Tag: history

If Trump gets his way Team USA will not be enjoying the World Cup

SAN FRANCISCO

Lee Heidhues 6.15.2026

Trump’s anti-immigrant crusade may snag its biggest prize. The current star of the American soccer world.

Team USA stunned its fans and media pundits when it soundly defeated Paraguay4-1 in its opening World Cup match last Friday in SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. The most goals ever scored by America in a World Cup game.

The man responsible for this feat is Folarin Balogun, the 24 year old Nigerian who earned “Birthright Citizenship” when his pregnant mother was obliged to stay in New York City during her pregnancy. Medical authorities told her it was unsafe to return to Nigeria. Folarin was born on July 23, 2001 and became an American citizen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folarin_Balogun

Now Donald Trump is attempting to take away Birthright Citizenship which was deemed legal in 1898. The Supreme Court heard arguments months ago and will soon issue its Decision. United States v. Wong Kim Ark – Wikipedia

United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898), is a landmark decision[3] of the Supreme Court of the United States which held that “a child born in the United States, of parents of Chinese descent, who, at the time of his birth, are subjects of the Emperor of China, but have a permanent domicile and residence in the United States, and are there carrying on business, and are not employed in any diplomatic or official capacity under the Emperor of China” became “at the time of his birth a citizen of the United States by virtue of the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.”[1]

Wong Kim Ark was the first Supreme Court case to decide on the status of children born in the United States to alien parents. This decision established an important precedent in its interpretation of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.[3]

Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco, had been denied re-entry to the United States after a trip abroad, under the Chinese Exclusion Act, a law banning virtually all Chinese immigration and prohibiting Chinese immigrants from becoming naturalized U.S. citizens. He challenged the government’s refusal to recognize his citizenship, and the Supreme Court ruled in his favor, holding that the Citizenship Clause should be interpreted “in light of the common law”.

Excerpted from The Hill 6.15.2026

U.S. men’s soccer striker Folarin Balogun scored two goals in the Americans’ victorious opener of the FIFA World Cup on Friday, a performance that would not have occurred had his mother not traveled to the U.S. just before he was born. 

Folarin Balogun scores for Team USA in the World Cup in Los Angeles – 6.12.2026

The performance has also put President Trump’s push to end birthright citizenship back in the spotlight. A challenge to Trump’s executive order ending the policy is before the Supreme Court. 

Balogun’s mother, Florence Balogun, traveled to New York while she was seven months pregnant with the future soccer star in 2001. Florence Balogun and her husband, Ben Balogun, were born in Nigeria and lived in London at the time. 

While Florence Balogun was at the airport to head back to England, airline employees refused to allow her to fly — saying she was too pregnant, according to an ESPN profile of her son from 2023.

As a result, she stayed with her sister-in-law in Brooklyn and gave birth to Folarin in America on July 3, 2001, ESPN reported. Nearly 22 years later, and despite coming up in the Arsenal academy and playing for England’s under-17, under-18 and under-21 teams, Folarin Balogun decided to play for the U.S. senior national team.

That decision paid off on his World Cup debut, as the 24-year-old scored the second and third goals of the Americans’ 4-1 victory over Paraguay on Friday. The win marked the most goals the U.S. has ever scored in a single World Cup game, and it’s one more than the three goals it netted in the entire 2022 tournament.

But if the Supreme Court were to rule in favor of the president on birthright citizenship, Folarin Balogun may not be able to play for the U.S. 

The president’s executive order, which he signed on his first day back in office, stated that the 14th Amendment “has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.” 

US soccer star’s 2 World Cup goals thrust Trump birthright citizenship push into spotlight

Rail travel is the SMART trip. North Bay voters just said YES for 30 more years

SAN FRANCISCO

Lee Heidhues 6.3.2026

It is very reassuring to know that voters in Marin and Sonoma County have overwhelmingly endorsed the SMART train which currently runs from Larkspur in Marin to the far reaches of Sonoma County.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoma%E2%80%93Marin_Area_Rail_Transit

At a time when voters in car centric America are loath to fund public transit the results coming from Marin and Sonoma Counties prove that voters appreciate the value of sustainable passenger rail travel.

