Read this paragraph from a recently posted postmortem on the 2022 Pennsylvania election:
State senator Doug Mastriano, on the other hand, romped to victory in his primary for the open gubernatorial seat on a ticket of 100 percent pure unfiltered MAGA “stolen election” revanchism. While Oz’s campaign was merely sluggish and tone-deaf, Mastriano’s was actively toxic. An ultra-conservative in a swing state, he was most known for speaking at a QAnon-friendly “Patriot” conference and attending the January 6 protests outside the U.S. Capitol, and for then doubling down on his belief that the 2020 election was stolen and that he, as governor, would intervene in future elections to prevent that from happening.
Now, guess where it comes from.
Is it some left-leaning Biden-liking commentary from some mainstream media news source?
Nope - it's from The National Review.
For those who do not know, The National Review is one of the pillars of American Conservatism. It's been around since 1955. That's seven years before Ronald Reagan left the Democratic Party, saying, "I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me."
From The NYTimes:
Year Zero was 1955, when William F. Buckley Jr. started National Review, the small-circulation magazine whose aim, Buckley explained, was to “articulate a position on world affairs which a conservative candidate can adhere to without fear of intellectual embarrassment or political surrealism.” Buckley excommunicated the John Birch Society, anti-Semites and supporters of the hyperindividualist Ayn Rand, and his cohort fused the diverse schools of conservative thinking — traditionalist philosophers, militant anti-Communists, libertarian economists — into a coherent ideology, one that eventually came to dominate American politics.
Buckley would be appalled at the state of the current GOP, dominated as it is by a QAnon-infested crowd intent on turning the party's collective back on most, if not all, of Buckley's coherent political ideology.
To them, it's just RINO.
And I don't think that this piece from the National Review will move any of them. Let's be honest: for those conservatives still clinging to Buckley's bi-weekly, they can't actually leave the GOP. The GOP has already left them.