1. When I first started researching the militia movement, aeons, together, I was struck by how frequently adherents claimed there was no difference between Democrats and Republicans (frequently calling them all "Republicrats"). Eventually I came to understand something important:

2. Extremists look at the rest of society like someone peering into the wrong end of a telescope. Viewed this way, other people seem a) very far away from you and b) very close to each other. As a result, people on both the right and left fringes find it difficult to distinguish

3. between mainstream society and the opposing fringe. This in turn often leads the extremists to view their counterparts as having more power and influence than they do, which probably makes them more vulnerable to conspiracy theories as well. It also means they are more likely

4. to have difficulty distinguishing among different types of opposing extremists and to be more likely to lump them all together. This latter quality can sometimes be seen in the way the far left (or even just the left) looks at right-wing extremists, with many tending to view

5. all of them as "fascist" and many tending to view all of them as racist or white supremacist. All these dynamics may also help explain why both right and left fringes tend to have such hostility towards moderates or "centrists," as they may view such people as being closer to

the opposing extremist fringe than to themselves.

*in that first tweet, it should read "aeons ago," not "aeons, together." Not sure what happened there. I blame Obama.