Sixteen American cities broke their all-time homicide records in 2021.
AOC spent 2020 demanding New York City go further than a billion-dollar police cut – and now she wants you to forget it ever happened.
But Ron DeSantis just gave Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a brutal reality check about her defunding the police movement.
AOC's Attempt to Rewrite History
On ABC's This Week Sunday, Jonathan Karl asked AOC point-blank whether she still stood by defunding the police.
She didn't answer.
Instead, she borrowed a line from a New York City councilman: "Woke 1 was crazy."
She laughed.
Then she claimed the conversations from that era were actually "quite fruitful."
That's not a walk-back.
That's a politician trying to hold two contradictory positions simultaneously – signaling to her socialist base that she still believes in the mission while assuring moderates she's grown up.
In 2020, AOC didn't just nod along to defunding the police.
When New York City proposed cutting $1 billion from the NYPD budget, she said it didn't go far enough.
"Defunding police means defunding police," she said at the time. "It does not mean budget tricks or funny math."
DeSantis Wasn't Laughing
"You're really going to just say that it was a mulligan or something like that?"
That was Ron DeSantis at a press conference in Pensacola, responding to the interview.
He didn't use her name – called her "one of the big lefties" – but everyone knew who he meant.
"People were actually attacking law enforcement. They wanted to defund the police. You did have candidates and still have candidates who talk about abolishing prisons," he said.
https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2087911406427365539?s=20
Then DeSantis drew the contrast with Florida: "Not me. Not Florida. We were the first state to fight back, and we fought back very quickly."
He's right.
While New York City cut the NYPD by $484 million and Los Angeles stripped $150 million from its police department, DeSantis signed legislation making it illegal for any Florida city to defund its police – with his cabinet holding final veto power over any local budget that tried.
He recruited officers fleeing blue states with signing bonuses of up to $5,000.
Florida hit a 50-year low crime rate under his watch.
The Bill Americans Paid for "Woke 1"
The murder rate surged nearly 30% in 2020 – the largest single-year increase in more than half a century, according to Heritage Foundation analysis of FBI data.
Portland cut $15 million from its police budget and watched shootings triple, from 400 in 2019 to more than 1,200 in 2021.
Philadelphia recorded 561 homicides that same year – a number the city hadn't seen since 1990.
New York City saw murders jump 36% in a single month.
https://twitter.com/unownz2pd/status/2087925908640252162?s=20
Black Americans paid the heaviest price.
Over half the murder victims in 2020 were Black – a body count run up in the name of a movement that claimed to be protecting them.
AOC called the conversations from that era "fruitful."
Someone should ask her to say that to the families in Philadelphia who lost someone in 2021.
The Record They Are Trying to Erase
The DSA's national platform still calls for abolishing the police.
Wisconsin Democrat gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong – a politician AOC's movement put on the map – has called for canceling Thanksgiving and tearing down the prison system entirely.
AOC's own preferred Senate candidate in Florida, Angie Nixon, is running on defunding ICE right now.
Nothing has changed except the political winds.
That's the tell.
https://twitter.com/TheBelaaz/status/2087915392547098833?s=20
When these ideas were ascendant on college campuses and cable panels, AOC couldn't go far enough.
When voters buried them in 2021 and 2022, suddenly it was "Woke 1" – an era to be laughed off like a bad haircut.
Here's why the rebranding is happening now: AOC is already being positioned as a 2028 presidential contender, and you cannot run a national campaign on abolishing prisons.
DeSantis is right: you don't get a mulligan on policies that got people killed.
"You got swept up in that frenzy," he said. "You don't get to say, 'Oh, that was yesterday, let's just move on.'"
Sources:
- Staff, "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shrugs off past 'defund the police' comments, joking 'Woke 1 was crazy,'" Fox News, August 10, 2026.
- Staff, "AOC Dismisses 'Defund the Police' Past, Calls Era 'Crazy,'" Capitalism Institute, August 2026.
- Staff, "AOC Turns on Woke: 4 Positions She Has Walked Back," Newsweek, August 2026.
- Kevin Dayaratna, "FBI Statistics Show a 30% Increase in Murder in 2020," Heritage Foundation, September 30, 2021.
- Staff, "American Crime Story," Republican Policy Committee, U.S. Senate, March 2022.
- Staff, "DeSantis endorsed by 60 bipartisan law enforcement officers," Fox News, 2023.
