The line to draw, I feel, is are you attacking institutions (i.e. smashing the windows of Wall Street, chaining yourself to the doors of the police station), or people (like the loons here in Oregon attacking minority families during the fires)? Are you harassing oppressed groups (like kristallnacht did) or the overpowered establishment (like Blair Mountain did)?

(Obviously, punching individual Nazis is still fine.)

But really, at the end of the day, violence is still violence, and while it may be the right action, it is never a good action. That is something I feel all protesters need to keep in mind.

To paraphrase Dan Shive, there are times when you best (or only) choices lie between the least-bad and most-bad options. And when that happens, humans tend to try and rationalize the least-bad choice as being the good one. This is a trap. If you start to think of the least-bad choice as a good choice, pretty soon you start to believe it—and then you stop looking for the actual good options.

Even if an actual good option—like a nonviolent protest—isn’t feasible for one situation, you should always try to find a truly good option, if you can. That’s why the combo of violent protests on one side, peaceful group on the other, tends to get the best results.