[Sound
Of Freedom star Jim Caviezel] has repeatedly
referenced some baseless claims embraced by the QAnon conspiracy,
which sees Trump as a savior figure.
While promoting "Sound of Freedom" on Steve Bannon's
podcast, Caviezel warned without evidence that children are
trafficked for their blood -- a claim he has made before -- and,
in the past, he has invoked "the storm," which QAnon
followers think will be a kind of climatic battle against evil.
(Efforts to reach Caviezel for comment were unsuccessful.)
Jim Caviezel, star of the surprise blockbuster
thriller about child trafficking, Sound Of Freedom, has
in all apparent seriousness proclaimed #NeverWasMyPresident Donald John Trump to be "The New Moses." He's
actually not the first person to call Trump a New Moses (here, from a 2016 blog post, is a considerably less
flattering example), but in any case
Trump is apparently eating up Caviezel's praise, even "re-Truthing" it twice so far on his little
social media playground. And his campaign seems all set to brand Trump as a
heroic leader in the fight against human trafficking as he takes
another stab at infesting the White House in the 2024 US
presidential election.
I mentioned these developments in the resource list at the end of
my previous blog post about Sound Of Freedom, but it's worthy of its own post as well. If some of this
stuff looks familiar, it's because I copied and pasted my own
words directly from that post. Why reinvent the wheel?
Jim Caviezel, along with the inspiration for Sound Of Freedom,
Tim Ballard, were special guests at a private screening of the
film at Trump's Bedminster, New Jersey, golf resort on Wednesday,
July 19, 2023. It was primarily an evangelical/political (evangitical?) to-do, as reported by ABC News ahead of the event.
Wednesday's event has a specific purpose, according to his campaign: to burnish both his record on human trafficking and his credentials with evangelical Christians, who are a key bloc in states like Iowa that are early in the GOP.
"Sound of Freedom" is a faith-based film, and evangelicals are one of its main audiences. An adviser to Trump told ABC News that the screening was going to include a large faith-based element.
Faith-based, my ass. As has been mentioned
probably hundreds of thousands of times over the past few years,
Donald Trump is hardly the role model or leader that the
"faith-based element" of old would have enlisted to
fight any evil, including and perhaps especially sexual exploitation or human
trafficking of any sort.
But that was then and this is now. Today, all too
often, "faith-based" is code for "Christofascist
theocrats who want to destroy democracy and remake America in
their own image" -- in other words, the endlessly power-hungry religious reich and
other "conservatives." It's not at all surprising that
in the wake of Sound Of Freedom, which has these folks
newly outraged or pretend-outraged over human and particularly
child trafficking, they are kissing up to Trump even more,
because they believe him to be their primary source of power and
influence.
Accordingly they do not seem to care at all that their orange
hero has been found liable for sexual assault; that he has
repeatedly and publicly expressed his incestuous fantasies about
his very own daughters, most notably Ivanka, of course, but also Tiffany, when the latter was a baby; and that he happily partied with the late and unlamented sex
predator and trafficker Jeffrey Epstein back in the day. (Of course the two later had a falling-out,
apparently over some real estate deals, and after Epstein was
arrested Trump disavowed their past friendship, but still.)
Epstein wasn't even the only pedo pal with whom
Trump has been associated over the decades. Here's a partial list,
courtesy of a recent Twitter...er... make that "X"
post. If you think that's too shaky
a source, look up the info yourself. (And please don't bother
what-a-bouting by bringing up Bill Clinton. I've previously owned
up to having cut Bill too much slack in the past, but in any case
he isn't running for president and will never hold public office
again. And don't bother with the Biden accusations either. The Ashley Biden allegations have never been
authenticated, and there is zero evidence to support the numerous pedophilia
rumors about the president.)
And never mind that Trump has repeatedly expressed contempt for the Jesus crowd
and their beliefs. Jesus people vote,
and they exercise ungodly influence on potentially millions of
voters in the "poorly educated" demographic that Trump
has praised and that make up a significant part of his base.
That's really all that matters.
Also never mind that despite the Trump campaign's
claims to the contrary, Trump was not exactly on the front lines
in the fight against human trafficking. His immigration agenda actually set back the clock on that struggle. (Here's a pretty comprehensive history of his vile
"zero tolerance" policies.)
