To our so-called president: I refuse to shut up and obey

that news media should “keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.”

Just last Sunday, senior policy adviser Stephen Miller declared on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that “our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”

What you do “will not be questioned?” Lord, have mercy. That’s the kind of statement that, in another time and place, would have been greeted with an out-thrust palm and a hearty “Sieg heil!” Here, however, it demands a different response:

Just who the hell do you think you are?

Meaning you and all the other trolls you have brought up from under their bridges. Maybe you didn’t notice, but this is the United States of America. You’ve heard of it? Nation of laws, not of individuals? First Amendment? Freedom of the press? Any of that ringing a bell?

Let’s be brutally clear here. If you were a smart guy with unimpeachable integrity and a good heart who was enacting wise policies for the betterment of all humankind, you’d still be subject to sharp scrutiny from news media, oversight from Congress, restraint by the judiciary — and public opinion.

And you, of course, are none of those things.

I know you fetishize strength. I know your pal Vladimir would never stand still for reporters and judges yapping at him like so many poodles.

I know, too, that you are accustomed to being emperor of your own fiefdom. You tell people to make something happen, and they do. You yell at a problem, and it goes away. Nobody talks back. I can see it would be hard to give that up.

But you did. You’re no longer an emperor, Mr. SoCalled President. You are now a “public servant” — in effect, an employee with 324 million bosses.

And those bosses are unruly and loud, long accustomed to speaking their minds without fear or fetter. And they believe power must always answer to the people. That’s at the core of their identity.

Yet you and your coterie of cartoon autocrats think you’re going to cow them into silence and compliance by ordering them to shut up and obey? Well, as a freeborn American, I can answer that in two syllables flat.

Hell no.

In his 72 years, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, who was raised in segregated Richmond, Virginia, acknowledges that he has seen much change, often for the better, including advances in the 1960s. But in his elegant new memoir, “All Falling Faiths: Reflections on the Promise and Failure of the 1960s,” he explains why today’s distemper was incubated in that “burnt and ravaged forest of a decade.”

He arrived at Yale in September 1963, a year after John Kerry and a year before George W. Bush, “never dreaming that this great university would in many ways set the example of what education