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And yet there’s one fixed principle that has stood me in good stead over two decades of writing it: The minute you start sounding like a John Bircher, you’ve made a terrible mistake.

Tipped off by a creditor, North Carolina bankruptcy trustee John Bircher III, ran an online search on a Chesapeake, Va., businessman and found a newspaper article about his collection of 250 guitars.

“It all really boils down to whether the guy who did this was a member of, or inspired by an international terrorist organization,” says John Bircher, public relations director for the organization The Military Order of the Purple Heart and himself, like all of his colleagues, a recipient of the award.

It sounds like either the paranoid nightmare of a John Bircher or the wildly optimistic dream of Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders.

Then, in the late 1990s, Bachmann began reading David A. Boebel, an actual John Bircher Society member and minister who wrote in insane pamphlets for crazy people with names like "Communism, Hypnotism, and the Beatles."