“America, love it or leave it.” Judge Andrew Napolitano says this about that statement:
The phrase itself—with its command of the government’s way or the highway—admits no dissenting opinions, suggests that all is well and proper here, and insinuates that moral norms and cultural values cannot be improved. The phrase itself is un-American.
This is nonsense, and Napolitano is projecting, or he’s dissembling. The phrase has no government’s way or the highway meaning, and it calls forth dissenting opinions. Especially contrary to Napolitano’s distortion, the phrase insists not only that “norms and cultural values” can be improved, but that those with dissenting opinions have an obligation to offer their ideas for solutions. And thereby does not at all suggest that “all is well and proper here.” In fine, it demands, all it demands, is American-ness—loyalty to America.
Except in the fetid imaginations of the Left, and apparently of Napolitano.
The phrase simply suggests that if a man is miserable here, he’s free to leave, and it wonders why he does not.
Of course, loving America necessarily includes wanting to make us better, which involves praise for the things we are doing better or already do well, and criticism of those things we do wrong or not well enough, while offering solutions for the corrections.
But if all a man wants to do is sit in the safety of the sidelines and carp and wallow in the misery of his location, why stay? We don’t have walls keeping anyone in. Why shouldn’t the man go somewhere where he will not have to face the misery, which is all that he sees?
As to the torrent of hatred Napolitano fears has been unleashed, that certainly has been. The loosening of the fetters began with Obama’s and his Party henchmen’s open contempt for bitter religion- and gun-clinging denizens of flyover country.
They were loosened very much further with Obama’s State Department Secretary and staffers insulting the intelligence of Americans by insisting that the terrorist murders in Benghazi were the result of a YouTube movie
The fetters were taken off altogether by then-Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton calling tens of millions of Americans irredeemably deplorable racist, misogynistic, Islamophobic homophobes.
The sharks of hatred currently are chummed by the racist and anti-Semitic statements of Progressive-Democratic Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, Congresswomen and behaviors that Party actively condones if not openly embraces.
America, love it, indeed, and help us do yet better. Or leave, if you’re so miserable and find us to hateful.