Sound of interference
It says something about where we are as a culture when something as profound as seeing children liberated from sex slavery is not unanimously celebrated as an unalloyed good. Yet, it seems that is where we find ourselves. A new movie, "Sound of Freedom", tells the story of former Federal agent Tim Ballard and his efforts to save trafficked children in Colombia. We have not seen it ourselves, but we have heard from some of you that it is a worthwhile use of your time. Regardless, the media response is something of a barometer revealing the depth of this present darkness.
Some corporate media outlets begrudgingly acknowledged that bringing the horror of child trafficking to light is a good thing: "Though we differ on the culprits and causes, everyone agrees that child trafficking is indefensible", concluded The Guardian's review. Yet the reviewer was happy to give you his laundry list of why you should be on the lookout for ideological subtexts. "Sound of Freedom" "pretends to be a real movie, like a 'pregnancy crisis center' masquerading as a bona fide health clinic."
Back in 2014, Ballard's story was applauded by mainstream news, but today it's "QAnon adjacent", paranoid propaganda, funded by a far-right fringe. It's anti-Semitic and tries to sneak a delusional conspiracy theory into the mainstream. They don't like that Tim Ballard is "anti-trans", or that Jim Caviezel who plays him in the film, sounds like Q. And of course, it's another example of the Right agitating for a culture war because they have nothing better to do.
The unsympathetic opinion of corporate media may be simply because the "wrong people" endorse the movie. If it sounds like something MAGA-folks would like, it's their job to dunk on it. But it's possible the mainstream media has painted itself into a corner with this one. For many years now, the chattering elites of the New York Times et al have spent a good deal of energy carrying water for those who want to expose children to sexual content and blur the lines of who can consent to what. So celebrating something that so clearly repudiates that is damaging to their work.
In one interview, Ballard accused corporate media of "running interference" for pedophiles. "I think they don't want to have a discussion about...why 85,000 children showed up unaccompanied [at the U.S] border and got released into the interior of a country that has the highest consumption for child exploitation material on the planet. They don't want to talk about why these same publications are pushing an agenda to change the word "pedophile" to "minor attracted persons" in order to normalize sexual activity with the children. That's what they are trying to avoid."
That is to say nothing of relentless media promotion of drag queen story hours, its celebration of child mutilation in the form of gender transition, the chastising of anyone who wants to take explicit books out of school libraries and the portrayal of parents as suspicious for wanting to know what their kids are being taught.
You don't have to be "Q adjacent" to believe that when adults place their own desires above the needs of children, they make children vulnerable to the most horrific treatment. You don't have to subscribe to the idea that powerful actors are engineering a global racket. You only need to understand that the rebellious human heart is desperately wicked and that the real fight is always against the spirit of the age.
After years of going after traffickers, Ballard says there is a new war that we need to fight. "I used to think that I might be out of a job someday because perhaps by some miracle we'd be able to rescue all the kids. Now I'm worried..I won't have a job because all the laws required for me to...protect children are being chipped away at...as we're normalizing child sex in this country. So this culture war is what we have to win first to preserve even the ability to keep kids safe.” God strengthen our hands for this task!