The Obama claque’s attempts to smear the president’s opposition as a bunch of crazies are so transparent as self-serving propaganda that it’s tempting to think that none of its members actually believe it, but what if some of them actually do? In this important piece, Reason’s Jesse Walker asks some tricky questions about just that:

“We’ve heard a lot of warnings about extremist paranoia in the months since Barack Obama became president. We’ve heard much less about the paranoia of the centrists; indeed, the very idea that the sober center could be paranoid sounds bizarre. But when mainstream columnists treat a small group of unconnected crimes as a “pattern” of “rising right-wing violence,” their thesis bears more than a little resemblance to the conspiracy theories of the fringe figures they oppose. In both cases, the stories being told reflect the anxieties of the people discerning the patterns much more than any order actually emerging in the outside world.”

Read the whole thing.