A USA Today columnist, Dace Potas, has sounded the alarm on the normalization of political violence in leftwing, progressive circles. He specifically cites the posthumous mockery of Charlie Kirk and his widow, which has taken a decidedly creepy and ghoulish turn. The name of his piece is: “The left normalizes political violence. We can’t accept it.” You should read it.
Dace Potas is writing editorials for USA Today, while I’m just some guy in Ohio. But I saw this coming a few years ago, when the catchphrase “punch Nazis” became commonplace in progressive spaces online.
Why shouldn’t we want to punch Nazis, you ask. Isn’t that what Harrison Ford did in Raiders of the Lost Ark?
That’s all fine and good, if you’ve got a time machine and you’d like to go back and slug it out with a brigade of the Waffen SS. Be my guest, if you can pull that off. Knock yourself out.
But in most cases, what you actually read about is young punks carrying out cowardly attacks on 80-year-old men wearing Trump hats.
A part of me isn’t surprised. Folks on the far-left fringe have long engaged in a version of “stolen valor”, vis-a-vis World War II veterans, few of whom are still alive to speak for themselves. (Note: My maternal grandfather was a World War II veteran who engaged in combat with the real, historical Nazis—the ones who spoke German. My maternal grandfather lived well into my adult life. We had many long discussions. My maternal grandfather would have had nothing but disdain for twenty-first-century “antifa” goons.)
Here’s the problem with the whole “punching Nazis” thing. Who gets to decide who is a “Nazi”?
The historical Nazis are all dead. (A few may be living out the last of their days in nursing homes in Germany. They would be over one hundred years old in 2026.)
Okay, what about homegrown, American Nazis? The American Nazi Party, which had a grand total of 500 members in the late 1960s, doesn’t really exist today.
What about the Ku Klux Klan? There are fewer than 5,000 of them in the USA in 2026, scattered throughout the country. They mostly exist online.
So you’re not punching non-existent “Nazis”. And you can’t even find a genuine, sheet-wearing klansman to punch in Toledo or Poughkeepsie.
So who is it that you want to punch?
Let’s cut the BS, and define what is really going on here. What “punching Nazis” means in practice is: labeling those who disagree with you as ‘Nazis’ so that you can justify political violence against them, while LARPing as a member of the 82nd Airborne, circa 1944.
Likewise, “Antifa” is—if you’ll pardon my technical jargon here—a complete bullshit term. Calling yourself “antifascist” does not make you a freedom fighter, any more than me calling myself “Taylor Swift’s boyfriend” would make me that. If you want to fight fascism, join a branch of the US military, because they’re the last US-based organization to actually do that.
This doesn’t mean you have to silently agree with everyone on the political right. I certainly don’t. I find Matt Walsh (to pick one name at random) to be an insufferable killjoy who wants to outlaw all biblically non-compliant forms of sex (based on his interpretation of Scripture, of course).
But to compare Matt Walsh to Reinhard Heydrich is gross hyperbole at best…and it is the encouragement of political violence at worst, if accompanied by rants about “punching Nazis”.
-ET
Above: A self-styled Captain America (the comic book shirt on a grown man speaks volumes) encourages people LARPing as antifascists to engage in street violence against people LARPing as Nazis.
Everyone in this scenario is nuts. There are no heroes here (and certainly none that rise to the level of the men and women who fought in World War II).
A pox on both their houses, basically.