Sunday, August 13, 2023

Sound Of Freedom funders' hall of shame, and the Utah/Mormon huckster connection

Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes and his fellow Mormon Tim Ballard, who is the inspiration for the highly fictionalized summer hit movie Sound Of Freedom, are good buds, not to mention devoted Trumpsters.

Much of this post was originally part of the August 7, 2023 Whirled post about the arrest of Fabian Marta, one of thousands of participants in the crowdfunding of the hit movie Sound Of Freedom. I decided that it works better as a separate post, with additional content and links.
~ CC

Twitter/X user, podcaster, and former alternate-reality game developer Jim Stewartson, who describes himself as an anti-disinfo activist, was the first source I know of to report on the late July 2023 arrest of a guy named Fabian Marta, who helped crowdfund the highly fictionalized hit movie about child sex trafficking, Sound Of Freedom. Marta was charged with being an accessory to felony child kidnapping. I wrote about that on my previous post on this Whirled.

Most of the mainstream press, and Stewartson himself for that matter, framed their reporting, or at least their headlines, around the fact that Marta was a funder of Sound Of Freedom. The big hook, of course, was that a financial backer of this passionately anti-child-trafficking movie was himself (allegedly) involved in felony child kidnapping. In my post I tried to draw a middle ground, stressing that Marta was only one of thousands of participants in the P&A (prints and advertising) campaign ahead of the movie's release.

But I also emphasized that Marta's arrest had become a story in the first place because of his own public bragging about his role in bringing the movie to audiences after Disney had shelved it. And I also noted that even if Marta is ultimately exonerated of the child kidnapping charges, he's still an unsavory character with ties to the sexually exploitative sugar daddy/sugar baby culture, and to top it off, he's apparently a reich-wingnut.

Credibility is not an all-or-nothing thing
Regarding Jim Stewartson, I am well aware of assertions that he is not the most credible of sources. For example, a May 2023 Vice article claims that in his extensive writings about disgraced former national security advisor and loyal Trumpcult member Michael Flynn, Stewartson has so far failed to produce credible hard evidence of his declarations that Flynn is for all practical purposes the infamous "Q" (of QAnon infamy), or that Flynn is part of a Kremlin-funded psyop to destroy U.S. democracy. (If you want to go a little further back in time, a May 2021 Vice article gives more background info about Stewartson, focusing on his involvement with fighting QAnon, via an organization he founded called The Thinkin Project (the name is a pun on the anti-Trump org The Lincoln Project).)

The May 2023 Vice piece about Stewartson and Flynn was published in the wake of a defamation lawsuit that Flynn had filed in Florida against Stewartson. Vice basically presented the saga as being a case of conspiracist vs. conspiracist. (If you're willing to take a peek down the rabbit hole, here's a February 2022 post from Stewartson about the Flynn/Q connection.)

But there's no doubt that whether or not he is actually "Q," the loathsome Flynn is a fierce conspiracist who isn't afraid to embrace QAnonsense and other wackadoodle conspiracies, not to mention that he's a big supporter of Donald Trump's efforts to destroy American democracy. He may be a lunatic, but he's a dangerous one. And while I am not, at this point, willing to go all the way down the Flynn-Kremlin-psyops rabbit hole with Stewartson, I agree with his basic premise that Flynn is a peril to America.

More importantly to this post and my previous one, I will say that in my opinion, Stewartson's reporting on what some journalists have described as the "Q-adjacent" film Sound Of Freedom does have credibility. That's why I've cited him in my blog posts about the movie and its principals and funders.

One of Stewartson's X posts that caught my eye was his response to a post by Angel Studios, the distributor of Sound Of Freedom, following Fabian Marta's arrest. Angel Studios expressed gratitude towards law enforcement for their fine work in collaring child traffickers and kidnappers. Stewartson wrote:

Hey @AngelStudiosInc if you are so grateful to law enforcement for arresting “Sound of Freedom” funder Fabian Marta, did you screen your funders, producers, and actors before putting them in the credits? Are you going to now? If Fabian Marta was the only funder with problems, that would be one thing. He’s isn’t.

