The hush that followed President Kennedy's 1963 Dallas murder was a matter of universally shared basic decency. But today, if a conservative figure fell to a lunatic's bullets, progressive Democrats would freestyle on the coffin lid.

Recall that following the attempted assassinations of Donald Trump, ghoulish miscreants in political, entertainment, and media spheres immediately leapt into the spotlight, maws a-drip.

And sadly, their wickedness endures.

Upon hearing during a March 11 broadcast that President Trump rightly condemned vandalism and arson of Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism, MSNBC host Alicia Menendez grabbed up the fake news bullhorn: "So, just to be clear, you protest a private company, you are labeled by this administration a domestic terrorist."

Were MSNBC's top-floor nabobs at all decorous, they would acquaint Menendez with the Joy Reid exit door.

Only mentally disheveled subversives and press charlatans would rank purposeful violence as legitimate protest. Violence is not speech that enjoys constitutional protection. You can express disagreement with others, but you cannot firebomb their businesses.

During the often-savage George Floyd street riots of 2020, police were assaulted, cars were set ablaze and overturned, innocent passersby fell victim to screamed epithets and physical attacks, and at least one law enforcement precinct was torched by Molotov cocktail-hurling thugs. (Some 163 other structures were also burned.)

Deceitful media commentators pronounced the anarchic mob actions to be "mostly peaceful."

As Freddie Gray rioting had raged five years earlier, Baltimore's Democrat Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake asserted, "We also gave those who wish to destroy space to do that, as well." (Her office subsequently backtracked. But as goes the saw: When someone first shows you who they are, believe them.)

The plain difference between word and action was once widely understood. But no more. Left-wing agitators apparently feel that perpetrating destruction is a justifiable means for ideological promotion. 

(The distinction was muddied by the U.S. Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling in 1989's Texas v. Johnson. The majority held flag-burning to be "symbolic speech" that merits First Amendment protection. Do not think it beyond crafty quislings to contend window-smashing is similarly symbolic speech.)

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a noble and inspirational leader whose fine endeavors sped America's advancement toward the justice that the Founders envisioned. He is correctly respected as a hero. But this writer submits that King erred grievously in seemingly conferring moral imprimatur upon riots by pronouncing "a riot is the language of the unheard."

Riots are not reasonable avenues open to any who feel -- fairly or not -- unacknowledged. To argue otherwise is to fan anarchy's flames.

(Yes, the Boston Tea Party included property destruction. But it challenged oppression by an unelected foreign sovereign; that pivotal circumstance does not exist in modern America.)

In decades since King's words, all manner of pernicious dissidents have fancied their flawed ideologies to be valiant crusades whose validity renders lawfulness negligible. 

It is hoped that due respect for law and order will return in this Trump era. A good start would be understanding that violence is not laudatory protest.

Understand, Alicia?

Iowan DC Larson authored Ideas Afoot and That a Man Can Again Stand Up. Among his freelance credits are Daily Caller, The Iowa Standard, and the Des Moines Register. And his political blog is American Scene Magazine. 

Image: AT via Magic Studio