Alligators are known for being rather intimidating creatures. But did you know that they can be a bit playful, too? This is something that Michael Kiehl seemed to discover recently in Venice, Florida. While out near a swampy area, he came across an alligator — or as some folks like to say, he saw a “swamp puppy.” There was something about this alligator stood out. He was chewing on something, but it was not what you’d expect. Usually, you would expect to catch an alligator chewing on their prey. But in this case, the gator was chewing on a squeak toy! Suddenly, the nickname “swamp puppy” has never felt so accurate. Luckily, Michael was able to keep a safe distance to capture this moment on camera. See it for yourself in the video below! @fox13tampabay ONLY IN FLORIDA A "swamp puppy" was caught on camera playing with a squeaky toy in Venice. Have you ever seen anything like this before? #florida #gator #onlyinflorida #news ♬ original sound – FOX 13 News Tampa Bay “As a Floridian this is just a causal day,” one commentor jokingly writes in reply to Michael’s video. Others add, “My dog would be going nuts to get that ball” and “Awww swamp puppies are the cutest.” When This Florida Gator Gets a Hold on a Squeaky Toy, He Proves Why “Swamp Puppy” is Such a Fitting Nickname Like many others, you may be a bit concerned for our alligator friend. What if he is trying to eat the toy instead of play with it? While this can’t be entirely ruled out, alligators are much more playful than most people realize. In fact, the University of Tennessee completed a research study on this very topic years ago. This study applies to both alligators and crocodiles. (Note, these creatures are in the same scientific order but not families.) In the end, the results show that these animals do, indeed, engage in “play-like behavior.” Who would have guessed!? You can find the source of this story’s featured image here! The post Gator Finds Unlikely “Prey” And You’ll Never Guess What He’s Chomped On! appeared first on InspireMore.

Iran Says No Negotiations While Under Israeli Fire

'There is no legal process for people'

BREAKING OVERNIGHT ... TRUMP DEFEATS GAVIN NEWSOM IN THE 'NUTTY 9TH' CIRCUIT ... POLITICO: Appeals court blocks Newsom’s bid to reclaim control of National Guard from Trump A federal appeals court has indefinitely blocked an effort by California Gov. Gavin Newsom to reclaim control of the National Guard troops President Donald Trump deployed to Los Angeles following unrest related to immigration enforcement.

And the fact that this is happening to the Mets

'Yet who really wants to side with illegal aliens who spit on and burn American flags while waving Mexican flags?'

Movies & TV 28 Years Later 28 Years Later Is a Weird and Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Adventure This movie is probably not what you were expecting. In a very good way. By Leah Schnelbach | Published on June 20, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share If you’ve been looking forward to 28 Years Later expecting a tense, high octane, scare-a-minute horror movie, I feel it’s best to warn you now: that movie does show up—in the last five minutes. (Except then it hilarious, not just scary, and it’s thrilling as hell and made me very excited for the next film in this new trilogy, The Bone Temple.) For the two hours before that, Alex Garland and Danny Boyle take a thoughtful, meditative look at what life would actually be like nearly 30 years after the outbreak of the Rage Virus. If you’re looking for the frenetic chase scenes of the first two films, you’ll only find them occasionally; honestly there’s a bigger jump scare in the new Wes Anderson movie. What you get instead is a movie about a family trying to make a life in this world. You get a relentlessly realistic look at what happens to humanity when they’re cut off from larger society. You get a movie that is beautifully weird. This film is overflowing with ideas, and it’s exciting and strange and I wholeheartedly recommend it. It isn’t scary, the way the first film in the series was—but then again 28 Days Later helped invent a whole horror subgenre, and how often is a filmmaker going to pull that off? Here, Boyle and Garland have made a really cool choice to intercut the action with Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Boots” and scenes from Laurence Olivier’s film of Henry V, and also to linger over 1950s-era paintings of Queen Elizabeth that decorate Holy Island’s community hall. The UK, abandoned by the world, throws itself back on past glory to try to survive. This is very much a post-COVID, post-BREXIT film, about the resilience of the human spirit if not always its mind, and the more I think about it the more I like it. If I can invent a subgenre: Post-apocalyparesque? There is a scene, foreshadowed early on, that when it actually happened it made me hold my breath, and then laugh with delight when they pulled it off. There is a scene that made me cry. We begin in the Scottish Highlands, during that first terrifying outbreak 28 years ago. The virus tears through a small town, and we watch a weirdly giddy Reverend give a crucifix to a young boy before telling him to run and giving himself up to a horde of infected. This scene is one of the few that feels like the old films. It’s all screaming, chaos, and terror. After that we’re in the future. Or, well, now. The