This is Wayne writing in July of 2023, BEFORE going to prison in handcuffs, I should note:
In 2007, motivated by my readings in social movement research, I penned an article with an infamous title: Boycott Veganism. The title was clickbait. I was not, in fact, boycotting veganism but arguing that consumer activism was insufficient to create social change.
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Multiple vegan forums exploded with angry responses after I posted an early draft. I was criticized for being oppressive, arrogant, traitorous, and – most commonly – downright stupid.
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But something strange happened, over time. A small number of people actually read the article, rather than just the headline. And many were swayed by the logic. Two points were key. First, I argued that veganism, as a narrative strategy, could not inspire people to anger or hope - the key ingredients to social change.
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What we needed, I argued, was something different: direct action. Giving aid to animals directly was the right narrative strategy because it focused on animal cruelty, and our ability to stop it. Unlike veganism, it had the power to enrage and inspire. And direct action could expand the scope of the movement’s support, by focusing on identities (e.g., animal lovers, families with pets) that were much larger and influential than vegan consumers. It was a movement strategy that could mobilize the masses, rather than just a small dietary niche. […]
[Digression:] Is there ANY EVIDENCE that Wayne's strategy has mobilized (or "inspired") large numbers of non-vegans, rather than a tiny cult group, much smaller than veganism qua "a dietary niche"?
In the early 2010s, effective altruism (EA) was just beginning to capture the attention of animal advocates.
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A closer examination of good scientific research around leafleting and other forms of so-called impersonal outreach, i.e., trying to persuade someone you have no other relationship with, showed dismal results.
The Science or Science-y blog post, like Boycott Veganism, generated an enormous amount of hate. The leaders of a few prominent animal rights organizations called me a mole for the meat industry, publicly, and would tell everyone they met at animal rights conferences that I was damaging the movement. But as with Boycott Veganism, the critique gained a following. A prominent (non-vegan) effective altruist thinker, Jeff Kaufman, began to question the conventional wisdom on the effectiveness of vegan advocacy. And the leaders of Animal Charity Evaluators, a prominent EA organization that had been extremely hostile towards my work (and towards me personally, for reasons I never fully understood) eventually ran a study in 2017 showing that vegan outreach probably had no effect at all.
That left the movement in a tough spot, after years of focusing on outreach above all other interventions. What do we do instead?
[Commentary:] So, yes, the man who led the campaign "it's not food, it's violence", that consisted of teenagers (like Zoe Rosenberg) breaking down weeping in a restaurant while screaming at random patrons claims that his methods have scientifically verifiable outcomes, whereas his rivals' methods do not, etc.
The burden of proof still lacking to demonstrate that Zoe Rosenberg screaming at strangers or Cassie King pouring blood on herself (publicly) has positive outcomes is considerable: I do not mean this from a position of phony skepticism. I do not mean to insinuate that any kind of political action faces an insurmountable burden of proof as to its efficacy.
Genuinely, it is more difficult to believe that Zoe Rosenberg is succeeding in changing the world than it is to believe that the earth is flat: someone could show me scientific evidence that would change my mind about the shape of the planet, whereas it is genuinely impossible to imagine that there could ever be any evidence to vindicate the tactics used by Zoe, Cassie and Wayne.
It is not difficult to believe that what the Israeli military is doing right now will change the world: it would be phony skepticism indeed to ask aloud, "How can it possibly make a difference to hunt down and kill the leaders of a rival political faction, and to demolish their political-and-military infrastructure?" Although we may not be able to predict the outcomes in Israel, there is no doubt that there will be outcomes.
What Wayne has been advocating (for so many years) genuinely belongs in the category of political actions so counterproductive that we may question —after the expenditure of so many millions of dollars, and the ruination of so many people's particular lives— whether or not there are any outcomes at all.
Nobody has ever complained about the negative outcomes of my philosophy (and of their own attempts to put it into practice) as Rachel Z. now complains about DxE in retrospect —after the somewhat sobering experience of facing the possibility of a criminal conviction in a court of law (as a result of Wayne Hsiung's preferred method and mode of activism). The methodology set down in my books (all two of them) will not ruin your life, and will not cost anyone millions of dollars.
But here we are in 2023, when the evidence for the inefficacy of Wayne's philosophy has had quite some time to stack up, and he is still defending his anti-vegan (and frankly pro-violence) position from 2007.
The parallels to Roger Hallam's XR (Extinction Rebellion) and its sequels (Just Stop Oil, etc.) are so close that my refutation of one serves as a refutation of the other: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gB33D8_jsrU
At what point do the proponents of empiricism admit that the empirical evidence is against them?