Oh, it's political, all right.
A fiercely far-right friend of mine on Facebook,
in a recent conversation about the film, accused me of making
everything political, a tactic he's employed several times previously as a
way of dismissing points I've tried to make. (I don't know why I keep trying to play chess with
pigeons.) Now, as mentioned previously
on this blog and scads of other places, Sound Of Freedom
is not an overtly political movie. But... um... I wasn't the one
who made Sound Of Freedom political. I'm just one of
zillions of people spewing out comments about the fact that it
has become very, very political.
One big reason is that, as also mentioned on my
previous post, both Jim Caviezel and Tim Ballard have been all
over the right-wing media-sphere spouting right-wing talking
points, many of them direct endorsements of Trump and his
"policies" and/or vicious slams at President Biden.
Here's Ballard for instance, as
reported on the right-wing outlet The Daily Signal a few
weeks ago.
The woke Left is championing the same “pedophile doctrines” that enable child sex slavery, warns Tim Ballard, a former Department of Homeland Security agent who has rescued hundreds of children from sex slavery.
He also warns that taxpayer dollars are in effect funding child sex slavery under President Joe Biden...
And Ballard goes on and on with false claims about Biden's border policies (while claiming that trafficked kids are praying for Trump's Big Wall to be completed). He also clutches his pearls over other culture-war issues, most notably transgender care. It's all in the service of promoting Sound Of Freedom, and, yes, it's all extremely political.
And here's Caviezel, as also reported on The Daily Signal.
Caviezel and his co-actor Eduardo Verástegui, rumored to be pondering a presidential bid in Mexico [spoke] in a June interview with The Daily Signal at The Heritage Foundation studios in Washington, D.C.
Both actors, who are Catholic and vocally pro-life, stressed the connections between sex trafficking and pornography, open borders, and abortion. They hope that the movie will shake viewers from apathy into action to aid victims of human trafficking across the globe.
Again, all in the service of promoting Sound
Of Freedom, and blatantly political.
And now that Caviezel has pulled Cantaloupe
Caligula onto the Sound Of Freedom bandwagon by
shamelessly pandering to the latter's massive ego, while the
Trump campaign is working hard to burnish Trump's image as the
Savior Of Children, the movie is more political than ever -- with
the very real and serious issue of human trafficking set to
become further politicized as well.
On July 20, Newsweek reported on Trump's reactions to viewing the film at his golf motel. Trump called it a "great
movie" and an "incredible inspiration," and he
praised Caviezel and Ballard to the moon and back. In a statement
before the screening, he also criticized media outlets such as Rolling
Stone, The Washington Post, CNN, and The Guardian,
whom he claimed have "trashed the film and mocked the
millions of movie-goers who purchased tickets to
screenings." Which is not at all what has been going on, but
you know those reich-wingers and their persecution
complexes.
For his part, Caviezel has rolled over on his back
and wet himself kissing up to Trump on Twitter by flogging the
Moses motif, writing in a tweet on July 20:
President Trump is going to save Children the likes of which you have never seen! You might even say he is the new Moses telling Pharaoh (World Cabal) to let the children Go Free! Mr. President …. You are The "New" Moses!… but I’m still Jesus ;) +++
In the olden daze the "faith-based"
contingent would most likely have considered Caviezel's Jesus
remark to be unforgivably blasphemous, and they would have immediately
canceled him and his entire body of work; after all, just a few decades
ago, throngs of indignant American teens and their parents were burning Beatles albums merely because John Lennon
indicated to an interviewer that the public seemed more
infatuated with the band than with Jesus.
Well, those days are gone (and frankly, good riddance). In any case, Caviezel's Jesus claim is
a reference to his starring role as Jesus H. Christ in the 2004
Mel Gibson movie, The Passion Of The Christ. So it most likely didn't raise an eyebrow among the
faithful, who for the most part had embraced Mel's movie too.
Apparently not having gushed and sucked up and wet himself
sufficiently, Caviezel added this on July 21:
Mr President @SOFMovie2023 jumped in Box Office Numbers after we visited you at Bedminster the other night….We are gonna have an incredible weekend because of you Sir! Moses told me it’s ok to un-retire his jersey… says you can wear it for the rest of your life! Love JC+++
If you want to respond to Caviezel on Twitter,
tough luck, unless you are actually mentioned in one of his
tweets, or he follows you.
