I contest that it is the speech the Nazis were silencing. They were suppressing their enemies' willingness to remain politically engaged and active. Doesn't matter what their platform was or what they said at the meetings that were interrupted with baseball bats, they were rival parties and that was the problem.
Political speech--assembly, association, engagement as you call it--is probably the most important kind of speech for a free society to protect.
I have a consistent opinion on when it's okay to use violence. None of them hinge on any factors related to the birth lottery/immutable qualities. Usually has more to do with behaviors, decisions, attitudes, actions taken, that kind of stuff. There's also the obvious self preservation stuff (kinda ties in to those mentioned, though). For that reason attacking people who espouse that violence is ok based on factors related to the birth lottery/immutable qualities is kind of a grey area. They are presenting themselves as something of a threat to those groups they target so...?
So our society has established due process to deal with threats. The due process for dealing with threatening ideas is to speak against them, campaign against them, vote against them. Not to physically attack people in the streets for their ideas.
Kinda hard to feel bad about it. I kinda vaguely get that it's maybe a poor precedent (if applied to things like...the birth lottery and immutable qualities). But these are choices they made. We decide that choices and behaviors of some kinds mean you get punished all the time.
"We" didn't decide any such thing in this case. What we decided was that there should be due process for people whose speech we disagree with. What we decided was that we should not physically attack people in the streets for their ideas.
What you and Hercules and the masked vigilante seem to have decided is entirely at odds with what our society has agreed should be due process. What you seem to have decided is that we should live in a world where disagreeable ideas are met with unrestricted violence--with masked vigilantism.
What you seem to have decided is an idea that I find disagreeable in the extreme. What remedy should I pursue? The remedy of due process? Or your remedy of masked vigilantism?
Someone from the threatened community probably feels well justified in packaging their rebuttal in the most certain and unmistakable terms, I can't really articulate a disagreement that doesn't sound intellectually dishonest.
Your whole position on this is either intellectually dishonest, or else apocalyptic in its ramifications.
As for me, I aspire to live in a society where justice is decided based on more than someone's feelings.
ETA: It's the period before the war that we fail to study the most: Appeasement.
The war had already started by the time appeasement came into play. Hitler broke the terms of Versailles, and was appeased. Hitler took Austria, and was appeased. Hitler took Czechoslovakia, and was appeased.
What legal rules has Spencer violated? What territory has he taken? How does punching him reverse that appeasement? How does it begin to claw back whatever it is you think he's taken?
I might have some respect for the brave man who stood up and said, "Richard Spencer's poisonous ideology must be stopped. I will stop it, and I will accept the punishment for acting outside of society's rules. Because that is how strongly I believe in the importance of what I am about to do." And then, you know, he stopped Richard Spencer.
I would still want him to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law for his crime, but I would respect him for having the courage of his convictions. That's not what happened here, though. What happened here was a cowardly, pathetic act. At best, it was an act of personal entertainment for the attacker. At worst, it was an attempt to intimidate speech with violence. Either way, I can't condone it, and I don't see how anyone else could either.
