Heroism On Display: Marine Leaps Into Action to Rescue Trafficked Girls - Jason Nelson

On July 21st, 2023, Jason Nelson and his wife were enjoying a rare date night at the Hotel Indigo, an upscale boutique hotel in Waco, Texas. They were jolted from their slumber at 3am to horrific screams. Jason quickly opened his hotel room door to see three women being attacked by a 6-foot-5, 370-pound man. A massive fight ensued, but I'll let Jason tell you the details. It turned out that Jason had disrupted a sex trafficking operation and he had defended himself with lethal force. A grand jury has since determined that his actions were self-defense and Jason is now able to speak about the experience. Jason's faith in God has been instrumental in recovering as Jason believes that God puts us in places to make a difference in the world and this was one of those times. Jason is a man who will always put himself in harm's way to protect innocent women and children. Jason is a recently retired U.S. Army soldier and former United States Marine. His highly decorated service includes combat deployments and humanitarian missions where he served as a civil affairs NCO in operations and planning. He is 100% permanently disabled from combat service. This is the CounterCulture Mom Show. I'm your host, Tina Griffin. Sex trafficking is the critical topic of the week. To talk about this horrific monstrosity, I'm with disabled veteran, former congressional candidate, Jason Nelson. Jason, all I'm going to say with the last hour of talking with you before I hit the tape button here is you are a hero. Keep staying in the fight. You rock. Welcome to the program. Thank you. Thank you for having me and I really don't like that word, but I appreciate where it's coming from in the spirit and I appreciate you putting together this series of programs on this topic. I think it's extremely important and anybody that can shine a light on it, especially the kind of light that you can shine on it, it's much appreciated. Well, thank you very much, but I will tell you that I was not the one literally fighting a 370 pound man in the middle of the night at a hotel room in Waco, Texas, trying to save three women's lives. So the obvious quick question is, can you tell us what in the world happened to you and your wife on July 21st, 2023? Yeah, if you don't mind, I'll make it brief, but you know, we had a, my wife and I had had a date night. My brother was in town and watching our children at the time. We had four children and we stayed at what I thought to be an upscale hotel. I mean, it was technically an upscale hotel, but in the middle of the night, about 3 a.m., we'd been sleeping and we heard screams. It sounded like children screaming, actually. And when I went to my door to see what it was, a fire, some other issue, there was a woman who was banging on the doors outside, screaming for help. I said there was a man trying to murder girls inside the room, just a couple doors down from us. So I retreated, you know, I was already disabled as it was on a cane, that sort of thing. But I went and retrieved a firearm and attempted to draw the man out from the room. At the time, throwing a girl through a glass wall, you know, just horrific screams. And after three attempts to get the man to withdraw from the room, he did. And I was ready to let him walk down to the lobby and let the police, hopefully, who were on their way, deal with him. But I was alone in that hallway at the time. And I emphasize that only because I know for a fact there were about 18 other men on that floor based on the police interviews and the witness statements. 18 men who sat at the doorway and didn't come out and who could have helped me, who at the time became disabled, but they didn't. And when Mr. Searles had the chance to walk down the hallway and he didn't, he instead turned around and attacked me, picked me up by my neck, slammed me into the wall, and then attempted to take my firearm from me. So I had no choice but to discharge it. And at the time, I didn't realize it. I thought I'd missed because that's how quick it all happened. I made a mistake and let him close the distance. But, you know, I didn't have an interest in shooting someone. That's not my job. I wanted him away from those women and that happened. But he attacked me. And when he did, like I said, I thought I'd missed. And then I was in a hand-to-hand fight while he was taking the firearm from me. He was a much bigger man than I was. And, you know, I remember the exact moment when I thought, okay, I'm about to lose this. And that's when he started to lose. It just fell and went down. And it turns out that it had been a fatal shot. I didn't know that. I tried to render aid, believe it or not. Someone finally did at that point come out. But I was arrested. You know, I had to go through the process of going through a grand jury. Of course, it took about 12 seconds in Waco, Texas for them to look at the facts. But that said, the journey that we've been on since then was one of a lot of discovery and what ended up really what happened that night, if you will, other than the end incident, as you're aware. Unreal. And I just want to thank you along with the behalf of I know every viewer and every person tuning into this program right now. Thank you for getting off the bench in the game and being proactive in saving those