Cubans are no different from anyone else on this earth; God has endowed them with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of property. For the past 67 years, a pitiless regime, run mostly by one family, has deprived them of these rights, and when they have raised their voices, the regime’s henchmen have thrown them into dungeons and left them there for years.

Terror always works. Stalin died of natural causes, as did Mao. It took an invading army made up of some 50 countries, led by the U.S. and Britain, to dislodge Adolf Hitler. There’s not much an unarmed population can do when those with a monopoly on violence are sufficiently unfeeling to repress their compatriots.

But now there is a glimmer of hope. For the past several months, and thanks to the actions of the Trump administration, Cubans, in the seventh decade of their misery, do seem to be getting closer and closer to enjoying the rights that God endowed them with (or, if you prefer, nature). The planets do seem to be aligning such that enough of the regime’s enforcers will start refusing to repress their own people.

Today, on the 124th anniversary of Cuba’s independence, huge steps were taken. The first was that the U.S. Justice Department unveiled criminal charges against Raúl Castro, the reigning 94-year-old patriarch of the family that has called the shots (and that is the precise term) in Cuba since the victory of the Revolution in 1959.

Castro was indicted for his involvement in the 1996 downing of two Cessna planes being flown outside of Cuba’s territorial waters by American pilots working for the U.S.-based charity group Brothers to the Rescue, which used to fly search-and-rescue missions to spot Cubans fleeing the island on rafts who found themselves in distress in the Florida Straits.

Four men aboard the two Cessnas were burned to death when their planes erupted into fireballs after being shot at by Cuban pilots aboard Soviet-made MiG fighter planes. One of the Cuban fighter pilots was recorded boasting after firing his guns, “We blew his [testicles] off. He won’t give us any more [expletive] trouble.”

Castro was the defense minister at the time for his brother, Fidel Castro, the leader of the 1959 Revolution and the dictator who single-handedly ran Cuba for many decades. In an audio recording that emerged in 2006, Raúl Castro is heard saying: “I told them [the Cuban pilots] to try to knock them down over [Cuban] territory, but they [the pilots aboard the two Cessnas] would enter Havana and go away. Of course, with one of those missiles, air-to-air, what comes down is a ball of fire that will fall on the city … Well, knock them down into the sea when they reappear.”

In February, four U.S. lawmakers asked President Donald Trump to indict Castro in connection with these events.

Many other things have happened recently to lead even the most skeptical observer to have hope that change may come to Cuba yet. Earlier this month, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, visited Havana to deliver a message from Trump to the ruling regime.

Axios reports that an official has told it that Cuba has bought 300 drones from Russia for use against the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, in eastern Cuba, and possibly U.S. ships.

In another key move today, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent Cubans a video message explaining to Cubans on the island how their suffering is the result of the regime’s cruel repression and offering U.S. support.

Speaking in Spanish, Rubio, the proud son of Cuban exiles, told Cubans, “The real reason you don’t have electricity, fuel, or food is because those who control your country have plundered billions of dollars, but nothing has been used to help the people.”

“Cuba is not controlled by any ‘revolution,’” explained Rubio. “Cuba is controlled by GAESA,” the conglomerate that controls 70% of the Cuban economy. GAESA was founded by Castro, who still wields great power over it today.

“President Trump is offering a new relationship between the U.S. and Cuba,” Rubio said in the video. “But it must be directly with you, the Cuban people, not with GAESA.”

Trump’s vision for Cuba, Rubio explained, was for it to be a normal country, a place “where you can complain about a failing system without fear of going to jail or being forced to leave your island.”

“This is not impossible. All of this exists in the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and even just 90 miles away in Florida. If owning your own business and having the right to vote is possible around Cuba, why is it not possible for you in Cuba?”

Cubans can get back to this life. They used to have it.

Today’s U.S. actions against Cuba might convince the Castros’ goons that the jig is up. They might realize that it’s not worth it to continue repressing a population exploding into protests. After the regime finally falls, the long-suffering Cubans may begin the long and arduous process of reconstruction.  

Cuba was so good at growing sugarcane that it produced about one-third of world sugar exports before the 1959 Revolution. Then, when Marxism’s central planning destroyed the economy, the Revolution began producing internal repression and exporting violent mayhem to the world.

Today, hopefully, that starts to change.

WASHINGTON, DC — Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr told Breitbart News at a press conference on Wednesday that parents are increasingly concerned about transgender content in children's television as the agency considers updating television ratings.

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Buttressed by testimony from Daily Signal senior investigative reporter Tyler O’Neil, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing titled “Manufacturing Hate” on Wednesday, scrutinizing the Southern Poverty Law Center’s credibility, citing recent federal charges against the organization.

The Department of Justice announced April 21 that a federal grand jury charged the SPLC with wire fraud, false statements, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

O’Neil’s Press Conference

In a press conference ahead of the hearing, including speakers and organizations who have spearheaded an investigative campaign against the SPLC’s alleged fraudulent network, O’Neil disputed the organization’s stated mission of combating hate.

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” O’Neil said.

