“If you’re willing to try a therapist, if you’re willing to try Xanax and pills and everything, why not maybe find your answers in someone else that’s higher than yourself,” Rascal Flatts bass player Jay DeMarcus said on the Today Show Tuesday.
Jay DeMarcus told TODAY hosts Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager that writing his new memoir Shotgun Angels was like “being in therapy” because of having to relive the painful moments of his life.
The memoir, DeMarcus said, is really a tribute to his mother, whose strong Christian faith served as the seedbed for his own relationship with Christ.
“I attribute a lot of who I am today to the foundation that she laid early on in my life by dragging us to church like three or four times a week,” Jay DeMarcus said with a smile. “Sometimes I thought we should just have a bed there and save money on the gas and time going back and forth.”
“I realized later on in life that she was planting seeds of faith in me that would take really, really strong roots the older I got and I really, really leaned on it through some really tough times there in Nashville trying to make it in the music business,” he said.
In language rarely heard on Today, DeMarcus said that he is not ashamed of being a Christian.
“I find my hope in a relationship with Christ,” he said. “Being a believer is not about being perfect by any means. It’s simply admitting that we need help.”
“For me, I found the toughest times of my life to be better by having a strong relationship with Christ that I could lean upon,” he said.
The Grammy-winning Rascal Flatts has been a wildly successful country rock band, with seven albums certified platinum or higher as well as 14 number one singles.
Rascal Flatts co-founder and bass player Jay DeMarcus says he is “not preachy,” but laments the loss of America’s Christian roots.
“We’ve really gotten away from the Christian principles that the country was founded upon,” Jay DeMarcus told host Tom Shillue on Fox News Radio Tuesday. “But the further and further we get from it the more I feel like our country and our world sinks more into darkness and it’s disturbing to me.”
DeMarcus said that his Christian faith has gotten him through many tough situations in his life and he only wishes other people might give God a chance.
“I think you have to do is be real about the situation that we live in and be real about your life and I know that when people go to their rooms and their closets and they’re by themselves people deal with deep hurt and deep pain and all I’m saying is there may be another solution out there,” he said.
“Being a believer is not about being perfect,” DeMarcus said. “It’s about admitting that you need help. We’re all broken, flawed individuals put on this world that aren’t meant to do this alone.”
Saying he does not like to climb up on a “soapbox,” DeMarcus said that for him, Christianity has a powerful message of hope.
“We need somebody that I believe is greater than us that sent his Son to die for us and at the end of the day that has been a strong source of strength and hope for me in my own life and I believe it can be for other people,” he added.
Six human smugglers were arrested and 60 Central American migrants were apprehended after an illegal caravan was stopped in Veracruz.
State police from the Secretaría de Seguridad Pública (SSP) halted a suspicious caravan of four vehicles traveling along the Minatitlán-Acayucan Highway earlier this week in the municipality of Texistepec. State police identified six human smugglers and placed them into custody, according to local reports. The smugglers were identified as Ernesto “N,” 18, Olíver and Víctor Alonso “N,” 30, all from Chiapas. The other three smugglers were identified as René “N,” 35, Jorge “N,” 46, and Víctor Manuel “N,” 37, from Veracruz.
Authorities reported that of the 60, 29 were men, nine women, and 22 minors. The smugglers were turned over to the federal attorney general’s office. The 60 were placed into the custody of Instituto Nacional de Migración (INM).
Mexico is seeing a sharp increase in Central American migrants entering the country to reach the U.S. border and request asylum. This practice has triggered human smuggling organizations into action. The flaws in U.S. immigration law created a pull factor, leading to record-setting border apprehension statistics. The asylum tactic is expected to result in approximately 900,000 migrants entering the U.S. in 2019, per estimates by the Department of Homeland Security.
The migration has caused a humanitarian crisis in which human smuggling organizations place migrants at extreme risk while hurriedly transporting them through Mexico to avoid detection. Breitbart News recently reported about a fatal crash that killed 23 migrants and injured 33 in Chiapas. The migrants were packed into a large cargo truck that went into a ravine.
In early April, human smugglers abandoned 155 migrants on a road in Pueblo, according to local reports.
In February, Mexican security authorities arrested a human smuggler transporting 39 migrants in Veracruz who tried to bribe officials with $10,000 pesos ($530 USD).
Breitbart News is told by local contacts that human smuggling organizations make promises of safe passage but instead often hold migrants for ransom.
Robert Arce is a retired Phoenix Police detective with extensive experience working Mexican organized crime and street gangs. Arce has worked in the Balkans, Iraq, Haiti, and recently completed a three-year assignment in Monterrey, Mexico, working out of the Consulate for the United States Department of State, International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Program, where he was the Regional Program Manager for Northeast Mexico (Coahuila, Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, Durango, San Luis Potosi, Zacatecas.)
May 1st was long ago appropriated by communism as its worldwide holiday and, unfortunately, the civilized world has yet to take it back. The latest murders by Marxist regimes bring the death toll from communism ever closer to 100 million, but there are still marches in celebration of the ideology everywhere, including American cities.
The precise death toll from communism is difficult to tabulate, given that so many of the killings occurred in environments with poor record-keeping and officials prone to lying about how many people they murdered.
The more modest estimates suggest 94 million dead worldwide at the end of the 20th Century, making communism several times deadlier than fascism or violent crime. Communism’s favorite sport is the Hunger Games, as many of its victims were killed by starvation during famines caused by either collectivist incompetence or deliberate murderous intent. Venezuelan Marxists were doing their level best to bring the death toll into eight digits as recently as yesterday.
The persistence of May Day owes much to Marxist infiltration of the early labor movement, which continues to push the day as a celebration of “workers’ rights.”
Some of these groups are making an effort to dissociate themselves from the May Day label and develop new brandings like “Worker’s Day,” although they have a tendency to slip up and revert to “May Day,” the term still embraced by the anarchic segments of the political spectrum. Many of these “workers’ rights” movements have been co-opted by the open border agenda and used May Day this year to push policies that aggressively hurt American workers, such as supporting illegal immigration.
The most optimistic May Day organizers want to purify the day and take it away from communism, but they consistently underestimate how viral and toxic Marxist ideology is. Instead of dismissing communism wholesale as unmitigated evil the way fascism was condemned, generations of intellectuals made the horrible mistake of thinking they could pluck a few noble-sounding ideas from Marx’s poisonous brew and leave the murderous totalitarian oppression behind.
Nothing can reform communism. Everything that touches it becomes more communist, more infected with the pathologies that killed those hundred million victims and will kill a hundred million more if given a chance. May Day is a march down a one-way street where only left turns are allowed.
It didn’t take long for the Communist banners to come out in the London May Day march:
Photos by Leon Neal/Getty Images
Those engaged in the filthy capitalist practice of selling memorabilia at the event certainly seemed to have no confusion that Britain’s new national holiday celebrates communism, not ancient pagan equinox rituals or Roman celebrations of spring:
Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images
Things got lively in Paris as masked thugs went on a destructive rampage and the police responded with tear gas. The French government warned May Day would bring out the Yellow Vest demonstrators, Black Bloc anarchists, and labor militants, but the march went ahead anyway and ended precisely as feared:
Photos by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Of course, the May Day rioters in Paris went after banks, which are a rather important component of the employment process that “workers’ rights” activists supposedly care deeply about:
Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
The blood-red flag of communism flew high in Paris as well:
Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
In Venezuela, supporters of dictator Nicolás Maduro celebrated Simón Bolívar, who the regime portrays as not only a liberator from imperialist rule but a founding father of Latin American communism. Thanks to Marxist economic practices, Bolivar now has one of the world’s most worthless currencies in the world named after him:
Photo by YURI CORTEZ / AFP
Indonesian workers, who have some very understandable complaints about compensation, scuffled with police during a huge march in Jakarta:
Photo by BAY ISMOYO/AFP/Getty Images
Turkey, which made May Day a holiday almost a century ago, had an exceptionally rough time this year as the government tried to push labor demonstrators back from Istanbul’s Taksim Square. The police reported arresting 137 people for holding illegal demonstrations.
