SYDNEY—This past March, the Trump administration sent a cable ordering its embassies and consulates to launch local campaigns to proactively combat propaganda targeting the U.S. This initiative, of course, includes the U.S. embassy and its consulates in Australia, where Washington is already monitoring the criminal activity of local migrants and taking a keen interest in other aspects of the country’s domestic sphere.
U.S. Secretary of State Mark Rubio signed the March 30, 2026, cable, an initiative that involves the U.S. Department of War’s Military Information Support Operations (MISO), formerly the Pentagon’s Psyops unit. The cable also advocates for the use of social media platform X in combating anti-U.S. propaganda, despite that platform’s reputation for sharing bigotry and generating deepfake child porn.
The mission has five goals, according to the cable: countering hostile messaging, expanding access to information, exposing adversarial behavior, elevating the voice of local U.S. supporters, and the telling of U.S. stories. To this end, local influencers, academics, and community leaders should be utilized to dispel anti-U.S. ideas, so that local pro-U.S. narratives appear to have sprung up organically.
These inroads into the domestic affairs of this country have been ongoing since the second coming of President Donald Trump in early 2025. Initial forms involved pressure to follow the U.S. on issues like ending diversity in hiring, only recognizing two sexes, and upping Australia’s military spending. But this has shifted to the monitoring of migrant crimes in the country and asking why members of the Australian public aren’t armed.
Ongoing reports about U.S. embassy interference in Australia’s domestic sphere have not been addressed by the government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and have not had much attention from other politicians. Australia has increasingly become hardwired into the U.S. imperial system, so that any foreign military intervention that it makes necessarily includes Australia, which then makes it difficult to prevent domestic subterfuge.
Combating anti-U.S. sentiment
“These campaigns seek to shift blame to the United States, sow division among allies, promote alternative worldviews antithetical to America’s interests, and even undermine American economic interests and political freedoms,” The Guardian reports the cable as saying. Digital platform use, state-controlled media, and specific influence operations are all cited as key forms of disinformation.
Disbanded just prior to Trump’s re-election to president, the U.S. Global Engagement Center had coordinated these types of activities for global reach in the past. The new initiative appears to now be outsourcing this task to embassies and consulates around the planet. The incorporation of local influencers has long been used by the U.S. in foreign nations.
This March, Sarah B. Rogers was appointed U.S. Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy. She has cited countering anti-U.S. “propaganda” domestically as a “top priority.” Rogers had already singled out antiwar organization CODEPINK in February 2026, claiming that it and other U.S. left-wing organizations are mouthpieces for the Chinese government.
The chief culprits listed by the cable as producing and spreading disinformation about the U.S. around the world are China, Iran, and Russia. The highly unpopular U.S.-Israeli war of aggression on Iran, which was launched illegally with no clear objectives, is an obvious reason why the White House is now scrambling to outsource its combating propaganda mission to its embassies.
The White House further appears to now comprehend that when billionaire Elon Musk, as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), disbanded USAID, the nation lost much of the soft power the development agency produced for the U.S. This included distributing U.S. flag-branded aid and producing media for foreign nations. Rubio has now directed embassies to commence this work.
Monitoring “migrant crime”
The U.S. State Department already informed its Western allies that it would be monitoring their domestic populations for criminal activity that is being perpetrated by migrants. This was announced to the press of the affected nations on Nov. 24, 2025, a week after the department sent a cable to embassies in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and across Europe to inform them of this.
The cable stated it would be collecting data and reporting on “migrant-related crimes and human rights abuse.” These policies are being actioned by a Trump White House that actively promotes white supremacy and has been carrying out a mass deportation drive targeting undocumented migrants, which involves agents often using skin color as a means of identifying potential migrants.
A U.S. official told the press that “mass migration is an existential threat to Western civilization and the safety of both the West and the world,” while the White House also wants local politicians to know that the U.S. “stands ready, willing, and able to support them in handling what we see as an existential crisis.”
Australian Green Party Sen. David Shoebridge told Sydney Criminal Lawyers that “this is an attempt at direct political interference from the Trump administration to try to impose Donald Trump’s offensive and racist migration and domestic policies on Australia and the rest of the United States.”
“It is extraordinary that the U.S. issued this statement,” the senator added, “and the Albanese Labor government has said absolutely nothing in response.”
No other local politicians other than Shoebridge have spoken out about this development. It is just one step away from Washington insisting that it is concerned about certain activities of non-white peoples on this continent. The focus on “migrant crime” certainly runs counter to the Albanese government’s much-trumpeted concern about “social cohesion.”
Foreign interference U.S.-style
The onset of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran showed that the Australian government really has no choice but to follow Washington into yet another war. No resistance was forthcoming from Australian PM Albanese, as he immediately championed the illegal U.S. and Israeli assaults on Iran, which followed over 30 months of perpetrating the ongoing genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza.
Albanese tried to distance himself from the illegal war in Iran, stating that Australia is not involved. On Good Friday, it came to light, however, that the government had secretly sent a further 90 special forces troops to the region two weeks prior, just in case the war on Iran escalated. While the PM said this was for defensive reasons, these are not defensive troops.
The initial reason why Australia is so shackled to the U.S. is that since the 1960s, the joint surveillance facility Pine Gap has been operating in the middle of this continent and so has the U.S. naval communications facility at North West Cape. Both these facilities are likely to have been used by the U.S. in its current warring against Iran.
But since 2011 and the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia,” U.S. presence in Australia has risen further and is continuing to spike. There are U.S. troops in the top end, it has unrestricted access to dozens of military bases, the Australian air force is increasingly interoperable with theirs, U.S. B-52 bombers are being stationed in the north, and U.S. submarine bases are being established in the west and the east.
The moves of the U.S. embassy in Canberra, and the U.S. consulates in Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth toward becoming actively engaged in attempting to thwart unwelcome ideas about the United States circulating in Australia will also see them liaising with local influencers and other figures that might assist in spouting pro-American rhetoric in the Australian public sphere. That’s not the end of it.
Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin met with Trump administration officials in the U.S. on March 2 to discuss the state of the Australian Jewish community after the Dec. 14, 2025, Bondi Beach massacre. A chief concern coming from U.S. officials was why Australian Jews aren’t arming themselves, which, of course, bucks against Australian gun laws.
This again hints at the increasing U.S. foreign interference in Australian domestic affairs. The U.S. is a pro-gun society, and the Trump administration is particularly pro-gun. Assertions about Jewish people in Australia arming themselves further translate as: “Why aren’t your citizens allowed to take up guns?” U.S. expressions of “concerns about “migrant crimes” could easily shift to whether the country might need assistance in combating this.
Sen. Shoebridge said in December that the discussion of monitoring the crime of migrants reads like the United States wanting to export its internal conflict around undocumented migrants to Australia and other allied nations. The Greens senator also warned that this nation should rather be distancing itself from the Trump White House. Meanwhile, Richard Marles, Australia’s Defence Minister, has called the U.S. “fundamental.”
The Guardian – Workers Weekly / Sydney Criminal Lawyers (edited for space)
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