Last Thursday, at a White House event for progressive groups hosted by Press Secretary Karine Jean- Pierre, whose presentations fail to invigorate either viewers or journalists, a young attendee broke into the scheduled speeches with a protest. When a staffer approached to escort her out, he was uncharacteristically waved off by Jean-Pierre, who told him to “let her speak.”  Elise Joshi, the young woman, described herself as speaking for “a million young people” by “channeling the strength of my ancestors and generation” then went on to condemn the Biden Administration’s permits for oil and gas pipelines, in a segment which quickly made news on Instagram and Twitter. 

But Joshi isn’t exactly a pleading voice in the wilderness; she’s the executive director of the progressive advocacy organization Gen-Z for Change, which is the most influential young activist organization in Washington.  As this tableau demonstrated, Gen-Z for Change is also the newest arrow in a gerontocratic administration’s re-election quiver: a youth astroturf group purporting to represent the rising grassroots and “speak truth to power” but really part of the power configuration it says it’s fighting against.  

Gen-Z for Change’s insiderism begins with Aidan Kohn-Murphy, whose parents Chris Murphy and Laurie Kohn came up from Harvard University and Georgetown Law School through the nonprofits into elite government positions.  Like the parents of a millennial influencer Lena Dunham, Murphy and Kohn never broke through to prominence but provided the environment that allowed their child to make the leap. Aidan first garnered media coverage as a seven-year-old asking D.C. officials about chocolate milk for schoolchildren. He later worked for Democrat senator Ed Markey’s Massachusetts campaign and attended a Democracy Summer program sponsored by Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin. He made the New York Times in 2022 as a student at Georgetown Day, where Ketanji Brown Jackson sat on the board.  

Kohn-Murphy broke through to fame in 2020 when a conference call for a Biden phone bank he organized was attended by 200 social-media creators under the handle “TikTok for Biden,” posting over a hundred videos urging Gen Z’rs to cast their first vote.  These videos were picked up by an establishment eager to claim credit for listening to what it says is "the voice of the rising generation." By November 2020, Kohn-Murphy had been contacted by the Biden campaign’s digital director and “maintained an informal line of communication” during the presidential transition. In January 2021, he changed TikTok for Biden’s name to Gen-Z for Change and expanded its moves in coordination with the White House.  

During the summer and fall, the group co-hosted a YouTube town hall discussion with Anthony Fauci promoting the COVID-19 vaccine and coordinated with the White House promoting Build Back Better, even as it also became more aggressive, mobilizing TikTok followers to call in false tips to a Texas anti-abortion hotline and causing it to crash, then doing the same to a website signing plaintiffs for cases against President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan.  By the end of the year it was organizing as a 501c4, which, unlike 501c3s, “can participate in lobbying and political activities.”  And by early 2022 it was

organiz[ing] a briefing between senior administration officials and prominent social media influencers about the war in Ukraine… inspiring a Saturday Night Live sketch in which President Biden… solicited advice… from… ditzy TikTok stars. Kohn-Murphy… was flattered by the parody. 

Kohn-Murphy probably was flattered, since these “ditzy TikTok stars” in no way resembled the connected careerists whom he had brought on to run things. Elise Joshi graduated from Mountain View High School, an elite public school at the heart of the Stanford-Berkeley government-funded tech boom, and attends University of Berkeley“; she told a local paper that she’s already met two presidents, Clinton and Obama.  Sam Shlafstein went to Suffield Academy in Connecticut and attends Johns Hopkins.  Jack Petocz graduated from the International Baccalaureate Program in Miami, cut his teeth on pro-LGTBQ-anti-De Santis activism there, will attend Vanderbilt, and calls himself “besties” with the Vice President.  Olivia Julianna, who comes from a less-privileged background, identifies as a “queer, plus-size, disabled Latina.”  In fact, the demographic that most of the leaders of Gen-Z for Change really represent is one half of America’s ultimate divide, between those who benefit from elite institutional backing and those who don’t.  

They talk about their volunteerism, even though many are funded by family tuition payments as they build their career résumés. They talk about their “agitating” outsiderism, even though their partnerships with and features in Teen Vogue, owned by Conde Nast, seem like outsiderism’s opposite.  They talk about  “muster[ing] up every ounce of courage to interrupt” Karine Jean-Pierre, though Elise Joshi had no problem two days earlier, “bump[ing] into Joe Manchin” and bragging that she made him “run around in circles like a scared-y cat.”  They talk about their “tensions” with the Biden administration, even though these “tensions” amount to pushing the President in the direction his administration is clearly already headed.  They talk about representing future generations -- even though using videos of child “activists” to promote a warming agenda and pushing back against questions of Chinese influence on TikTok may not be doing later generations any favors.  Finally, they talk about how, according to Joshi, “any progressive change, by any means, is our goal” -- even though when Kohn-Murphy quickly breaks in to say “by most means… means within reason,” it reads like the comment of an operator who treats politics as a zero-sum game but doesn’t want to alert the natives.

It doesn’t take much imagination to envision how the White House will use Gen-Z for Change in 2024.  On Biden priorities ranging from canceling student loan debt to shutting down the oil-and-gas industry, from attacking anti-establishment candidates like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to limiting speech in the name of anti-discrimination, Gen-Z for Change will be a crucial part of the campaign, assuring people that Democratic policy is the wave of the future, silencing critics with aggressive moves Biden can then disavow, and doing it in the unobjectionable name of young people taking their futures in their hands.  Eventually, Gen-Z for Change will give the President an excuse to push policy Left on the environment, while never going so far as it demands, keeping his claim to moderation even as the end goal is never in doubt.  As Generation Z Democrat congressman Maxwell Frost said about Joshi’s White House exchange, “The President has made historic investments in combatting the climate crisis. However, to save humanity, we must do so much more.”

There’s an unsettling precedent, intended or not, for Gen-Z for Change -- where another elderly leader used another youth group to validate another centralizing agenda in another disintegrating system.  The system was the Soviet Union; the leader was Leonid Brezhnev, an uncomfortable point of comparison for Joe Biden; and the group was the Komsomol, an officially independent activist organization for 14 to 28-year-olds which reached its peak during Brezhnev’s rule as a route for smart, ambitious youth to achieve communist party success. America is not Soviet Russia, but power is concentrating here faster and faster, helped by “independent” but connected activists who, like the Soviets, traffic in the language of powerlessness.  Elise Joshi might or might not be right when she justifies her tactics with the principle that “power concedes nothing without a demand,” but she isn’t on the side she says she is.  Look closely enough and Gen-Z for Change is part of the establishment it claims to oppose.

Image: Gen-Z for Change