So I'm reading Flashback by Dan Simmons. The setting is

[Bucky]

11. Sadly, most of what wingnuts genuinely believe is just that OTT

just cause it seems ridiculous to you doesn't mean someone else doesn't think it's a just a few months away from happening. A few years ago I read some cockamamie essay by a well respected SciFi author--a very talented writer--and it was essentially a story about his own son, then still a toddler but now 60 years old and heavily battle scarred, who'd jumped back in time from the mid-2050s where he was a mechawarrior fighting in the North American resistance movement against the imposition of Shariya law on the former United States. His child was warning him about how Muslim fanatics had overrun our society because we were too tolerant of them and had failed to realize that most of the immigrants to the US from the Middle East were sleeper agents waiting entire generations to conquer us.

We can laugh off such silliness, but this was the same type of paranoia that led a reliable lib like FDR to lock up all the Nissei. For that matter, it's the same paranoia that led Germans to believe half a million Jews--mostly shop keepers and urban professionals--could manipulate a nation of 66 million Germans. Crazy doesn't need your stinkin' facts.