What MLK and Yarvin Have in Common
Finding Freedom in Human Difference
It’s prestigious to lament what the Trump administration is doing lately. The 47th President is Defunding Science, harassing cute immigrant Hamasniks, and violating some other principles I’ve professed before. If I’m not angry, did the RFK brainworms eat my capacity for reason? Have I cucked, like JD, against ‘my own’ best interests? No, but my relationship with performative moral outrage has grown complicated.
As a child, I loved to spend hours at the library. Sometimes I read Korean manga like My Sassy Girl, and sometimes I read tomes on youth rights or libertarianism. I developed opinions on ‘debateable’ issues, such as the death penalty. The state shouldn’t kill people: that makes sense! What if the conviction was wrong? That makes sense! I especially liked arguments against hypocrisy—appeals to universalist ethics.
Growing into adolescence, the time in the stacks turned to time at the computer lab. One site that I liked to follow was the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC). It fed my addiction to minutiae and weaved a grand narrative of light winning out over darkness. Abolitionists spoke the language of progress and civilization when necessary, but many did not share my own moral intuitions.1 This is called ‘framing.’
Dr. Frank Baumgartner analyzed nearly 4,000 New York Times articles on the death penalty (1960-2005), showing how media framing directly affected death sentences independent of crime rates or actual exonerations. His research demonstrated that the ‘innocence frame’—shifting focus from victims to defendants2—drove policy change by avoiding deeply held moral beliefs about what is right or wrong to do in principle.3
Isolated demands for justice
In principle, voter intimidation is bad. In practice, it is only bad for some. On Election Day 2008, two New Black Panther Party members—one wielding a billy club—stood outside a Philadelphia polling place, shouting ‘white devil,’ ‘cracker,’ and warning voters they’d be ruled by the black man. Despite video evidence of the intimidation, the Obama DOJ dropped the charges and forbade its own attorneys from testifying.
That administration showed a pattern of selectively prosecuting bias crimes when the victim was black or Hispanic, and of dismissing them when the victims were white. This particularist ethic didn’t begin or end with Obama. Racist (pro-black) policies have enjoyed elite consensus for decades, especially among the political and media class. To utter “All Lives Matter” was scandalous to any college-educated audience.
In fact, it’s still scandalous to advocate for race-neutral policy in blue America. Many influencers in Austin, Nashville, and other purple places breathed a sigh of relief after Trump’s election: they could take down the “In This House We Believe” signs that said nothing they ever believed. But in large swathes of the country, where ‘compliance’ once meant saying BLM while thinking ALM, now it means the reverse.
Some Democratic intellectuals advocate reform: Matt Yglesias favors universalistic solutions over racial spoils systems. While his tactics shift, his metrics remain racial. He thus can celebrate MLK’s vision: “We shall eliminate slums for Negroes when we destroy ghettos and build new cities for all. We shall eliminate unemployment for Negroes when […] We shall produce an educated and skilled Negro mass” and so on.
Do a pruned plant grow back thicker?
Trump’s ban on university DEI departments has led to rebranding, not elimination. Yarvin foresaw this last year, citing a long history of conservative self-owns: James O’Keefe vs ACORN, Ward Connerly vs affirmative action, Anita Bryant vs the gays. As he put it, incremental victories just ‘prune the forest,’ creating ten new activists for each martyr who is pushed toward a better-paying job at an off-campus organization.
The alternative systemic critique focuses on how journalism and academia (‘the cathedral’) promote not the most accurate ideas but the ones that validate power. Climate change is Yarvin’s illustrative example in the cathedral explainer: climate alarmism corresponds to action, while climate denialism corresponds to inaction. In lecture halls and newsrooms, just one of these ideas gives more power to your friends.
But climate models might someday generate validated predictions, and the issue only remains salient insofar as it connects to ‘climate refugees’—a national identity issue. So the most effective ideas for validating power today relate to race, whether it’s to marshal state resources toward locking down borders or ‘reducing racial inequities.’ One is a tyranny at the border, which I lament; the other made every day a living hell.
The libertarian ideal holds that individuals should live free from state intrusions. Yet the disparate impact regime mandated constant production of racialized statistics and updates on compliance with arbitrary targets—all to redistribute resources to patrons of particularist justice. Housing, education, crime, medicine, research grants, government contracts—all were opportunities to reward friends and punish enemies.
Beautiful losers scream into the void
On some measures, this new administration looks more venal than the alternative. It takes much less paperwork to buy Trump Coin or Melania Coin than it would to file for “fully forgivable loans up to $20,000” offered exclusively to “Black entrepreneurs.” Both systems distribute resources along tribal lines, but one is more garish about it. This is the postmodern critique turned against its authors: structures conceal power.
The side that was just trounced in a populist backlash has proven more methodical. They use sophisticated A/B testing and models to identify which messaging most effectively advances their priorities, like death penalty abolition. But to what end? By mood affiliation alone, I’d rather “have a beer with” the PhD than with the President. We could feel righteous and beautiful together in our principled powerlessness.
Martin Luther King Jr. intuited what Baumgartner later proved: persuasion works by targeting actions, not beliefs. King crafted rhetoric with multiple entry points—patriotic appeals, a biblical cadence, some socialist candy—that produced his desired behavior (the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) despite the varied motivations of listeners. He recognized that human difference persists beyond rational persuasion.
Better biometrics and freer social media have exposed our pre-rational selves, marking the death of a previous ‘consensus’ based on data and expertise. My library-bound idealism once presumed debate would lead all rational minds to agreement. I now recognize freedom not in moral conformity but in systems that allow for stubborn human differences. On the razed cathedral grounds, build a stock exchange!
In the 2000s, the divide between intra-activist and external messaging was clearer. In 2018, the Supreme Court of the State of Washington ruled that “The death penalty is invalid because it is imposed in an arbitrary and racially biased manner.” In 2021, Virginia abolished it legislatively hot off the Summer of Floyd and a governor’s ‘blackface’ scandal.
Contrary to popular ideas about media bias, Baumgartner found victim characteristics (police, women, children) didn’t affect pro-death penalty story tone, nor did defendant demographics (gender, race) affect anti-death penalty coverage. Only terrorist defendants significantly shifted the New York Times stories toward supporting capital punishment.
Which frames matter to this scholar-activist when addressing allies? See his 2021 DPIC interview foregrounding race, and his 2022 article arguing that “racial resentment of blacks drives support for the death penalty.” Note: ‘racial resentment’ in social science measures agreement with views like “individual choices, not racial discrimination, explain racially disparate outcomes.” In other words, a universalist view would be considered ‘resentment.’