If ever time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.

Samuel Adams

I’ve used this quote often over the last 10 months. I am always moved by how wise our founding fathers were. It was as if they had some sixth sense about what was to come for this land.

Or maybe it was just common sense, allowed to flourish in the absence of reality TV, video games, and the moral relativism of the left.

Whatever it was, we, as a nation, have drifted afar from the shores of virtue and patriotism that were once the glory of the new world. Until Tuesday, there was a fragile hope of rising up as a people and retaining some fragments of our noble past.

Alas, it was not to be.

I don’t think the reality of what has been wrought on us has fully settled in. There are some feeble and appeasing voices that are saying, almost as if to convince themselves as much as anyone else, that maybe a Trump nomination won’t be so bad.

Other voices have resigned themselves to fate, out of party unity. We must back Donald Trump and come together as a unified party, in order to save the party and defeat the Democrats in November.

I have a different take. The Democrats have already won. They played the game masterfully. Republicans would have never of thought of sending in one of their own, a lifelong conservative, with a solid record of backing socially and fiscally conservative causes and candidates, to register as a Democrat and then run on the Democrat ticket.

Of course, that scenario probably wouldn’t have worked as well. Apparently, Democrats have principles. They’re all wrong, but at least they stand on what they believe. No one claiming to be a Democrat, but with a record of conservatism and who would openly profess policies that are the exact opposite of the progressive platform would ever get very far.

Tuesday, we saw the death of the Republican party. Sure, there will be some shell of what calls itself the GOP that hangs on a bit longer, but the day they allowed a Manhattan liberal to become the face of the party, it was over.

There is no conservatism in the Republican party, anymore. There is only Trumpism. Its founder is a cultish figure leading a Heaven’s Gate revival of virulent, populist anger. He has raised up the ugliest, most hateful and pathetic wretches of our society and mobilized them to drag the nation into hellish oblivion.

These cultists cling to every syllable he breathes with ravenous devotion. There will be no dissention. There will be no question. There will be no debate. His word is law, even as he preaches things they formerly claim to have stood against.

It’s frightening to watch, but it’s equally disheartening to see so-called leaders and voices in the conservative movement say we must unify behind an unqualified, dangerous charlatan, for the sake of saving the party.

I’m sorry. I cannot. I will not.

My loyalty was never to a party. My loyalty is to a set of principles. My loyalty is, and always has been with the conservative movement. It is that movement that was once embodied within the platform of the Republican party, but apparently, is no more.

The party has been infested.

I will mourn the party, as I mourn our nation, but if we are to save the nation from progressive, big government overreach, and the creeping cancer of Trumpism, we need other options. I’m not sold on the Libertarian option. The platform has some fiscal ideas that I could potentially get behind, but socially there are points that aren’t to my conservative comfort.

We need a genuine conservative option. We need a small government, free market, God-country-family conservative champion.

Now is the time for a conservative third party option to emerge. The time has come and to not take this leap of faith may very well consign our nation to certain ruin. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government.

Thomas Paine

What I tend to hear when I mention Rick Perry is his two failed attempts. Granted, in 2012 he jumped in unprepared, but by 2015 when he announced, he had done his homework and he was more than ready. He was, unfortunately, hindered by the indictment for abuse of power that was still hanging over his head in Texas. It staunched the flow from big money donors that would normally have kept him afloat. That, and the party was crushed with 17 candidates, all vying for the nomination.

It’s hard to get traction with that kind of chaos.

I contend that this is Governor Perry’s chance, and our nation’s chance to get it right. With Trump as the new face of the GOP, many disenfranchised conservatives are looking for another option. Governor Perry is well known, well liked, is the best retail politician in the business, and has a record of executive leadership that is unequaled by anyone running for either party.

He was persecuted by corrupt Texas Democrats and stood his ground. In the end, he won and the charges for abuse of power were dismissed, but it was too late to save his run for the nomination. This would likely play well to conservative media, as a story of principled conservatism, no matter the cost.

Those who are grieving the death of common sense in this nation will look back and see that it was Rick Perry who first stood against the threat of Trumpism. In fact, it was Perry who coined the phrase as early as July 2015, saying:

He offers a barking carnival act that can be best described as Trumpism: a toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued. Let no one be mistaken – Donald Trump’s candidacy is a cancer on conservatism, and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised and discarded. It cannot be pacified or ignored, for it will destroy a set of principles that has lifted more people out of poverty than any force in the history of the civilized world – the cause of conservatism.

Principles. Rick Perry has them.

Looking back over the speech that yielded that warning, it’s clear that Perry is the kind of serious leader we need. Conservatives should be camping out on his lawn in Round Top, Texas, begging him to run.

An interesting turn of events came to light in late March, when the Texas Tribune reported that while Perry showed up in person to pick up an absentee ballot for the March 1 Texas Republican primary, the Fayette County Board of Elections, where he is registered, never received the ballot.

Perry, who endorsed Ted Cruz and was actively campaigning with him, insists that he mailed the ballot in, but apparently, it was lost in the mail.

Call it fate. Call it random chance, but whatever you call it, by his lack of a vote in the primary, he was made eligible to run as a third party candidate.

Will he run, is the question. Will anybody step forward to save us from this pit the mindless masses and a vile, complicit media have dug for us?

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.

Abraham Lincoln