All the shopper wanted was to buy a laptop.
Instead, a routine trip to a Best Buy turned into a bizarre confrontation over gender, pronouns and whether a customer should be compelled to address a biological male employee as “ma’am.”
Video of the encounter shows the Best Buy employee, who presented with a distinctly masculine appearance, objecting after the customer referred to the employee as “sir.”
The employee insisted on being addressed as “ma’am.”
The customer wasn't having it.
His position was straightforward: the person standing in front of him appeared to be a man, and he wasn't going to be forced to say something he didn't believe simply because an employee demanded it.
You can argue that mistakes happen and that most decent people aren't deliberately looking to insult a stranger.
But that's not what made this encounter different.
The confrontation represented something much bigger: a “woke” ideology that reached its cultural peak several years ago and somehow transformed ordinary human interactions into ideological minefields.
Today, even progressives have a name for that era: Woke 1.
And apparently Woke 1 “was crazy.”
During a recent ABC News interview, progressive Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez repeated a phrase connected to New York City Councilman Chi Ossé: “Woke 1 was crazy.” The phrase has since exploded.
Woke 1 basically describes the cultural and political environment surrounding the pandemic and the upheaval following George Floyd's death, an era when ideas previously considered fringe suddenly became fashionable.
Defund the police, abolish the police, cancel culture, you name it. Identity politics seemingly injected into everything. And increasingly complicated rules governing what ordinary Americans were permitted to say about race, gender and sexuality.
But now some liberal politicians who embraced that environment are distancing themselves from their old rhetoric.
For example, Wisconsin progressive Francesca Hong declared in 2020, “I support defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police.” She later moved away from those positions. Ocasio-Cortez has likewise said rhetoric from the lockdown era isn't rhetoric progressives would necessarily use today.
The political winds changed.
Perhaps politicians discovered what millions of Americans already knew: telling people that police departments should disappear, prisons should be abolished or that ordinary language must constantly be reconstructed around someone's personal identity was never going to work in the real world.
Which brings us back to Best Buy. The employee in that viral confrontation appears to be living in a cultural moment that much of the country — and increasingly even parts of the political left — has already begun leaving behind.
Yet somehow even that became a cultural confrontation.
That apparent retreat from Woke 1 hasn't escaped the attention of Joe Rogan, who recently challenged politicians who once embraced the “defund the police” movement to explain exactly what changed.
“How far out did you track the consequences of defunding the police?” Rogan asked. “Because I immediately went to… you're gonna have more crime because no one's gonna be able to stop the crime.”
Then he posed perhaps the most important question:
“What did you think defund the police meant? Everyone's gonna, like, eat mushrooms and we're all gonna, like, be flower children? What did you think? Because there's no police around, no one's gonna do crimes?”
Behind Rogan's sarcasm was a legitimate criticism of the Woke 1 era: what was the actual endgame?
His criticism went further. He questioned whether politicians genuinely reconsidered those policies after examining their consequences or simply abandoned them once public opinion turned against them.
“Or have you changed your opinion?” Rogan asked. “And if you did change your opinion, what were you thinking back then?”
That's the question politicians who embraced Woke 1 should have to answer.
Changing your mind isn't necessarily a bad thing. But when the policy involves policing, crime and public safety, Americans deserve more than a catchy phrase acknowledging that things went too far. They deserve an explanation of why those ideas were embraced in the first place.
For several years, Americans who questioned some of these ideas were routinely told they were the unreasonable ones. Now many of the same political circles that entertained those ideas are acknowledging that maybe things went too far.
Woke 1 is dead, but not everyone is up to speed, like the Best Buy employee. But what comes next?
If politicians themselves now acknowledge that Woke 1 went off the rails, what exactly will “Woke 2” look like?
We'll find out soon enough, but hopefully it won’t include defunding police!
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