In the end, tearing down statues was wrong. This is a good place to start when summarizing the debate sparked in Italy following Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks on ABC’s This Week in early August. Journalist Giovanna Botteri, for example, did just that on In onda, La7’s summer talk show, stating in a clip that went viral:
“The problem with woke culture was, at a certain point, cancel culture—the erasure and rewriting of history in a ‘let’s erase everything’ vein. Tearing down statues, including Christopher Columbus. And this led to a sort of self-sabotage by the entire movement. So Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says, ‘Be careful—let’s keep what’s good, save the baby and throw out the bathwater…’.”
The journalist’s stature and the context of the interview serve as a perfect litmus test of how the debate within Italy’s center-left has sought to quickly shake off the “woke” label, spearheaded by activist Giuseppe Conte’s letter to La Repubblica and social media statements by prominent figures from the moderate wing, such as Matteo Renzi and Giorgio Gori. It must be said, however, that there has been no shortage of nuanced perspectives in La Repubblica itself, which echoes Susan Neiman’s position: to reevaluate the Enlightenment (a movement criticized by those Frankfurt School thinkers and French postmodernists at the root of woke ideology) and to define “wokeness” as a “right-wing phenomenon” (a position well summarized by Alessio Mannino on Inside Over).
And then there’s Elisabetta Piccolotti, an AVS member of parliament, who, also in Repubblica, states: “In our country, there is no organized political movement that has promoted cancel culture.” In essence, the argument is that since there is no explicitly programmatic “wokeism” in Italy, “woke” has existed only as a specter conjured by the right. Or Diego De Leornadis, writing in Valigia Blu, who—by meticulously reconstructing the passages from Ocasio-Cortez’s interview and the controversial line “Woke 1 was crazyyyy” (itself a quote from a tweet by New York City Councilmember Chi Ossé)—argues that AOC meant something entirely different and was not renouncing “wokeism.” Starting with that “crazyyyy,” which should be interpreted not as “madness” but as “crazy,” to be read with the enthusiastic tone of a National Lampoon’s character. Davide Piacenza, in his newsletter Culture Wars, goes further and defines Woke 1 as “a sort of meme”—a sort of inside joke within the community of American socialists.
Even if Chi Ossé had meant something else (which is entirely possible), the fact remains that, as postmodernists and deconstructionists—the scourge of contemporary French philosophy—teach us, narrative is more important than facts. The narrative says that woke was madness, and the Italian left is taking note. A simple abandonment of ideology? Rebranding of the same? Or, to quote a sequel where the second installment was even better than the first, is the “Final Showdown” or “Day of Judgment” about to arrive? Or will “woke strikes again”?
You die from woke ideology
Before proceeding with the analysis, a clarification is in order. Woke can be understood as referring strictly to Critical Race Theory and the principle of intersectionality, or as an umbrella term encompassing all the issues for which the liberal American left has been a spokesperson for nearly a decade. Having written about this since 2018 in dozens of articles and several books, I will assume the second interpretation.
First of all, with all due respect to Botteri, the excesses of woke culture have not been limited to the toppling of “statues of Christopher Columbus.” Cancel culture is an extremely serious manifestation of the woke phenomenon, so it is also legitimate to use the term “cultural genocide” to describe the long-term impact it causes.
But “woke” has caused far more immediate and obvious damage—consider the murder of 18-year-old British student Henry Novack in December 2025, when the police combed through his private chat logs dating back as far as six years, hoping to find a “racist” remark that would allow them to soften the narrative surrounding the case. This is not a phenomenon that began in 2025 or 2020, but as Roger Scruton wrote in 2014 while discussing the Rotherham abuse scandal—the first major instance of the Pakistani grooming gangs issue, with origins dating back to the 1990s:
“The police are more concerned with political correctness than with crime. The result has been that law enforcement goes to great lengths to avoid accusations of racism, while social workers hesitate to intervene in any case where they might be accused of discriminating against ethnic minorities”.
That was in August, twelve years ago. The term woke was just beginning to gain traction, but the entire rotten ideological apparatus had already been in place for quite some time. And when discussing the excesses of woke before cancel culture, before schwas and rainbows, we should offer a prayer for its victims.
Shedding the Communicative Ballast
As for why the left is now only too happy to shake off woke (which perhaps “did some good things” as well, though these are often reduced to the principle of intersectionality alone. As Chiara Valerio noted in the pages of Repubblica, viewing as positive the fact that struggles must proceed in parallel—a concept already known to socialists as early as the beginning of the 20th century)—the first hypothesis is that of abandoning a slang that is no longer in line with current objectives.