Perhaps North Bay voters have experienced rail travel outside the United States where public transit is an essential part of daily life.

The blogger can only bemoan the sordid history of how the automobile industry worked hard to destroy public transit in the United States. (see attached link).

https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollective/demise-american-public-transportation/183456

Excerpted from The San Francisco Chronicle and Marin Independent Journal 6.3.2026

SMART’s (Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit) critical sales tax extension rode to passage Tuesday.

Officials in the public transportation world have something to cheer about andare trying to remain optimistic, pointing to a SMART train sales tax extension on Tuesday that won 70% of the vote in Marin and Sonoma counties.

To many observers, it demonstrates not only that residents value transit but that they view SMART as a centerpiece for a new wave of development.

With 100% of precincts reporting, results from Marin show 70.25% of voters in favor and 29.75% opposed. In Sonoma County, with 72% of precincts reporting, returns showed 70.44% voted yes and 29.56% were opposed.

Measure B renewed the quarter-cent sales tax for 30 years. The tax generates about $51 million annually for SMART, equal to more than half of its annual operating budget.

Marin County has 173,082 registered voters, while there are 319,260 in Sonoma County.

The citizens’ initiative required a simple majority vote to win, as opposed to a traditional two-thirds threshold. If the measure had failed, the existing tax would have expired on June 30, 2029.

“We couldn’t be more pleased with the results we’re seeing right now,” said Suzanne Smith, chair of the SMART initiative committee.

“I think it’s a testament to SMART as an organization and the services they provide to the community,” said Smith, a former executive director of the Sonoma County Transportation Authority. “We, as a committee, were lucky enough to have such a great project to sell to voters, to tell voters about, and voters see that value, so we’re pretty excited.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/smart-tax-renewal-measure-heading-toward-passage/ar-AA24ILgV?ocid=BingNewsSerp

Mom and Pop on the FBI 10 Most Wanted List. Not your typical American family.

SAN FRANCISCO

Lee Heidhues 5.31.2026

The 1960’s radical movement thankfully never went away.

Depending on your retrospective walk through American history in the 1960’s ‘Progressives’ are thought of as either forward looking progressives determined to upend the System. Or spoiled rotten kids who didn’t appreciate the good things about the consumer driven money making post World War II era in which their parents participated in.

Zayd Ayers Dohrn was unwittingly and unknowingly raised and nurtured in the maelstrom of 1960’s politics. And seems to have landed with both feet firmly in the camp of realistic thinkers without having forsaken his upbringing.

Excerpted from The Wall Street Journal ‘Review’ Joseph Epstein – 5.29.2026

What’s in a name? Consider the name of Zayd Ayers Dohrn, the author of “Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young.” His first name derives from that of Zayd Shakur, the minister of information of the East Coast Panthers, a radical group formed in the late 1960s. Ayers was his father’s name, his father being William Ayers, a leader of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a founder of the terrorist group the Weather Underground and a relentless organizer on behalf of revolution. Dohrn was his mother’s name, and she, Bernardine Dohrn, was a fellow member of the Weather Underground, as well as the fourth woman to appear on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List. Quite a bit, it would seem, can be in a name.

The subtitle of Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s book is “A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground.” Reading it, I was more than grateful for the ticket I had drawn in the parent lottery. Throughout his book, Mr. Dohrn, who was born in 1977, wonders how much he, his younger brother and his foster brother really meant to their parents. As a child he feared, and he reports he fears still, that next to their commitment to revolution, perhaps not all that much.

The book offers an account of both of his parents’ revolutionary careers. Neither was brought up in a radically political family. Both came to their politics in their early adulthood.

His mother, whom J. Edgar Hoover would call “the most dangerous woman in America,” was born into a middle-class home and grew up in a suburb north of Milwaukee. Strikingly good-looking and an excellent student, she went off to college at Miami of Ohio, where she was rejected by every sorority on campus because she was Jewish. Doubtless this rejection set her off on her political path.

