On Nazi-Punching, Moral and Otherwise

Reflections after Berkeley and Auburn

When an anonymous antifascist punched celebrity white supremacist Richard Spencer in the face on camera in January 2017, Americans of all stripes took notice. Rightists muttered darkly and polished their pistols. Leftists and liberals made memes.

My personal favorite remix of Spencer getting punched, posted by YouTuber “Because Reasons.”

Before long, there was an entire Twitter account devoted to videos of the Nazi-punch set to music. Meanwhile, Newsweek determined that enjoying the videos was permissible, but that Nazi-punching itself was beyond the pale.

You can savor watching a Nazi get punched on your screen, but don’t try it at home, they say.

Alternative voices, like Katherine Cross, made powerful arguments that punching Nazis was, in fact, a moral imperative. Others, like Tauriq Moosa, urged liberals to focus their limited stores of attention not on the ethics of punching Nazis, but rather on the violence and real, ongoing threat of white supremacism. But, as the meme ran its course and Richard Spencer faded off-screen, the notion that Nazi-punching is to be enjoyed as spectacle but also somewhat condemned as action seemed for most liberals to have carried the day. The violence of Nazis remained largely out of focus, relegated to history and not taken seriously as a force in the present.

The current header of Nazi platform The Daily Stormer shows a Spencer lookalike punching a woman in Berkeley.

Now, however, in the wake of ongoing clashes between antifascists and a rag-tag, militarized collection of neo-Nazis, so-called Proud Boys, “Oath Keeper” law enforcement personnel, and other white supremacists, the question of violence against Nazis is back on the agenda. The question is whether and to what extent private individuals should violently resist Nazis and other white supremacists when they claim public spaces. Unfortunately, the going agenda often still assumes that Nazism today is primarily about speech, while antifascist attacks on Nazis are by contrast primarily about violence.

What was crystallized in Richard Spencer getting cracked in the head remained largely at the level of entertainment, or at best catharsis. It was a spectacle, not a call to action, because Nazism wasn’t seen by many as a contemporary and actual threat of violence.

Gonzo journalist Shane Bauer’s picture, one of several from the April 15 Berkeley clashes, of a neo-Nazi sieg heiling.

The events in Berkeley and at Auburn University this past week — which saw violent confrontations between antifascists and white supremacists — have felt like clearer calls to action. Nazism is, without parallel in modern history, an ideology committed to violence and to the dehumanization of others. These are its raison d’être. Whether going by this name or one of a dozen others, rightist rallies have increasingly frequently mobilized under the symbols of Nazism. Rightists themselves have come ready for violence. And everyday, regular people on both sides of the country have mobilized to reject the violence of this white supremacist ideology with violence of their own.

Brawling in Berkeley was confused and intense, as this video from Pacific Northwest Fascist Watch shows.

And that raises, now much more seriously for many, the question of where Nazi speech bleeds into Nazi violence, and of what our collective responsibility in the face of that pairing might be. In other words, should antifascists attempt, with violence, to shut down white supremacists? This is a tactical and strategic question, of course, but it is equally a question of practical morality. As an acquaintance recently asked, “Would you consider it morally justified to punch someone who declared themselves a Nazi?”

The rest of this essay addresses the morality-of-Nazi-punching question with a “Well, sort of.”

To be clear, I see all violence of any sort whatsoever as unjustifiable. That is to say, no violence is ever without moral injury to both the victim and the perpetrator. Violence is always morally wrong.

But, that’s at the level of the principle (since justification assumes a chain of reasoning that goes back up, from lived experience, to a governing principle). Ideal morality tells us what we ought to value, in an ideal world, and even what we ought to hope for in this world, but it can’t tell us what we ought to do in this world. What we ought to do is where things get messy.