Just as no one on the left speaks of “land for the peasants” anymore—not even when criticizing illegal labor recruitment (because the interests of big-box retailers come first)—woke ends up in the ideological museum. Moreover, the media controversy over “The first Woke was madness” arose from discussions about the abolition or defunding of the police by other local candidates from the Democratic Socialists of America, of whom Ocasio-Cortez and New York Mayor Mamdani are the leading figures.
The “defund the police” movement and the decision by ultra-liberal district attorneys (often elected thanks to grants from George Soros, as explained in an article in the Washington Post) not to prosecute shoplifting as a crime are now a thing of the past. They were among the main causes of Trump’s second term, along with the fact that unchecked petty crime led to a decline in property values—something unwelcome to large investment funds. The most famous of these “district attorneys” was Chesa Boudin, the son of members of the left-wing terrorist organization Weather Underground. Removed before the end of his term via a sensational “recall election” in 2022, after only three years, he had to abandon his political career but was hired by the University of California as dean of the School of Law.
Similarly, even though on paper Democrats continue to condemn Trump’s stance that only women born female at birth should compete in women’s sports, lawsuits filed by detransitioners—especially young women scarred by premature and unnecessary transitions, facilitated precisely by woke policies—are flooding in across the United States. So far, there are no class-action lawsuits, but for anyone familiar with the U.S. judicial system, it’s clear that if these individual cases were consolidated, it would become a national scandal. This carries the risk that even those who promoted this narrative at the political level would suffer the consequences. Yet another of the follies of the first wave of woke ideology.
So the Democratic Socialists of America have had to abandon that kind of rhetoric, partly because Trump’s crisis of support ahead of the midterm elections offers a major opportunity that must be seized.
MAGA versus woke
In the last presidential election, Trump won thanks to the tremendous mobilization power provided by the various factions of the MAGA movement—precisely in opposition to woke radicalism. As paradoxical as it may seem, Trump did not win by mobilizing extremists, but by mobilizing that silent, disillusioned majority that became “radicalized” not because of Trump, but because of the excesses of wokeness.
Now Trump’s image is in crisis over the Iran issue, and the MAGA movement is shaken by deep divisions: the silent majority has returned to a state of disillusionment, with the risk that it will stay away from the polls.
For the Democrats, therefore, it is now an easy task to present themselves as moderates, abandoning the woke label that had served primarily to galvanize young people—with excellent results, as in the previous midterm elections. Those young people who helped elect Biden and who today, no longer so young, are grappling with the classic problems of adulthood—from high gas prices to student loan debt. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hasn’t become a moderate simply because she’s now 37, but because her electorate is approaching 40.
Abandonment or rebranding?
So from the perspective of U.S. politics, the “woke 1 was crazyyyy” narrative effectively represents a move away from the most controversial issues. But at the same time, it lends itself to a simple reconfiguration of the woke image: the principles of critical race theory and intersectionality remain in place, after toning down some of the more controversial elements—which certainly held little appeal for the moderates the left now hopes to attract.
As demonstrated by the international outcry over the death of Jason Arday, the entire apparatus surrounding white privilege remains intact. Similarly, attempts are being made to cover up scandals such as the reimbursement of non-profit organizations serving Somali immigrants, with California even passing AB2624—a law that severely hinders investigative journalism targeting organizations that provide services to immigrants, ostensibly to “curb racism.”
Or the case of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, which blocked the installation of statues of the patron saints, St. Michael (police) and St. Florian (firefighters), in the new Quincy Department of Public Safety building in the name of “religious freedom.”
Religious freedom, of course, to be understood in only one direction. This is also because redefining “woke” serves another purpose: to adopt a more restrained approach toward Muslim voters. Consider the statement from the British Green Party, which—with typical British humor—notes that it used to be “green” because it was environmentalist, but is now “green” because it is Islamic. Green Party representatives are taking a less strident approach to communication on LGBTQ issues, and the same goes for their Muslim candidates, who use intersectional principles as a shield for the struggle of minorities but, aside from token statements, reject the entire LGBTQ agenda.