‘The Weather Underground’ Academy Award nominee 2004 – The Weather Underground (film) – Wikipedia

Soon, the author explains, Ms. Dohrn transferred to the University of Chicago, where she fell in with the political faction among the students. (Bernie Sanders, later a firebrand senator, attended at the same time.) She went on to law school, though at the time she had little interest in a legal career. She would work with Martin Luther King Jr. on his rent strike in Chicago and, her son reports, had a single magical meeting with Muhammad Ali.

Ms. Dohrn would later have a hand in planning the student riots in Chicago in 1968. “I consider myself a revolutionary Communist,” she declared when she was elected to the SDS national board that year. “There’s no way to be committed to nonviolence,” she said, “in the middle of the most violent society history has ever created.” Her hatred for America was unqualified.

William Ayers grew up in the middle-class Chicago suburb of Glen Ellyn, the son of a high-level executive at Commonwealth Edison (he would eventually become its Chief Executive Officer). In 1963 Mr. Ayers went off to college at the University of Michigan, at the time the residence of the political organizer Tom Hayden and the scene of the founding of SDS. Not political before then, Mr. Ayers began showing up at protests. Soon he quit his fraternity and not long after dropped out of school.

The young Chesa Boudin

They didn’t marry until 1982, when Ms. Dohrn was 40 and Mr. Ayers was in his late 30s. They settled in Hyde Park, Chicago, where they also raised Chesa Boudin, the son of Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert who were serving long prison terms.

Former Weather Underground member Bernardine Dohrn walks with friend Bill Ayers and an unidentified child outside the Federal Court Building in New York, May 17, 1982. The couple refused to identify the child. Dohrn refused to cooperate with a Federal Grand Jury investigating on October’s bloody Brink’s robbery in Rockland County. (AP Photo/David Handschuh)
“You don’t need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/dangerous-dirty-violent-and-young-review-raised-in-the-revolution-e0a005a9?st=wFcDsx&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Top photo: Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers with a young Zayd Ayers Dohrn

Death of CBS radio news is a victory for Trump over free speech

SAN FRANCISCO

Lee Heidhues 3.21.2026

The blogger has listened to radio news for a lifetime. One of the first stations was KCBS-740AM in San Francisco. Long before the days of National Public Radio.

The omnipresent CBS Radio News sign on

Make no mistake the shutdown of CBS radio news has nothing to do with money despite what corporate management insists.

Donald Trump has railed against mainstream media which fails to bow down. The death of CBS radio news is another victory over mainstream media free speech for Trump.

The Trump administration approved Mr. (David) Ellison’s purchase after Paramount paid $16 million to settle a suit brought by President Trump against “60 Minutes.” – NYT 3.20.2026

Excerpted from The New York Times 3.21.2026

It transported Americans onto the rooftops of London in the Blitz and into the bleak embers of concentration camps in liberated Nazi Germany, an aural atlas to world events thousands of miles away.

Edward R. Murrow broadcast from Buchenwald Concentration Camp April 1945

In more recent years, it transmitted eyewitness dispatches from world capitals to hundreds of local stations in rural and sparsely populated parts of the country.

CBS News Radio was a pioneer and stalwart of the mass media century, the proving ground of star journalists like Edward R. Murrow, with a distinctive five-tone chime that became synonymous with breaking news — long before the rise of 24-hour cable and the internet.

Now, its venerable airwaves are crackling to a close. Paramount Skydance, the parent company of CBS, announced on Friday that the radio news network would sign off, after 99 years, near the end of May.

Excerpted from the New York Times 3.20.2021

CBS News came under the control of David Ellison, a billionaire tech heir, after his Hollywood studio Skydance absorbed the media giant Paramount last year. The Trump administration approved Mr. Ellison’s purchase after Paramount paid $16 million to settle a suit brought by President Trump against “60 Minutes.”

Mr. Ellison said he wanted CBS News to appeal to a centrist audience, and he installed Bari Weiss, an opinion journalist and critic of the mainstream news media, as its new leader.

CBS News eliminated its century-old radio division, which broadcast Edward R. Murrow’s World War II dispatches from London, amid a round of layoffs on Friday announced by the network’s editor in chief, Ms. Weiss.

CBS radio news journalists on election night November 1936

More than 60 employees, or roughly 6 percent of the news division, are set to be laid off under the plan, according to a person who requested anonymity to share internal details.

