Rick Wilson is one of the disillusioned Republicans who founded the Lincoln Project, and he recently opined about the devolution of the Grand Old Party. The Lincoln Project, as most of you are aware, was created by a group of long-time, well-respected strategists and operatives who had repeatedly been tapped for significant roles in high-profile Republican campaigns. The Project wasn’t composed of ordinary Republican voters who’d become disillusioned; it was the product of respected and savvy political professionals.

Wilson describes himself as an American political strategist, media consultant, and author. He’s produced televised political commercials for governors, U.S. Senate candidates, Super PACs, and corporations. (He’s also the author of the book Everything Trump Touches Dies.)

Wilson’s basic point in the rant that follows was that the GOP–far from being the party of Lincoln–is now the party of Marjorie Taylor Green, she of the “California fires were started by Jewish space lasers” and more recently “Being made to wear masks to battle the pandemic is just like what happened to the Jews during the Holocaust.”

Wilson’s takedown was heated and comprehensive, and I decided it was worth sharing in its entirety– so with apologies for the length of the quotation, here it is:

This woman is not an outlier. She is the core of the Republican Party. She is the heart and soul of the Republican Party. She is more important in the Republican Party ecosystem than Kevin McCarthy. He issued a pusillanimous, limp-dicked statement today about her finally after getting beat up for hours and hours on end, and I gotta tell you something: He does that because he wants to stay [minority leader]. And he knows that she is the future of the GOP. She is the core, the heart, the soul of what the Republican Party now stands for. It is idiotic, it is violently stupid. It hates experts, it hates authority, it hates science, it hates culture. It hates everything except their reflexive trolling of the rest of the country. She is a monstrous person. She is a person who I would not piss on her if she was on fire. She is a person who deserves all the public … shame you could possibly imagine. But here’s the thing: Kevin McCarthy will not take a single step to expel her from Congress. She is the heart and soul of the Republican Party today. She is exactly the center of it, she is what they have become, and everybody in the Republican Party who goes, ‘Oh, no, that’s not me,’ they only do it quietly. They won’t go out in her face and say, ‘Shut the hell up.’ They won’t go in her face and say, ‘You are a crude, anti-Semite clown.’ They won’t do that because they understand she is their future. She is the party as it is written today, she is the party as it is comprised today. I find her so repulsive and so disgusting that it is all I can do not to get myself thrown off social media by saying what I really feel about her.

Before you dismiss this diatribe as an overheated and exaggerated description of Greene’s influence, let me tell you about a recent incident in Nashvillle, Tennessee.

Hatwrks, a hat shop in Nashville, advertised an anti-vaccine yellow star patterned after those forced on Jews by Nazi Germany. Needless to say, that product has been met with considerable backlash; as a local rabbi told Nashville TV station WSMV, “Using the yellow star, or any holocaust imagery for anything, is a disservice to the memory of the six million Jews who were systematically murdered during the Holocaust.”

It boggles the mind that proprietors of any retail establishment would hear the ludicrous anti-Semitic ramblings of someone like Greene, and then produce a product endorsing her odious comparison. But then, it boggles the mind that a significant percentage of self-identified Republicans believe Donald Trump won an election that he lost decisively.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is obviously mentally ill, and she’s far from the only elected Republican to routinely manifest delusions and mental disorders. What is truly terrifying, however, is not the presence of a few mental cases–it is the accuracy of Rick Wilson’s accusation, and the fact that clinical insanity is arguably the central characteristic of a once-respectable political party.