Because of Caviezel and Ballard, "Q-adjacent" doesn't
even begin to describe it.
As also mentioned on my previous post, both Caviezel and Ballard seem to be engaging in
a straw-man argument when, defending the film against its
detractors, they argue that Sound Of Freedom is not, not,
definitely not a QAnon movie. Few credible
sources have actually accused the film of being blatantly QAnon,
instead describing it as "Q-adjacent" or something similar, and then
offering specific and valid reasons for that description. Those behind the film, such as Angel Studios, are trying their best to disavow
any connection to QAnon or other conspiracies and controversies, but it's an uphill battle.
For there's no denying that the movie does appeal to QAnon supporters, who have openly slapped their own (partisan) twist on
it. And front and center in this effort are Caviezel and Ballard
themselves.
But you'd never know that by talking to them.
Ballard, for instance, had a disingenuous response to a question
about the matter on a Fox & Friends interview earlier this
month. From Media Matters, July 11, 2023:
In the Fox & Friends interview, Ballard also denied the film itself had anything to do with the QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that a cabal of liberal elites are engaged in a worldwide pedophile ring.
“There has been criticism in the mainstream media where they suggest there is some sort of a connection to your movie and QAnon,” co-host Steve Doocy said. “Can you explain that?”
“I can't explain it and neither can they,” Ballard responded. [Pants on fire, Tim! ~CC]
Ballard has refused to distance himself from QAnon in the past, legitimizing an outlandish theory that furniture company Wayfair was involved in child trafficking, for example. More broadly, the anti-trafficking movement that Ballard has helped to create retains significant overlap with QAnon. (OUR ultimately denounced QAnon in a written statement to The Atlantic.)
The Advocate had a few things to say about the QAnon connection with the film. From July 20, 2023:
Some commentators have said that in dramatizing Ballard’s work, Sound of Freedom exaggerates it and distorts the nature of child trafficking. And while it does not push QAnon ideology, both Ballard and Caviezel have stated their belief in QAnon claims, continuing to do so while promoting the film.
The Advocate piece notes that QAnon adherents have said they hope the film brings more into the fold, adding:
“It’s being marketed to QAnon believers, it’s being embraced by this community, and its leading actor is a huge part of the QAnon community,” Mike Rothschild, author of The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything, told NPR’s Morning Edition.
Another right-winger who is embracing the film is Donald Trump, who is scheduled to host a screening Wednesday at his Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., NPR reports. The former president is a hero of the QAnon movement, whose supporters claim he’s fighting the cabal.
Moreover, Caviezel himself spoke at a QAnon convention in Las Vegas in October 2021, and in more recent appearances he has continued to push the "big storm coming" trope that is part of the rallying cry of QAnon. His 2021 Vegas speech was, as noted on a tweet by @patriottakes, "riddled with religious fanaticism and Q propaganda."
[Caviezel said] "We must fight for that authentic freedom and live my friends. By God, we must live and with the Holy Spirit as your shield and Christ as your sword may you join Saint Michael and all the other angels in defending God and sending Lucifer and his henchmen straight back to hell where they belong."
It underpinned his speech that mentioned child sex trafficking, an issue at the core of the QAnon conspiracy, as well as a fight against Satan and liberal values.
A few months earlier, Caviezel had appeared virtually at the Health & Freedom conference at Rhema Bible College in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. From Vice.com, June 10, 2021 (keep in mind that this was more than two years before the release of Sound Of Freedom):
We briefly touched on the wackadoodle adrenochrome conspiracy on my previous post, but here again is a link to info about that.[Tim] Ballard couldn’t appear in person in Oklahoma, Caviezel explained. “He’s down there saving children as we speak. They’re pulling children out of the darkest recesses of hell," he said. "All kinds of places, the adrenochroming of children.”
“You said adrenochrome?” host Clay Clark, an Oklahoma personality who bills himself as a “growth consultant” and business guru, asked a moment later. “We need to discuss that.”
