By Craig Andresen Right Side Patriots

Over the past couple of weeks, since the GOP convention, I…along with others from the #NEVERTRUMP camp, including my friend and colleague Diane Sori…have been regaled with charges of abandoning our principles for stating that we will now be voting for Trump in November.

We have been told, primarily by Cruz supporters, that we have become traitors and that we have become Trumpers.

I believe it is time to clear the air and put our position into its proper perspective related to the reality of the big picture, and I hope many of those who have taken to social media, acting just as the true Trumpers did leading up to the convention, hurling vile insults at us will take the time to read this article through to the end and reevaluate their position.

Here we go…

Leading up to the convention, I was solidly in the Cruz camp, believing he was the best man for the job. Cruz was, and is, a constitutionalist, a man with a vast wealth of knowledge, a man who sees clearly the faltering and failing position of our nation on the world stage and who sees clearly the issues we face at home. Cruz had, and articulated policy plans that would have and could have brought this great nation back from the brink of disaster and would have, without a doubt in the world, made the best appointments to our courts, including the Supreme Court, that would have ensured that the Constitution be followed in all such matters.

But, at the end of the day, a day that ended at the convention, Ted Cruz was not our party nominee. Donald Trump was.

Yes, I, along with so many others, was a part of the #NEVERTRUMP camp, hoping that somehow, he would be stopped at the convention, but when those efforts failed…my focus shifted.

My focus shifted away from a singular candidate and directly to our nation because, as I have always believed, the time to take a rock solid stand for a specific candidate, the time to get behind one candidate and do everything possible to get that person the nomination, is during the primaries and leading up to the convention, but as I have said over the years, once the convention is over, and a candidate has been named, it is time to drop our individual candidates of choice if they are not the nominee.

This election cycle, we are faced with daunting choices.

The Republican nominee, Donald Trump, instills little if any confidence in those of us who have been against him from the beginning as reality paints a dubious, at best, picture of him. However, the liberal nominee is far, far worse.

While Donald Trump is a train wreck in the making, and while a Trump presidency would be dangerous…we know exactly what to expect of Hillary Clinton just as we know exactly who and what she is.

There are a few things the #NEVERTRUMP voters can do…

They can simply stay home and not vote at all.

They can go to the polls and vote a straight Republican down-ballot while leaving the presidential box blank.

Or they can write in their substitute candidate of choice.

In any of these three cases, they will say that they are voting, or acting on their conscience, as their conscience and principles will not allow them to vote either for Trump or Clinton, but here is the problem with that stand…

In doing any of the above three things…those voters are willfully and purposefully aiding Hillary Clinton’s efforts in November whether or not they believe it. You see…among those who will not vote for Trump, there are those who will vote for a variety of substitute candidates which means that no one substitute candidate will garner enough votes to even make them a faint blip on the final vote radar.

Further, every non Trump vote helps Hillary Clinton as far, far more Republicans will be splitting our side’s votes that there will be liberals splitting the vote between Hillary and Sanders.  You see, every vote by a liberal for Hillary adds up…1+1+1+1 and so on…while every non Republican vote for someone other than Trump comes out to 0+0+0+0 and so on.

This is where my conscience and my principles, and those of others who are now looking at the big picture come into play.

Rather than attaching my principles and/or my conscience to any particular candidate…I, and many others, have attached our principles as well as our consciences to our country.

While we realize that Trump is what he is, and that he neither is nor will be a savior to our great nation, we believe that he is the only viable alternative to stopping Hillary Clinton because we know that, despite our emotions, no 3^rd party or write-in candidate can win in November.

Hillary Clinton has a long, long history of unethical behavior, of lying, of cover-ups as well as a history of espionage, violating the laws we must, as citizens, abide, of being above the laws the rest of us are held accountable to and of treason against our nation.

We know that Hillary Clinton is pro-muslim, will be pro-Iran and their nuclear ambitions and we know that Hillary is as decidedly anti-Israel as is Obama.

We know, that being above the law, Hillary will continue to flaunt and violate our nation’s laws in her efforts to finish what Obama has started…the fundamental transformation of America…from a Constitutional Republic into a socialist/Marxist empire ruled by government dictates and mandates rather than of, for and by the people.

We know full-well that Hillary Clinton will appoint far left judges to the courts, including to the Supreme Court who will hold sway by legislating from the bench the sorts of agenda items that will end many of the freedoms upon which our Founders and Framers knew to be paramount to a free people.

Gone will be our 1^st and 2^nd Amendment rights. Gone will be our Constitutional protections down the line. Under a Hillary Clinton presidency and administration, we will no longer be a nation of freedom…we will become a nation of people serving the whims of government.

Under a Hillary presidency, socialism, under the guise of “equality” will make us all equal at the bottom of the ladder while only government elites and those with an inside track to them will prosper as that is exactly what the socialist/Marxist…the liberal agenda…is aimed at.

One thing I can say unequivocally, is that Trump is neither a Marxist nor a socialist. Trump is a capitalist no if’s, ands or buts about it but can I also say that Trump, a life-long democrat until just a couple of years ago when he registered as a Republican, will act, as a president, in the way we would like a Republican president to act straight down the line?

