But that hasn’t prevented a healthy amount of antifa self-mythologizing, particularly in a number of pieces for The Nation by journalist and part-time masked vigilante Natasha Lennard, who has extolled the “pure kinetic beauty” of one of her cohort decking the unsuspecting (and odious) alt-right leader Richard Spencer. A more recent piece features Lennard engaging in delusions of tragic revolutionary grandeur by comparing today’s antifa with the anti-fascists who fought (and lost) in street battles against government-supported gangs in Nazi Germany and fascist Spain and Italy.

I enjoy seeing Nazis punched as much as the next decent human being, but I still maintain that violence is wrong and is a failure of political thought, not a righteous tool of it. In the aftermath of Inauguration Day’s viral Spencer-punching, it was more than a little disconcerting to see so many people who heretofore were proponents of the rule of law cheering on antifa as the self-deputized arbiters of acceptable political violence. While social media flooded with images of Indiana Jones and Superman and Captain America punching Nazis, I wondered if the terms “Nazi” or “fascist” might come to lose their meaning when deployed by antifa in search of the thrill of a fight.