Women are supposedly losing their minds this fall—and pumpkin spice lattes have nothing to do with it.
Before the predictable online backlash begins, let me clarify: it is the broader “woke” movement that appears to be losing its mind.
Again.
Remember when commentators were writing woke’s political obituary?
“It’s a vibe shift,” they declared.
“Woke 1.0 was craaaazy,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, laughing off an era when teenagers could face intense backlash for something as minor as smirking.
For a brief moment, it seemed ordinary Americans had taken the culture back from its most zealous activists.
I regret to report that they had not.
If Woke 1.0 seemed extreme, Woke 2.0 looks even more unmoored.
Two stories I read this week, one after the other, suggested that woke politics never disappeared. It simply retreated from view—perhaps to western Massachusetts before resurfacing in Philadelphia.
Consider Philadelphia. Hannah Gann, a veteran public-school teacher, reportedly spent years presenting herself to local activists as Palestinian, Tunisian or another identity that suited the political moment.
A Gaza “scholasticide” teach-in even introduced her as Palestinian American.
According to the account, fellow activists confronted Gann, and after about an hour she acknowledged that she had no Palestinian heritage.
Her grandfather, she said, was born in Baltimore.
The activists were outraged, alleging that Gann had solicited money while claiming financial hardship caused by sending funds to relatives in Palestine.
The account also said Gann is Jewish and that her relatives overseas live in Israel.
The episode offers another example of how the activist slogan #FreePalestine has assumed a role in progressive politics once associated with Black Lives Matter.
In an Instagram confession, Gann described herself as a “white woman of significant privilege and wealth.”
Yet by the movement’s own standards, it is fair to ask what, exactly, she did wrong.
After all, this is a movement that insists men can become pregnant.
If you can identify into possessing a uterus, why can’t you identify your family tree into Ramallah?
Maybe Hannah has a Palestinian soul and she was born in the wrong body.
Why does gender self-ID get you a book deal and racial self-ID get you a struggle session? Make it make sense.
Exhibit B: Greenfield, Mass. (is there something in the water, Massachusetts?), where, per the Boston Globe, men in ponytails and N95s flock to order hibiscus tea.
I’m not making that up. I couldn’t make that up.
Meet Last Ditch, a lesbian bar that required N95 masks at all times. In the year-of-our-Lord 2026.
It was going broke (because woke), so it made Saturdays mask-optional and gently broke the news to its “immunocompromised disabled divas.”
Everyone responded reasonably. Just kidding.
No, the bar’s owners were denounced as ableist and eugenicists, and one commentator hoped the place got firebombed.
The bar attempted to apologize but the apology got dragged too, because the graphic had no alt-text for the vision-impaired.
Then came the community meeting, and I really need you to picture it.
Masked adults in a circle on a dance floor with a stripper pole in the center.
Two mediators, and a calming breath circle.
Everyone got two-minute turns. There was a Zoom peanut gallery.
The meeting went for three and a half hours.
Then the Zoom crowd attacked the mediator for being a white therapist, and the 26-year-old owner who got stuck with a $50,000 loan after her two co-founders bailed (one for clown school, I swear to God), broke down crying.
She was promptly informed her tears were racist.
You cannot convince me this isn’t the plot of a Christopher Guest film.
Laugh, I did. But underneath the clown-school comedy is something darker.
The Last Ditch bar’s own regulars are fantasizing about it getting torched.
And in Philly, a woman in a costume spent years earning the trust of mostly black teenagers by pretending to share their oppression.
That’s what makes Woke 2.0 even scarier than the original.
They’re so sure they’re the good guys that anything goes: lying, conning people out of cash, shooting executives or campus speakers, wishing arson on a bar for lifting its mask mandate in 2026.
Woke didn’t die. It was hibernating.
And judging by this week, it woke up hungry.
Bridget Phetasy is the host of the “Dumpster Fire” and “Walk-Ins Welcome” podcasts, and author of the upcoming book “The Left Can’t Meme: How Comedy Wins Culture Wars.”