Virus was beaten back from the Continent, and now the UK is utterly cut off from the rest of the planet, under a quarantine that sees massive tankers patrol the seas around it. No one can leave, and anyone who sets foot on land has to stay. There is seemingly no humanitarian aid, no supply drops tossed down from helicopters, nothing. For a moment my brain recoiled at this break with reality—surely humanity wouldn’t have allowed this nightmare to continue? Surely people would send in dinghies full of medicine and food, at least? Then I came to my senses and focused back on the movie. (I do wonder if they’d drop a cure if one was found? Or has medical science given the UK up as lost forever and stopped even researching?) A community of uninfected humans has cropped up on Holy Island, off the Northeast coast of England, connected to the mainland by a long, thin causeway that’s only accessible at low tides, and that will feel eerily familiar to any fans of The Woman in Black. The island is ringed by high wooden walls, and several people spend shifts in the watchtowers, making sure no infected try to make it across. The people of the community have done surprisingly well: they farm, they pool supplies, they have lots of kids and a school for those kids that seems to teach a mix of basic education and post-apocalyptic survival skills—archery is a BIG deal here. When the tides are low, raiding parties go across to the mainland to forage more supplies… and to practice killing Infected. We join the story on the morning that a man named Jamie takes his kid, Spike, for his first big trip across the causeway. Spike’s only 12—the usual age for this initiation ritual is 14 or 15—but his dad is sure he’s ready. And yes, things go a little awry, but not in the way you might expect. In the interest of not spoiling anything I’ll say that the first section of the film really is a slice-of-life family drama more than anything else. Garland and Boyle ask how people would realistically live in this situation, and they find some fascinating answers. There is extraordinary beauty to be found in a mostly post-human landscape, but also a few mysteries and potential terrors that I think will be explored more in the next film. Even more interesting is that they’ve leaned into the idea that humans, at least in the UK, are on two separate tracks now. The Infected aren’t revenants or zombies, after all, they’re people. They’re social, and left to their own devices they form a community of their own. Kind of. Spike is a winning protagonist. Alfie Williams is great at showing us Spike’s fear, but also tempering it with the fact that this is the only life the boy’s ever known. To him, the Infected aren’t victims of a virus, or mutated humans, or a judgement from a deity—he thinks of them more like 19th Century Kentuckians would have thought of bears: they’re in the woods all the time, they might kill you if you get too close so always have a weapon at the ready, and if they chase you you’re fucked. The one note of wonder is that this is his first trip across the causeway. After years of hearing stories, and watching his elders cross over for raids (and presumably not everyone made it back) it’s his turn to step into adulthood, and that’s just as awesome and scary as you’d expect. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is perfect as Jamie. He’s nurturing and proud, and supportive in a way I found surprising in this genre of movie. But he also isn’t perfect, because no dad is, and Spike finds himself siding more with his mother Isla, played by Jodie Comer. Isla is ill, but with no real doctors or medication available anymore, no one’s quite sure what’s wrong—just that she isn’t Infected. (If she was Infected they would have killed her already.) Comer does a great job with the difficult role of being ambiguously sick. Edvin Ryding is excellent in a prickly role as an outsider to the community. And maybe best of all we have Ralph Fiennes as Ian Kelson, who has tried to make his own way in a post-Outbreak world. Fiennes’ performance here might be my favorite non-Sinners acting of the year so far—I’m trying so hard not to give stuff away, but he really leans into the strangeness of the film. One last note: The cinematography (by Anthony Dod Mantle) editing (by Jon Harris), and soundtrack (by Young Fathers) are all fantastic. When we do get real action scenes, they’re chaotic enough to feel real, but, importantly, I always knew where everyone was. There are particular moments with slower members of the Infected that are deliciously drawn out. And again, while I wasn’t exactly scared at any point, this team, and especially Young Fathers, created an eerie atmosphere that made me feel like I was pretty much extinct, if that makes sense? Like I was seeing into a world where humans were an afterthought. I’ve alluded to the next film in this trilogy a few times now, and just to be clear: 28 Years Later seems to end with The Bone Temple’s beginning. At least I hope it does, because the scene at the end of the film is a jolt of weird new energy, and Jack O’Connell is riveting for the few moments he’s there. If the next film is as good as this one, we’re all in for a treat when it hits theaters in January.[end-mark] The post <em>28 Years Later</em> Is a Weird and Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Adventure appeared first on Reactor.