  • Eduardo Verastegui, producer/actor, disciple of one of the worst pedophiles in Mexican history, Marcial Maciel, and current member of infamous pedophile-ridden child trafficking Catholic congregation Legion of Christ
  • Alejandro Monteverde, director, whose only two other films were with Verastegui, including the last film in 2015 called “Little Boy” which was a small budget movie about a dwarf teenager which required more than a thousand prepubescent boys to audition for some reason
  • Former richest man, Carlos Slim, funder, a Mexican mafia warlord who enables drug and human trafficking at scale
  • Tony Robbins, funder, MAGA self-help fraud in business with international terrorist Erik Prince, and credibly accused of sexual harassment of underage girls
  • Lee Severino, producer, who admits to grooming his wife while she was an underage high school girl and he was her church guidance counselor, and did a film with Verastegui and Monteverde while infamous pedophile Marcial Maciel was still alive
  • Tim Ballard, producer/alleged subject of the film, says he has watched thousands of hours of CSAM [child sex abuse material] and can’t watch his own movie, and raised money by spreading the lie that children are sold in Wayfair cabinets
  • Jim Caviezel, actor, brainwashed QAnon/Pizzagate propagandist who can’t find work anywhere else and makes a living lying to people at QAnon conferences

So Angel Studios, this entire production is dirty and you know it. Are you going to distance yourself from the rest of your cast and crew? I will wait.

I won't comment on that entire list, though I urge you to research some of those names in more detail, and I can't wholeheartedly agree with Stewartson that "this entire production is dirty." I do, however, want to mention that Alejandro Monteverde, the director and screenwriter of Sound Of Freedom, seems to be trying even more desperately than Angel Studios has been doing to distance himself and his film from QAnon conspiracy narratives, as well as from the furious and deeply divisive U.S. political angle. That's according to an August 14, 2023 article in Variety, which among other things quotes Monteverde as saying, in reference to Jim Caviezel and Tim Ballard, "There's people that are too close to the film that are in politics. So it's like, I love you, but I have to keep my distance." (Monteverde did not attend the July screening of Sound Of Freedom at Trump's Bedminster golf resort.)

In his interview with Variety, Monteverde also provides insight into the gigantic ego of Tim Ballard. The piece is worth a read, though I also need to point out that in listing Monteverde's previous film accomplishments, it does not mention Little Boy, the movie Stewartson cited in the X post quoted above.

Regarding another name on the list, this one much more familiar to most folks, I also want to note, as I also had on a previous Whirled post, that it's true that selfish-help huckster Tony Robbins, the subject of several posts on this blog, is a major investor in Sound Of Freedom. That's in contrast to Fabian Marta, who, as noted above, was just one of thousands of crowdfunders.

Not surprisingly, Robbins is a good buddy of Tim Ballard, who is of course the inspiration for Sound Of Freedom. The two of them were even involved in a murky rescue op together; Vice.com spilled the details in an August 12, 2021 article that's pretty eye-opening. (Note that the investigation of Ballard and Operation Underground Railroad (O.U.R.) that was mentioned in the article has since been closed, but a newer investigation into same is apparently still ongoing, and may have been related to Ballard's recent departure from O.U.R. But O.U.R. is being very tight-lipped about that one so far.)

In addition, allegations of sexual harassment and other types of abuse have been leveled against Tony Robbins. Regarding those allegations, see the "Related on this Whirled" links following this post for background information.

Moreover, not all of the unsavory characters funding the film have a connection to human trafficking or pedophiles. Some are just plain fraudsters. Consider one of the movie's executive producers, Andrew McCubbins, who in 2020 pleaded guilty to defrauding Medicare of $89 million. From Insider, July 13, 2023:

Sound of Freedom executive producer Andrew McCubbins, a Utah serial entrepreneur, ran a telemedicine company that paid kickbacks to physicians and nurses in exchange for unnecessary prescriptions for genetic screening tests, which were processed by a lab McCubbins owned, according to charging documents and an Insider interview with McCubbins. Medicare reimbursed up to $8,000 per test, according to the federal indictment.

Hollywood scoundrels v Mormons on a mission
I know what some defenders of Sound Of Freedom and its principals may be thinking. The movie biz -- in particular, the mainstream Hollywood system that has so firmly entrenched itself in our culture -- is not known for being a paragon of morality and ethics. If every producer/investor/financier were required to be a choir boy or girl, tons of movies would have never gotten off the ground. And that is a valid point. Some of my favorite films bear the name "Harvey Weinstein" in the production credits. Honestly, seeing that name in the post-#MeToo era makes me wince...but not enough to make me stop enjoying the movies.

However, Angel Studios' entire mission, where film is concerned, is framed in their determination to do better than Hollywood in every way, most particularly spiritually and morally. They're all about spreading love and light, Jesus-style, to a "faith-based" audience egregiously under-served by Hollywood. So maybe, just maybe, their standards should be a little bit higher.

