HUSH, DARLING, YOU'RE SCARING THE CHILDREN:

When 65-year-old Scott Gudmundsen of Loveland, Colorado, saw two men in blue polo shirts bearing the name of a roofing company in his neighborhood, he knew just what to do. He called the police, warning them that there were "antifa guys" in the area, and "I am going out there to confront them." When police arrived on the scene, they found Gudmundsen in fatigues and tactical gear, holding the two young men at gunpoint. Weirdly enough, they turned out to be not "antifa guys" but ... roofers.

It's one small story, albeit one of particularly vivid stupidity. But there is a specter haunting American conservatives. It's clad in a black hoodie and bent on destroying their homes, their communities, and their very lives. Antifa, they believe, is coming for them.

They believe it because it's what they're being told, not only by conservative media but by the president of the United States, who among other things claimed that the 75-year-old man in Buffalo who was pushed to the ground by police in riot gear was actually an "antifa provocateur." And there's a very good reason it's happening right now.

It's not because antifa itself has in any objective sense grown more powerful or threatening in the last month or so. It's because the urgency of the movement for police reform, and the striking change in Americans' opinions about Black Lives Matter, has left many on the right in a psychologically difficult spot.

Many of the subtle and not-so-subtle ideas about societal order and the threat from supposedly criminal (or generally uppity) black people that they've relied on in the past have become more problematic to argue for in public, at least for the moment. And because anger and fear are both the foundation of Donald Trump's presidency and the ideology of media outlets like Fox News, a temporary redirection was in order. Enter antifa.

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