Richard Spencer, face punching, and violence.
I shouldn't have to write this disclaimer, but here we go anyway: I am not one of these people and never will be. I mirrored the documents in question because data has a way of disappearing from the Net when lawyers get involved, a phenomenon called HTTP Error 451 (Unavailable for legal reasons), and we're already seeing potentially damaging and damning information quietly going away. So, if you're going to say that because I have a copy of a particular document on my website I support the author when I just said I didn't, please pull your head out of your ass.
What a world in which I have to say this.
If you were fortunate yesterday you got to watch this man, Richard Spencer (Wikipedia page archived at 20170121@0955 hours PDT in case somebody sanitizes it) (local mirror) (mugshot), get punched dead in the face (local mirror in case the video disappears) by what appears to be an antifa protestor on live television. Spencer is openly and vocally a white supremacist and chairbeing of an uncannily influential white supremacist think tank called the National Policy Institute (google them, I'm not linking to their website), though in the US they're calling themselves white nationalists these days. He wrote this article (Internet Archive copy because it mysteriously vanished from his website) (local mirror) At the Inauguration yesterday, he said this: "Let's party like it's 1933." (local mirror) There is some controversy about this guy getting clocked while being interviewed. Perhaps, some say, they should have given him a chance to make the first move. Perhaps he should have been taunted into throwing the first punch to have some justification for getting nailed.
I disagree, and this is why: Have you ever gotten stomped?
Seriously - have you ever gotten the living hell beaten out of you because you were not white, or because you were queer or just because somebody wanted an excuse to take you out? Legit beaten down, wound up in the hospital, perhaps injured for an extended period of time? Maybe still feeling it years later?
These screwheads do not give you a chance. They do not taunt you into throwing the first punch. They do not let you make the first move. They come at you with everything they've got, usually as a group, and they do not let up until either you're down and out or somebody comes to your rescue (which is rare, if ever). They have only one thing in mind, and that's turning you into paste on the floor or sidewalk. They do not let up until they think they're done, for some definition of done. They care about taking you out, period, full stop.
Does that make what happend to him right? Well, yes, he's a goddamn Nazi. His followers, and groups moving along the same lines have done the same thing to people time and time again over the years, often much worse than he got. People like Spencer have the gift of making up erudite-sounding words to justify it.
I shed no tears and raise a toast to the unknown person who punched him. That was a very small taste of what some of us got for the crime of merely existing. It isn't a matter of right or wrong, it's a matter of what goes around comes around.