🇺🇸🇵🇭 The Pentagon Paid $12.8 Million for a Four-Person “Think Tank” at Stanford called SeaLight. It is US-funded and dictates how Manila performs on camera SeaLight, once called Project Myoushu, sits under Stanford’s Gordian Knot Center. Public records show the centre took roughly $12.8 million from the US Department of Defense and the Office of Naval Research. Its director Ray Powell spent 35 years in the US Air Force, including postings in the Philippines. He has been clear about the goal: raise the political price China pays for enforcing its claims. The method is industrial. Philippine Coast Guard vessels deliberately enter contested waters, seek contact, film every angle, then push the footage out with ready-made victim subtitles. Western media and selected social accounts do the rest. The product is a steady drip of “China bullying the little guy” content that costs Beijing in reputation while Washington risks nothing. Now the same script has moved onshore. SeaLight put out a report attacking ordinary teacher-training cooperation between Jinan University and Philippine Chinese-language schools. Days later Defence Secretary Gilberto Teodoro was repeating the lines almost word for word, calling the exchanges a grey-zone threat and telling universities to review every China-linked programme. The South China Morning Post ran it without blinking. This is not organic Filipino policyt is outsourced information warfare. Powell’s team supplies the framing, the timing and the talking points. Manila supplies the boats, the cameras and the political cover. When the temperature rises the United States claims it is only supporting an ally. When it gets too hot the Philippines stands alone on the front line. China is simply holding the line on long-standing rights while running the same educational exchanges that have existed for years. Western coverage treats the staged confrontations as spontaneous Chinese aggression and the teaching programmes as infiltration. Both claims fall apart under basic scrutiny. The Philippines is being used as a disposable proxy. The more provocations it stages, the closer any real escalation comes to Manila’s own doorstep. The people writing the scripts sit safely in California. How many more of these grey-zone stories does Manila need to swallow before ordinary Filipinos notice who is actually writing the plot?