Of course not, but bureaucrats in my home state of Missouri evidently think otherwise. Or maybe they’re just hungry for attention.

As it happens, the new, March 23 issue of TAC carries an important essay by Philip Jenkins on the regularity with which hysteria about “far Right” movements recurs during Democratic presidential administrations. It’s like clockwork. With FDR, we got the “Brown Scare” of the 1930s. In the Kennedy-Johnson era, there was much angst about the Minutemen and John Birch Society. And under Clinton there was the Great Militia Panic of the 1990s, which saw a budding Timothy McVeigh in every gunowner. Obama has been in power barely three months, and already the Left (and law enforcement, which has a financial stake in whipping up hysteria) is conforming to the pattern.

You can read the Jenkins piece on-line right now if you’re a subscriber to TAC by logging in here. (And if you’re not a subscriber, you can sign up now and get instant access to our current issue and full archives in PDF form.)