WINGNUTS ARE AS AMERICAN AS APPLE PIE

That's one sad conclusion to be drawn from John C. Miller's Crisis in Freedom: The Alien and Sedition Acts. In the 1790s, the Federalists were the wingnuts of the day.

Like our current wingnuts, they had hysterical fears:

Confirmed pessimists (and, indeed, they had only to look to Europe to find their worst fears realized), their minds moved to such themes as "The Burning of Boston," "The Pillaging of Philadelphia," "The Execution by Guillotine of President Adams and his  Cabinet." (Miller, p. 23)

They disliked the cosmopolitan cities:

It was the population of the cities that they particularly distrusted: "Cities," said a Connecticut Federalist, "are subject to sudden passions, and the dupes of design" -they were "the seats of vanity, ignorance and vice." In Boston, Stephen Higginson declared, dwelt "all the seditious and desperate" -in sharp contrast to the country districts, inhabited by a virtuous, conservative -and largely Federalist- yeomanry. (Miller, pp. 33-34)

Some thought that God was actively on their side:

It was deemed significant, by some, that Jacobinism first appeared in the United States at almost the same time the country suffered its worst outbreak of yellow fever­ - the great epidemic of 1793 that for several months made Philadelphia, then the capital of the United States, a mere ghost city. From this coincidence they drew the conclusion "God had sent out one as a corrective of the other. Our have been punished in proportion to the extent of Jacobinism; and in general at leastthree out of four of the persons who have perished by pestilence have been over zealous partizans." (Miller, p. 40)

They also disliked immigrants:

Many Federalists shared Hanison Gray Otis's conviction that the root of all the evil in the United States was the large foreign-born population. Here was the chief source of oppo­sition to government, the breeding place of faction, the re­cruiting ground of the democrats. Coming from "a quarter of the world so full of disorder and corruption" as Europe, it was to be feared that immigrants would "contaminate the purity and simplicity of the American character"; "their principles spread like the leaven of unrighteousness; the the ignorant and the needy are thrown into a ferment, and corruption threatens the whole mass." (Miller, pp. 41-42)

Yes, the "librul media" was also to blame back then:

Just as the French monarchy had been overthrown by calumny and abuse, so, said Mrs. John Adams, "have their emissaries adopted the same weapons in this Country and the liberty of the press is become licentious beyond any former period."  Washington deplored the "cowardly, illib­eral and assassin like" efforts on the part of newspapers to "destroy all confidence in those who are entrusted with the Administration'' -the prelude, as the experience of European republics had revealed-to revolution. (Miller, p. 57)

UPDATE: I missed one - paranoia:

Menaced by French agents, Irish revolutionaries and internal enemies, the Federalists believed themselves to be as­sailed from yet another quarter -the Society of Illuminati. Supposedly, this was a world-wide secret organization dedi­cated to the destruction of all religious establishments and existing governments. Many Federalists were firmly con­vinced that the French Revolution and he slave uprising in St. Domingo were the handiwork of this society; and they did not doubt that emissaries of the Illuminati were at work in the United States itself. (Miller, p. 145)