It's pretty scary how the article goes from killing Nazis is fantastic, to anybody at my right is a Nazi and it's morally ok to punch them. >Too often, when we engage in arguments with extremists who talk of racial purity, we falter to explain our side. Instead, we punch them and tell them “because.” >Nationalism leads to war So if you see somebody waving a flag, you punch them? I don't like the "punch them" rhetoric…
If they're carrying a battle flag (a specific design you can look up) then they're literally signalling that they're there for purposes of conquest. It's perfectly OK to oppose that.
I don't like the "punch them" rhetoric. It's not compatible with free speech. It's way better to combat "racial purity" ideologies (or any other speech) with more speech, with reason and truth than with violence. The second option makes you look like the Gestapo or the NKVD
But the 'racial purity' ideology is not always expressed in terms of their personal life choices about who they start a family with. Rather, it frequently comes paired with the assertion that the Other must be conquered, driven away, or eliminated.
'More speech' sounds really nice in principle, but I'm guessing you're not a member of any group that is threatened by eliminationist rhetoric, and people who are under threat are not obliged to serve as martyrs for you to use as moral exemplars in polite debate. Thus, the 'unlimited free speech' argument is a very privileged one, because speech is only free if it can be engaged in without existential anxiety.
Consider Jeremy Christian, the guy who killed two people and injured a third in Portland just weeks ago. He was yelling abuse at two female passengers on the train and people intervened to ask him to stop, and he attacked them with a knife. Those people took your 'more speech' approach and they're dead, are they not? No more speech of any kind for them, and no speech of yours can possibly restore them to their families.
Why, exactly, should people have to subject themselves to injury or death at the hands of bad actors before they're allowed to take any other action in your value schema? By feitishizing 'free speech' without regard to the consequences, you're giving extremists a license to engage in criminal threats but insisting that the people who are the subject of such threats do nothing to safeguard their own persons.
If your approach is so great, how does authoritarianism get off the ground anywhere? Why isn't it just talked out of existence by people armed only with reason and truth? What good are reason and truth when confronted with anti-rationalist ideologies that ignore logic and rely on atavistic emotional appeals, and which are demonstrably successful in activating people to commit violence against innocent people and populations?