It’s all fun & Nazi punching until you pepper-spray a woman wearing a “Make Bitcoin Great Again” hat and attack an immigrant in a business suit.  (That actually happened, by the way.)

Because when you encourage “punching Nazis”, that’s what actually happens, because lots of people love punching more than they care about figuring out whether who they are punching is an actual Nazi.

You could have had Nazi punching if the Nazi punchers were the kind of person that didn’t support punching Nazis, since they tend to do a better job figuring out who is and isn’t a Nazi.

But now people that aren’t Nazis have to defend the physical security of Nazis because Tumblr thinks the proper answer to “but what if I thought I was punching a Nazi but it was just a white guy with a shtty haircut” is “run” and not “don’t be a dumbfk that punches people without checking whether they’re actual Nazis first”.

That doesn’t even get into what happened with the actual Nazis and street violence (it didn’t stop them), or the threat level they represent right now (fairly low), or whether they can be won over by other means (one black man got some huge number of dudes to quit the KKK by befriending them), or ideological consistency (you also have to punch Tankies), or whether there will be retaliatory violence (oh Nazis would love that) or whom that retaliatory violence would fall on (hint: usually people more marginalized and vulnerable than the punchers).