Thanks for the post. I think this is an important strategic debate to have, so I'll reply in more length than usual.

I agree with you that we should be honest about what we believe, pursue a variety of strategies, and try to expand the moral circle. I also think you're right that animal liberation played an important role in recruiting many of the movement's current leaders. And I have immense respect for liberation-focused activists like Wayne Hsiung who do courageous work to help animals. None of the following is intended as a criticism of their work. That said, I disagree with you on a number of other points:

1. EA didn't just ignore diet change -- it deprioritized it based on evidence it wasn't working. You write that in EA, "there appears to be scant (and in many cases zero) room for diet change advocacy." But the EA Forum has a whole section on diet change with 198 posts. It includes numerous posts by EAs going deep into the evidence on dietary change -- and finding little evidence of impact. A post arguing for more resources to go to dietary change should at least engage with the evidence that suggests it doesn't work.
2. We've tried many versions of diet change. You write, "A failed attempt does not test an idea for all time. It tests one version of that idea..." But we've tested many versions of the idea! EAs have tested -- and funded the testing of -- leafletting, online ads, documentaries, institutional meat reduction, pledges, and just about every dietary change idea produced. Other funders have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into diet change with limited effects. We should keep testing new approaches to diet change. But, until we find one that works, I don't think we should invest dramatically more in an approach that has repeatedly failed.
3. It's not clear to me why AI and more resources will change the relative cost-effectiveness of dietary change vs. other strategies. You write, "Animal liberation and diet change advocacy have never operated at the scale that may soon be possible with 1) AI and 2) dramatically more resources." This is true. It's also true of all other interventions. What matters is not whether AI or vastly more resources could increase animal liberation / diet change's impact -- I'm sure they could -- but whether they will make those interventions relatively more impactful than the other interventions we could deploy AI and those resources toward. Again, the post doesn't explain why they would.
4. I'm skeptical that animal liberation activism made farm animal welfare improvements possible. You suggest that "It seems to me quite possible that advocacy on behalf of animal liberation is what shifted the Overton Window with regard to farm animal welfare." But you don't point to evidence for that claim, so consider some evidence to the contrary. All federal US farm animal welfare improvements (the 28 Hour Law, the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act) preceded any liberation activism, as did critical UK, Swiss, Scandinavian, German, and EU reforms. All the recent corporate animal welfare wins came after the movement pivoted away from vegan outreach (2015 onward) and toward focusing on welfare wins. Animal liberation activists largely opposed these campaigns. It's not clear to me how liberationist activists chanting that cage-free is evil encouraged corporations to go cage-free.
5. The justice movement analogy points to the challenge with dietary change. You ask "Are there other justice movements that ignored the fact that they were justice movements?" To which I reply: "Are there other justice movements that succeeded through individual behavioral change as dietary change seeks to?" I can't think of any. (Also, as Elliot notes in the comments, there are lots of social movements that have succeeded without the liberation / justice frame.)
6. I think the talent section presents a false choice. You write, "If we don’t tell the world why animals matter ... will we attract people with the passion and focus on maximum impact that comes with knowing you’re in a liberation struggle?" But EAs are constantly telling the world why animals matter, and constantly attracting people who are passionate and focused on maximum impact. I think EA in general is a rebuttal to the idea that you can only attract passionate and impactful people to doing good by framing things as a liberation struggle. AI safety doesn't, global health doesn't, and it's not clear why animals should be the exception.
7. This is a good case for some funding of animal liberation / diet change, but not a good case for spending more at the current margin. If you include PETA's $80M annual budget, and the ~$50M annually spent on diet change globally, animal liberation and diet change currently account for over a third of the animal movement's funding. So the question is not "should animal liberation and diet change get any funding," but rather "at the margin, will increasing animal liberation / diet change advocacy from ~$130M to $X do more to help animals than the alternatives?" I think we should keep assessing that on the merits of each opportunity.

Thanks again for this thoughtful post, which I think makes an important point. 

Why am I not bullish on civilizational refuges for reducing bio xrisk? I believe bio xrisk is concentrated in E2H scenarios or AI takeover, and neither of these things benefit much from refuges. For both of these threat models, there is value in refuges but only if they are a safe staging area to take back control of the environment or against an AI, which means you probably need a full industrial base worth of people/infrastructure to be protected. Society-wide biohardening and PPE is therefore the better option even on purely longtermist grounds (and has the additional property of also being much more valuable on non-longtermist grounds as well!)

EA is facing its most serious PR crisis in history, and nobody in EA seems to be discussing it or doing anything effective about it. Everyone seems to be carrying on as if this is business as usual.

President Donald Trump, AI Czar David Sacks, and the Department of War have launched a coordinated campaign in the last week to portray EA as treasonous and toxic. 

Their campaign motto is 'Americanism, not Effective Altruism'. Tens of thousands of MAGA political influencers are attacking EA (often from positions of total ignorance) on social media platforms such as X, Truth Social, and Facebook. They're also portraying all concerns about catastrophic risks from AI as a 'hoax', a 'psyop', and a CCP influence campaign -- part of a 'Doomer Industrial Complex'.

This is unprecedented. It's far worse than any previous scandal or crisis that EA has faced. Even the SBF/FTX debacle didn't lead to key American leaders and legions of influencers directly attacking EA.

Are we going to do anything about this, or just let the pro-AI accelerationists, in the current White House administration and the Pentagon, trash-talk the movement that we've spent the last 15 years growing and defending? 

"We cannot choose not to be vegan, even for a moment, even if it would be pragmatic to do so."

I genuinely don't mean to be glib, but have you tried? One can just choose to become non-vegan, so if one truly believed that non-vegans were better advocates and we need more of them, surely it should be something to consider.

Will anyone take the other side of this bet? By January 1, 2034, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Bloomberg will all agree the AI bubble has popped. (As in, they will all report it as news, not just publish an opinion column saying so.)

The stakes: $20 to the charity of the winner's choice.

Why this bet? Mainly just for fun. But also to make a point.

I chose 7 years as the time horizon for the bet because I read that 5 to 7 years is the time horizon for many AI investments.

My hunch is that the AI bubble will pop within 3 years, but who knows. Markets can keep lending and investing in unprofitable ventures for a very long time.

YC never had any sort of monopoly on the best startups though, its own terms are much better than they used to be, and its still definitely the most prestigious. The question isn't "why didn't Anthropic join YC", it's "why, if AI truly makes most developers 10x more productive and transforms the unit economics of customers, are the valuations of a cohort of prestigious "AI-enabled" startups round about their non-AI enabled 2019 peers?". There really aren't enough people founding research labs for that to be the issue

Of course, any early stage valuations graph is as much a graph of investor sentiment as anything else, but if AI was really making these companies significantly more productive, investors would have to be very bearish on AI or YC selection effect to have gone down the toilet for that not to show in the data. I presume median data looks similar?

The best counterargument is that AI also makes it easier for competitors leading to less defensible business models even if AI actually enables them to grow faster, but if that was the case investor sentiment should be much more bearish on incumbents...