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).