Today longtime Washington Post political scribe Dana Milbank has a column titled Trump brings bigots out of hiding. He starts off with several examples of the antisemitic abuse he took after branding Trump “a bigot and a racist” earlier this month.

“Let’s not mince words,” somebody tweeted under the name Helios Megistos. “Milbank is an anti-white parasite and a bigoted kike supremacist.”

Milbank continues:

The Twitterverse and social media generally can be dark places, as can the comments section of Post articles, and my email inbox. This is the seventh presidential campaign I’ve covered in some form over 25 years, and harsh criticism comes with the territory. But the Trump-backers’ venom is without precedent. His supporters surely aren’t all bigots — but he is bringing the bigoted in from the cold.

I write this not out of any hope of changing the minds of Trump-backers, nor to reinforce the prevailing view among liberals that Trump has unleashed ugliness. I write this to conservatives of conscience: Is this what you want conservatism, the Republican Party and America to be?

While Dick Cheney and Paul Ryan loudly condemned Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims entering the country, not one presidential candidate was willing to get even close to doing so on the debate stage this week in front of 18 million people. Even the candidates who had dared to express more than mild disagreement with a religious test for entry into the United States previously were much more up in arms about Trump’s apparent unfamiliarity with the term “nuclear triad” than anything else.

Personally, I feel like Trump is much more likely to be able to learn military terminology than unlearn how to be a vituperative bigot!

Shame upon every man and woman on that debate stage for being cowards. Shame upon the whole GOP for welcoming the absolute worst people in America into their “big tent” . I am pretty sure they could have figured out a way to lose the popular vote in 5 out of the last 6 presidential elections without enlisting the help of human detritus.

I know I and everyone to the left of Joe Lieberman will be doing our part to contain this toxic waste in the voting booth. However, it is fully up to Milbank’s “conservatives of conscience” to clean up this mess. Grab a fucking shovel.