Lists Jaws 12 Things You Didn’t Know About Jaws For its 50th anniversary, find out more about how the very first summer blockbuster was made. By Don Kaye | Published on June 20, 2025 Credit: Universal Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Universal Pictures Arriving in theaters 50 years ago today (on June 20, 1975), Jaws was a groundbreaking movie in many ways. Aside from being the first “summer blockbuster” (more on that later), it was one of the most influential action thrillers of the next five decades. It changed the way movies were marketed and distributed, and became the breakout film for director Steven Spielberg, just 28 years old at the time and now one of the greatest living filmmakers of his age. Jaws became a pop culture phenomenon and, for two years, was the highest grossing movie ever made until another summer event film, Star Wars, came along to unseat it. Based on the best-selling novel by Peter Benchley, Jaws is a simple story on the surface: it’s set in the small Long Island resort town of Amity, where a great white shark has begun killing people in the water. The town’s chief of police (Roy Scheider) tries desperately to close the beaches—against the wishes of Amity’s greed-driven mayor (Murray Hamilton)—and finally heads out to sea himself with a crusty shark hunter (Robert Shaw) and a marine biologist (Richard Dreyfuss) in a last-ditch effort to kill the beast. Jaws was the #1 film at the box office for 14 straight weeks when it first came out, and has been re-released multiple times in theaters and on home video. Yet for all its success, this was a film that was plagued with problems almost from the start: its three mechanical sharks (nicknamed Bruce, after Spielberg’s lawyer) all worked poorly, if at all; the movie blew past its budget and schedule thanks to the unpredictable nature of shooting on location and on the ocean; and the script was rewritten daily. Even with all that, what emerged was nothing less than a masterpiece of suspense and terror. Here are a dozen things you (probably) didn’t know about Jaws, from the original concept for the book to the way it changed the motion picture industry.  Peter Benchley’s earliest version of the book was… a comedy? In the early 1970s, Peter Benchley was a struggling non-fiction writer. But when he pitched the idea of a novel about a small beach town under siege by a great white shark, editor Thomas Congdon at Doubleday bit (no pun intended), advancing Benchley $7,500 for the first 100 pages. There was only one problem, however. “The first five pages were just wonderful,” Congdon told BBC News Online. “They just went in to the eventual book without any changes. The other 95 pages though were on the wrong track. They were humorous. And humor isn’t the proper vehicle for a great thriller.” Congdon asked Benchley for a rewrite more in line with those opening pages, and the finished manuscript was eventually delivered in early 1973. The book did not have its title until the last minute Credit: Universal Pictures Benchley did not have a title for his book when he submitted it. Among the candidates were A Stillness in the Water, Leviathan Rising, and The Jaws of Death, but none of them stuck. Benchley told author Brett Gilliam in his book Diving Pioneers and Innovators that he and Congdon went through “125 titles” before finally settling on Jaws “20 minutes” before the book had to go into production. “I said to Tom, ‘Look, we can’t agree on a title. In fact, the only word we both like is ‘jaws,’” Benchley recalled. “‘Why don’t we call the bloody thing Jaws?” When Congdon asked what it meant, Benchley replied, “Who knows? At least it’s short.” A TV movie was Steven Spielberg’s calling card to direct Jaws Credit: ABC Steven Spielberg only had one feature, The Sugarland Express, to his credit in 1974, along with a lot of TV work. But Spielberg desperately wanted to direct Jaws after reading the novel, which he thought shared similar elements with Duel, the TV movie he directed in which a traveling salesman is terrorized on a lonely road by an unseen driver in a massive truck. Spielberg felt both stories were about average working people battling almost supernatural monsters. Ironically, after landing the assignment, he got cold feet and almost backed out of Jaws to direct a comedy called Lucky Lady. But good sense prevailed, and in a nod to Duel, Spielberg mixed the sound of the truck’s fiery end into the audio of the shark’s explosive death in Jaws. The trio of stars were not the first choices Credit: Universal Pictures It’s impossible nowadays to think of anyone but Roy Scheider as police chief Martin Brody, Robert Shaw as shark fisherman Quint, and Richard Dreyfuss as marine biologist Matt Hooper, but they weren’t the first potential names on the call sheet. Universal Pictures execs wanted bigger stars in the movie, while Spielberg