three girls' lives. Who knows today what would have happened if you would not have gotten involved? That says so much. That says so much. Were you there? You were there with your wife. Did she know what was going on? Did she come running out afterwards? And how was her response with knowing what was going on? Well, believe it or not, after, you know, as much experience as I've had in the world, the type of experience that we actually have a predetermined plan for something like that, like a hotel shooting or something of that nature. So my wife had gone to the bathroom and been inside the bathtub. She didn't come out until I called her when she came out with towels for us to attempt to render aid. So when she came out, you know, she had to go out and then get me to call so I could call in a 911 and try and get an ambulance and so forth and so on. But then, you know, she had, you know, a rifle put in her face. She was arrested because, you know, I disassembled the firearm and put it in front of the door. And so the police obviously had to take precautions and make sure that there wasn't some sort of just random shooting happening. But it's a very traumatic event overall. And, you know, it had echoes because, you know, later on we found out that it wasn't just some girlfriend that he was beating up in there. It was, you know, a prostitute. Wow. And he was, you found out later, in the midst of sex trafficking, he was involved in it? Yes. So, I mean, it's hard. Obviously, you can't question a dead man and his accomplice was one of the intended victims. And she had been facilitating this. We know that, you know, it's been very difficult to track down the other two girls. They did not speak English. They were very eager to get away. They tried to flee the scene before the police even arrived and luckily were detained by somebody. And, you know, it's, yeah, it's apparently something that had been ongoing. It was a relationship that was being facilitated. I don't know how many other people were involved, but our lawyer did a lot of work to discover that that hotel had had a number of incidents leading up to that. And that it was, you know, voluntarily removed itself from what's known as the Safe Streets Program, which is kind of an anti-human trafficking, anti-crime program that the Waco PD had put in. Okay. It trained employees to look for identity of, excuse me, indicators of human trafficking. And, you know, they removed, self-removed themselves from that program, which is insane. A free program the police offered. And, you know, these are things, obviously, I didn't know when I booked a room that night with my wife. Yeah. You're trying to do Innocent Date Night. Finally, you get away, you know, and have just not that exciting of a level of an experience. And here that all ensued. I was going to ask you, are hotels often hubs for sex traffickers? You say yes. And I've seen some horrific video footage over the last couple of years of sex trafficking, human trafficking happening in hotels around this nation. Tell us more about that. Is it every major city? Is it also in the small suburbs? What have you learned as a result of, and how did your view of sex trafficking change after this all went down? Tina, you and I were talking about this before we came on, but for the benefit of the viewer who's not, you know, in that part of the call. There's this myth, I think, that's out there that these are big city problems, that these are things that happen in major metropolitan areas. And the movies have made everybody think it's just, it's got big bells on it and you can clearly see what's happening, sex workers on the street. And it's not that that doesn't happen and it's not proliferating in many urban areas. It's just that that's not the majority of this country. The majority of this country is rural, it's suburban. And, you know, unfortunately, the rate of sex trafficking does not go down when you move out into rural or suburban areas. The appetite for that illicit substance, if you will, is just as high, if not higher in these areas. So what you see is a different modality in which this same product is sold, and I call it a product because that's what it is. People consume it at different levels. And so what you see is you start to see these tentacles and these downstream effects that happen, and they seem to start in metropolitan areas and work their way out. So these hubs are run from Dallas or, in this case, it was Houston that this woman operated where this man had facilitated the transaction. They pulled these girls out of sex clubs, strip clubs, or whatever people want to call them down in Houston, and pulled those people out. And, you know, what it told me as I started to look more and more into this was that what people think of as being a big city problem is actually, it's not my town. And the truth is, yes, it is. Yes, it's happening right now. Yes, it's children and women who have no options. Many of them are slaves, and they are made into substance abuse victims. They are made dependent on their pimps. And, you know, it's everywhere. And what I thought was something that I would only maybe have to warn my children about when they were in some foreign city or in a major Chicago, New York, and it turns out, no, it's everywhere. And we should all be on the alert because it's happening right under our noses. You fight every single day for your kids, for what they eat, what they learn, what they watch. So why would you settle for healthcare that doesn't fight for your family too? I'm Tina Griffin, and for over 15 years, MediShare has been one of the best decisions I've ever made for my family. I've had all four of my children with MediShare, gone through two major surgeries, and every eligible bill has been shared by this outstanding community of believers. Here's what makes MediShare stand out. Members can save up to 50% compared to other healthcare options. You get 24 seven telehealth access for those late night sick kid moments, nationwide provider access, and no annual caps or lifetime limits. 