I'm not sure what people who support this "punching Nazis" narrative think they'll gain. You do realize this gives people like Spencer relevance when otherwise nobody would've said much? Imagine if nobody punched him. Most people wouldn't recognize his name. You give him unwarranted exposure.
The only winner when somebody punches Spencer is Spencer. I'll just re-post my whole rant on this shit:
People are not generally donning Nazi regalia and marching through Washington declaring that Hitler has risen to take the West. White nationalism is more subtle than that, which is why it garners practitioners. No shit it's based in ignorance - but "incredible ignorance" doesn't warrant violence.
People don't join with the expectation of being Nazis. I've seen this indoctrination occur enough times in enough ideologies to have a grasp on how it functions.
-By perception or by experience, a person feels that society is wrong somehow. -They find rhetoric from crazy people that provides an explanation for society being wrong in a roundabout way. -That person attaches themselves to this as a form of confirmation bias. -That person starts reading hypotheses about their movements and even begins participating in forums. -The forums, whether they be tumblr, reddit, 4chan, etc - become echo chambers to seal opposing viewpoints out. -Because these forums exist as echo chambers, handy rhetoric and insults are invented or applied to people who disagree. Strawman arguments are taken and used to "debunk" people who disagree with the echo chamber's ideology. -This results in people religiously dedicated to an ideology because they eventually believe it to be true and do not subject themselves to opposing viewpoints and create an increasingly dismal image of the opposition by constructing strawmen against them.
This can apply to literally any ideology, but it's poisonous among really radical ones. I've seen this in high concentrations with:
-AnCaps. -Feminists and Social Justice movements. -White Nationalists. -Young-Earth Creationists. -Flat Earthers. -Political movements in general, but Trump's ardent support base on T_D are a noteworthy recent example.
*I'm not suggesting these are all equivalent in morality or intelligence, just that they all have movements that really reflect echo chamber mentality.
It's usually more detailed/complicated than the bullet points list I made but it all starts with people who are psychologically vulnerable in some manner and aren't exposed enough to critical thinking. This is why you can have nice-seeming people who have bizarre or crazy viewpoints.
education and proper debate is the soap to the germs that are cancerous radical ideologies, not punching morons
The fact that some people interpret "don't punch a guy saying things" as "muuhhhh muhhhh ur defending spencer" shows how intellectually soft the left got in the last 8 years. Jeeeesus. ---