thought that lesser-known actors would add to its realism. That’s why it must have felt strange to consider Charlton Heston—busy saving airliners and Los Angeles in movies like Airport ’75 and Earthquake—for Brody, in what seemed like a much smaller scenario than the Ten Commandments star was used to. The role of Brody was offered to Robert Duvall, but he wanted to play Quint instead. Tough guys Lee Marvin and Sterling Hayden both passed on that part before Shaw accepted. As for Hooper, up-and-coming actors up for the role included Jeff Bridges, Jon Voight, Timothy Bottoms, and Jan-Michael Vincent, but Spielberg chose Richard Dreyfuss on the advice of his good friend George Lucas. Spielberg threw out most of the book’s subplots Credit: Universal Pictures Steven Spielberg envisioned Jaws as a thrilling shark-hunt adventure on the high seas, but the novel was very nearly a soap opera, with Peter Benchley squeezing in a number of salacious subplots. In the book, Brody’s wife Ellen has an affair with Hooper, who she knew back when they both spent summers in Amity as kids. Spielberg had that removed, fearing it would make the characters unsympathetic. Additionally, the book’s Mayor Vaughn owes the Mafia a lot of money, which he can only pay off if Amity keeps the beaches open. The mob goes as far as killing Chief Brody’s cat in his front yard as a threat. That was also a non-starter, with Vaughn’s motivation in the movie now a deeply misguided concern over the town’s loss of tourism. Spielberg also had the ending changed: in the book, both Quint and Hooper die before the shark finally succumbs to multiple harpoon wounds and sinks silently into the depths. In the movie, Hooper lives and Brody blows up the shark with an air tank and a lucky gunshot—a much more cinematic demise, to be sure. The shooting schedule tripled from 55 days to 159 days Credit: Universal Pictures Jaws was given a budget of $3.5 million (in 1975 dollars) and a 55-day shooting schedule. By the time the movie was finished filming, the schedule swelled to literally three times the original length—topping out at 159 days—and the budget had ballooned to anywhere from $7 million to $11 million, depending on the source (then, as now, budgets are one of Hollywood’s most closely guarded secrets). Filming on location in Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts, shooting fully one-third of the movie on the open ocean—something never done before on a major motion picture—and utilizing three mechanical sharks that kept failing to function all contributed to the movie almost spinning out of control. Spielberg began shooting the film without a finished script; screenwriter Carl Gottlieb (who also played the newspaper editor Meadows) penned the next day’s scenes every night back at the hotel. In the end, the experience made Spielberg a better filmmaker—forced to show less of the shark, he relied on the tension and fear forged by its largely unseen presence. A soon-to-be-famous director worked on the movie’s crew Credit: Universal Pictures Remember the sequence in Jaws where two fishermen lob a holiday roast off a short pier in an effort to catch the shark, only for the monster to take the bait, wreck the pier, and dump one of the men into the drink? Carl Gottlieb writes in his essential book on the making of the movie, The Jaws Log, that one of the crew members who worked on rigging the breakaway pier for the sequence was director John Landis. At the time he had just directed the low-budget 1973 horror comedy Schlock, and had been invited out to Martha’s Vineyard for a meeting with Spielberg. Landis stuck around the set and, because the production needed an extra set of hands, eventually got recruited to build and set up the pier for that scene. Landis later embarked on a successful directing career of his own, with titles like National Lampoon’s Animal House, An American Werewolf in London, The Blues Brothers, Coming to America, and the iconic music video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” all on his resume. The “bigger boat” line was reshot so that audiences could hear it Credit: Universal Pictures Following a test screening of the nearly completed movie, Steven Spielberg and editor Verna Fields (whose heroic work on Jaws earned her an Oscar) tweaked a couple of scenes for maximum impact. The first was when the shark initially appears at the stern of the Orca, scaring the hell out of Brody, who tells Quint, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” The line itself was improvised, but arose from the crew’s real-life issues with the size of the craft used to transport the production gear out to the spot in the ocean where they were filming. According to David Yewdall’s Practical Art of Motion Picture Sound, the line got lost in the test screening as the audience responded to the shocking emergence of the great white. So