COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

Secretary of War™ Pete Hegseth said during a speech on Friday that the US is at “a 1939 moment” of “mounting urgency” in which “enemies gather, threats grow,” adding, “We are not building for peacetime. We are pivoting the Pentagon and our industrial base to a wartime footing.”

Everything’s getting darker and creepier in the shadow of the empire.

Nate Bear has a report out on his newsletter titled “The AI Drones Used In Gaza Now Surveilling American Cities” about a new company called Skydio which “in the last few years has gone from relative obscurity to quietly become a multi-billion dollar company and the largest drone manufacturer in the US”.

Bear reports that Skydio now has contracts with police departments in almost every large US city to use these Gaza-tested drones for surveillance of American civilians.

Hegseth: “We are not building for peacetime. We are pivoting the Pentagon and our industrial base to a wartime footing. Building for victory should our adversaries FAFO.” pic.twitter.com/eoxhgZh7sZ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 7, 2025

Haaretz reports that Israel’s efforts to manipulate American minds back into supporting the Zionist entity include pouring millions into influence operations targeting Christian churchgoers and efforts to change responses to Palestine-related queries on popular AI services like ChatGPT.

It’s crazy how you can literally just be minding your own business in your own church on a Sunday morning and then suddenly find yourself getting throat fucked by propaganda paid for by the state of Israel.

The Intercept reports that YouTube, which is owned by Google, quietly deleted more than 700 videos documenting Israel’s atrocities in Gaza in a purge of pro-Palestine human rights groups from the platform.

Mass Silicon Valley deletions like this combined with the sudden influx of fake AI-generated video content polluting the information ecosystem could serve to erase and obfuscate the evidence of the Gaza holocaust for future generations.

The US empire keeps getting creepier      Video: Caitlin Johnstone

A new report from Reuters says that last year the US had intelligence showing Israel’s own lawyers warning that the IDF’s mass atrocities in the Gaza Strip could result in war crimes charges. This is yet more evidence that the Biden administration knew it was backing a genocide the entire time, including during election season when left-leaning Americans were being told they needed to vote for then-Vice President Kamala Harris if they wanted to save Gaza.

In Italy, a journalist was fired from the news agency Nova for asking an EU official if she thought Israel should be responsible for the reconstruction of Gaza in the same way she has said Russia should have to fund the reconstruction of Ukraine.

A Nova spokesperson confirmed to The Intercept that the journalist was indeed fired for asking the inconvenient question on the basis that “Russia had invaded a sovereign country unprovoked, whereas Israel was responding to an attack.”

Reuters reports that the US is preparing to establish a military base in Damascus. For years the empire waged a complex regime change operation in Syria to oust Assad, first by backing proxy forces to destroy the country and then via sanctions and US military occupation to prevent reconstruction.

And it worked. The empire’s dirty war in Syria will be cited by warmongering swamp monsters for years to come as evidence that regime change interventionism can succeed if you just stick at it and do whatever evil things need to be done.

These are just a few of the disturbing stories from the last few days that I hadn’t had a chance to write about yet. This is the kind of world we are being offered by the US empire. There is nothing on the menu for us but more war, more genocide, more surveillance, more censorship, more tyranny, and more abuse.

Things are going to keep getting more and more dystopian for everyone who lives under the thumb of the imperial power structure until enough of us decide that the empire needs to end.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

We are gathered here to mark the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists.

The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) National Media Section usually campaigns for journalists’ rights and industrial agency in Australia — but today, we join hands with the IFJ — International Federation of Journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Reporters sans frontières — Reporters Without Borders, to make a stand against the global assault on press freedom.

The past few years have been particularly hostile for journalists around the world.

From the press briefing rooms in the White House to the streets of Gaza, journalists have been in the crosshairs.

Shortly after assuming office in January 2017, US President Donald Trump accused the press of being an “enemy of the American people”. He has doubled down in his second term.

We have seen newsroom after newsroom fall foul of White House press secretaries; we saw bans on CNN, The New York Times, the LA Times and Politico back in 2017, and now, the Associated Press for simply refusing to fall in line with the so-called renaming of the Gulf of Mexico.

Three weeks ago, the world watched Pentagon journalists exit en masse, after rejecting Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s latest edict.

Another White House rule
Just last week, we saw the declaration of another White House rule — this time, restricting credentialed journalists from freely accessing the Press Secretary’s offices in the West Wing.

These attacks on US soil are complemented by an equally invidious assault on media outlets on a global scale.

Funding freezes and mass sackings have all but silenced Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Middle East Broadcasting Networks and Radio Free Asia — the latter of which employed several of our colleagues here in Queensland and the Pacific.

We have seen Trump’s verbal attack on the ABC’s John Lyons, and how that presidential tantrum led to the ABC being excluded from the Trump–Starmer press conference in the UK.

Apparently, they simply didn’t have space for the national broadcaster of the third AUKUS partner — and all this with barely a whimper from the Australian government.

But then, why would our Prime Minister leap to journalism’s defence when he sees fit to exclude Pacific journalists from his Pacific Island Forum press conference — in, you guessed it, the Pacific.

This enmity towards journalism, has been a hallmark of the Trump presidency.

Blatant ignorance, hubris
His blatant ignorance, hubris, and perfidy — indulged by US allies — has emboldened other predators and enemies of the press around the world.

As at December 2024, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) listed 376 journalists as being imprisoned in various countries around the world — it was the highest number three years running, since the record started in 1992.

China topped the list with 52 imprisoned journalists, with Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory a close second with 48.

Myanmar had 35, Belarus 33, Russia 30 and the list continues.

Among this group are 15 journalists arrested in Eritrea more than two decades ago, between 2000 and 2002, who continue to be held without charge.

And it gets worse.

The same CPJ database records 2023, 24 and 25 as the worst years for the deaths of journalists and media workers — worse than the years at the height of the US and allied invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the war against the Islamic State.

Killed journalists
The war in Gaza accounts for a significant number of these deaths.

A staggering 185 journalists and media workers have been killed directly because of their work in the past 25 months — on a small strip of land just 2.3 per cent the size of Greater Brisbane.

I urge you to read the ICRC case study on the legal protection of journalists in combat zones. It clearly explains how Protocol 1 of the Geneva Convention protects journalists, even when they engage in producing “propaganda” for the conflicting parties.

Since our vigil 12 months ago, the CPJ has recorded the deaths of 122 journalists and media workers around the world. These are deaths the CPJ has confirmed as being directly linked to their work — such as those killed while reporting in combat zones or on dangerous assignments.

Of those, 33 were confirmed murders — meaning those journalists were deliberately targeted.

A staggering 61 of those 122 were killed in the Occupied Palestinian Territory — in Israel’s war on Gaza. Another 31 were killed in a single day during targeted Israeli airstrikes on two newspapers in Sana’a in Yemen. And three more were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a compound housing journalists in Lebanon — meaning Israeli defence forces were responsible for 78 percent of last year’s killings.

We talk of Israel’s attack on journalists because it is unprecedented, but Israel is by no means the only perpetrator of such crimes — there was the Mozambique journalist murdered during a live broadcast; a video journalist tortured and killed in Saudi Arabia; and a print journalist tortured and killed in Bangladesh.

Today we read the names of 122 fallen comrades and remember them one by one.

Dr Kasun Ubayasiri is co-vice president of the MEAA National Media Section. He gave this address at the annual vigil in Brisbane Meanjin last Sunday, on International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists. Republished with the author’s permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz