Are We Still Punching Nazis, Or What?

A History Lesson, a Legal Warning, and a Fist. The Moral Case Hasn't Changed. The Legal Risk Has.

I was listening to the song by Cheap Perfume, called, It’s Ok to Punch Nazi’s and it got me thinking…

IS it still ok to punch Nazi’s?

There was a time, not long ago, and not ancient history, when the answer to “is it okay to punch a Nazi” was not actually a complicated question.

It was settled at Normandy. It was settled at Stalingrad. It was settled in the photographs of American soldiers liberating concentration camps, in the Nuremberg trials, in the deliberate construction of an entire postwar international order designed around the premise that fascism had to be stopped by any means available, including and especially force. The Allied powers did not defeat the Third Reich by platforming it, by debating its merits in good faith, or by trusting that exposure to better ideas would eventually win out. They bombed it into rubble and hanged its architects.

The cultural shorthand that followed, that punching a Nazi is not only acceptable but occasionally correct, wasn’t fringe radicalism. It was the distilled lesson of the 20th century’s most catastrophic chapter. A lot of our grandfathers fought them. They believed it. Your history teacher probably believed it. Indiana Jones believed it, and we made him a fuckin’ hero.

Then we forgot. Or we told ourselves the problem was solved. Or we got comfortable enough that the question felt hypothetical.

It stopped feeling hypothetical on January 20, 2017, when Richard Spencer, a man who coined the term “alt-right” as a rebranding project for white nationalism, got punched in the face on camera during an interview, mid-sentence, by a masked protester. The video went viral. And America spent the following week in a bizarre national argument about whether punching his Nazi-face was okay.

We had arrived at a place where the acceptable response to a white nationalist explaining his ideology on camera was apparently to let him finish his thought… What?!

I’m an older Millennial, born in 1982. I learned the Holocaust history in school. I read the books, watched the documentaries. It’s in my bones that when I see a Nazi, I punch that mother fucker square in the face and don’t let him get up. No questions asked. Oh, you’re a Nazi? Boom. Lights out.

But somehow, we’ve arrived at a weird point where we’re debating it now. I am still trying to wrap my head around how we got here.

Half the country is now saying: you can’t punch people for their beliefs. The other half says: these are not merely beliefs, they are a documented pathway to genocide, and we know this because we have the receipts, and the receipts are written in eight million fucking names!

That’s the half I’m a part of. The half I naively thought, ALL of America was a part of as well. Who are those other whackadoodles?

Both sides were talking past each other because they were operating from different premises about what Nazism is. One side treated it as a political position on a spectrum, disagreeable but containable within democratic norms. The other side treated it as a movement with a body count and a blueprint, one that has historically required physical confrontation to stop.

History sides with the second group. Not because violence is good, but because the evidence is in. THE EVIDENCE is in. Case closed.

So, Is It Still Okay To Punch A Nazi In 2026?

Morally? The argument hasn’t changed. A movement that explicitly calls for the elimination or subjugation of people based on race is not a debating partner. It is not operating in good faith within democratic norms because it does not believe in democratic norms. You cannot Marquess of Queensberry rules your way out of a fight with someone who has no intention of following them.

What has changed is the context in which you will be prosecuted for acting on that moral logic.

Where it gets specific, and where I need to stop being abstract, because this is not abstract for me, is the fact that my husband is Black. My children are bi-racial. We also live in Texas.

When someone calls my family the n-word, I am not having a philosophical debate about the boundaries of acceptable political speech. I am watching my husband’s jaw set and fists clench and my children’s faces change in real time, and I am doing the math on what kind of threat this is and what I am willing to do about it as a white woman in fascist America.

The cultural norm says I’m allowed to punch that person. History says I’m allowed to punch that person. Basic human decency says I am allowed to punch that person.

Texas law says I will be arrested.

And in 2026, in a state whose attorney general has made clear whose rights he is interested in protecting, I will not receive the benefit of the doubt that the abstract cultural norm assumes. My husband may also be arrested, because that is how these encounters go for Black men regardless of who threw the first punch. We will spend money we don’t have on lawyers. The man who said the word will face no charges.

This is not a reason to abandon the moral standard. It is a reason to know exactly what you’re choosing when you act on it.

What White Supremacy Looks Like When They Ditched The Hood for A Suit

The Nazi of 2026 does not always show up in a uniform. He shows up in a gerrymandered map. He shows up in a state legislature gutting early voting in counties that are majority Black. He shows up in a school board meeting demanding the removal of books that teach children that slavery was horrific. He shows up in your child’s classroom, church and boy scout troops and sexually assaults your children. He shows up in court rooms saying the n-word trying to put a black woman in the place he feels she needs to be in. Looking at you Michael M. Phillips of Brazoria County, TX. You slimy white supremacist pig. He shows up in your comment section with a Gadsden flag avatar, calling your kid a slur and then reports your response for harassment.

He shows up in policy. He shows up in judicial appointments. He shows up in the systematic dismantling of the consent decrees and civil rights enforcement mechanisms that took fifty years to build.

The punch-a-Nazi norm was developed for a specific kind of visible, organized, uniformed fascism. What we are dealing with now has the same ideology, the same goals, and the same willingness to use state violence… but it has learned to wear a suit and operate through institutions.

Which means, our response has to operate on multiple levels simultaneously.

The physical confrontation question is real… lets not sugarcoat it. But the fight that is going to determine whether my children grow up in a democracy is happening in courtrooms and statehouses and school board meetings and on ballots, and that fight requires us to be present, strategic, and not in jail.

Say You Do It Anyway And Punch That POS Nazi - What Now?

What actually happens if you act on the norm. First and foremost, I’m not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.

So anyway, you punch the Nazi. It feels correct. It feels good. So good, you consider becoming a Nazi-Hunter. It IS correct, morally, historically, in every way that matters to your soul. And then the police arrive.

In most states you are looking at assault charges, minimum. Class A misdemeanor in Texas, which carries up to a year in county jail and a $4,000 fine. If he goes down hard and hits his head, it escalates.

The Nazi, who said the word that started all of this, faces no charges. He may in fact press charges against you. Because, well, White Supremacist Nazi’s are inferior pussies, for lack of a better term. In the current legal environment, in states run by people who have made their sympathies clear, he may find a sympathetic prosecutor.

You will need a lawyer. A real one. That costs money you probably need for something else. So, you’ll have to choose again. Pay the mortgage or pay the retainer for a lawyer?

Can you fight it? Yes. Depending on the specific facts, whether he was physically aggressive, whether there were witnesses, whether you got it on video, you may have viable defenses. A good criminal defense attorney can work with provocation, with context, with the full picture of what happened. It is not automatically hopeless. But it is not free, and it is not fast, and it will take up months of your life.

Know your rights. Know your risks. Know what you’re choosing.

Because if you choose to say fuck it and punch that weak-ass white supremacist in his small-dick-energy face, the law in 2026 may not be on your side. Not because you were wrong, but because the people administering that law are not neutral parties. They did not become prosecutors and judges and attorneys general because they wanted to protect your family… just sayin.

The norm still stands. See a Nazi, punch a Nazi has outlasted every attempt to rehabilitate fascism as a legitimate political perspective, and it will outlast this moment too.

Just understand the cost before you choose it. Make it a choice, not a reaction. And if you’re going to do it, documentation of what he said and did before your fist connected is the difference between a defensible case and an unwinnable one.

The bridge in Selma is still there. People just marched on it again. That fact is the whole argument.

We are not post-anything.

If a paid subscription isn’t in the cards right now, I completely get it — truly. But if you’ve ever read something here and thought “damn, she needs to keep doing this,” you can throw a few bucks in the tip jar over at Buy Me a Coffee.

No pressure. No guilt. Just me, asking nicely, with my hand out like a very earnest raccoon who writes controversial essays.

☕ buymeacoffee.com/eeviebateman

Thank you for being here. Seriously. You make this worth doing.