To me, this story could be framed more usefully. Rather than asking if toxic talk will re-emerge (which is speculative), it would be better note the importance of being on guard against it. If the author had links, or at least quoted more extensively from "Start Stopping Obama Now!" by Jay Severin (see link) readers would have known that this article called for destabilizing the Obama presidency to avoid his re-election in 2012--which to me has more import than the author's sarcastic aside about the minutemen would have left me to believe. The author loses some credibility by quoting so extensively from Morris Dees's Southern Poverty Law Center, which has received criticism as being more about its fundraising than its mission in both Harpers ( "The church of Morris Dees: How the Southern Poverty Law Center profits from intolerance" by Ken Silverstein) and the Progressive ( "Poverty Palace, How the SPLC Got Rich Fighting the Klan" by John Edgerton.) Neither article is currently available online and both were embraced by the white supremicist groups Dees fights. But Dees has also been criticized for his conflating anarchists like the WTO protesters with the racist groups he is more known for fighting. The incident in Maine, BTW, didn't result in any charges, according to John Richardson in the Portland Press Herald on November 22. The sign reported by the AP reporter was gone by the time police came to investigate (link).