New Orleans       When your name comes up in Google Alerts, it’s good to know what’s out there in the world, but mostly my advice from years of experience as often a pin cushion for right wing zealots, conspiratory hunters, and conservative crazies is to treat it like water off a duck’s back.  Yawn, ignore, and go on with my business.  For me that’s standard operating procedure, and I generally recommend it.  No sense in being paranoid.  Mostly it’s sound and fury signifying nothing.

Recently, when an alert sounded about yet another zany carom shot from the suits at the hyper-conservative, wannabe right wing governmental “think tank,” Capitol Research, I opened the link, scanned, sorted, and ignored with my usual indifference.  Then, I read an article about Trump and his team’s concerted attack on what they see as the “left” infrastructure of the Democratic Party.  I read the piece with some interest, even though I never would have exactly counted myself or the organizations we’ve built as part of any party’s infrastructure.  The basic thrust of the attack the Times reported was on party allied law firms and ActBlue – the small donor fundraising tool used by many Dem politicians.  They also mentioned wanting to see how they could get rid of the nonprofit tax status of many organizations they felt were troublesome to their anti-democratic ambitions by voicing dissent and opposition to their programs.  Hmmm, I thought, we’re now moving past my worry and warning about attacks on nonprofits to hearing about their more determined strategy and tactics.

But, then I read further,

Scott Walter, president of the conservative watchdog group Capital Research Center, which monitors liberal money in politics, recently briefed senior White House officials on a range of donors, nonprofit groups and fund-raising techniques. The White House group is said to be exploring what more can be done within the law. It is not unusual for partisans in Congress or their outside allies to push for investigations into political groups on the other side of the aisle.

But using the levers of government to target the opposition has long been considered an abuse of power, sometimes leading to prosecution.

Oh, no, not the Capitol Research Center home of broad stroked, guilt by association, innuendos disguised as research.  If they are briefing the White House on nonprofits, nothing good could come of this.

I went back a read their recent piece that had named me.  It was in piece by Michael Watson, one of their team entitled “A History of Everything Leftist Unionism:  The Rise of SEIU.”  I got my paragraph that squeezed in Local 100, ACORN, and SDS somehow into a devil’s brew of the trouble that comes with this Wade Rathke.  They also took a shot at the great Cecile Richards, who had begun as a union organizer with Local 100, before setting the world on fire in so many ways.  Most of it was on the John Sweeney and Andy Stern, former presidents of SEIU and what they had wrought in the labor movement and as party funders.  Basically, I was proud to be in such great company.  We may have all won some and lost some, but we were all American freedom fighters and democracy defenders, one and all.

That might not have been the right general lesson, though.  None of us can stop what we’re doing.  As we found in the attack on ACORN in 2009-10, the lesson has to be stand and fight.  There’s no place to hide, and we have to be willing to stand together.  At the same time, we need to batten down the hatches to be prepared and ready.  It’s not paranoia, when they announce they are coming after us.