On the other hand, Angel Studios, along with the entire Angel empire, is a Utah-based organization, and Utah is infamously "the land of bilk and money," in the words of one of the world's most ignored bloggers (that would be me). A much less ignored blogger, in his day, is Jason "Salty Droid" Jones, who years ago did a lot of impressive, groundbreaking work regarding Utah boiler rooms and multi-level marketing scams and state government corruption and whatnot, and who once said to a reporter for a Utah alternative weekly, "Fraud built Utah like cocaine built Miami."

I suspect things haven't changed much since that 2012 article. If there's one thing I learned from all of Jason Jones' posts on this general topic, it's that the huckster circles in Utah are pretty tight, often supported by grifting Utah politicians, and arguably reinforced by the fact that almost all of the participants share the unique bond of Mormonism.

I linked to this May 2021 Substack post in a resource list at the end of a previous Whirled post, but it's appropriate to bring it up again. Titled "A cult within a cult: Operation Underground Railroad, the Mormon church, and me," the post illuminates how Tim Ballard exploited that Mormon bond to persuade gullible people to support his mission. It's very well worth reading.

None of the above is an attack on Mormonism per se, just an acknowledgment of those undeniable bonds that, while undoubtedly inspiring good deeds, can also inspire or validate bad or at least misguided ones (and are even a major factor in the coverup of truly horrendous deeds such as sexual abuse within the Church community, including child sex abuse). And unfortunately, due to the tight bonds within Latter-day Saints culture, innocent Mormons are uniquely vulnerable to fraud such as Ponzi schemes perpetrated by other Mormons. This is known as "affinity fraud."

To give a contemporary example of what I suspect is a Mormon-based bond among the not so innocent and vulnerable -- if you'll pardon a brief but pertinent digression -- Utah's current attorney general, Sean Reyes, who has been described as a confidant and friend of Tim Ballard, has scoffed at "media attacks" on Ballard and says Ballard is "a true hero." According to the July 14, 2023 Faithwire article linked to in the previous sentence, Reyes added that anyone doubting Ballard's experience and credibility is doing so from "absolute ignorance." Clearly, Reyes is conflating legitimate criticism, questioning, and clarification of his true hero with "attacking."

It's not a real big stretch to imagine that Reyes might possibly have exerted undue influence in Davis County, Utah DA Troy Rawlings' decision in March of this year to close out the two-and-a-half-year criminal investigation into Ballard and O.U.R. I linked to an article about this matter above, in the part about Tony Robbins and Ballard being buds, but here's that link again. From the article:

The reviewed charges by Rawlings’ office included communications fraud, witness tampering and retaliation against a witness, victim or informant, according to a declination statement which Rawlings confirmed was authentic.

The determination to close the investigation came after Rawlings’ office received and reviewed financial audits of Operation Underground Railroad and information supplied by law enforcement agencies including the Utah Attorney General’s Office, the document says.

Rawlings’ office also took into account details provided by Operation Underground Railroad about the organization’s domestic and international initiatives and “the current prosecutorial priorities of the Davis County Attorney’s Office” in making the decision, according to the document.

“In sum, the Davis County Attorney’s Office does not believe that the decision to pursue charges against O.U.R. or any individuals associated with O.U.R. is prudent,” the declination reads.

"Prosecutorial priorities" and the belief that pursuing charges against O.U.R. wouldn't be "prudent"... well, that could cover a wide range of possibilities. Of course, there's always the possibility that they actually did do a thorough investigation and honestly found no wrongdoing. But I find myself running low on benefits of the doubt to give.

Of note, AG Reyes, like his good buddy Tim Ballard, is also apparently a staunch Trumpster, and is one of 11 GOP attorneys general who used their offices to defend Trump, following the August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, by filing an amicus brief in September 2022, accusing the Biden administration of "ransacking" Trump's home. Also in September 2022, a group called The 65 Project filed an ethics complaint against Reyes with the Office of Professional Conduct over his "concerted" effort to overturn legitimate 2020 presidential election results.

To round out his far-reich creds, Reyes also believes that women who travel out of state to get an abortion should be tracked, because otherwise states' rights to enforce their own abortion laws would be unlawfully hindered. (States' rights only go so far with him, though. A few years ago he and his fellow rethuglican gun-nut AGs were campaigning for legislation that would allow people with a concealed-carry permit in one state to legally carry a gun in any state, because they claimed that to prevent permit holders from carrying outside their home state infringes on the Second Amendment.)