“Essentially, you have adrenaline in your body ... and when you are scared, you produce adrenaline,” Caviezel explained. “If a child knows he’s going to die, his body will secrete this adrenaline. And they have a lot of terms that they use that he takes me through, but it’s the worst horror I’ve seen. It’s screaming alone. Even if I never, ever, ever saw it, it’s beyond. And these people that do it, there will be no mercy for them.” The audience applauded, solemnly.Caviezel, whose agents and managers did not reply to several requests for comment, had just promoted one of the more extreme and lurid conspiracy theories out there, and one central to the cosmology of QAnon—the utterly false idea that a cabal of elites is torturing and killing children to obtain a fictionalized biological substance—and he’d done it in the same breath that he promoted OUR. (Adrenochrome is a real chemical compound, but the idea that it can only be harvested from terrified torture victims was purely the stuff of horror movies before Q came along. For QAnon believers, however, it has a much larger significance. The concept that evil elites are harvesting the substance from murdered children is a central facet of their belief system; they believe those elites take the substance to maintain their youthful appearances or life force.)
(By the way, some other luminaries speaking at that "Health & Freedom" conference in Broken Arrow included Chicken Soup for the Soul king Mark Victor Hansen, as well as Mike Adams and several other alt-health/reich-wing conspiracy peddlers -- which reinforces a point I made in a September 2021 post about the growing alliance between Scamworld and reich-wing politix.)
The Q-ish taint on Sound Of Freedom, of course, plays into the politicization and culture-war angle. From Vox, July 14, 2023:
The ongoing spread of QAnon as well as the recent reappearance of classic homophobic “groomer” rhetoric have given conservatives the ultimate perfect excuse to demonize liberalism. Just as Ballard’s real goal seems to be less about protecting children and more about promoting Tim Ballard, calls to protect children are really about attacking left-wing ideology, no matter how bizarrely unfounded such attacks are.
And reviewers who have criticized the film have been caught in the crossfire of the culture wars. Also from the Vox article:
...reviewers who’ve been less than charitable about the film have been deluged with harassment from people calling them pedophiles and groomers. Rolling Stone’s Miles Klee, who, in his review, highlighted numerous examples of Sound of Freedom fans linking themselves to QAnon, told journalist Marisa Kabas that “the intensity of the death threats and pedophile smears outstripped any previous hate campaign I’ve experienced in my career.” (Disclaimer: Both Klee and Kabas are former colleagues and friends.) Still, Klee also noted that to the film’s fans he was just “a convenient embodiment” of evil for “a demographic that thinks child abusers and groomers make up the entire government, entertainment industry, and media, and all run cover for each other.”
That far-right Facebook friend I mentioned earlier in this post even suggested the possibility that I might be making excuses for pedophiles, an accusation apparently triggered by the fact that I clearly wasn't buying into the false narrative that there's a massive and sinister organized effort to keep people from seeing Sound Of Freedom (see my previous post, under the heading, "Conspiranoia runs deep. Into your life it will creep.").
* * * * *
So here we are. Thanks to Jim Caviezel, we now have
an image of Trump as The New Moses. I'm sure that the real
imaginary Biblical Moses is rolling over in his imaginary grave,
but whatever. And yes, I know that I could make a joke about a
burning bush, or offer some snide remark about a red sea of
screaming, foaming-at-the-mouth MAGA-capped Trump worshipers. But I'm
better than that.
The takeaway here, in case it isn't painfully
obvious, is not necessarily that Caviezel's cheese may have finally slid off his cracker, although that may also be true, but that despite the
filmmakers' and the distributor's better intentions, Sound Of
Freedom has found itself up to its neck in the Q fever
swamps -- and that is due in no small part to a leading man who
just can't seem to shut his sanctimonious, conspiracy-spewing
pie-hole.
Related:
So now Donald Trump is... Moses? Daily Kos, July 24, 2023: Daily Kos staff member Hunter ponders on the feasibility of Trump as a leader in the fight against sex trafficking.
"I'm still Jesus" is the sort of sentence that used to cause record-burning rallies, but Donald Trump as the hero who will stop sex trafficking. The grabby, rapey, ogle-teen-girls-in-dressing-rooms, import-foreign-models hero Caviezel thinks has to lead this whole operation. Donald Trump as the "Moses" who will confront the sex traffickers with a booming "let my people go"—I mean, what?
And why stop at Moses? Trump, Hunter suggests, could fill up an entire Bible.