“Certain parts of this newsroom need to get smaller in order for us to make room for the things that we need to build to remain competitive in the future,” Ms. Weiss, who started her job in October, said during a newsroom-wide conference call on Friday, according to a recording.

CBS News Radio, which has roots in the Jazz Age, was once among the premier news broadcasters in the country. “CBS News Radio served as the foundation for everything we have built since 1927,” Tom Cibrowski, the president of CBS News, wrote in a memo.

Original CBS Radio news headquarters in New York City- circa 1939

Shades of 1930’s Germany. Trump accuses critics of ‘Treason’

SAN FRANCISCO

Lee Heidhues 3.16.2026

Does this look familiar?

There’s the old saying made famous by Wes ‘Scoop’ Nisker. “If you don’t like the News. Go out and make some of your own.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wes_Nisker

Donald Trump is using all the tools of power to bend the media to pervert the news.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Nazi_Germany

Censorship in Nazi Germany was extreme and strictly enforced by the governing Nazi Party, but specifically by Joseph Goebbels and his Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Similarly to many other police states both before and since, censorship within Nazi Germany included the silencing of all past and present dissenting voices. In addition to the further propaganda weaponization of all forms of mass communication, including newspaper, music, literature, radio, and film, by the State,[1] the Ministry of Propaganda also produced and disseminated their own literature, which was solely devoted to spreading Nazi ideology and the Hitler Myth.

Book burning in 1930’s Germany – May 1933

Excerpted from The New York Times 3.16.2026

The president and his allies have sought to vilify the news media since the start of his political rise a decade ago. But this recent denigration of news organizations — including The New York Times — comes as Mr. Trump has appeared at pains to depict his Middle East military effort as a smashing success, despite some facts to the contrary and opinion polls that have revealed widespread doubts among Americans about the war.

In particular, Mr. Trump has zeroed in on accusing American news organizations of disloyalty to their country, as in an official White House news release declaring that CNN had sought “to undermine our decisive victories in Operation Epic Fury.”

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement on Monday: “The media has been undeniably biased and negative in its coverage of President Trump and Operation Epic Fury. Anybody with eyes and ears can see this.”

Racism is the sad reason why the SF former Mayor still out of work

SAN FRANCISCO

Lee Heidhues 1.25.2026 UPDATED

People in supposedly tolerant and enlightened San Francisco may be loath to admit it. The harsh reality is that former Mayor London Breed is still out of work because of systemic racism all pervasive in America.

LURIE & LONDON – SF Standard Power Play 1.25. 2026

If the former Mayor was a white guy or gal he/she would have been swept up by a political action committee or consulting firm the day after leaving office. Not only was London Breed Mayor for over six years, she was twice elected Supervisor and was President of the Board of Supervisors.

London Breed is a black woman raised in the Western Addition housing projects just blocks from City Hall who worked her way up through hard work and political smarts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Breed

Breed definitely didn’t enjoy the privileged upbringing of the white man who defeated her in November 2024, having spent millions of his own money to capture City Hall. The billionaire scion of the Levi Strauss & Co. family fortune, Daniel Lurie.

Mayor Breed on the City Hall steps at a rally decrying hate and bigotry

As Mayor Breed was definitely a fighter for the issues she believes in, mainly funding the police department and pushing for housing development. Breed brawled consistently with San Francisco White progressives whom she looked down at with thinly veiled disdain.

Perhaps Mayor Breed’s most crowning achievement was her advocacy for car free spaces. This advocacy resulted in the voter approved car free JFK Promenade in Golden Gate Park, Sunset Dunes Park along the Pacific Coast shoreline and numerous car free streets throughout the city. That will will be her environmental legacy. One for which Breed has not received enough credit.

Then Mayor London Breed talks with Liz Heidhues at the 4th anniversary of JFK Promenade – 4.28.2025 – photo Lee Heidhues

Philosophical and political positions which one would think would be a calling card amongst the billionaire class for future employment.

Not, yet. Heather Knight, former columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle, and now New York Times reporter took a look at London Breed one year removed from office.