In any case, the follies of Woke 1 continue undeterred. On August 7, the staid Economist told us about Defund “Paw Patrol” (the children’s cartoon featuring police and firefighter dogs), revisiting an old controversy from the Guardian in 2021, arguing that the presence of police dogs clearly implies an authoritarian and fascist subtext. And the even more staid and ever-on-the-ball The Guardian, in late July, lamented the “lack of diversity” in the new Tolkien adaptations, citing statements by Andy Serkis, the actor who played Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, who—after serving us an adaptation of Orwell’s Animal Farm that shifted from a critique of Stalinism to a critique of capitalism—made a partial apology by saying he did not want to pander to ethnic quotas in his upcoming film The Hunt for Gollum. Officially, this was out of respect for the original narrative, but above all because he was well aware of the “go woke, get broke” adage. And from Canada comes the news that, for the 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001, national TV, in an internal memo, issued instructions not to refer to the hijacking as a “terrorist attack.”
In short, in the Anglo-American world, Woke 1 is still going strong in the most prestigious publications.
The Communication Issue: The Italian Case
On the subject of Woke 1, the Italian case is particularly interesting. Both as yet another demonstration of how our left operates on conditioned reflexes coming from across the ocean, and because one cannot invoke mutatis mutandis the well-known aphorism about July 25: 45 million fascists before, 45 million antifascists after—all out of a population of 45 million.
In the case of woke—unlike with fascism—virtually no one on the left admitted its existence, whereas today everyone is denying it. Of course, there were a few exceptions (often linked to an international milieu, such as Professor Enzo Traverso of Cornell University, who in 2020 published Tearing Down Statues Helps Us Process History in Jacobin Italia), but in Italy, attempts have been made for years to deny the existence of woke ideology and cancel culture.
This is also summarized by the popularizer, critic, and polemicist Yasmina Pani on YouTube in a video titled From “Woke Doesn’t Exist” to “Woke Belongs to the Past”. That publicly denying woke while privately embracing it was an established practice was pointed out by Davide Piacenza himself regarding the incident involving the private chat of a group of feminist content creators where the following phrase appeared: “And above all, to truly make cancel culture our own. It’s the most powerful weapon feminism has had in the last 25 years.”
At this point, allow us to quote ourselves: we have dedicated an entire chapter of the essay Cancel culture: L’arma di distruzione (culturale) di massa che il wokeismo ha scagliato contro la civiltà occidentale (Signs Publishing, 2025) to the Italian intelligentsia’s denial of the woke phenomenon. They begin with the case of Zerocalcare’s comic strip for Internazionale in May 2021, titled precisely “The Imaginary Dictatorship,” which effectively imposes a narrative according to which cancel culture is merely a form of moral panic stirred up by the American right. The discussion then moves on to the late Michela Murgia, who, around the same time in L’Espresso, took aim at the foul-mouthed comedy duo Pio & Amedeo in a piece titled “Political Correctness Is an Imaginary Enemy,” writing:
“To protect their claim to this dominance, for years we have witnessed the construction of lexical phantoms that exist only by virtue of the frequency with which they are named. The expressions ‘cancel culture’ and ‘politically correct’ are a good example of this tendency to treat as real phenomena that do not actually exist.”
Two figures—not exactly minor players—in Italy’s left-wing cultural scene who were firing off a barrage of insults against anyone sounding the alarm about the “woke” threat. Today, however, Chiara Valerio, a writer and longtime friend of Murgia, admits in La Repubblica that the woke movement has led to excesses, even if “it has done some good things.” Dagospia, in reposting the piece, ironically called it a recantation.
The paradox is that there is no tribunal of the Holy Inquisition here with a pyre already lit, demanding a recantation—they’ve all done it on their own. And they continue to do everything on their own, including those few who still play the role they did before August 9, 2026—namely, that woke is merely moral panic. Philosopher Alessandro Lolli describes this in the pages of his Substack, analyzing the controversy between journalist and feminist Giulia Blasi (for whom “woke” does not exist/is right-wing/is cultural appropriation of minority struggles) and left-wing writer Christian Raimo, who had defended “woke” (which, for Raimo, does exist and is a good and just thing) precisely because Raimo is a “heterocis male.” In short, according to someone who writes that woke doesn’t exist, Raimo wouldn’t be qualified to speak about it because he is unconsciously an “oppressor.” As Lolli brilliantly concludes: “You may believe that Woke doesn’t exist, but the problem for Woke is that you exist.”
Marching in disarray to strike at random?
