To clarify what you likely meant: Extremists on either side are equally dangerous. I figured you'd get down voted for sounding like if you're generalizing.

"Equally dangerous"? If so, that'd be a highly unlikely coincidence. Both sides advocate a bunch of really stupid ideas that'd be likely to kill a large number of people, but those stupid ideas are radically different in both likelihood and mass death potential.

Extremists are usually unpredictable.

No, I think people on the left are quite aware that fascists aren't going to punch themselves. When Nazis are marching in the streets, someone will have to step up to the plate.

https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/white-supremacist-rallies-i...

(it's a sad sign of the times that "Nazis must be and should be stopped by force" is somehow seen as a controversial statement. Sometime, ask a WWII vet if they had any second thoughts about killing Nazis, let alone just giving one a black eye.)

What Antifa does may be illegal, but it's also morally correct. A lot of people have problems with confusing those two concepts.

Keeping torch-wielding supremacists from terrorizing innocents is not morally equivalent with those doing the terrorizing, even if both use violence.

Killing Nazis is controversial because leftists have changed the definition of what a Nazi is to include up to half the population.

Perhaps this would be a good time to point out that neither the article nor I were talking about Nazis. There's a lot of room to disagree before we hit Nazi.

"Extremists on both sides" is literally always a coded way to complain about Antifa fighting back against Nazi street gangs. And that's what your original comment was getting at - the top comment responded perfectly to your dog-whistle. It's really not a mystery where that talking point came from - that's Trump blaming Antifa after they beat up a bunch of torch-wielding supremacists at the Charlottesville rally.

It's not like Antifa is going into people's houses and beating up 50% of the country. If you're marching under torches and hate symbols you don't get much sympathy from me when someone gives you a black eye for it.

Antifa doesn't make you march around with torches and swastikas, you chose to march under the symbols that have been used for centuries for symbolizing intent to murder, lynch, and exterminate "lesser" human beings. Hopefully at that point most people would have a think about "Hans... are we the baddies? We're marching around with torches..."

There are a lot of people who are susceptible to fascist/"alt-right" slogans and thought, even if they're not the ones currently going out in the streets and attacking people. Some of them can be convinced to go a bit farther. "Hey guys, bring tiki torches to the rally tonight!" and so on. It's an active phenomenon with the alt-right to radicalize and recruit additional members - they call it "red-pilling" (after the MRA thing, although many right-wing groups use the term).

It's not dissimilar to the radicalization tactics that Muslim extremists use, which shouldn't be surprising - providing a home and an ideology for the disaffected is a highly effective radicalization tactic.

http://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/red-pill/

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nnk3bm/how-to-tell-if-you...

http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/05/the-online-radicalization...

Remember, the actual Nazis were a minority in Germany too, and that took decades to build up.