Now, that's not to say inserting Trump into every last bit of the Bible wouldn't be an entertaining endeavor. Caviezel could probably make it his next film, no problem. Trump is already supposed to be Saul né Paul, Cyrus the Great, and something near to the second coming of Jesus. Slap together a new Bible in which Donald Trump plays every role: He'd love it, Jim would love it, his base would love it. It'd come out pretty weird but sure, go for it.
But the devil is in the details.
Anyone who has read the Bible knows that Trump already appears in it. It's in the Book of Revelation. Don't give him all these new fake roles while ignoring the one he nailed the audition for.
Yeah, what Hunter said.
Why the child sex trafficking film 'Sound of Freedom' is getting such conflicting reactions, Upworthy, July 20, 2023: The author of this piece, Annie Reneau, explores why, all too often, people who love the movie are accused (by left-leaning commentators) of being QAnon quacks, while those who criticize it are accused (by those who lean rightward) of being evil pedos. Reneau has the advantage of having interviewed Tim Ballard back in 2018 when Sound Of Freedom was still in production; at the time, she thought he was a full-blown superhero.
I learned a lot talking with Ballard, but notably missing from our conversation was anything QAnon-related. He mentioned nothing about pizza parlors or Hillary Clinton eating babies (remember Pizzagate?), nothing about Hollywood actors secretly being arrested for some global sex trafficking ring run by elites, nothing about adrenochrome or any of the other QAnon claims that were already well underway in 2018. The industry he talked about was similar to what other anti-trafficking organizations I've spoken to have described.
But what a difference a few years made.
But in the years since I spoke to Ballard, I've been dismayed to see him and OUR tacitly courting of QAnoners who have completely wrong ideas about what child sex trafficking looks like. I've watched partisan politics play a bigger and bigger role in Ballard's anti-trafficking messaging (and fundraising) and have been baffled by his and OUR's seeming refusal to denounce any specific QAnon kookery—despite the comment sections of their social media accounts being filled with the stuff...
...All I've ever seen from Ballard and OUR are vague statements like, "We don't support conspiracy theories," which is meaningless, because QAnon folks don't see themselves as conspiracy theorists. When the big #SaveTheChildren push came about in 2020, with its skewed statistics and total misrepresentation of the scope and reality of child sex trafficking, neither Ballard nor OUR corrected the widespread misinformation QAnon followers pushed. Instead, they saw the attention as an opportunity.
Reneau says that the way Ballard and OUR have
failed to set the record straight with their QAnon following has
led directly to extreme and predictable reactions to Sound Of
Freedom, adding that it doesn't help that the film's lead,
Jim Caviezel, seems to be fully embracing the QAnon lunacy, and
that Ballard has turned the whole thing into a partisan,
politicized fight between good and evil. She closes her article
with a list of resources for learning more about child sex trafficking and some of the organizations that are combating it,
sans the Q and reich-wing controversies.
'Sound of Freedom' Is
Surprisingly Popular With Democrats (Newsweek, July 31, 2023): This might put a bit of a
damper on the partisan political hoopla from both republicans and
Democrats that has been swirling around the media in the month
since the movie's release, but according to a recent poll of
1,500 US adults, conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies on
behalf of Newsweek, 59 percent of Democratic voters have
a "favorable" or "very favorable" opinion of Sound
Of Freedom, and only 10 percent view it unfavorably. Among
republican voters, 65 percent have a positive view of the film,
while it is viewed positively by 73 percent of third party voters
and 49 percent of non-voters.
As for the "suppression" conspiracies, 21 percent of
Dems believe them, according to the poll, while 37 percent of
repubs do. And as for the accuracy of the film, if we're to
believe the polling samples, 74 percent of republicans believe
that the film's portrayal of human trafficking was either
"reasonably accurate" or "very accurate,"
while 57 percent of Democrats believe the same.
What do I make of this? It's interesting, but
doesn't change my opinions that Sound Of Freedom needs
to be viewed through a skeptical lens, regardless of the politics of the viewer, and that anyone who wants
to learn true facts about human trafficking, and/or do
something to help, needs to turn to much more credible sources
than a fictionalized movie or the self-aggrandizing
"hero" upon which the movie is based. (Start with The Polaris
Project.)
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