Radio host Michael Savage, age 74, was in a restaurant in Tiburon, California, on Tuesday. One of the other guests began taunting him by saying, ‘weener, weener.’ The heckler was apparently referring to Savage’s legal name, Michael Alan Weiner.

More words were exchanged as Savage was leaving and Savage was sucker punched and knocked down. Both Savage and his assailant tried to place each other under “citizen’s arrest.” (My kidneys nearly couldn’t handle keyboarding that.) Police showed up, listened to both, and sent them both on their way. According to the San Jose Mercury, Savage is 5’6″ and his assailant is just the opposite, he’s 6’5″.

A lot of folks were yukking it up when alt-right intellectual spirit chieftain Richard Spencer got sucker punched while speaking to the media the day of Trump’s inauguration. At some point, it seems, it became okay to physically assault people simply because you don’t like what they are saying. I didn’t get the memo so I wasn’t one of them. (As an aside, what Spencer was yakking about was nothing more exceptional than you’d find at any Nation of Islam gathering but no one is going to punch that guy selling Brother Howard’s Bean Pies from the median strip because he, unlike Spencer, is probably going to kick your ass.) Cheering this kind of behavior, no matter how good it might make you feel, is dangerous because in the mind of the guy (and people like him) who punched Spencer there is absolutely no difference between Richard Spencer and Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz and you and me. You don’t have to defend what Spencer is saying but commonsense and enlightened self -interest demands that you oppose what happened.

And here we are.

I’m not a Michael Savage fan. I’ve listened to about a hour of his show since it has been on the air. Not my cup of tea. That said, accosting a person in a restaurant is just a sign that you had terrible parents. Doing it over politics just means your parents were horrible people as well as being horrible parents. Sucker punching an out of shape 74-year old guy who is a foot shorter than you are is not a sign of manliness. Rather is labels you as a pu**y. With just a little bad luck, given Savage’s age, size, the disparate size and strength of the assailant, and the surprise nature of the attack, and Savage would have been killed. That would have been really funny, right?

This behavior is going to increase in frequency. Within a couple of months the left will have developed a cute little name for it and we’ll be told that it is constitutionally protected response to being triggered. Within six months a federal judge in somewhere in the Ninth Circuit or Maryland or New York will discover that it is actually a right to beat people who piss you off so long as you are a properly pedigreed and right-thinking person.

We are in very dangerous times. We are a hop-skip-and-jump from latter day Spartacists and Freikorps shooting it out. And I don’t know that we can stop or even that anyone wants to.