Excerpted from The New York Times 1.16.2026

London Breed has said little in the year since she left office. She has thoughts on the praise that the current mayor, Daniel Lurie, has received.

Mayor Breed and her most vigorous Progressive antagonist, then Supervisor Dean Preston, who represented the District she represented and catapulted her into the Mayor’s office in 2018. Both were voted out of office in November 2024.

Ms. Breed said that she wanted Mr. Lurie to be successful. It’s just that it has been hard for her to see him get so much credit, she said, and she wondered if race was a factor.

London Breed needs a job, and she wants you to know that.

A year ago, she left her post as the 45th mayor of San Francisco — and its $383,000 salary — after losing her re-election bid to Daniel Lurie, the heir to the Levi Strauss fortune.

London Breed puts on a smiling face with Daniel Lurie, the billionaire who defeated her, on his inaugural day – January 8th 2025

Past mayors have used the office as a springboard. San Francisco’s 38th mayor, Dianne Feinstein, became a longtime U.S. senator who once chaired the Senate Rules Committee. The 42nd mayor, Gavin Newsom, is finishing his second term as California governor and has his sights on running for president.

Ms. Breed, 51, is still unemployed. She didn’t serve long enough to qualify for a municipal pension and health care benefits, and is living off her savings.

“I need to get myself out there,” she said in an interview with The New York Times.

Mr. Lurie, a political neophyte, has reaped the benefits of strong poll numbers and praise for the city’s turnaround.

It is common for former elected officials to resent their successors, especially if a prosperous stretch follows. And in the glow of San Francisco’s recovery, Ms. Breed has been largely forgotten as she has retreated to the political wilderness.

Top photo: Mayor Breed with a group of San Francisco Police Department officers

5 years since 1.6.2021. America suffers from political Amnesia

SAN FRANCISCO

Lee Heidhues 1.7.2026 UPDATED

Straight out of the 1930’s Nazi Germany playbook
Wall Street Journal – 1.7.2021
Wall Street Journal 1.7.2026

It is nearly five years since Donald Trump led the insurrection and tried to violently overturn the November 2020 election.

The place Trump belongs. Prison

As rebellion flared up in the nation’s capitol America failed its biggest test. Putting this criminal insurrectionist back in the White House a year ago. He should be in prison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack

The American sheep like people continue to suffer from Amnesia and are all too willing to let this abhorrent event fade into the historic background.

On this New Year’s Day I went into the PBS FRONTLINE archives. Resting there for all who care to view is the graphic documentary originally broadcast on January 26, 2021. Reasonable people thought this criminal would land in jail. Wrong.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/trumps-american-carnage/

As rebellion flared up in the nation’s capitol America failed its biggest test.

There is one Hero amongst the somnolent lazy American public. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Smith_(lawyer)

Excerpted from The New York Times 12.31.2025

Jack Smith, the former special counsel, defended his decision to twice indict President Trump, accusing him of “exploiting” violence on Jan. 6, 2021, to overthrow the 2020 presidential election, according to a transcribed interview released by House Republicans Wednesday.

Mr. Smith, a former prosecutor vilified by Mr. Trump as a partisan, spent much of the eight-hour, closed-door session on Dec. 17 before the House Judiciary Committee rebutting a range of Republican claims, including the accusation that he had improperly obtained metadata on phone calls involving Trump-allied lawmakers.

“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power,” Mr. Smith said, according to the transcript.

Bloviating mindless January 6th insurrectionists were pardoned by Donald Trump the first day he returned to office 1.20.2025

In the interview, Mr. Smith sought to undermine the narrative that the president was an innocent figure persecuted by partisans who weaponized federal law enforcement, a core belief among many Trump supporters.

True reporters, like Sy Hersh, dare to expose what they’re told not to.

SAN FRANCISCO

Lee Heidhues 12.9.2025

I have followed Seymour Hersh writing for decades. I became transfixed when I read his classic “The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House” published in 1984. A compendium of the treacherous foreign policy instituted by President Nixon and carried out enthusiastically by Henry Kissinger. Countries in the Western Hemisphere to the near East and Asia, specifically Vietnam and Cambodia, were in their Machiavellian sights.

Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet who overthrew the democratically elected President Salvador Allende on 9.1.1.1973 shakes hands with Henry Kissinger. The story of Nixon and Kissinger’s involvement in the coup is written about in detail in Sy Hersh’s book.

The soon to be released documentary “Cover-up” is must viewing for those who want to know what genuine, honest investigative reporting is all about in the era of Donald Trump and his relentless assaults on the media. A mainstream media which has been cowed and compliant. Enabling this liar to attack the core of American democracy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh – An American journalist icon

Excerpted from Variety 8.25.2025

As “Cover-Up” reveals, the key lesson of Seymour Hersh’s career is that when it comes to crucial stories of corruption, just about every situation is layered, booby-trapped, woven with deception. The movie is called “Cover-Up” because cover-up is the metaphysical state we live in. The true reporters, like Hersh, are those who dare to expose what they’re told not to.

When Hersh, in the documentary, talks about how American media works, how it’s too cozy with power, he can sound a lot like the Noam Chomsky of “Manufacturing Consent.” But part of what’s so compelling about “Cover-Up” is that Hersh, in his heyday, wasn’t a pie-in-the-sky purist agitator like Chomsky; he was a regular guy who simply wanted the truth to get out there.

The film captures how he sort of fell into journalism, after helping to run his family’s dry-cleaning business on the South Side of Chicago. He was originally a crime reporter, and got his big break in 1963, when he went to work for the Associated Press. Assigned to cover the Pentagon, he would walk out of the scripted press briefings and, instead, wandered the halls and used his sports chatter to befriend high-ranking officers.

That’s how he got wind of the My Lai story, when an officer referenced what was going on with Lt. William Calley (without actually naming him). “Cover-Up” takes us inside the process of how this complex story was brought to light.

That’s how he got wind of the My Lai story, when an officer referenced what was going on with Lt. William Calley (without actually naming him). “Cover-Up” takes us inside the process of how this complex story was brought to light.

A false mythology of the massacre lives on to this day (that American soldiers went “crazy” with violence in the jungles), but the far uglier truth is that the murder of Vietnamese civilians had been ordered as a way to inflate the casualty numbers (which was the Army’s yardstick of success). My Lai wasn’t the only My Lai — far from it.

The story, which Hersh broke in 1969, made his name.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/cover-review-laura-poitras-enthralling-121321596.html?fr=yhssrp_catchall

https://screenanarchy.com/2025/09/toronto-2025-review-cover-up.html

U.S. Flips History by Casting Europe—Not Russia—as Villain

SAN FRANCISCO

Lee Heidhues 12.6.2025

Looking afar from the West Coast of America to most Americans Europe seems far away and inconsequential. Only as a tourist destination and photo op.

The reality is that Europe is an integral bastion economically and culturally for the United States.

It’s shocking to read that Donald Trump is striving to turn this centuries long relationship on its head as he seeks to solidify his indecipherable relationship with Vladimir Putin. Trump’s not so secret goal is to let Europe fend for itself while he withdraws into Fortress America.

Excerpted from The Wall Street Journal 12.6.2025

Nathalie Tocci, director of the Institute for International Affairs in Rome and a former EU diplomatic adviser, said the document lays out a fairly coherent vision of a world dominated by three big powers—the U.S., China and Russia—who have areas of cooperation and zones of influence.

“I think it’s fairly clear that Europe is seen by the administration as being on the colonial menu” for domination by either the U.S. or Russia, she said. “So to me, the real question is: ’What else needs to happen for us Europeans to wake up to this?’ ”

For years, the U.S. government has published an annual National Security Strategy that lays out how Washington sees the world and its approach to dealing with looming threats, from China to Russia to drug-traffickers in Latin America. 

Flags of the European Union.

This week, the Trump administration’s version seemed to reserve its harshest tone for a new target: America’s closest allies in Europe.

The 30-page document painted European nations as wayward, declining powers that have ceded their sovereignty to the European Union and are led by governments that suppress democracy and muzzle voices that want a more nationalistic turn.

It says the continent faces “civilizational erasure” through immigration that could render it “unrecognizable” in two decades—as well as turning several North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies into majority “non-European” countries. It concludes the region could grow too weak to be “reliable allies.”