Photo by ADEM ALTAN/AFP/Getty Images
Photo by YASIN AKGUL/AFP/Getty Images
May Day is a bit more festive in full-blown Communist countries like China, although China is actually experiencing one of the most important labor protests in the world right now, the 996 movement:
Photo by FRED DUFOUR/AFP/Getty Images
The problem at the heart of the intersection between well-intentioned labor activism and malevolent communism is the immense difficulty of determining the value of labor. People are naturally uncomfortable analyzing the value of work performed by human beings with the cold dispassion they might bring to valuing any other resource. Allowing capitalism and market forces to determine the price paid for labor is easily seen as callous and unfair, even for people who would strongly agree that buyers have a right to negotiate the best price for any otherresources.
The deadly illusion of communism is that government, acting as the combined will of the people, can do a far better job of establishing the value of labor than private industry. This is manifestly untrue – it is downright absurdwhen considering the ineptitude and corruption of governments around the world – but the dream of fairness mandated by a loving elite remains incredibly attractive, especially with examples of workers treated shabbily by their employers readily available everywhere you look.
Marxists easily take advantage of labor unrest by selling collectivism as a fairer and more just system of distributing society’s wealth. It always ends in corruption, tyranny, and violence, but people make themselves forget. The Marxists never forget that teaching people to hate those who would pay for their work is the easiest way to enslave them.
Earlier this month, Planned Parenthood-supporting students at the University of Texas-San Antonio giddily mocked a pro-life group’s display known as the “Cemetery of the Innocents,” which is a dedication to the unborn killed by abortion.
The Students for Life chapter that created the display caught the vulgar mockery from members of the school’s Students United for Planned Parenthood group on video.
“Stop, hey, hey, what’s that sound, all the fetuses are in the ground!” sang one female student, dancing in the mock cemetery. She also led chants with the other pro-abortion protesters in support for Planned Parenthood and bragged about getting an abortion herself. “Look, there’s mine right there!” she said, pointing to one of the crosses representing a killed unborn child. Another female student joked that they should “kiss in the fetus graveyard” and said getting an abortion is her biggest “kink,” according to StudentsForLife.org.
In a report posted to the pro-life group’s website, Sarah Zarr, the Texas Regional Coordinator for Students for Life, said the protesters took to their display immediately after it was set up. “Some of the members came to talk to us but would not have dialogue they just wanted to shout their points at us. One girl told me I was using my white privilege and ‘wasn’t allowed to be out there talking about this issue when it affect black women,’” Zarr recalled.
The group also had a table with pro-life literature set up. A male protester picked up three stacks of literature from the table and ran off, said Zarr. A pro-life student at the table named Mica chased after him and asked for their materials back, but he “threw it all in the gutter,” she claimed.
“We then went and filed a police report and the police said they couldn’t do anything because we were handing out the info he didn’t technically steal even though we said not all of it was to take,” Zarr said. “He finally let us a file a police report but said charges can’t be made until they investigate.”
Last month, a Cemetery for the Innocents set up by the University of Michigan Ann Arbor’s Students for Life chapter was desecrated by pro-abortion activists. In video captured by the pro-life group, a female abortion activist is seen picking up pink crosses from the display and placing them in a black trash bag.
“Is there a reason why you’re doing this?” Kaylena Wiederhold, Students for Life’s Michigan regional coordinator, confronted the activist.
“We disagree with it,” responded the pro-abort.
Wiederhold contended, “Okay, but this isn’t your property,”
“We know that having a conversation isn’t going to work,” the vandal said in response.
But when an officer approached the activist, she changed her tune, telling authorities she was merely “cleaning up” “garbage” on campus.
“We were just cleaning up this garbage on the school campus, but we’ve realized that apparently this is someone’s property. And you’re telling us to leave it, I’m assuming?” she said.
