SAN FRANCISCO
Lee Heidhues 7.20.2026 UPDATED
Donald Trump lives in America in 2026. His attitude and actions are akin to Germany in the 1930’s.
While Trump is precluded from going as far as 1930’s Germany he is using his Department of Justice to intimidate and bully the media for exercising its First Amendment rights to publish.
This is a chilling assault on the foundation of 🇺🇸 American democracy
One of the first things the National Socialists did after assuming power in early 1933 was quash the free press. This action was followed by a series of book burnings.
The Nazi book burnings were a campaign conducted by the German Student Union (German: Deutsche Studentenschaft, DSt) to ceremonially burn books in Nazi Germany and Austria in the 1930s. The books targeted for burning were those viewed as being subversive or as representing ideologies opposed to Nazism. These included books written by Jewish, half-Jewish, communist, socialist, anarchist, liberal, pacifist, and sexologist authors among others.[1] The initial books burned were those of Karl Marx and Karl Kautsky,[2]&n bsp;but the burned books came to include other authors, including the works of Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, H.G. Wells, and effectively any book incompatible with Nazi ideology. The first burning consisted mainly of LGBTQ books from the Institute of Sexual Research (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) founded by the pioneering Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld as the first medical center devoted to the study of gender and sexuality.[3] In a campaign of cultural genocide, books were also burned en masse&n bsp;by the Nazis in occupied territories as well, such as in Poland.[4] Nazi book burnings – Wikipedia
Donald Trump Is Tearing Up The First Amendment
The president is waging an across-the-board war against the First Amendment and its legal interpretations from the mid-20th century to today. – Huffington Post 3.13.2025
Excerpted from The New York Times – 7.20.2026
The Trump administration sought the phone records of several New York Times journalists and their relatives — including one reporter’s mother — in its effort to unmask the confidential sources who had provided information for articles about the security capabilities of President Trump’s new Air Force One jet.
The Justice Department told The Times late last week that it had issued subpoenas to third-party phone service providers seeking several journalists’ phone and text messaging records. That effort was in addition to the subpoenas issued on July 10 that sought to compel reporters to testify before a federal grand jury.
The government’s actions amount to an extraordinarily aggressive and unorthodox attempt by the Trump administration to unearth the confidential sources of independent journalists whose reporting had angered the president.
The additional subpoenas — which also sought information about calls and messages on the phones of two of the reporters’ spouses — were described in a motion filed on Saturday by lawyers for The Times, which is seeking to quash the requests. The motion was unsealed on Monday morning by Judge Arun Subramanian of U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution&nbs p;prevents Congress from making laws respecting an establishment of religion; prohibiting the free exercise of religion; or abridging the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the freedom of peaceable assembly and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.[1] It was adopted on December 15, 1791, as one of the ten amendments that constitute the Bill of Rights. In the original draft of the Bill of Rights, what is now the First Amendment occupied third place. The first two articles were not ratified by the states, so the article on disestablishment and free speech ended up being first.[2][3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
Top drawing: Herblock in Washington Post June 1971 during Pentagon Papers First Amendment battle. The Nixon administration tried to enjoin the New York Times from publishing the history of the Vietnam War. The Supreme Court upheld the Times right to publish.
Lee's Perspective 