Thad P asks: “I’m confused, what does “guilt by association” mean?”

Ask Red says: Reasoned people describe it as a fallacy, but the ages have proven GBA zealots can level unjustified hurt on the innocent. In Salem, Mass. in the late 1600s it could have resulted your being burned at the stake as a witch because someone saw you in a forest after midnight. In the 1950s, you could have been brought before U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s committee trying root out communism in America because you were friends with someone who didn’t pledge his allegiance to the flag. Today, if you are a youth in some places it means an arbitrary disgracing by those who don’t remember what it was like being young.