“Correct. And they do have a permit, like she explained to you,” the officer answered.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday that the Democrats and other anti-Trump adversaries exploited special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe to undermine President Donald Trump.
During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing featuring Attorney General William Barr’s testimony on the Mueller report, Lee said Democrats and other anti-Trump political operatives exploited the Mueller report to undermine Trump’s administration.
He quoted the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, saying:
Nothing is so politically effective as the ability to charge that one’s opponent and his associates are not merely wrongheaded, naive and ineffective, but, in all probability, crooks. And nothing so effectively gives an appearance of validity to such charges as a Justice Department investigation.
During the Senate hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said the Mueller report has concluded that President Trump did not collude with the Russian government during the 2016 presidential election and that he did not obstruct justice by firing former FBI Director James Comey.
“So the bottom line is we’re here for Mr. Barr, the results of a two-year investigation into the Trump campaign, all things Russia, the actions the president took before and after the campaign, $25 million, 40 FBI agents,” Graham said.
“I appreciate very much what Mr. Mueller did for the country. I have read most of the report. For me, it is over,” Graham concluded in his opening statement.
“That observation, I think has been borne out, time and time again, over the past two years,” Lee added. “Time and time again, the president’s political adversaries have exploited the Mueller probe, its mere existence, to spread baseless innuendo in an effort to undermine the legitimacy of the 2016 election and the effectiveness of this administration.”
Donald Trump Jr. has come out swinging against the “social media gods” of Instagram once again. According to Trump Jr, a photo of him with a wounded Army veteran was deleted from Instagram. Veteran Army Sgt. Omar “Crispy” Avila posed for a photo with Don Jr. at the 2019 National Rifle Association convention and posted it to Instagram. Avila said it was taken down, according to Fox News.
Facebook continues its agenda of scrubbing its platform of populists and Islam critics in Britain, “unpublishing” the page of right-leaning news website Politicalite and suspending its editor-in-chief for a post supporting Tommy Robinson.
Last week, Breitbart News covered the takedown of posts linking to a Politicalite story from British Yellow Vest activist James Goddard. Now censorship against the populist website on Facebook continues
The site received a message that its Facebook page had been unpublished late last week.
Following the suspension, site editor-in-chief and former UKIP activist Jordan James reported that his own Facebook account had been suspended as well, for a years-old post offering support to Islam critic Tommy Robinson. (Robinson has also been banned from the platform).
Breitbart News asked Facebook to supply a justification for the blacklisting of the British news website, which now bills itself “Britain’s most censored news outlet.” Facebook did not offer a response.
A recent investigation of Facebook by undercover journalists recently found that the social network is engaged in a program of deliberate, secret suppression of conservative and right-wing voices. A whistleblower at the tech company told reporters that a secret “deboosting” code was applied exclusively to right-of-center and populist individuals and organizations on the platform, limiting the reach and visibility of posts. The source said she never saw the code applied to far-left pages on Facebook.
Leftist Facebook Page “Occupy Democrats” recently shared a meme celebrating the hypothetical death of President Trump without any repercussions from Mark Zuckerberg and the Masters of the Universe at Facebook.
The conservative group For America recently highlighted a post by Occupy Democrats, a leftist Facebook page which shares left-wing content and anti-conservative memes and news stories. One of the most recent memes shared by Occupy Democrats depicts White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders speaking with President Trump; accompanying the image is a paragraph of text emulating a fake conversation between the two which reads: “Sir, I had a dream that you finally got the parade you’ve wanted. There were millions of people lining the streets waving and cheering as you passed by in a large, black limo. Was I smiling, Sarah? I don’t know, sir, the lid on the casket was closed.”
For America shared a screenshot of the Occupy Democrats post to Twitter, adding: “Occupy Democrats is a filth based leftist propaganda site that Facebook rewards with tens of millions of engagements. Here is one of their top posts of the week where they celebrate the hypothetical death of President Trump. Why are conservatives being banned for far less?”
Occupy Democrats is a filth based leftist propaganda site that @facebook rewards with tens of millions of engagements.
