Why should people committing unjust acts be allowed to commit them in peace? Where is the peace for their victims if we do not speak up? The MLK quote seems entirely fitting.

While the civil rights movement was largely "peaceful" (loaded word with little meaning), it was also incredibly disruptive. People in the movement were very rude to moderates who advocated in favor of negative peace while reaffirming their appreciation of the status-quo.

MLK's position here was not that the people within the civil rights movement needed to be more respectful to white moderates. His position was that the moderates were the issue. The people who consistently advocated for negative peace were the issue.

The leaders of vegan movements also don't generally go around attacking the moderates of our time who appreciate the status-quo and advocate for negative peace. There are individuals that do attack moderates, just like there were individuals in the civil rights movement who literally physically assaulted white moderates (much worse than calling someone a cheese-breather and having their feelings get a bit hurt). Again, MLK did not draw attention to these fringe cases because the actual issue were the moderates themselves. Some might even say the racists deserved to be beaten, and that's not even something I would necessarily argue against.

Veganism is the same. The issue is not the people who are a bit rude online to bloodmouths/carnists. The issue is the moderates themselves, their constant advocacy for negative peace in place of positive peace needs to be shut down unequivocally.

MLK actually alienated white moderates to about the same degree that vegans alienate carnists. It was only retroactively, after the civil rights movement, that white moderates pretended like they were aligned with him all along. In 1966 MLK was polling in the low 30s among white Americans.

I'm sure future moderates/apoliticals will do the same with veganism. Lab grown meat will become a thing, we'll outlaw our barbaric practices of animal torture and slaughter, and those future generations will look back with horror at how savage we were, and all the moderates will proclaim proudly that "I would've been a vegan if I was born in the late 20th/early 21st century", and they would be almost always wrong.

It's similar to everyone's modern position on slavery. If you polled the majority of the population "would you be an abolitionist if you were born in the early/mid 19th century?", you'll get the vast majority of people saying they would've been, but the vast majority of people were not, and its not like we had some evil gene in us that got naturally selected out of us. People were just normalized in that environment. People today are just generally incorrect about what the impact of normalization would've been on them in the past (or even what the impact of it is on them today).

The people in Washington listened to MLK because he was radicalising hundreds of thousands of people, and if his demands were not met, the politicians worried that those people would start listening to Malcolm X. The radical and moderate sides of any movement exist in symbiosis. They are the carrot and the stick, working together. The owning class likes the carrot much better than the stick, so they give credit to the carrot. But you need radicals so that you can say "look who's coming for you if you don't listen to me". It's good cop bad cop.