Lives Matter when the latter said they were Marxist revolutionaries intent on overthrowing American society, journalists punished those who did.

In but one example, I offer this hammy, self-regarding, and sadly typical NPR story in which they explained that they saw months of riots as a way of “forcing the United States to confront the racism of its past and present.” At NPR, they said, “We’ve been reporting on this unique moment in the nation’s history for a new three-part series called Summer of Racial Reckoning.”

So, no, we will not get judgment and retribution with “Woke 2.0.” It is led by the same organizers and groups, funded by the same leftist dark money and malign foreign actors, and “covered” by media eager to play their part in awakening the country to the supposed oppression of its system so that it can be torn down, which is all woke is.

And, frankly, judgment and retribution, as satisfying as they would be, are not the most immediate priorities. We most need to concentrate on fixing the institutions that wokeism has damaged.

As for what that looks like, I can’t improve on Notre Dame professor Pat Deneen’s verdict from 10 years ago — you don’t have to agree with everything Deneen says to find this on the money:

My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of Western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.

Still, let’s look at what shape these admissions are taking, and yes, celebrate what is there to celebrate, before we take stock of what’s ahead.

The whole thing started with an interview that ABC News’s Jonathan Karl had with Ocasio-Cortez on the network’s signature Sunday morning news show, This Week With George Stephanopoulos, on Aug. 9.

It was two days before the Wisconsin primary election, and they were discussing Francesca Hong, the Democratic Socialists of America’s candidate for governor. Hong had taken a lot of woke positions typical of the DSA, and Karl listed them to Ocasio-Cortez:

Karl: Abolish prisons, abolish police, which is also positions that have been taken by a lot of the progressive candidates who have won. … How do you get around that?

Ocasio-Cortez: Yeah.

Karl: These are not positions that are supported by … I mean …

Ocasio-Cortez: Right. I think that a lot of these races, even right now, they’ll have a tendency to be nationalized. … But these races, ultimately, are local, and all politics are local. My understanding is that Francesca Hong has made clear her present stances.

Karl: Yeah, she’s moved away from a lot of people.

Ocasio-Cortez: Right. She’s moved away from it, and I have a local city councilman that has this, uh, saying, ‘”Woke 1″ was crazy.’ (Laughs)

Karl, laughing himself: ‘”Woke 1″ was crazy.’ OK, that’s interesting.

We would love to laugh, too, if we could forget the lives these people ruined with cancellations and firings, as well as the social ostracism inflicted on those who dared do anything that the keepers of “Woke 1” considered politically incorrect. It was the Inquisition without the burnings — though in 2020, many buildings did burn.

But now the woke illuminati are also telling us that those actions were counterproductive — who knew? — and alienated more people than it convinced.

Take Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE), who said on a podcast this month, “There is no question, in my mind, that many of the strategies and tactics that we employed over the last five years, that they didn’t work in staving off the regression,” referring to people fighting back against the woke overreach.

“There is no question that we are facing a cultural regression in this moment, not just substantively, but in public opinion,” McBride added, giving as an example that “support for [same-sex] marriage is less today than it was three or four years ago.”

One of the things that didn’t work, according to McBride, was “a strategy of shaming and blaming. That includes a strategy of cutting off conversation and, in many cases, cutting off relationships. I think none of those strategies work.”

Well! Now they tell us.

Even CNN’s Abby Phillip, in defending the Smithsonian after two congressional hearings and a White House report detailing the museum complex’s skewed politics, said the excesses of the Great Awokening made the job easier.

“The administration has used these so-called, you know, woke policies of the 2020-era to justify what they are doing in order to try to rewrite what is in the museums,” she said.

But none of these things, as temporarily pleasing as they may be to hear, should lure us into complacency. “Woke 2” is already being defined, and it should surprise no one to hear that it is just as bad.

“Woke 2” does not get rid of looking at life through the oppressor-oppressed dynamic — otherwise it would cease to be “woke.” That term, borrowed from black slang, means being awake to the suffering of the members of the supposedly oppressed groups.

Ocasio-Cortez was not the first to talk about “Woke 1” and “Woke 2.” There was indeed a New York City councilman. His name is Chi Osse, and before Ocasio-Cortez spoke, he had posted “Woke 1 WAS crazyyyy.”

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But “Woke 2” will simply substitute Palestinians and Middle Easterners in general for the U.S. minority groups on whose behalf the woke claimed to speak.

What we need to do, obviously, is to dewokify the culture, something which, as McBride points out, is already happening.