Spielberg and Fields extended Brody’s reaction, giving the audience a few more seconds to settle down before Roy Scheider uttered the now-immortal phrase. The “head in the hull” scene was filmed in a swimming pool Credit: Universal Pictures The second scene reworked for Jaws was reshot after principal photography was completed, long before “post-production photography” became a regular part of tentpole shooting schedules. The sequence in which Brody and Hooper find the wrecked boat of local fisherman Ben Gardner, only for Gardner’s severed head to pop out of a hole in the hull in front of a terrified Hooper, is one of the biggest jump scares in the film. But Spielberg was unhappy with the way it turned out, and Universal was unwilling to pay for additional shooting. So the director opened his own wallet to redo the shot, which he ended up filming in Verna Fields’ swimming pool. With black plastic covering the top of the pool and a container of milk poured into the water to give it a murky ocean look, the “head shot” was refashioned to Spielberg’s satisfaction—and the screams of audiences everywhere. P.S.: Universal picked up the tab after all. Why a scene from Moby-Dick was not in the movie Credit: MGM Speaking of Ben Gardner, the role was played by local Martha’s Vineyard fisherman Craig Kingsbury, whose eccentric mannerisms and expressions were a large influence on Robert Shaw’s portrayal of Quint. But Quint was also inspired by one of the classic characters in all of literature, Captain Ahab from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, whose obsession with capturing the white whale is echoed by Quint’s descent into near-madness in his efforts to kill the shark. Spielberg wanted to make the connection even more apparent by including a scene in which Quint is introduced watching John Huston’s 1956 film of Moby-Dick in a theater, but Gregory Peck—who played Ahab in the adaptation and owned the rights to the film—would not allow him to use it because he was unhappy with his performance. Who wrote Robert Shaw’s famous monologue about the U.S.S. Indianapolis? Credit: Universal Pictures In a now-classic scene, Brody, Quint, and Hooper sit around the cabin of the Orca at night, drinking and comparing scars. Quint reveals that he survived the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis during World War II, one of just over 300 crew members who lived while hundreds more died—many of them eaten by sharks, thus giving Quint his lifelong hatred of the fish. The monologue is absolutely mesmerizing, but the credit for it has been a subject of debate over the years. Carl Gottlieb writes in The Jaws Log that he, Spielberg, and others—including screenwriters Howard Sackler (who conceived of the speech) and John Milius—all worked on it, but it was Robert Shaw himself who looked at the various drafts, did some of his own research, and wrote the version that appears in the film. The marketing plan for Jaws was mapped out in a bathroom Credit: Universal Pictures Also according to Gottlieb, the first sneak preview for Jaws was held in Dallas, where it went over like gangbusters. The second took place in Long Beach, California, closer to Hollywood, with top executives from Universal Pictures in attendance. This one did even better, so the Universal brain trust gathered in the men’s room—the only place where they could talk without an excited crowd around—and decided on the spot to completely change the release plans for the film. Instead of opening in a few select big cities and expanding to the rest of the country over weeks and months—which was the way they did it back in those days—they opted to send Jaws out on 500 screens (a huge number at the time) all at once. And with that, the heads of Universal invented the “summer blockbuster,” altering the way that movies were distributed and turning them into “events.”[end-mark]                                                                                                                         The post 12 Things You Didn’t Know About <i>Jaws</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Last week, the Trump White House hosted PragerU CEO Marissa Streit to launch a patriotic exhibit called “The Founders Museum,” a joint effort involving the White House, PragerU, and the Department of Education. That seems a rather odd thing for an “antigovernment extremist group” to do, yet that’s exactly the label the Southern Poverty Law Center applies to PragerU. According to the SPLC, this nonprofit best known for its five-minute educational videos secretly works to “protect white supremacy” and belongs on a “hate map” with chapters of America’s most notorious hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC’s ire against PragerU comes as no surprise. After all, the SPLC has a long track record of putting mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits