On Tuesday night's Hardball, MSNBC's Chris Matthews invited Mark Potok of the leftist Southern Poverty Law Center to estimate when all this frightening and hateful anti-government militia talk started. Potok argued it began with Ronald Reagan, and his supposed description of "the federal government as a kind of enemy."

Matthews said one could be concerned about government growing too large, "But then there are people who've taken up arms. There are people who are worried about the black helicopters. There are people that think now not that government's a problem but government's the enemy, that it's foreign, that it's almost like the old Kremlin wall, you know? They think of it as hostile. When did that start, Mark?"

Liberal TV show host? Want to guarantee that the post-Stack finger will be pointed at conservatives?  Choose as your sole guest on the subject someone from the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center. That's precisely what Chris Matthews did this evening, with utterly predictable results.

Right on script, SPLC director Mark Potok twice associated Austin plane-bomber Andrew Stack with "the radical right."

How consciously did Matthews stack the deck?  He described the SPLC as a group "which monitors extremists"—as if the SPLC looks for wackos on the left as well as the right.

CNN anchor Rick Sanchez and guest Mark Potok of the liberal Southern Poverty Law Center concluded that there was a “disconcerting” infiltration of militia groups into tea party and health care town hall protests during a segment on Thursday’s Newsroom. The two focused on the appearance of armed people at these events, and one individual’s apparent connection to a militia which plotted violence.

Sanchez interviewed Potok at the bottom of the 3 pm Eastern hour on how Ernest Hancock, a Ron Paul supporter and online radio host, reportedly defended the members of a militia called the Viper Team. Hancock also interviewed an acquaintance of his who openly-carried an AR-15 near a venue where President Obama was speaking. Before introducing Potok, the CNN anchor used a clip from a former Secret Service agent he interviewed to hint that Hancock and his acquaintance were “gun nuts.” He then played a clip of the rifle-carrying individual himself, who railed against taxation which redistributed wealth and a tyranny of the majority: “I want this and that, this and that, and I’ll just vote and take it from you. The burden of all this thievery gets too thick.....we will forcefully resist people imposing their will on us through the strength of the majority with a vote.” Sanchez then implied that these words were a threat of violence: “Somehow, the words ‘forcefully resist’ coming from a man with an AR-15 outside a presidential event is just a little unsettling.”

SANCHEZ: Since the administration of Barack Obama began in this country, has there been a heightened sense of any kind of hate? We first started discovering this last night in one of the interviews we did.

But before we do that, I want to show you something now. I want you to just write down some numbers. These are hate groups in the United States, all right? Let's start with the first year. I think we're going to start with the year 2000 -- 602 hate groups at the time in the United States, as counted by the best resource on this, by the way, the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Now let's go to 2007. Uh-oh. It's going up, 888. Now let's go to 2008. Uh-oh. Going up again, 926.

POTOK: Well, as you suggested in your intro, there have been quite a growth over the last eight years.

Until about a year ago, that growth was driven almost entirely by these groups pushing the immigration issue and especially the idea that people with brown skin are kind of coming to destroy our country. In the last year, though, we have seen several other factors come into play, you know, the assent, obviously, of Barack Obama, the announcement by the Census Bureau that whites will lose their majority in this country along about the year 2042, and the crashing economy and worsening unemployment.