Stop the circular firing squad. I’m here to tell you it is not only crazy, it is counterproductive.

No, Mitt was not the man we wanted. Yes, he was shoved on us by the establishment. But he was the best candidate we could have this year, and he campaigned well. He campaigned like he wanted it. Unlike McCain, he deserves our thanks, and a place as speaker at future conventions.

Why did we lose then?

Let’s start with the media. You don’t have to take my word for it. Go look at videos of the conventions. The Republicans’ reasonable convention, reasonable concentrating on the economy, made not a dent. But the Democrats abortionpalooza where we were told we belonged to the government, that became the great convention of the century.

The media kept the Republicans in a cone of silence, when they weren’t amplifying Obama’s attacks.

A science fiction editor posted on Facebook yesterday that we must make sure that we voted for Obama, or we’d be back in the fifties with segregation and without women’s rights.

How can they even believe that? What part of the Republican platform had anything to do with that?

And all of my libertarian friends who think the problem is that Romney didn’t say he was okay with contraception and abortion — since when was contraception and abortion part of the campaign? The Republicans campaigned on the economy. Contraception and abortion were the media’s theme, introduced in the Republican primary. It was never in doubt that it wouldn’t be outlawed — a president can’t do that.

And yet even our side thinks that’s what it was about, and tears into each other over it.

And the socons can stop whining, too, that if we’d only had a true conservative … I will tell you right now, I’d have voted for Santorum only because I’d have voted for Satan himself against Obama. I can’t imagine a worse combination than someone who wants to regulate both my private life and my economic life. And I’m a conservative and I am, for the record, pro-life (I am an abortion survivor and wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been botched. You want to fight over it, libertarians, go right ahead. I’m fairly sure I’m a person even if mom would have preferred I weren’t alive — and had actual good reasons for it having to do with her health.) and very iffy on contraception due to my distrust of all unneeded chemical tampering with the body.

A “true conservative” candidate would not have a snowball’s chance in hell. Reagan, even, wasn’t that. No. I was alive then. Go look it up. He was conservative where it counted, which was fixing our economy and defeating the USSR. That’s it.

So, why did Mitt lose? How? The media. It’s hard for us to believe but our neighbors still believe it. Our neighbors know nothing about Benghazi. They’ve bought the cooked job numbers. They actually think things are getting better. I heard it over and over this morning from my college-educated friends: “Oh, good, now we can have a chance to get better.”

Yes, they deserve what they get, for their blindness, their willful ignorance.

But it’s not all their fault. It is ours too. We’ve hid in the political closet. We’ve eschewed politics in polite company. We’ve become what gays used to be: a minority that’s safe to ridicule. At that, I’m not even sure we’re a minority. I think the people who believe in the Constitution are still a majority in this country. It’s just that they’re not “racist, homophobic, religious bigots, uninformed, stupid, misogynistic.” Neither are you, you say?

Neither am I. I just believe in small government. But the media portrays us as all of those things — and so people never look at our true principles.

We’re horrible, uncaring people. We hate everyone. We’re stupid too. We’re something out of a comedic routine.

And we let it go on.

Why do we let it go on? Because the leftists are capable and willing to wreak havoc on our personal lives, our jobs, our very being, if we oppose the slightest bit of their Marxist, statist agenda. So we shut up. We have jobs, we have children, we have outdoor pets who could suffer. We shut up.

And we let the stereotype go on.

If you have gay friends — weirdly for such “homophobic” people, a lot of us do — ask them about the effects of such closeting of who you are. The effects on yourself, the effects on society. I still remember when gays were a safe target of every comedy. No more. People have found out there’s more to gay men than mincing, lisping figures of fun. They’ve found gay people are their brothers, their sisters, their friends, their co-workers.

And gay people have found that they are better for being themselves.

I came out as a conservative about two years ago.

It hurt my income and I didn’t have the room for it to be hurt. It hurt my social standing with my peers. But I sleep better at night. (Not last night. No. Not even with the pint of Jim Beam.) And I feel I was doing what I had to do.

I’m an American. We don’t go quietly into that good night, and we come from the spiritual stock of people who risked their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor in pursuit of liberty.

Without them there would be no Americans. Without them we wouldn’t be trying to get back what would never have existed.

We’ve let the Marxists mao mao us into the closet, and we’ve let them get away with fraud, and we’ve let them get away with violence.

They parade the worst president ever and an impeached president as paragons. We refuse to admit to George W. Bush, who, for all his faults, kept the economy humming after 9/11, because they scream and say he’s a liar.

Because we’re in the closet. Because we let them define us, our candidates, our positions.

The fault is not with our candidates or their campaigns, but with ourselves.

Come out, come out, wherever you are. Let’s proclaim 11/7 constitutionalist and small government pride day. Maybe we can have a parade.

Will it be painless? Hell no. Will you suffer for it? Unless you’re already on top of your field, and feared, or unless you work for yourself and can’t be punished, probably.

Did you think it was easy? Did you think it was a game? Did you think such a good as liberty could be purchased cheap?

But if you come out, if you admit who you are, if you tell people what you believe — if all of us do — eventually the caricature will be defeated.

The other side has nothing. Marxism enshrines envy as a virtue and cannot build. It can only tear apart. The world they’ll create is mire and horror for whoever comes after us.

We must not let it happen. Our life, our fortune, our sacred liberty. If we’re lucky, we’ll not need to water this tree with blood.

It’s 11/7. It’s our Constitutionalist Pride Day.

Come out, come out, wherever you are.

Be Not Afraid.