on its “hate map,” and PragerU’s videos spread far and wide, encouraging Americans to defend family values, free markets, systems based on merit rather than identity—in short, the virtues of America. This patriotism explains why PragerU is celebrating America’s 250th anniversary at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, so why does the SPLC hate it so much? SPLC’s Beef With PragerU As I wrote in my book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC gained its reputation by suing Klan groups into bankruptcy. Now, it uses a “hate map” to suggest that mainstream conservative nonprofits are somehow akin to the KKK. This map inspired a terrorist attack in 2012. We're going through something similar to the Protestant Reformation and the Wars of Religion afterward, I tell @prageru's @marissastreit.The Left's NGOs are rebranding the woke revolution, and the SPLC is trying to prevent anyone from stopping it.https://t.co/u7MRZJohrv https://t.co/hPIUANVxnl pic.twitter.com/zarjPlm8B2— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) June 17, 2025 Back in 2018, the SPLC insinuated that PragerU has connections to the alt-right movement, even while admitting that PragerU published a video condemning the alt-right. Dennis Prager—who has been recovering in the hospital as the SPLC attacks him—eviscerated this disgusting attack at the time. When the SPLC added PragerU to the “hate map” in May, it also published its “Year in Hate and Extremism” report, which mentions PragerU in two sections—the “anti-student inclusion movement” and the opposition to the Left’s diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda. “In 2024, [DEI] initiatives became ground zero for hard-right mobilizations to whitewash American society and protect white supremacy,” wrote SPLC research analysts Maya Henson Carey and R.G. Cravens. Carey and Cravens frame DEI as “essential in ensuring pluralism … and promoting democracy.” Such programs “promote teaching accurate histories of American inequalities as structural.” This sentence smuggles in the notion of critical race theory, which teaches that American society is fundamentally unjust and oppressive against certain races, classes, LGBTQ identities, and more. Critical race theory inspired The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which attempted to redefine America’s Founding—placing the real beginning of America with the arrival of the first slaves, rather than the signing of the Declaration of Independence. PragerU naturally disagrees with this. Yes, America has struggled to live up to the ideals of the declaration, but critical race theory effectively denies the real progress of abolishing slavery and defending civil rights. It also encourages Americans to judge each other by the color of their skin, not the content of their character. “The antigovernment group PragerU calls DEI ‘an affront to America’s core values’ that must be ‘cast … into the dustbin of history alongside all the other racist and discredited ideas of the past,'” the SPLC noted. Right-thinking Americans agree with PragerU on this score. Fighting the Left’s Takeover of Education The SPLC also attacked PragerU as part of an “anti-student inclusion movement” including Moms for Liberty (which has been on the “hate map” since 2023). The SPLC uses this framing to suggest that the parental rights movement is the aggressor in the cultural battles over education, while conveniently ignoring the Left’s ideological seizure of the classroom. In fact, the SPLC runs its own program—long called “Teaching Tolerance” but now rebranded as “Learning for Justice”—pushing critical race theory, transgender identity, and other leftist social causes in schools. The retreat away from tolerance is instructive. When the parental rights movement calls for putting an end to classes teaching that blacks are inherently oppressed and whites inherently oppressors, for removing pornographic books from school libraries, and for parental opt-outs to LGBTQ lessons, the SPLC says that amounts to “promoting far-right ideological narratives.” The SPLC claimed that PragerU is a “significant actor in this disinformation ecosystem,” and that it “specializes in promoting far-right propaganda through professionally produced media.” “Critics have accused PragerU materials of promoting nationalism, anti-DEI narratives and the whitewashing of historical events as patriotic education,” the SPLC noted. “These narratives play into broader moral panic campaigns that portray public schools as battlegrounds for the nation’s cultural future.” So, SPLC’s attack on PragerU boils down to two things: PragerU fights the SPLC’s woke agenda in schools, and PragerU loves America too much. By claiming that PragerU’s great sin is being insufficiently negative about America’s history and telling kids about the virtues of our Founding, the SPLC effectively admits there’s really nothing to justify PragerU’s presence on the “hate map.” Americans should be grateful that PragerU, not the SPLC, is advising the White House’s celebration of America’s 250th anniversary. The post Why Is PragerU on a ‘Hate Map’? Because It Loves America’s Founding Too Much appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Among U.S. allies in Europe, Poland has been the strongest advocate for expanding European defense forces since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Continuing to take this mission seriously, Poland has turned to South Korea as a defense partner, particularly in the acquisition of K2 tanks.  