[TTP:  Mike will be covering the SOTU in the HFR, so we won’t steal his thunder today. This news, ignored by the Legacy Media, should brighten your day. Please take a good look at this picture. As Beege would say, “Dawg!” Isn’t that a hoot?!]

The last time I wrote anything at length about the Panama Canal specifically was last April, so almost a year ago.

The new Trump administration had moved swiftly to reassert American influence in the region and engineered a pretty impressive about-face as far as the Panamanian government went, which had been in the middle of a Belt and Road Initiative build-up with the Chinese Communists.

All that came to a screeching halt.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth went down there with a couple of US Navy ships for some collaborative maneuvers, managed to back the Panamanians out of a recently extended port management agreement with Hong Kong-based firm CK Hutchinson subsidiary Panama Ports Company (PPC) , and into a multinational deal to sell the rights (among others) for the Panamanian Canal ports to Blackrock.

Heads exploded in Beijing…

Sometimes, major historical shifts are virtually invisible.

That’s what just happened in India, and it upends 80 years of geopolitical calculus.

80 years is a very, very long time.

So here’s what happened. The Indian Ministry of Defense posted on X (formerly Twitter) that the Indian Navy has been carrying out raids and capturing Shadow Fleet vessels in India's Exclusive Economic Zone, starting on February 5th. About an hour later, someone deleted the post.

Hardly anyone noticed: Peter Zeihan, me, a handful of others.

But then Reuters and the Wall Street Journal (neither of which gave it serious coverage) confirmed the key details. It’s really happening, in the plural.

Why should you care? A little background will help.

India, Our Old Frenemy

India’s mythology is independence. Its identity since independence has been that it bows to no one. It has been reinforced for decades by a justifiable civilizational confidence: poor though it may be, India is not Belgium. India is a continental-sized power. It doesn’t “join blocs.” Blocs join it.

India founded the “Non-Aligned Movement” at the beginning of the Cold War, a mostly anti-American, mostly pro-Soviet group led through the years by such paragons of freedom and democracy as Josip Broz Tito, Gamal Abdel Nasser, both Fidel and Raül Castro, Robert Mugabe, and perhaps my current favorite, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

It’s also a founding member of BRICS (it’s the “I”), the transparently anti-U.S. alliance that will surely displace us, replace the dollar, blah blah blah.

And that’s the thing: for all its talk of “nonalignment,” India has always been all too aligned.

When my autistic son, Hunter, was very young, he sometimes had explosive public meltdowns.

Like many bright children, he also learned quickly that those meltdowns got him attention and could be used as leverage.

One afternoon, we were leaving a shopping center after a long day. Hunter wanted to go into a toy store he spotted. I said no. There was no money, and everyone was worn out. So he threw himself onto the sidewalk.

I turned away, deliberately cutting off the attention that fed the behavior. But behind me, I heard his stepfather say, calmly but firmly, "You know what? You have a cool name — Hunter. When you act like this, you don’t deserve that cool name. Until you calm down and behave, your name is Zelbert.”

Hunter stopped immediately. He stood up, sniffed, and reached for his stepdad’s hand.

No force. No indulgence. No shaming. Just a withdrawal of unearned status. From that point forward, all it took was a look, and Hunter shaped up rather than risk being called Zelbert.

The lesson was simple and profound: Identity comes with expectations. A name is not a costume you wear while refusing the obligations it implies.

That principle applies far beyond parenting.

I am here to tell you that the pundits are wrong: that America First never meant America Alone, that Donald Trump has no intention of dissolving or “shattering” NATO.The Trump foreign policy is not to abandon allies but to force them to stop freeloading, to make them true partners, not surly dependents, and by doing so, across the world, from Europe to the Middle East to Taiwan and Japan, reduce American overreach — paid for endlesssly by the American taxpayer — and replace it with an unassailable alliance that maintains peace through strength.

It is true nationalism: the idea that discrete groups of people should have the right to rule themselves, not to be ruled by a foreign elite in some distant capital, whether London or Moscow or Beijing or Brussels. It is the idea that those nations are responsible to and serve the interests of their own people. And it is the axiom that such nations should be able to defend themselves, not outsourcing their sovereignty but standing upright, individually, or in concert.