No…but with Trump, there is the hope that he will design a cabinet of those who will advise him to do so and the hope that he will heed such advice.

With a Hillary presidency, absolutely no such hope exists and we know also, full-well, that Hillary’s primary advisor will be Huma Abedin replacing Valerie Jarrett…that is to say the Iranian agent advisor will simply be swapped out for the Muslim Brotherhood advisor and that is something Trump would not have in his inner circle.

All of this now said, I am fully aware that there are still those reading this that say their conscience will not allow them to vote for Donald Trump and that they will instead, on principle, write in someone else. They will say that they are doing what’s best for the country because neither Hillary nor Trump is worthy of the office. Those same folks will also continue to claim that I, and others, have abandoned our principles because we will vote for Trump in November.

I submit that those are folks who have, either out of pride, emotion or both, adhered themselves to a specific candidate rather than to our nation and they have become so invested in their candidate of choice that they either fear the scorn they will take from others in their camps or they would feel embarrassed at this stage to walk away from what they have stated via social media.

I admit that I too struggled with this concept but in the end, I resolved it by asking myself, what would our Founders and Framers expect of me?

Would the Founders and Framers want me to stand on an individual island of my own emotions while claiming it to be a matter of principle, casting my vote in such a way as to allow a treasonous snake to assume the highest office in the land based on the 1+1+1+1 VS. 0+0+0+0 concept, or would they expect me to cast my vote based on the concept of preserving, based on the hope that a candidate would surround himself with those whose agenda would be based on the Constitution, our Republic?

The answer was quite clear.

The Constitutional Republic, envisioned by and entrusted to us by the Founders and Framers will be destroyed by the ilk of Hillary Clinton but even with the dubious nature of Trump, it would survive to be rebuilt down the road and that is exactly what I believe our Founders and Framers would want under these circumstances….for us to do everything possible to keep the Republic intact enough to rise again to its rightful place on the world stage as a beacon of light and freedom rather than to be destroyed by a traitor.

I believe our nation can survive a Trump presidency. I know with conviction that it will fall under Hillary Clinton.

Therefore, I have not, in any way, been swayed by the Trumpers. I have not become, in any way, a Trumper. I also am not a Trump supporter, nor a blind follower of Trump, but what I am, and it is all that I am, is a Trump voter.

While my principles and my conscience both tell me that Cruz would have been a far, far better choice to become our next president, they both also tell me in no uncertain terms, that Trump would be a far, far better choice, given the current election cycle circumstances than Hillary Clinton, and I further submit to those who will, no doubt, continue their attacks against me and those who, like myself and Diane Sori, along with so many others are looking at the big picture not through glasses clouded by emotion, fear of scorn or adherence to any specific candidate but through the clear glasses of what is truly best for our nation’s future regardless of its present situation…if you take the 0+0+0+0 option against the liberal, socialist/Marxist Hillary Clinton 1+1+1+1 option…you will be far more responsible for our demise that we.

What those of us like Diane, others and myself believe, as a matter of principle and conscience, is that we have the ultimate responsibility to see to it that the treasonous, lying, anti-American, anti-Israel, pro-muslim socialist/Marxist Hillary Clinton never, ever becomes the occupier of our Oval Office…even if it means that we must don clothes pins on our noses this November to stench the irritating stink of having to vote for Donald Trump.

We can tolerate the smell, and we are willing to suffer the slings and arrows coming from those whose emotions are, for the time being, preventing them from seeing the big picture, because we know that the alternative is ever so much worse.

If the Republican vote splits 6 ways from Sunday this November, and we wind up with a Hillary presidency as a result of it, which we most surely will under that scenario, and any who take the 0+0+0+0 option then stand on their claimed island of principle and conscience to say that, at least they didn’t vote for either so they can’t be blamed…

It will be their principles and their consciences that should be brought under scorn and scrutiny…not ours…as we will have voted to give our great nation a fighting chance vs. their having voted in such a way to give her no chance at all.

Setting aside my emotional attachment to Ted Cruz, as well as my distrust of Trump was a matter of pragmatism based on the principle of allowing my conscience to clearly see the bigger picture. If I can do it, I know others can as well.

This is not, in any way, about uniting in support of Donald Trump…this is about uniting in support of the future of the Constitutional Republic and our always great nation against a treasonous snake whose very agenda is meant to destroy it all.

As Ted Cruz, my candidate of choice urged me to do, I will vote my conscience by casting my vote in November for the only candidate with a chance of keeping Hillary out of the White House in order to preserve what’s left of the country I love until we can nominate a candidate who embodies the principles and conscience of the Founders and Framers.

I urge the entire #NEVERTRUMP movement to set aside their emotions, drop their emotional intent to write-in a substitute candidate’s name and adopt pragmatism over their individual feelings lest we lose our nation to a traitor. Remaining #NEVERTRUMP in the face of a Hillary presidency is not taking a stand on either principle or conscience…it is, in my belief, turning one’s back on the principles and consciences of the Founders and Framers.

It is far better to be a part of the pragmatic solution than the problematic destruction when our country’s future is at stake.