Such collaboration serves as an example for other U.S. allies while also pointing to the necessary expansion of European defense.  Polish forces utilized Soviet-era battle tanks before investing in K2s. New efforts in modernization include plans to replace any outdated tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and artillery systems.  In August 2022, Poland signed a defense agreement with Hyundai Rotem in South Korea. The agreement included a contract for $3.4 billion worth of K2 tanks—180 units—to be sent to Poland before 2026.  By the end of 2024, Poland had already received 84 of the K2 tanks. Yet, the acquisition benefits of this relationship have only just begun. In addition to waiting for complete fulfillment of the first order, Poland is pursuing another deal with South Korea to acquire 820 additional tanks.  This purchase aligns with Poland’s 2025 security strategy which supports defense spending through streamlining investment into the defense industry and initiating a framework for Europe to take responsibility of their own security.  In addition, the purchase is consistent with Poland’s defense modernization program which intends to enhance land capabilities through new armored vehicles, artillery, and air defense.  The Polish Deputy Prime Minister W. Kosiniak-Kamysz recently stated to the Foreign Affairs Council, “We spend more not to participate in wars, but so that there are no wars in the first place.”  Nevertheless, Poland faces challenges related to the speed of procuring new systems and integrating them into their force structure.   But the key to accomplishing modernization goals lies in defense purchases from qualified countries like South Korea.  In fact, the U.S. International Trade Administration stated that, “As of 2023, South Korea has the world’s 9th largest defense budget and is the world’s 8th largest defense exporter.” The former South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared intentions to bring South Korea into the rankings of highest four weapons suppliers in the world.  Such defense prioritization and a prosperous defense industrial base have placed South Korea as a leading security partner to the U.S. and its allies.  The accelerated timeline of Poland’s defense modernization necessitated outsourcing as domestic production could not have kept pace alone. Purchases from South Korea can and already have provided new systems with updated technology while on an efficient timeline.  The K2 Black Panther is a modern tank with advanced autoloaders, active protection systems, composite armor, and fire control. Additionally, the K2 has a 1,500-horsepower engine and advanced suspension which together offer benefits in maneuverability. Finally, the K2 is compatible with other NATO systems.   Yet, the cooperation between Poland and South Korea does not end with K2s. Poland has also signed contracts to purchase K9?155mm tracked self-propelled howitzers, HOMAR-K?and Chunmoo Multiple Launch Rocket Systems, and light fighter aircraft.  South Korea has even agreed for Poland to produce a variation of the K2 domestically. This system, the K2PL, will begin production in 2026.  What’s more, these weapons deals have created a cooperative framework from which training collaboration has emerged. In May 2025, 16 Polish soldiers spent two weeks training with the Chunmoo rocket artillery in Paju, South Korea.   Following presidential elections in June 2025, there will be a new administration in Poland. However, Poland’s modernization program was a bipartisan development which is unlikely to see great change.  At the upcoming NATO summit in The Hague, there is no doubt that Poland will be one of the strongest advocates for increased defense spending.   In determining where to allocate this defense spending, other European allies should consider following Poland’s example and purchasing defense systems from qualified and friendly countries abroad.  Overall, the partnership between Poland and South Korea illustrates the mutually beneficial nature of defense cooperation. And the rest of Europe would do well to learn from Poland’s example.  The post Poland’s Purchases From South Korea Set Example appeared first on The Daily Signal.