I’m not sure “moderate” is exactly the right word here, but certainly Shapiro’s willingness to take a metric ton of flak for not being intellectually all-in for Donald Trump marks him as a different animal from, say, OAN. But Nelson’s point, especially his last line, applies more broadly, and not only to commentators as sharp-elbowed as Ben Shapiro. If you pay much attention to the Left’s pundit and intellectual class, the people they hate more than anyone — the targets that really raise their blood pressure — are conservatives who are educated, conservatives who are well-spoken and/or well-read, conservatives who speak the language of the upper middle class. In other words, the sorts of people who write at National Review. A lot of these folks have a deep-seated need to mock the idea that a conservative could ever be any of those things. You could see this, for example, in how much more viscerally many of them hated Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio than they ever hated Trump. Trump, after all, flatters their self-image; he presents a face of conservatism that marks conservatives as uninformed people with crude vocabularies who belong to a lower social class. But anyone who threatens the idea that all the smart people know to be on our side, that is who really raises their ire.