Red Scares, Brown Scares, and Now Militia Scares

Jesse Walker has a thoughtful article over at Reason on the new Militia Scare. He explores the striking parallels to past"scares" (most notably FDR's Brown Scare of the 1930s and 1940s) which used broad-brush attacks, guilt-by-association, and other methods to smear critics:

In the wake of the Tiller and Johns murders, such sloppiness and worse is seeping into the mainstream media. For some pundits, the very basics of critical thought seem to have gone out the window, as they treat a handful of distinct crimes as sign of a rising menace without so much as bothering to check if there's been more small-scale rightist terror this year than in previous years.