Here is one of their top posts of the week where they celebrate the hypothetical death of President Trump.
In a stark comparison, Facebook-owned image sharing website Instagram recently removed a post featuring Donald Trump Jr. from its platform for seemingly no reason. In a post to his own Instagram page, Donald Trump Jr. claimed that Instagram removed a post by his friend Omar Avila, an Army veteran who lost his right leg and suffered third and fourth-degree burns across 75 percent of his body. Avila is now an avid hunter and second amendment advocate who met Trump Jr. at an NRA show where they took a photo together. Shortly after Avila posted this photo, it was allegedly removed by Instagram for violating the site’s terms of service.
Breitbart News spoke with Omar Avila, known as “Crispy,” and asked Avila about the removal of his photo. Avila stated that he met Trump Jr. at the NRA event and took the photo, posting it to his profile where he rarely discusses politics outside of second amendment issues; Avila then traveled home: “and when I got off the airplane, y’know it’s like everybody, I opened up my stuff, I was looking at my account and I noticed it had been taken down and I got that little screenshot you get that says that your post violated Instagram guidelines. Again, I don’t know why, it had nothing on it that was political or that said anything derogatory.”
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolanor email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
On Wednesday, attorneys for Nicholas Sandmann, the Covington Catholic High School student who was targeted by the media after his encounter with Native American activist Nathan Phillips at the Lincoln Memorial on January 18, announced they are filing a $275 million lawsuit against NBCUniversal, alleging “NBCUniversal created a false narrative by portraying the ‘confrontation’ as a ‘hate crime’ committed by Nicholas.”
According to The Washington Times, the suit states that NBCUniversal was motivated by its “anti-Trump agenda,” adding that Sandmann was “an easy target for NBCUniversal to advance its anti-Trump agenda because he was a 16-year-old white, Catholic student who had attended the Right to Life March that day and was wearing a MAGA cap at the time of the incident which he had purchased earlier in the day as a souvenir.” The suit also states that NBCUniversal, by means of NBC and MSNBC, “unleashed its vast corporate wealth, influence, and power against Nicholas to falsely attack him despite the fact that at the time, he was a 16-year-old high school student.”
The lawsuit asserts, “Headlines run online by NBCUniversal outlets about the incident included, ‘Nathan Phillips, Native American man harassed by high schoolers, tells his story,’ and ‘Video of teens taunting man at Indigenous Peoples March sparks outrage.’”
Sandmann’s attorneys have already filed a $250 million suit against the Washington Post and another suit against CNN for $275 million. As The Daily Wire reported in mid-February, Sandmann’s lawyers warned when they sued The Washington Post that more suits would be forthcoming. They said in a statement:
Today, Lin Wood and Todd McMurtry filed their first lawsuit on behalf of Nicholas Sandmann against The Washington Post. The lawsuit filed is included below. The suit seeks $250 million in both compensatory and punitive damages. Lin and Todd will continue to bring wrongdoers before the court to seek damages in compensation for the harm so many have done to the Sandmann family. This is only the beginning.
The lawsuit against the Post stated: “In targeting and bullying Nicholas by falsely accusing him of instigating the January 18 incident, the Post conveyed that Nicholas engaged in acts of racism by “swarming” Phillips, “blocking” his exit away from the students, and otherwise engaging in racist misconduct. The Post ignored basic journalist standards because it wanted to advance its well-known and easily documented, biased agenda against President Donald J. Trump (‘the President’) by impugning individuals perceived to be supporters of the President.”
The Daily Wire reported in mid-March that Sandmann’s attorneys announced they were suing CNN, with one saying, “Well, what CNN’s tagline is facts first. And what we believe their reporting was in this circumstance was lies first; cover up second, and facts not yet determined by that organization. So the difference between this lawsuit and the other lawsuit that we have filed is that CNN is a very significant media organization with a much broader reach than say The Washington Post. It has a Twitter followers of 41 million people. It published four videos. Nine online articles that were tweeted out. So that’s millions and millions and millions of repetitions of the lies and falsehoods that CNN spread.”
