"By any means necessary" is an insult to the memory of Dr. King.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is always filled with powerful think pieces, heartfelt essays, and personal stories.

This year was no exception.

There was “The things you can’t make people do” by Jerusalem Demsas. Definitely worth a read, it was filled with gems like these: “There’s so much that policy can do to make the world a better place, many things it has yet to do. But policy cannot fill the void that duty has left.”

“There’s no law that can remove hatred and bigotry from people’s hearts,” Demsas pointed out, paraphrasing Martin Luther King Jr. “There’s no regulation that can make you patient with small children in public. There’s no policy that can compel you to treat public spaces with as much care as you would your home.”

“The law can constrain the worst parts of humanity, but it cannot bring out the best,” concluded Demsas, along with MLK Jr. and a nearly unbroken chain of progressive ministers and pastors dating all the way back to 1878.

And probably long before.

There was the usual amount of political brouhaha that accompanies every major holiday these days. Everything is Donald Trump’s fault, of course. Nothing he does is right, according to the many liberal-leaning news outlets that dominate the airwaves.

There were annual peace walks, bus wraps, and parades.

But there wasn’t anything about nonviolence. Nothing from the many progressive media outlets about the central, overarching theme of Martin Luther King’s life and work.

Why? Because it might be unpopular? Because “By Any Means Necessary” looks better — and scarier — on a tee shirt?

Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t just preach nonviolence as a personal virtue. He treated it as a political technology — the only force powerful enough to expose injustice without becoming it.

And that’s why the subject of nonviolence on MLK Day makes a lot of modern progressives uncomfortable.

Because the uncomfortable truth is that a growing segment of the left is flirting with the idea that violence is not only understandable, but legitimate — a kind of righteous shortcut when democracy feels slow, unfair, or corrupt. You can see it in the gleeful social media reactions to vandalism and arson. You can see it in the soft-focus rhetoric: “property damage isn’t violence,” “from the river to the sea,” “this is what revolution looks like,” “they had it coming.” And you can see it in the real-world escalation — from setting fire to Tesla dealerships, to torching police stations, to street-level chaos that always seems to be justified after the fact as “necessary pressure.”

Even worse: the polling is starting to catch up with the mood. More young people — raised in an era of viral outrage, institutional distrust, and online radicalization — are buying into the idea that political violence can solve long-term, embedded, electoral problems.

It can’t. It never has. Not in the way they mean.

Violence doesn’t “fix” a political system. It fractures it. It doesn’t persuade the undecided; it terrifies them. It doesn’t build majorities; it builds backlash. And it doesn’t deliver justice — it delivers permission to the violent.

Once violence becomes “valid,” everyone gets to claim their cause is valid enough to use it. The moral line snaps. The social contract becomes a dead letter. And suddenly you’re not living in a country where arguments compete. You’re living in a country where mobs compete.

That is not progress. That is regression — a return to the oldest form of politics on earth: whoever can intimidate, wins.

MLK understood something that too many activists today pretend not to understand: nonviolence is not passivity. It is not cowardice. It is not “politeness.” It is discipline. It is strength under control. It is the refusal to mirror the cruelty you claim to oppose.

And it worked precisely because it made the moral stakes visible. When protesters remained peaceful in the face of dogs, batons, firehoses, and jail cells, the brutality of the system couldn’t hide behind “they started it.” The nation was forced to choose. The conscience of ordinary Americans was activated. And the movement built durable public support — the only kind that can actually change a country without burning it down.

Here’s the part that needs to be said plainly, without euphemisms: if liberals don’t like the laws in the United States, they should run for office, get elected, and change the laws.

That’s not a taunt. That’s the assignment.

Democracy is not a vending machine where you get to smash the glass when you don’t like the snack options. It’s a long game of persuasion, coalition-building, patience, and compromise — and yes, sometimes it’s infuriating. But it is the moral alternative to blood and ruin.

If MLK’s legacy means anything at all, it means this: you don’t defeat injustice by becoming a better, trendier version of it. You defeat it by refusing to surrender your humanity — even when you’re angry, even when you’re tired, even when the timeline tells you violence is “based.”

Nonviolence wasn’t King’s branding strategy. It was his warning to the future.

And the future is here.

Lots of people like to point out that King died by violence. It’s true: An assassin’s bullet ended King’s life and career. 

But that wasn’t the force of violence triumphing over the force of nonviolence. Quite the opposite.

King was killed because of the power of his words, and the power of his strategy. Nonviolence is a dreadful, unendurable threat to violence and the violent.

Nonviolence is the only natural enemy of violence. It is the only thing that can defeat violent evil.

Indeed, as King knew, it is the only thing that ever has.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)