Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.
“I view the attempt to make the world even the tiniest bit better, or even just to be part of the effort to stave off the constant threats of regression that we face, as an utterly admirable motive.” — Jürgen Habermas, Things Needed to Get Better, 2025
From his mansion on Lake Austin, Texas émigré and 58-year-old unofficial mouthpiece for Generation X sellouts Joseph James Rogan Jr. thinks he’s got kids today fairly figured out.
“Behavior is very contagious to young impressionable people,” Rogan opined on episode 2,408 of his popular podcast, which aired in early November. “And when you’re getting caught up in these, you know, movements, any kind of a movement becomes very exciting. Like, think about how many people are caught up in the movement of climate change. ‘It’s so important to stop this. It’s so important to stop all fossil fuels. It’s so important.’ But is it — or is it that you just found a movement? You found a thing where you feel like you can become attached to. It’s just like a natural thing that young people tend to do when they want to make a change in life,” he explained.
Rogan’s was the most streamed podcast on both Apple and Spotify in 2025, and it won the No. 1 spot on the latter for the sixth straight year in a row.
“Pretty standard stuff here for the Joe Show,” Austin-based comedian and right wing-media critic RM Brown said of Rogan’s assessment. “We don’t like protesting, we don’t like people pissed off about stuff or having causes that they’re passionate about political-wise,” as he characterized the podcaster’s party line.
Rogan — himself a confusing pillbox of human growth hormone and Alex Jones-flavored conspiracy-mongering — tends to bend with the prevailing contrarian winds. Several years ago, he endorsed self-avowed socialist Bernie Sanders for president, while last year he reneged on a promise to never platform Donald Trump and helped sanitize the image of the twice-impeached, riot-instigating president for his massive audience right before Election Day.
This despite the fact that Rogan previously portrayed the MAGA movement’s relationship to Trump dismissively, saying “the morons had a king, and there’s a lot of morons.”
The message Rogan espoused above, however — the demeaning pop-psychoanalyzing of young activists — represents a remarkably consistent thread running through the frayed tatters of our polarized national conversation.
Back in 2016, feminist icon and fervent Hillary Clinton supporter Gloria Steinem said of women who who volunteered for Sanders’ primary campaign: “When you’re young, you’re thinking, you know, where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.” She later posted to Facebook that she “misspoke” and apologized for seeming to “imply young women aren’t serious in their politics.”
Clinton herself made an unsuccessful attempt to derail Barack Obama’s so-called “youth quake” in 2008.
“Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964… but it took a president to get it done. … . The power of that dream became real in people’s lives because we had a president who … actually got it accomplished,” she said.
This suggests that while civil rights leaders may make pretty speeches, it’s elected officials who deserve ultimate credit for instituting substantive reforms. Apparently absent from this model of social change is any recognition that mass movements often compel those very officials to act when they otherwise would not. Without the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, for example, would there even be a Voting Rights Act to sign?
More recently, conservatives and left-leaning moderates alike outdid one another to reduce the historic uprising after the police murder of George Floyd to little more than a bevy of counterproductive or ineffectual riots. The empirical evidence tells a different story.
Diana Muntz, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted a study of six nationally representative surveys of more than 3,000 randomized Americans between October 2012 and October 2020, finding that by “raising public awareness of the unfair treatment of Blacks,” the Black Lives Matter protests “encouraged greater support for the Democratic candidate” in political races “by a factor of 1.7 to 2.4.”
If it took a movement to get Sleepy Joe elected, anti-racist activism also served as a wake-up call for those trying to collectively bargain for higher wages. After surveying 500 organizers, Rutgers University labor historian Eric Blanc reported that BLM was the “influence that was most widely cited” by union drives in 2022.
“Given that Black Lives Matter protests were perhaps the largest in U.S. history,” he wrote, “it should not be that surprising that this insurgent energy fed into a wide range of workplace actions and organizing efforts.”
Surprising, then, that establishment Democratic strategists including James Carville continue to attribute the party’s inability to win back Congress to so-called wokeness.
“Time and again, the center-left’s response to electoral defeat has been to blame the unpopular and disruptive activists pushing for progress, whether abolitionists, suffragettes, labor unions, civil rights leaders, or environmentalists,” Waleed Shahid, director of the progressive populist organization The Bloc, wrote in The Nation after Kamala Harris’ 2024 loss.
“The Biden administration’s failure to offer a compelling narrative or deliver meaningful economic reforms alienated many young voters, especially on issues like unconditional weapons transfers to Israel,” Shahid counter-diagnosed.
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress,” abolitionist Frederick Douglass declared in a speech delivered four years before the start of the Civil War. “Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.”
Douglass concluded, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
Austin activist Bob Kafka, a wheelchair-bound Army veteran who dedicated his life to tirelessly advocating for the rights of the disabled, died on Dec. 26 at the age of 79. His is an example worth emulating, lest we forget that doing nothing is merely activism in defense of the status quo.
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