New Orleans   This is scary, and not because it’s the devil trying on a pair of angel wings, but because it’s reads like it is smart, comprehensive and effective. I’m talking about the fact that the Koch Brothers are looking past Trump and 2016, win or lose, and going for the long term victories at the grassroots level by implementing a training program to develop activists and, gulp, community organizers. They appear to have picked up our playbook, financed it, and are getting ready to run way past us!

An extensive report in the New York Times detailed the work of their “secret weapon,” the Grassroots Leadership Academy, a division of Americans for Prosperity Foundation, the political education arm of the Koch network. The curriculum appropriates “Saul Alinsky, the Marxist-inspired Frankfurt School, and even President Obama’s Organizing for Action.” This program isn’t small potatoes either. They claim to have held training sessions since February 2015 in three dozen states that have been attended by 10,000 people at a cost to the Koch’s of a bit more than $3 million which the intend to scale up even bigger in 2017 and beyond.

Here’s what’s worse. In many ways, they “get it” about community organizing. Maybe even more than progressives do these days.

Listen to Levi Russell, Americans for Prosperity’s communications director:

“We want a cultural shift of people being able to know what they want and how to talk to the people in their communities, so that in the future, when there are political leaders that want to demagogue free-market issues, they do hit resistance.”

With all of the discussion about the impact of demagoguery on the natural, working class base of the Democratic Party, wonder why they don’t understand this?

Listen to Slade O’Brien, vice president of the Grassroots Leadership Academy about what he learned from progressive political tactics:

”It was incredibly relationship-driven; it was truly at the grass-roots level. And they didn’t have to agree on everything to agree to work on something – that incremental victories matter, and they would work on those rather than swing for the fences and try to hit a home run.”

This is scary. They do have an understanding of the basics of community organizing, and they are making it their tool!

O’Brien added, astutely, that “You can’t just show up at somebody’s door six weeks before an election and build a relationship with them…” Like I say, he gets it, and if he gets it, the benefits are going to accrue to conservatives of the Koch stripe.

This is smart strategy, just like any national community organizing strategy. The Koch’s are trying to plant organizers all around the country. They are giving them tools, including how to attract media and use props in demonstrations. Sure not all of this will work. Not every root will branch, but if they keep this up, they will develop a more effective grassroots base and plant their own forest around the country. I would guarantee that.

You have to wonder: why aren’t we doing this?