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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered hundreds of top American generals and admirals who work around the globe to a meeting next week at a Virginia Marine Corps base without saying the subject of the Big Brass get-together.

Oops — that news doesn’t come from an official Pentagon press release. It’s a scoop that reporters got on Thursday, citing four United States government officials who requested anonymity.

And here I am, spreading the news.

And I’m repeating it just days after a bonkers, insidious, illegal demand from the Defense Department that Pentagon reporters sign a “pledge” not to publish sensitive information, even if it is not classified, unless it’s been “approved” by official press officers at the DoD, on threat of losing their press passes.

I have a press pass, and have had for four decades. Not from any federal agency, but from the Los Angeles County sheriff. Nobody’s ever threatened to take it away. But now the 90 or so national reporters licensed, as it were, to wander the Pentagon halls going about their business, and ask questions at press conferences there, are being told that they might as well sit in their cubicles, if they are allowed such, and wait for word on high not about stories that the American people deserve to know about, but filtered news that the government wants you to know. On pain of no longer being able to do their jobs.

If reporters followed such an absurd edict, we wouldn’t have known about Hegseth disclosing classified war plans in a private group chat that accidentally included a magazine editor, or that the secretary invited the billionaire Elon Musk to a briefing on the top-secret military plans if war broke out with China. Because that’s not the kind of news the government wants you to know.

Hegseth used to be a reporter, if you can call being a Fox News host that, himself. But right from the beginning of his term as DoD boss in January, he took away Pentagon office space for the normie New York Times, NBC News, NPR and Politico in favor of propaganda site Breitbart News, Trump-touting TV network One America News and others likely to report favorably on the president and his policies, so their toadying employees can be comfy while they bang out their reports rather than sitting on the floor.

The board of the Pentagon Press Association said it had “always welcomed new members and will continue to do so. … We are, however, greatly troubled by this unprecedented move by D.O.D. to single out highly professional media who have covered the Pentagon for decades, under both Republican and Democratic administrations.”

These are not normal times. This is one of hundreds of wildly irregular and corrupt actions and edicts by Trump and his posse — from the president continuing to have huge business interests around the globe that he ought not be involved in, given his influence, to the military firing missiles at speedboats in the Caribbean — that would prompt congressional and judicial action.

No president truly welcomes a truly free press, at least when it comes to reporting on themselves. But most at least pretend to. “Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed — and no republic can survive,” John F. Kennedy said — in a talk to newspaper owners. He used his charm to manipulate friendly reporters and editors, like his neighbor Ben Bradlee. “Power can be very addictive. And it can be corrosive. And it’s important for the media to call to account people who abuse their power,” George W. Bush said, though often combative with reporters. “Never forget: the press is the enemy,” Richard Nixon told Henry Kissinger. Barack Obama had an icy-cold relationship with reporters, but also knew how to charm. Trump’s different. It’s “frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write,” he said in 2017. This month he went further: critical coverage of him is “really illegal.”

It is not. Speak out against his unconstitutional crackdown, before it’s too late to speak at all.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.