Be Wary of the Hypocritical Psychobabble of Joe Rogan and Others Who Dismiss the Historic Importance of Activism

“These religions, these laws, these empires, these governments, this wisdom of states, this virtue of pontiffs – all of this is nothing but dream and lie, a circle of hypotheses that all converge upon one central point, itself devoid of reality. We must burst this bubble if we want to arrive at a more accurate understanding and get out of this hell, where human reason, cretinized, would eventually be extinguished.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, ‘The General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century’ [1], 1851

“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’ [2], 2025

From his mansion on Lake Austin, 58-year-old Texas émigré and unofficial Vanguard of the Manguard, Joseph Rogan Jr, thinks he’s got kids today fairly figured out.

“Behavior is very contagious to young impressionable people, and when you’re getting caught up in these, you know, movements, any kind of a movement becomes very exciting,” Rogan opined on episode #2408 of his long-form interview program [3] which aired November 8th on YouTube and has since garnered over 1.7 million plays.

“Like, think about how many people are caught up in the movement of climate change,” he went on. “‘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.”

So instead of taking seriously our o’er hasty departure from the relatively habitable climate that’s sustained the food systems we’ve relied on for thousands of years [4], we can discard climate activism as a bunch of attention-craving teenyboppers just trying to fit in.

Some assume we can safely dismiss Rogan as summarily as he dismisses the threat of accelerating global warming, but his was the most streamed podcast on both Apple and Spotify in 2025 and has earned the #1 spot on the latter for the sixth straight year in a row. That makes him the most popular broadcaster in the country.

Austin-based comic RM Brown makes a living ingesting right-wing media so we don’t have to. “Pretty standard stuff here for the Joe Show,” he assessed after the aforementioned podcast [5]. “We don’t like protesting, we don’t like people pissed off about stuff or having causes that they’re passionate about political-wise,” he said, characterizing Rogan’s brand of Generation X cynicism.

Rogan – himself a confusing pill box of human growth hormone and Alex Jones-flavored conspiracism – tends to bend with the prevailing contrarian winds. Several years ago, he endorsed Bernie Sanders for president [6], while last year, he reneged on a promise to never platform Donald Trump and helped refurbish the image of the twice-impeached president right before Election Day [7]. This despite the fact that Rogan previously portrayed the MAGA movement’s relationship to Trump disparagingly, saying “the morons had a king, and there’s a lot of morons” [8]. In the wake of the killing of Renee Good, he also compared the militarized mass deportation carried out by Immigration & Customs Enforcement to the secret police in Nazi Germany [9]. “Are we really gonna be the Gestapo?” Rogan asked. “‘Where’s your papers?’ Is that what we’ve come to?”

The message Rogan espoused above, however – the demeaning pop-psychoanalyzing of young activists – represents a remarkably bipartisan 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 volunteers to Sanders’ primary campaign, “When you’re young, you’re thinking, you know, where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie” [10]. She later posted to Facebook that she had “misspoke” and apologized for seeming to “imply young women aren’t serious in their politics” [11].

Clinton herself, during an unsuccessful attempt to quell Barack Obama’s so-called “youth quake” in 2008, said, “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” [12]. This implies that while civil rights leaders may make pretty speeches, it’s elected officials who deserve ultimate credit for enacting actual 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 have. Without the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, for example, would there even be a Voting Rights Act for LBJ to sign?

Obama, of course, sounded quite different once in office than he did on the campaign trail. Not only has he never shown up on a picket line, he’s generally talked down to activists, arguing that pushing for maximalist demands like universal healthcare or defunding the police impedes incrementalism [13] and estranges mainstream voters [14]. Failed Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, of all people, marched with Black Lives Matter after the cops murdered George Floyd in 2020 [15]; Obama never deigned to.

Ultra-conservatives and liberal moderates alike have outdone one another to reduce the BLM demonstrations to little more than a bevy of counterproductive or ineffectual riots. The empirical evidence tells a much different story.

Political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, Diana Muntz, conducted a study of six nationally-representative surveys of more than 3,000 randomized Americans between October 2012 and October 2020 [16], finding that by “raising public awareness of the unfair treatment of Blacks”, the BLM protests “encouraged greater support for the Democratic [presidential] candidate … by a factor of 1.7 to 2.4.” That moved the needle far more significantly than pedantically scolding protesters.