Trump has castigated the European countries for not spending sufficiently on the military. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_Germany. The German government now is considering reinstituting compulsory military service. Germans are protesting.

The document underscores how radically the Trump administration is reshaping traditional American foreign policy, and it is likely to deepen divisions in the trans-Atlantic alliance, which has largely kept the peace in Europe since World War II and promoted Western values across the world.

The document landed like a bucket of cold water in European capitals. European leaders reading the document need “to assume that the traditional trans-Atlantic relationship is dead,” said Katja Bego, a senior researcher at Chatham House, a think tank in London.

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/u-s-flips-history-by-casting-europenot-russiaas-villain-in-new-security-policy-cbb138fa?st=5dzpKf&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

A genuine Nazi. Trump dropped a flamethrower on the News Media.

SAN FRANCISCO

Lee Heidhues 12.5.2025 – UPDATED 12.9.2025

More seriously—more sinister—the White House has just put up a wall-of-shame webpage tracking media outfits and reporters who “misrepresent” or “lie” about the administration. Names are named, outfits identified and shamed. All this is meant to intimidate; it institutionalizes attacks on the media and, considering the broader context, potentially prompts and gives permission to unstable people who might want to act in the president’s supposed defense. The webpage, paid for by taxpayers as part of the White House website, looks not like an insult but part of a sustained campaign. It is a threat. It should be taken down. Peggy Noonan in Wall Street Journal 12.6.2025 – https://www.wsj.com/opinion/were-in-an-era-of-political-violence-cc359449?mod=hp_opin_pos_3

Donald Trump is a Clear and Present Danger to democracy.

I don’t know what’s more distressing.

The White House launching a Media Offenders Website titled ‘Hall of Shame’ https://www.whitehouse.gov/mediabias/ or the general silence with few exceptions from the American media whose First Amendment rights are being trampled.

The shock of all this is that the publishers should be at the proverbial barricades. Press freedom and the First Amendment are under attack. Journalists, editors and publishers must be aware that when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 he destroyed the free press in Germany. If they’re not unaware they’re deluding themselves.

‘Art of Catastrophe’ – Charlotte Salomon

Trump will never get that far. But his intimidation tactics using the power of the Federal government is sending a chilling message

Trump’s genuine Nazi like assault on the media. Utilizing the White House to intimidate journalists

Excerpted from Deutsche Welle 12.5.2025

A new government website lists journalists and media outlets that Donald Trump’s administration considers liars. Experts say the move endangers free media ― and thus erodes democracy in the US.

The website set up by the Trump White House amounts to threatening media outlets, Jonathan Katz, a fellow in governance studies at the think tank Brookings Institution, says, too.

“It can have a chilling effect on free speech, on independent media,” Katz told DW. “We’re watching carefully to see how this affects press freedom in the United States.”

It’s no secret that the current US administration doesn’t have too high an opinion of journalists. President Donald Trump recently called a female reporter asking him about his involvement in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal “piggy.”

And in a press briefing on Monday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt talked about how much of her job is taken up by dealing with what she labeled inaccurate characterizations published by White House correspondents.

“The fake news that we see pumped out of this building on a day-to-day basis — it’s honestly overwhelming to keep up with it all,” she said.

In response to what Leavitt said were “fake news and … attacks” being spread by reporters, the White House has created a website that lists media outlets and reporters who, according to the government, publish false, biased or misleading stories.

The new “Media Offenders” website includes featured “Offenders of the Week” as well as a “Hall of Shame” that consists of four pages (at time of publication) of media reports the White House has sorted into the categories bias, lie, false claim, malpractice, omission of context, mischaracterization, circular reporting, failure to report and left-wing lunacy.

In a statement released on December 1, the White House said by creating the website, it “dropped a flamethrower on the Fake News Media.”

Adolf Hitler addressing fellow Nazis – The crushing of the press in Nazi Germany is something Donald Trump would like to do in America

https://www.dw.com/en/how-white-house-attack-on-journalists-affects-us-press-freedom/a-75040640

Top photo: Donald Trump only wants to hear what makes him look good. He closes his ears to everything else.