A fascinating hit piece in the Washington Post accuses Florida gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis of attending "racially charged" conferences.

A Ku Klux Klan convention?  A Neo-Nazi confab?  Perhaps some white supremacist meeting complete with secret handshakes and code words?

Nope.  The authors are accusing one of the leading public intellectuals on the right, David Horowitz, of sponsoring "racially charged" conferences, specifically Horowitz's "Restoration Weekend" meetings that feature leading conservative thinkers and opinion-makers.

Observe the casual nature of the article's smears – as if it is a given that their definition of "racially charged" has any meaning in any context outside partisan political hackery.

The Freedom Center covered DeSantis's expenses for the 2017 conference at a luxury resort in Palm Beach, according to disclosure forms he filed as a member of Congress.

Fellow speakers included a former Google engineer who was fired after arguing that "biological causes" in part explain why there are relatively few women working in tech and leadership; a critic of multiculturalism who has written that "Europe is committing suicide" by welcoming large numbers of refugees and immigrants; and a British media personality who urged the audience to keep the United States from becoming like the United Kingdom, where "discrimination against whites is institutionalized and systemic."

Full disclosure: American Thinker editor Thomas Lifson has spoken at Restoration Weekend conferences in the past, as have several AT contributors.  I bet they'd be surprised to learn of the "racially charged" nature of those meetings.

Controversial?  In some quarters, yes.  But "racially charged"?  Apparently, a meeting is "racially charged" only when speakers don't follow the scripted version of history and current events that the left follows.  Black Lives Matter meetings can be about all sorts of fantastical conspiracy theories involving the police deliberately targeting young black men for murder, and I have yet to see anyone at the Washington Post refer to those meetings as "racially charged."

Horowitz blasted DeSantis's critics.  "There's a lynch mob on his back," Horowitz said in an interview.  "Saying a black person is articulate is not racist – it's praising him for him being articulate.  Are there no inarticulate blacks?''

The hard-line positions Horowitz, 79, has taken on immigration, climate change and national security – once on the political fringes – have moved closer to the mainstream during the Trump presidency.

I'm sorry the authors have been asleep for the last decade.  Fighting illegal immigration, calling out hysterical prophets of climate change doom, and – dare I say it – defending America are not and never have been "fringe" anything. 

And those issues have not "moved closer to the mainstream" since Trump was elected.  They have been mainstream positions for years.

You would think the WaPo would hire writers who know a little bit about the subjects of their smears.  After all, an informed smear is always better than the uninformed smear, which only shows the writer to be an ignoramus.