19 November 2016
“Congratulations, immigrants, on becoming U.S. citizens.
Donald Trump will be your President. Love him — or, leave!”
We’re entering an era in which dissent, the right to disagree with public officials and the decisions they make that’s the foundation of a liberal democracy, will be discouraged and punished. That became clear in Texas yesterday.
“Patriots don’t criticize the President,” an argument supporters of the Vietnam War, indeed all supporters of war, employed to denounce dissent as unAmerican, is the civics lesson a federal judge in Texas, emboldened by the election, taught new U.S. Citizens yesterday at a naturalization ceremony in San Antonio:
“I can assure you that whether you voted for him or you did not vote for him, if you are a citizen of the United States, he is your president,” Judge John Primomo said, according to KENS 5. “He will be your president and if you do not like that, you need to go to another country.”
There’ll be more of this “The election’s over, son. You lost. Now, damn you, either march to Trump’s tune, and whistle along and smile, or take your treasonous arse for a hike out of my America,” bully boy behavior, by both citizens and, to use Justice Jackson’s phrase, officials high and petty, before our nation turns back from the authoritarian path we chose on 8 November.