If you could magically transform every word that has been written about Donald Trump over the last 14 months into food, we would have enough to end famine for a thousand generations. Because of this, it’s rare that you come across an essay that manages to say anything new or interesting about the election. Sure, about this remark or that one, but not any deeper than that.

Then came a writer going under the name “Publius Decius Mus,” a member of the conservative think-tank Claremont Institute. In a piece titled “The Flight 93 Election,” this writer lays out a stunning indictment of NeverTrump conservative intellectuals that goes right to the meat of the matter.

“One of the paradoxes—there are so many—of conservative thought over the last decade at least is the unwillingness even to entertain the possibility that America and the West are on a trajectory toward something very bad,” he writes.

Though the conservative intelligentsia can rattle off a thousand complaints about the Democratic Party and what they have done to the country, he says, they clearly do not believe that things are as bad as all that.

“Oh, sure, they want some things to change,” he writes. “They want their pet ideas adopted—tax deductions for having more babies and the like. Many of them are even good ideas. But are any of them truly fundamental? Do they get to the heart of our problems?”

Publius Decius Mus argues that if conservatives are right about all of the ills that liberalism has visited on the country, cultural and economic alike, “then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff.”

And yet, he writes, many of them are perfectly willing to choose Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump.

“A Hillary presidency will be pedal-to-the-metal on the entire Progressive-left agenda, plus items few of us have yet imagined in our darkest moments,” he writes.

If conservatives are serious about their values, he says, they will choose the only man in this election who promises to defend those values, no matter how imperfect he may be.

It’s an essay worth reading in its entirety at Claremont.org because it speaks to a disturbing truth about the conservative movement that you rarely see spoken. Sure, there has been plenty of scorn thrown on the Republican establishment, but maybe not enough has been saved for the Conservative establishment. The National Reviews, the Weekly Standards, the George Wills. Maybe it’s worth wondering if these institutions are more concerned about preserving “pure conservative theory” or about getting America off a freight train headed into hell.

Theory is all nice and well, but right now, we’ve got more important things to worry about.

Things like the imminent demise of Western civilization.