Indeed, “the old world is gone.” The order now ushered in is not just different: it’s better.

The following address, above in full video and reprinted in full and beautifully articulating the vision I’m sharing with you, was delivered to the Munich Security Conference on Saturday(2/14) by Donald Trump’s Secretary of State and my former Senator Marco Rubio. In Munich, Secretary of State Marco Rubio buries the old order, defines the new era in geopolitics in which American allies must be true partners, not dependents...and gets a standing ovation. …RDM

I'm pretty sure that most parents have no idea that their children are being trained to become cannon fodder for the insurgency that has been gaining steam for quite a while.

Insurgencies are fundamentally different in their tactics from revolutions, even though their goals are largely the same.

Revolutions seek to replace the current order through a spasm of violence, and while they can and often do build upon work done by an insurgency, they need not.

They can be triggered by events or by a perceived weakness of the regime, whether caused by internal or external factors, while insurgencies aim to erode the regime's strength through some form of asymmetrical warfare.

The whole point of the "long march through the institutions" was to slowly build an insurgency by weakening the American regime through internal subversion and by training several generations through ideological indoctrination and destroying social trust.

First, take over academia, then government, and K-12, coopt the media and turn it into Pravda, and only then resort to low-level violence and unleashing criminals.

Because most adults fail to see the pattern and still trust our institutions despite their hollowing out, the left has made huge strides in achieving its goals, and perhaps the most important success story has been its takeover of public schools.

Conservatives rightly focus on the propagandistic efforts of Pravda to brainwash people, but that brainwashing is aimed at adults who will not be the ground troops of the revolution they hope to spark.

Children are especially ripe for brainwashing and recruitment for obvious reasons, and one of the key tasks of schools is teaching students how to be citizens in a Republic.

They used to teach civics. Now they teach activism and revolution.

[TTP:  Mature audiences may not be aware of Nick Fuentes or his “Groypers,” but our kids and grandkids almost certainly are. It behooves us to make ourselves aware.] [TTP:  Mature audiences may not be aware of Nick Fuentes or his “Groypers,” but our kids and grandkids almost certainly are. It behooves us to make ourselves aware.]

Whatever else may be said about him, one fact cannot be denied: Nicholas J. Fuentes, the 27-year-old racialist influencer, is on the run of his life.

That’s a remarkable shift from 2017, when Fuentes was a little-known university freshman who hosted a little-watched political talk show. Over time, he developed a fanatical, cultlike following known as the “Groypers.”

His digital following soon crossed over into the real world: first, with his involvement in the 2017 Unite the Right rally; then, with his long-running feud with conservative activist Charlie Kirk; and finally, with his role in “Stop the Steal,” which culminated outside the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

Fuentes has cultivated a reputation as the most provocative and controversial figure on the Right. He has done this by embracing taboos, praising Hitler, and opposing interracial marriage.

In turn, he has ridden a wave of spectacle and outrage to new heights, with an appearance on The Tucker Carlson Show, and garnering frequent coverage in outlets such as the New York Times and The Atlantic.

Attempting to undercut his growing influence, the media and Fuentes’s right-leaning critics both tend to focus on Fuentes’s record of offensive remarks. Take Fuentes’s appearance on Piers Morgan Uncensored. During the two-hour interview, Morgan played a litany of clips from Fuentes’s talk show, highlighting bigoted comments he’s made over the years.

But this line of attack merely plays into Fuentes’s hands.

You may only now be hearing about Kathryn Ruemmler because of her connections to Jeffrey Epstein — including reports that she referred to him as “Uncle Jeffrey” and accepted a $9,400 Hermes handbag from him — but you have seen her work. Those associations ultimately led to her recent resignation from Goldman Sachs, yet Ruemmler, Barack Obama’s White House counsel and often described as a political “fixer,” has been near some of the most consequential controversies of the past two decades.

Washington insists it runs on rules, but every so often the public sees something else — not a cinematic conspiracy, but a professional ecosystem. A network, sometimes called the “swamp,” a governing class that moves from government to law firms to finance to media and back again, carrying influence with it almost like diplomatic immunity.