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I have the key home, which gives me whole home protection and the key shield when I'm on the go. WaveGuard uses depolarization technology to significantly reduce EMF radiation without blocking your Wi-Fi or cell signal. Protect your family now. Use code Tina at checkout to save 20% off all devices at WaveGuard.com. That's WaveGuard.com, code Tina. Jason, what are your thoughts about this, since you were literally in the mix of saving three women's lives in the middle of a sex trafficking ring? How are so many children being trafficked, both nationally and globally, and why aren't more people concerned about this? What are your thoughts on that? Oh, gosh. It's tragic, but I think it's one of these things that... I would like to say it's out of sight, out of mind. That would make it easier, but there's no way that the average person, the people who sat here and Pizzagate and the Jeffrey Epstein list, they claim to care. So what I would say is... Boy, I don't know why I'm dancing around this. It's going to be unpopular. I'll let this be unpopular, okay? I believe that many people choose not to identify with the victims of sex trafficking because they believe in their mind that these people, in many instances, put themselves in the position that they're in. And what is the reality of what you've realized so far? There are many instances, you can see hypocrisy, where people, for example, will say someone had something to drink, they're not responsible for what happened to them. And then the other hand, say somebody had too much to drink, they should have known before they started drinking what would happen, and they should have taken steps to prevent it. It's weird how we change that culpability. One of those things is drugs, and people don't realize how people are introduced to drugs, how they become dependent on them. The entire infrastructure that's built, like just as good as any advertising company, Disney, anybody, is with worming their way into their children's developing brains, the access to drugs and chemical dependence that we've built, the lack of familial structure as we've pushed people out into the world, the idea that independence is somehow being an adult, when in reality, being an adult is what you produce, and that we've made it so we don't have these social structures that people depend on any longer. We allow people to go out to the world at the age of tender age and then sit here and say, you're an adult when we know their brains aren't developed. And so we are responsible as a society that we've created a situation in which drugs have been able to have the impact that they've had on people. And that alone, that driver, that driver to me is probably more than 50% of the cause of human trafficking. Matter of fact, I know based on who moves humans as collateral, and as it's the cartels, which would say that it's probably closer to 80% of the reason why human trafficking exists is because of drugs, dependence on drugs, a poor ability to pull people out of that. So I think people can't empathize. It's hard for them. They go and they go, well, that girl was a stripper. So she put herself in that position. And it's like, oh, she was dressed like that. She deserved it, right? I mean, there's lots of arguments you could say, well, why does a young girl feel the need to take her clothes off? I've had other adult men in my life. I don't really associate with them anymore, but other adult men who have daughters who would, we got a town on a business trip on a work trip, army trip, doesn't matter. And the first day I hear there's a strip club down the street. And what are you talking about? Like, what are we even saying here? Like, you know, don't enable that. And I think that it's easy for people to say, well, you know, I clicked on Only Fans model. Yeah, sorry. I don't mean to sound square, but I really am just not hip to this. But well, I mean, they choose to be on there. Yeah. Really? Because if you, I tell you something, if you told them there was just as much money out there, if they sold lemonade, you'd see a bunch of lemonade stands. Yes, totally. A lot of young people feel massively trapped and it's also sold to them in pop culture on a daily basis. If you can make them a lot of money on this side and then the consequences aren't even revealed. And these young girls, a lot of them and boys abuse situations or not feeling loved and cherished the way they should. I mean, I lived in Hollywood Hills for a decade. I saw a lot of insanity going on, but I tried to listen to the people's stories of how they even got there. And then my heart broke for the people that