The film Sound of Freedom has broken out and captured the hearts and wallets of American theatergoers — and the bile of mainstream media. “It’s about time to go to the movies,” Adam Baldwin says the day after he watched the new film from Angel Studios. “Made me cry, made me angry,” he continues, “all the things you want” in a film that tells true stories about child sex trafficking. “It’s tasteful and it’s dark,” he says, “and it exposes the underbelly of the child-trafficking/slave industry.” So why, then, are mainstream media outlets targeting Sound of Freedom for invective while audiences embrace the film based on actual events in the life of Operation Underground Railroad founder Tim Ballard?
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Welcome back to our VIP video series “The Amiable Skeptics,” featuring my friend Adam Baldwin! Adam is well-known for his long and storied Hollywood career, starting with My Bodyguard, and especially for his roles in Full Metal Jacket, Firefly, its film sequel Serenity, Chuck, and The Last Ship.
Adam and I spend a good portion of time just talking about the film, and, well … Adam knows films, obviously. We talk about the compelling performances from the entire cast. Obviously Jim Caviezel gets much of that attention as the central character of the film, but we also talk about how good the supporting cast is as well.
I point out that — as good as Caviezel is — the film really rests on the shoulders of the two child actors playing the main trafficking victims. “They were powerfully good at this,” I declare. “The whole time you’re thinking, My goodness, how did they get this performance out of these two children?” Adam offers some brief insight based on his own experiences you don’t want to miss.
After that, though, we turn our attention to the outright hostility from mainstream media to Sound of Freedom. “We’ve had many discussions about how the radical Left is a cult,” Adam says, “and this challenges cult doctrine, and cult doctrine right now is disruption of the normal. … Child sex slavery and pedophilia is a disruptor of the normal. And so that’s why I think they instinctively are attacking this.”
The attacks are mainly lies too, I argue. “The pushback on this is that this is all a QAnon conspiracy theory, it’s Q and On adjacent,” I say. “And I have no truck with QAnon. I think that’s a nonsense thing. I think Pizza Gate was a was idiocy. But I’m wondering,” I continue, “why the media is so quick to latch on to this as a way of discrediting this. Is it simply because conservatives like this movie and want to promote it? Is it something else?”
They’re useful political prostitutes, Adam says, quoting Mao, activists blindly following the party line until the party wants to discard them. Or maybe there’s a simpler answer. “Maybe it’s just for clicks, maybe it’s just click bait,” Adam suggests, noting that he doesn’t even really know much about QAnon anyway. But it’s certainly weird coming from a media that spent years ignoring Jeffrey Epstein, Adam notes. “Epstein, for crying out loud, was protected by the Left … until he wasn’t.”
From there, Adam and I have a broader conversation about the lack of urgency in dealing with child sex trafficking in California and elsewhere, and what the challenge of the success of Sound of Freedom means for the entertainment industry. Be sure to watch it all, join us in the comments — and go see Sound of Freedom yourselves in the theaters.