O’Neil criticized the SPLC’s “hate map,” which identifies groups it labels as extremist, arguing it places mainstream conservative organizations alongside groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.

“There are legitimately problematic groups on the hate map,” O’Neil said, “but there are many groups that do not belong there.”

He also rejected the idea that criticism of the SPLC is unwarranted, asserting that scrutiny of the organization is necessary given the allegations and its influence.

O’Neil concluded that, based on the charges and the organization’s history, neither corporate America nor the federal government should rely on the SPLC.

During the Biden administration, federal officials repeatedly met with the SPLC on policy and enforcement issues, underscoring the group’s role in advising the government.

Lawmakers Clash

“They are too valuable politically—you have to use them to your advantage,” Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said in the hearing, referencing what he described as the Biden administration’s approach to the SPLC. “Turns out creating hate was more profitable than fighting it.”

Jordan alleged the SPLC highlighted far-right extremists to solicit donations, telling donors their contributions would be used to fight extremism, while also compensating some of those same individuals.

“But guess what—[former President Donald] Trump became president, Todd Blanche became attorney general, Kash Patel became FBI director, and now they’re prosecuting these guys for running a scam,” Jordan said.

Ranking Member Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., pushed back, questioning the strength of the case and the evidence supporting the charges.

“Where are the donors complaining about having been defrauded?” Raskin said, arguing that donors would likely pursue legal action if widespread fraud had occurred.

Raskin also criticized the prosecution more broadly, calling it politically motivated.

“False, malicious prosecutions are how Donald Trump and his administration operate,” he said.

During his testimony, O’Neil directed Raskin to Page 10 of the indictment, which shows direct quotes from the SPLC admitting to its fraudulent scheme.

ContControversial children's Youtuber Ms. Rachel used her eight-year-old son as a prop in a campaign to benefit migrants being held in the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas.

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Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) and former football coach Derek Dooley are set to compete in the Georgia Senate Republican primary runoff in June.

The post Rep. Mike Collins, Derek Dooley to Compete in Georgia GOP U.S. Senate Runoff appeared first on Breitbart.

Music executive Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Records and the man who discovered Taylor Swift, was roundly booed by college graduates when he praised AI during a commencement address at Middle Tennessee State University.

The post Middle Tennessee State U. Graduates Boo Music Executive Who Discovered Taylor Swift for Praising AI appeared first on Breitbart.

Amazon founder and sole owner of the failing, far-left Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, said he is done subsidizing this failure.

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California could see gas prices spike as high as $10 per gallon due to multiple refinery shutdowns and U.S. involvement in the Middle East, a state lawmaker is warning.

“I believe we could very easily be around $10 gas. … It’s about to get worse if we don’t do anything about it,” Assemblyman David Tangipa, R-Fresno, said in an interview with the Daily Signal. 

“We have become extremely reliant on foreign imports. The last tanker from the Middle East that left the Strait of Hormuz arrived about 10 days ago. Now we aren’t getting anything from some of these foreign markets.”

Critics of the war with Iran argue that the GOP did not take gas prices into consideration when assessing the conflict. California Gov. Gavin Newsom referred to it as “Trump’s Iran war” and blamed President Donald Trump for higher prices.

“Trump’s Iran war is costing Americans $1.5 billion more at the pump this week alone, and what are Americans getting in return? Not better roads. Not cleaner air. Just higher prices as corporations pocket the higher prices and cash in on Trump’s chaos,” he said.

“‘Drill, baby, drill’ was always a lie to enrich Trump’s Big Oil donors—not a strategy to keep prices low, because oil is a global good with a global price,” Newsom added.

Tangipa, however, said shutting down two major oil refineries in California, Valero Benicia and Phillips 66, is also to blame, and that the way to mitigate extreme price increases is to bring oil production back to California. 

“California has some of the largest reserves in the entire world—it has some of the cleanest oil,” he said. “… Instead of using California resources, we are depending on foreign nations to not have any conflict.”

“What we really need to do is reactivate a lot of the oil wells that are here, and we need to work with a lot of our partners to make sure that we’re stabilizing our own supply,” he added.

According to the Western States Petroleum Association, California imports 70% of crude oil to meet its energy needs, despite once leading the nation in production.

According to the State of California Capitol Museum website, “Between 1903 and 1936, the Golden State was the country’s leading oil producer, with many California companies dominating the market.”

Tangipa warned that gas price increases are not the only thing Californians have to worry about; the cost of flights also will be affected.

“We import a lot of aviation fuel. I’ve met with the airlines, and they are telling me that because it’s getting scarce, your cost for flights is about to go up significantly,” he said.

“Especially with people going on vacations and starting to drive around, if our reserves start to shrink exponentially faster, there may be a gas crisis and an extreme shortage like they saw in the 1970s.”

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the American Founding, it’s important to point out that the Declaration of Independence does not begin with politics. Before it speaks of rights, consent, or government, it makes a claim about the structure of reality itself. The rights it asserts are not the product of historical circumstance or collective will. They are grounded in a prior truth: that human beings are created by God.