The Italian debate surrounding woke today—beyond the easy quip that “first woke didn’t exist, now woke is a thing of the past”—is ultimately interesting for another reason as well. Namely, the total disintegration of the cultural-media agenda compared to 2021. In 2021 (starting with Internazionale featuring Rech and L’Espresso featuring Murgia), there was a capacity for synthesis and analysis in presenting Stars and Stripes-style thinking to the Italian public in a harmonious and widespread manner across various platforms. It seemed there was a coordinated effort to deny the phenomenon or dismiss it as moral panic, or at least that the “hive-mind” discipline of the intelligentsia kept the various sensibilities more or less on the same wavelength, even without memos.
Observing today the disorderly flight of most of the left from woke and cancel culture—and the sparse attempts at resistance by the “last Japanese in the jungle” who still defend that ideological heritage—it is clear that the left’s cultural capacity seems to be in eclipse. And this is happening more because of its own incapacity than because of the ability of its competitors or adversaries to counter it on a cultural level. This lays bare an element that is often forgotten on the right: the “hegemonic culture of the left” is a paper tiger that survives only as an organized bureaucracy.
But is “woke” really over?
Even accounting for public renunciations, it’s unlikely that anything will change on the Italian and European left. Consider the statements about “whiteness” during the regional elections in Tuscany last November, when Toscana Rossa candidate Antonella Bundu launched the slogan “dismantle whiteness” as a matter of political urgency. Or take the case of the activist who, a few weeks ago, referred to the bridge over the Strait of Messina as an “act of colonialism.” The entire arsenal of Cynical Theories—as defined by the two leading scholars of the phenomenon, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay—appears far from being disarmed.
After all, “woke” is the perfect ideological formula for the age of social media and short-form videos, where people express outrage and seek easy controversy. And it’s an indispensable toolkit because the “American socialists” Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez say they want to focus their policies solely on jobs, housing, and wages. But everyone knows full well that sooner or later they’ll have to grapple with concepts like the Marxist definition of the “industrial reserve army,” admit that for some immigrant groups, standards of women’s emancipation are incompatible with Western ones, take a look at some statistics on crime and various ethnic minorities, and finally give up the lucrative business of nonprofits/NGOs/cooperatives which, as we noted above, Newsom’s California has placed above the law. In short, despite its renouncements, the left cannot give up “woke” because otherwise it would have to confront the elephant in the room: pro-immigration rhetoric that clashes with the harsh reality of the facts…
Conclusions: They still have the pickaxe in hand
And so the statues—those that remain—will continue to fall. As we wrote in Chapter 3 of Cancel Culture (title: The People Have No Bread, Give Them Statues to Tear Down), cancel culture has been a cheap way to do politics for over twenty years now. If, as commented a few months ago, the scope of contemporary politics—especially in Europe—is increasingly narrow, taking aim at a statue or street naming is an easy way to “radicalize” oneself and generate engagement. That fox of a man, Pedro Sánchez, demonstrates this well in a story that took a backseat in the Italian media: during the Ceuta migration crisis, the Minister for Territorial Policies and Democratic Memory, Ángel Víctor Torres, could find nothing better to do than to reopen the issue of demolishing the Piramide de los italianos at the Escudo Pass—a mausoleum for the Italian soldiers who fell in the Battle of Santander in August 1937.
The mausoleum (ceded to Spain in the 1970s after the remains were transferred to the Italian memorial in the Church of St. Anthony of Padua in Zaragoza, where both the Italian fallen of the Volunteer Corps and those of the International Brigades are laid to rest) had been painstakingly designated a historic monument by the government of Castile and León thanks to the efforts of Vox with the support of the People’s Party. Thus, after years of neglect, vandalism, and deterioration, restoration work finally began last June (excluding the inevitable “interpretive center,” a requirement under the law on “democratic memory,” the only one permitted). The construction site hadn’t even opened yet, and already, between July and August 2026, a monument commemorating a historical event from 90 years ago had once again become a “hot-button issue” on the Spanish political agenda.
The pyramid will likely remain in place (demolishing it requires more than just a crane, as with equestrian statues—it demands a considerable effort and substantial funds allocated ad hoc in the budget), but in the meantime, it’s easy to see how, in a situation of crisis or tension, the left’s tactic of waving the specter of a “fascist monument” to be torn down is always an excellent weapon of mass distraction.
And it’s worth remembering that these things don’t happen only in Spain: just think back to last January’s attempt to reignite the spin surrounding the monument to Ferdinando I de’ Medici and his four Moors in Livorno. Because despite the flop of Bundu in the elections, the “whiteness” trial has now begun, and the entire woke apparatus of “critical race theory” has taken root here as well. Conclusion: don’t let your guard down and don’t think you’ve got this one in the bag, because cancel culture, sooner or later, will strike again.
