Jared Kushner is the latest member of the Trump team to experience a full-blown demonization campaign, but there are already signs that others are in line for the same sort of treatment.  Part of the strategy in destroying the Trump insurgency is to let his allies know that they are in for trouble if they persist.  The left wants to impugn and, if possible, destroy anyone seen as an enabler of the Trump insurgency.

The Washington Post invested a lot of resources in publishing a nearly 4000 word-long “investigation,” that generates a conspiracy theory around one of my heroes, David Horowitz, like me, a former leftist who saw and grasped the underlying corruption inherent in leftist ideologies that deny human nature and promise utopia. It thus serves two purposes: adding a new target for other leftists to investigate and attack – putting him on the agenda, as it were – and offering up a fresh conspiracy theory – necessary in the continuing absence of any evidence at all of Russian “collaboration” with the Trump campaign, a non-crime in itself.

The title of the piece contains a tell on its bias: “How a ‘shadow’ universe of charities joined with political warriors to fuel Trump’s rise”

There is nothing “shadowy” about David Horowitz. In fact, in the course of the article he is “ dismissed…as a bombastic self-promoter” by Bill Kristol.

The lengthy piece begins with a breathless account of an event that it portrays as momentous.

The crowd rose to its feet and roared its approval as Sen. Jeff Sessions bounded onto the stage at the Breakers, an exclusive resort in Palm Beach, Fla. Stephen Miller, an aide to the Alabama Republican, handed him a glass trophy honoring his bravery as a lawmaker.

“Heyyyy!” Sessions yelled out to the crowd.

The ceremony that day, in November 2014, turned out to be a harbinger: It brought together an array of hard-right activists and a little-known charity whose ideas would soon move from the fringes of the conservative movement into the heart of the nation’s government.

The man behind the event was David Horowitz, a former ’60s radical who became an intellectual godfather to the far right through his writings and his work at a charity, the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Since its formation in 1988, the Freedom Center has helped cultivate a generation of political warriors seeking to upend the Washington establishment. These warriors include some of the most powerful and influential figures in the Trump administration: Attorney General Sessions, senior policy adviser Miller and White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon.

In the tale that unfolds, David Horowitz is portrayed as the man who brought together Bannon, Sessions, and --- hold your breath – the Mercers, the hedge fund billionaires that Hillary spun a vague, semi-incoherent conspiracy allegation around in her infamous blame-everyone-else speech at Recode:

 And I think again, we better understand that the Mercers did not invest all that money just for their own amusement. We know they played in Brexit, and we know that they came to Jared Kushner and basically said, “We will marry our operation,” which was more as it’s been described, psychographic, sentiment, a lot of harvesting of Facebook information, “We will marry that with the RNC on two conditions: You pick Steve Bannon, and you pick Kellyanne Conway. And then we’re in.” Trump says, “Fine, who cares,” right? So Bannon, who’d been running the Breitbart operation, supplying a lot of the … untrue, false stories …

The Wapo conspiracy features the Mercers and provides a little more information on who they are. (I suspect most readers already know.) The specific key incident concerns Pat Caddell, the Democrat pollster, who is credited with the blinding insight that inspired the members of the conspiracy to get together and get Donald Trump elected. See, in case it wasn’t the Russians, it had to be somebody else:

[Bannon] received an unexpected gift.

It came from Patrick Caddell, a veteran Democratic pollster who had once worked for President Jimmy Carter. He was speaking about his recent study of Americans’ sentiments toward Washington, the economy and the nation’s future. He said Americans were feeling glum: Two-thirds blamed self-serving elites in both parties for their troubles. They craved an outsider to shake things up.

His findings thrilled the crowd, Caddell told The Post in a lengthy interview. He earlier gave a similar account to the New Yorker.

Caddell said Bannon arranged for a private briefing the next day, to include Robert and Rebekah Mercer, a hedge fund billionaire and his daughter.

For two years, Bannon had worked with the Mercers, who invested millions in Breitbart News. The family also helped Bannon launch a Florida-based charity called the Government Accountability Institute, which describes itself as a nonpartisan investigative organization.

Bannon and the Mercers huddled with Caddell in a second-floor lounge at the Breakers. The Mercers were entranced by what they were hearing, Caddell told The Post, and Bannon “was ecstatic.”

“Being a basic rabble-rouser, it fit his views,” Caddell said.

Robert Mercer asked Caddell to confirm the poll’s findings, offering to pay the costs. Caddell told The Post the follow-up poll did just that. The charities and their media allies began to coalesce around the discontent that Caddell documented.

Full disclosure to readers: time for a confession. I was there. Before the subpoenas arrive, I want to make it clear that I was not at the briefings with the Mercers, though I did speak one-on-one with Pat Caddell, Jeff Sessions, and David Horowitz. I was a panelist on one of the programs at the meeting, as was AT co-founder Richard Baehr. I hope we won’t need to hire lawyers. There were hundreds of people there.

It is clear that the WaPo hopes to put the David Horowitz Center’s tax exemption up for dispute. But that would require a double standard, since there are far more tax exempt non-profits on the left, that avoid explicit partisan activity, while engaging in political activity.  Which means that the IRS will feel plenty of heat and may put Horowitz’s charity through hell.