The Declaration’s appeal to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” is not ornamental or rhetorical—it is the foundation on which its entire argument rests. The founders believed they were obligated to explain to mankind the reasons for their separation, and those reasons started with God and his law.

With this foundation, we can then proceed to the Declaration’s most famous sentence—“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Though it is often treated as a moral flourish or a proto-democratic slogan, it is in fact a tightly ordered philosophical claim that proceeds in three stages, each dependent on the one before it.

First, it makes an epistemological assertion: these truths are “self-evident.” They are not established by deduction, tradition, or positive law, but are known by reflecting on the observable world. Truths about God, human beings, and the good must be knowable if human beings are to be responsible for ordering their lives and laws accordingly. To deny that such truths can be known is not merely to revise political theory, but to undermine moral accountability itself.

Second, the Declaration makes a metaphysical claim: human beings are created and therefore possess a given nature. Equality is not asserted as a political preference but affirmed as a consequence of creation. It follows from the reality of a shared human nature, which exists because God created it. Human equality is intelligible only if there is something real that human beings equally are.

Third, the Declaration draws an ethical conclusion: because human beings are created in this way, they are endowed with rights (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) that no just government may rightly violate. To say that human beings are created by God is to say that they possess a given nature grounded in divine intention, not in change, appetite, or contingency.

This sequence is as decisive as it is brilliant. Remove any part of it and the argument collapses. Without a grounding in self-evident truths, claims about rights become matters of opinion or will. Without creation, equality loses its grounding in nature and becomes a political assertion to be enforced rather than an a priori truth. Without both, liberty ceases to be a moral claim and becomes a grant of the state for licentiousness. What remains is a thinner conception of freedom—one incapable of sustaining either justice or joy.

The assumptions that creation is intelligible, that God is knowable, and that human beings are responsible for acknowledging both stand at the foundation of the American experiment. They are the stress points at which its coherence either holds or fails.

A Vague Deity or Christ?

At this point, the Christian reader may be tempted to object that the Declaration does not go far enough. It speaks of God as Creator but says nothing of Christ. It appeals to natural theology but makes no reference to revealed religion. Does it leave us stranded with a Deistic account of God or a thin moralism that cannot sustain the claims it makes? The concern is understandable, especially when the Declaration is contrasted with documents such as the Solemn League and Covenant that explicitly confessed allegiance to Christ the King. Yet this objection rests on a misunderstanding of both the Declaration’s purpose and the relation between natural and revealed religion.

The Declaration of Independence is precisely that: a declaration of independence. It is not a confession of faith, a catechism, or a constitution. It has a specific and limited purpose: to justify political separation from Great Britain by appealing to truths binding on all human beings as such. The absence of explicit Christological language does not indicate theological indifference, but a focus on the specific political question at hand.

It is also worth remembering that many of the founders likely assumed that explicitly Christian commitments would find expression elsewhere. Nearly every state constitution in the founding era contained explicit Christian language, often including affirmations of Christianity or requirements that officeholders affirm specific Protestant beliefs.

The Declaration was never intended to bear the full theological weight of American public life on its own. It establishes a common foundation; it does not exhaust the moral or religious commitments of the people who affirmed it. Just as Romans 1 demonstrates that there is a clear general revelation (the study of natural theology) that shows the reality of universal sin and then explains our need for Christ, the Declaration’s three-fold assertion of knowability, God, and what is good provides a basis for the path to salvation.

This points to a second consideration: the Declaration’s appeal to natural theology is not compatible with every religious or philosophical system. The Declaration’s affirmation of God the Creator excludes belief systems that deny God the Creator such as monism (all is one) and dualism (God and the world are both without beginning).

It presupposes that God is distinct from the world, that the world is created rather than eternal, and that human beings possess a knowable nature grounded in that act of creation. Natural theology, on this view, is neither trivial nor thin; it is full and clear. It tells us a great deal about God, about ourselves, and about the moral order.

At the same time, natural theology is not redemptive revelation. Scripture does not merely restate natural truths more clearly or add moral instruction where reason falters. It answers a question that natural theology cannot answer on its own: how a just and holy God redeems sinners who suppress the truth they ought to know.

The founders were well aware of this distinction. The Bible was the most frequently cited book in their writings, and most took for granted that Christianity answered the question of redemption. Yet they also recognized that this answer could not be imposed by civil authority without corrupting both church and state. They had no interest in adjudicating disputes among Protestants, much less between Protestants and Roman Catholics. The Declaration’s silence on these matters reflects not skepticism about Christian truth, but a judgment about political competence.

In this light, the Declaration’s appeal to natural theology appears not as a theological retreat, but as a principled boundary. It affirms all that reason can and must know about God and human nature, while leaving the work of redemption where it belongs: in the proclamation of the gospel and the ministry of the church. The coherence of the American experiment depends on honoring both truths. Confuse them, and politics becomes a counterfeit religion. Separate them rightly, and both church and state are free to pursue their proper ends. This can serve as a call back to American Christians to remember the need for evangelical work if they hope for lasting positive change in America.

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