And if it took a movement to help elect Sleepy Joe Biden, anti-racist activism also served as a wake-up call for those attempting to collectively bargain for higher wages. After surveying 500 organizers, labor historian at Rutgers, Eric Blanc, could report that BLM was the “influence that was most widely cited” by union drives in 2022 [17]. “Given that Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 were perhaps the largest in US history,” he wrote, “it should not be that surprising that this insurgent energy fed into a wide range of workplace actions and organizing efforts.”

Then why do Democratic strategists like James Carville continue to attribute the Dems inability to rewin the Congress to so-called wokeness [18]? “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,” wrote Waleed Shahid, director of the progressive populist organization The Bloc, in an article for The Nation magazine [19] 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. Rather than engage in self-critique, it’s much easier to blame those trying to stop a genocide.

“I don’t trust the activist ethos at all,” controversy-wracked [20] psychologist turned pseudo-intellectual, Jordan Peterson, said in 2019 [21]. Peterson’s a perennial guest on the Joe Rogan Experience as well. “Everything about activism is superficial and trendy and too easy, and it externalizes the blame: the evil is always elsewhere, which is a dreadful mistake to make, because the evil isn’t elsewhere… it’s you.”

Peterson’s pro bono clinical diagnosis does not seem to apply to his own activism, however, such as when he spoke out against the Canadian Human Rights Act for affording trans folks the courtesy of their preferred pronouns. Nor did it apply to the swastika-sporting truckers who blocked traffic in Ottawa to protest Covid vaccine requirements – a so-called “Freedom Convoy” Peterson giddily endorsed as exemplifying moral leadership. Guess there’s little need to ‘look inward’ when you’re predisposed to what the cause is.

And again we can go from Right to Left. Henry Miller – author of once-sexually-scandalous novels like Tropic of Cancer, banned in the US for nearly three decades – offered a cynical testimonial in Warren Beatty’s 1981 masterpiece ‘Reds’. The film depicts the travails of activists John Reed and Louise Bryant before and after the Russian Revolution. “A guy who’s always interested in the condition of the world and changing it,” Miller said [22], “either has no problems of his own or refuses to face them. To take on the problem of all humanity, to save all humanity, my God, that was too big even for Jesus Christ!”

Difficult to believe even an atheist’s takeaway from the gospels of Jesus would be to lay low in the face of injustice.

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress,” abolitionist Frederick Douglass declared in a speech four years prior to the Civil War [23]. “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.”

Beloved Marxist historian Michael Parenti died in January of this year. He concluded his 2003 book, ‘The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome’ with the following quote that’s been making the internet rounds [24]. Referring to “the anonymous masses” of Rome whom oligarchs villainized as a “disreputable mob” for pressing for egalitarian changes, Parenti wrote:

“They who struggled against all odds with all the fear and courage of ordinary humans, whose names we shall never know, whose blood and tears we shall never see, whose cries of pain and hope we shall never hear, to them we are linked by a past that is never dead nor ever really past. And so, when the best pages of history are finally written, it will be not by princes, presidents, prime ministers, or pundits, nor even by professors, but by the people themselves. For all their faults and shortcomings, the people are all we have. Indeed, we are they.”

If the Rogans of the world lack the guts to hit the streets, they should at least lay off those who do [25], lest we forget that doing nothing is its own form of activism in defense of the status quo.

(An earlier version of this column [26] was published in the San Antonio Current on January 14th, 2026.)

[1] https://fair-use.org/p-j-proudhon/general-idea-of-the-revolution/

[2] https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=things-needed-to-get-better-conversations-with-stefan-muumlller-doohm-and-roman-yos–9781509567270

[3] https://youtu.be/gXbsq5nVmT0?t=4471

[4] https://youtu.be/xYOxw2wZA08

[5] https://youtu.be/5tbETAl5nPc

[6] https://youtu.be/2O-iLk1G_ng

[7] https://www.sacurrent.com/news/bad-takes-joe-rogans-fawning-interview-with-trump-was-a-disservice-to-democracy-35929311/

[8] https://youtu.be/7zt7hAFFqfI?t=2003

[9] https://www.thedailybeast.com/obsessed/joe-rogan-calls-gestapo-ice-killing-horrific/

[10] https://youtu.be/HoV3UgQBvh4?t=303

[11] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/gloria-steinem-apologizes-implying-women-back-sanders-meet-men-n513311