But I don't want to go too far down the Reyes rabbit hole right now. (If you want to, check out this August 21, 2022 video by journalist Lynn Packer, featuring best buds Sean Reyes and Tim Ballard.)

Getting back now to Angel Studios and Sound Of Freedom, the point I wish to make is that regardless of any given business's lofty mission statements, when push comes to shove it's generally all about the Benjamins, and the Harmon brothers, co-founders of Angel Studios, are no exception. They're nothing if not serial entrepreneurs, having made bucketloads of bucks by, among other enterprises, creating viral ads for products such as the Squatty Potty, which starred a cute little unicorn pooping out rainbow-colored soft-serve ice cream and had a  coprophagia theme, all in good fun, of course. Then there was a thing they had going for a while, VidAngel, where they committed serious copyright violations by taking feature films, decrypting them and "sanitizing" them for a wholesome (Mormon) audience, and streaming them. They ended up paying $9.9 million in settlements to various movie studios, and founded Angel Studios in order to create and distribute original content.

Notwithstanding the straw-man criticisms often leveled against anyone who dares to criticize aggressively capitalist (or crapitalist) entrepreneurs, I'm not claiming that there's anything intrinsically wrong with being motivated by the desire to make money. And the Harmon bros are apparently very good at doing just that, even if they have crossed legal lines in the process. What I am saying is that the money making mission appears to be their top concern, and in that regard they're not all that different from the Hollywood establishment.

Sound Of Freedom was already completed by the time Angel took over the advertising and distribution. Due to various issues regarding the original studio's merger with Disney, the movie was lying in limbo until Angel Studios acquired the rights for $5 million. But the Harmons, with their eye$ on the prize, apparently didn't think that the unsavory backgrounds (including pedo connections) of some of the principals involved in the film's production -- not to mention the lunatic Q-ravings in real life of the movie's lead -- were a big deal.

It's also not inconceivable that their fellow Mormon, the relentlessly self-aggrandizing and egotistical Tim Ballard, exerted some influence in Angel's decision to take on this tribute to Ballard's own (exaggerated) courage and heroism. Angel Studios says that through its platform, thousands of "Angel" investors choose which titles will be created, funded, and distributed, and that decisions are driven by creators and audiences. But this doesn't rule out any ties between Ballard and the Harmons, nor does it invalidate my point about the deeper, behind-the-scenes bonds among Utah/Mormon hucksters (and politicians, for that matter). If Salty Droid were still blogging, he'd very likely be on this like a rainbow on unicorn poop, but I guess you'll just have to settle for me for now. Or do your own research, and feel free to share it here.

Call for transparency
I'm thinking that in light of all of the buzz about Fabian Marta and other funders and financial backers, Angel Studios needs to publish and make easily accessible a complete list of all of the major investors, crowdfunders, and others who helped finance Sound Of Freedom ahead of its release, as well as the amount of money each one contributed. I don't mean that I think the names of and other info about individual "Pay It Forward" participants should be publicized; that would be an invasion of privacy. But I do think there should be disclosure of the names and amounts involved in the film's production as well as those who contributed to the crowdfunding before the movie was released. This might not do much to stop the swirl of speculation and wild rumors on "both sides," but it would be another step towards some much-needed transparency.

Transparency appears to be a big issue with Sound Of Freedom, though. According to The Hollywood Reporter (August 8, 2023), Angel Studios isn't exactly being forthcoming about how much of the film's $164 million (and counting) domestic take has come from donated tickets through the studio's innovative "Pay It Forward" scheme -- which allows people to buy and donate tickets for others to use -- and how much comes from those bought directly by a moviegoer.

A spokesman for Angel Studios says that the vast majority of tickets are being bought by humans and that only redeemed tickets are counted when reporting grosses to Comscore, the industry record-keeper of box office grosses. But many in the film industry continue to be skeptical, especially given the standard disclaimer on the Angel Studios web site that "Angel Studios becomes the owner of all funds upon receipt and may use them at its sole discretion to further the Angel Studios’ mission of amplifying light through impactful stories.”

In a recent-ish Facebook conversation with an ultra-right-wing friend who's a fan of Sound Of Freedom, I commented that where this film is concerned, I think Angel Studios' intentions are good and that despite the negative press, they're not overtly trying to promote political divisiveness or Q-lunacy through the movie. I stand by that opinion, but would like to amend it: Angel Studios' intentions may be good, but overall those intentions are not all that much better than those of the Hollywood establishment that the American reich, particularly the "faith-based" sector, so loves to vilify.

Related on this Whirled:

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