The left’s next phase is even worse than woke

Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) recently made headlines when she claimed during an interview on ABC’s “This Week” with Jonathan Karl that “Woke 1 was crazy.” She was specifically referring to the extreme progressive rhetoric and positions of the 2020 COVID lockdown era, particularly calls to defund or abolish the police.

Some have interpreted the DSA member’s words as evidence that the left is entering a more sane, commonsense phase — but BlazeTV’s Christopher Rufo believes the opposite is actually true.

On this episode of “Rufo & Lomez,” Rufo and co-host Jonathan Keeperman sit down with foreign policy expert Zineb Riboua to dive into what Rufo predicts is the left’s next phase — a movement that will make the pinnacle of wokeism look tame.

“It’s long been my thesis that what’s next on the left is the ideology of Third-Worldism,” says Rufo.

Riboua breaks down what that term entails. “Third-Worldism is really about seeing everything through a very specific lens, where you show who is the colonizer, who is the colonized, who is the oppressor, the oppressed.”

This “very binary” way of thinking, she explains, pits “the global north” against “the global south,” with the explicit goal of seeing the latter “triumph.”

But this isn’t the massive shift some interpret it to be, she says. Third-Worldism, Riboua explains, is just “a different form” of the left’s longtime goal to take money and power from the West and give it to other groups via redistribution, reparations, and shifting power.

“My kind of pet theory is that there’s also just a change in racial focus,” Rufo adds, highlighting 2020’s BLM era, which was hyper-focused around “black America’s historical grievances [and] historical oppressions” — an era whose “leadership class” ultimately “collapsed.”

Rufo wonders if Third-Worldism is simply the shifting of the left’s racial focus off of black America and on to the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia.

“Is it just a racial shift in the subject — seeking the same policies, yes, but seeking a kind of stronger leadership class?” he asks Riboua.

“While it’s true that there is a change in … which race we’re going to give priorities for, I think that what is, I think, more fundamental about Third-Worldism is that it positions things in a way that anyone who feels oppressed can join,” says Riboua.

“In a way, Third-Worldism is much more, I would say, inclusive of all these grievances against anything that is Western and de facto imperial, patriarchal even though things are obviously very much complicated in history,” she adds.

To hear more of the conversation, watch the episode above.

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