were trying to get acceptance in ways that were only going to lead them to more devastation. Unreal, how does porn play into this whole sex trafficking scenario and urgency in our culture? Once you turn it into a commodity, then people feel that it's their right to buy it. It has a transactional value. The other thing is, is I think that pornography moves the goalposts. The pornography that I knew, and I don't want to get into my, I'm a victim of young childhood sexual assault. So I was exposed to pornography at a young age. And I can tell you right now that there's no recovering from that. And that was pornography from the eighties. So I can't even imagine what, I mean, our children don't have access to the internet, period. They have piano lessons through an app that we monitor. If we have a YouTube video they need to watch, we download it. And so there's no accidental commercials or jumps to it. Because people do things, they embed things. There's a reason why the trans community goes after little children. There's a reason why adults try to break children. Because even if they aren't interested in children, they're interested in the teenagers those children become. And anytime you can shift those goalposts and change what people think of as modesty, as correct behavior, as what's supposed to be in a loving relationship between a man and a woman is God intended. And you start shifting all of those and you combine that with, again, the commoditizing of, I'm saying that word wrong, of sex and nudity and other things like that. And you put those two things together and then all of a sudden it becomes very easy for both parties, both the person producing content or the person who is consuming content, to validate or rationalize in their mind that next step towards sexual servitude. I completely agree. Completely agree. I use it every now and then, but I'm serious. We need to clone you. And I don't know if you do a lot of traveling and speaking, but you should think about it if you could. And do some parenting type classes or workshops. Talk to teens. Talk to other dads. So many people are struggling and do not have a guidepost. And it's so encouraging to see a man like you on American soil still standing for virtue. We all know how critical sleep is. Yet I've had major sleep issues for years. I just discovered WaveWatch and I'm finally sleeping through the night. The WaveWatch is a wearable device that delivers hundreds of sound frequencies throughout your body, supporting your body's natural systems. Did you know that each living thing vibrates at a unique frequency? And modern research shows nerve impulses may actually be sound-based. The WaveWatch emits gentle sound waves through your wrist that can help reduce physical discomfort, boost circulation, improve focus, support immune function, and enhance sleep quality. 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The topics covered in this Hollywood Exposed series are how TV shows and movies promote identity crisis and gender confusion, how celebrities promote Satanism and witchcraft in today's music, how video games, sexing, bowling, and social media impact our children, and how to safeguard your home from today's harmful entertainment. Download this Hollywood Exposed series from our Counterculture Mom website today and tune in with your kids immediately. Just go to counterculturemom.com and click on that store tab. Let's rewrite Hollywood script for our kids. Jason, thank you for jumping in the mix and thank you for getting off the bench in the game at 3 a.m. to do what you can to stop the screaming scenario. You are a hero, a warrior. I'm going to keep saying that till Christ calls me home. For everybody to jump on board and track you down and join forces, they can find you on X at Real Jason Nelson. That's Real Jason Nelson, Jason Storm Chaser Nelson, right there on X. You rock. Last but not least, very critical question. What's your one-two punch answer to what can we do to fight sex trafficking? Two most important things you can do is, one, educate yourself. And when I say that, I mean educate yourself on indicators, educate yourself on what steps would you take when you do identify somebody who's being trafficked or if you recognize the signs of something happening in your neighborhood at a hotel you're at. It doesn't matter, but look for the signs and be able to educate yourself on what you would do next. And I think the most important thing, period, is we need to go back to having family-centered, Christ-centered families. And I know that saying family-centered families seems redundant, but we just aren't anymore. We are focused on the world. And when I was young, I used to hear people say that, and I thought it was just ridiculous. I remember thinking, oh my gosh, you Bible thumpers. And now that I'm getting older and older and I have my own children, I realize that the Lord is going to give us the strength here, and the Lord's going to give us the right path to take. And if we move down that path, we listen to his calling towards us, we read his scripture, and we do exactly as God has commanded us. I promise you, as a family, we can move away from what isn't no longer just sin but straight evil in the world that's proliferating, and we can defeat that through the power of Christ. You rock, Jason. Keep at it. You're a warrior. Go get them.