Opposing human trafficking is suddenly a partisan issue.
I didn’t see that coming. But then again, just a few years ago opposition to female genital mutilation was a bipartisan issue; now the Democrats are funding and promoting it as gold-standard medical care, so I shouldn’t be as surprised as I am.
Still, I admit to being surprised at the Left-wing freakout regarding the success of Sound of Freedom, despite it being totally apolitical. It turns out that a movie about saving children from human trafficking in Columbia must be destroyed for some reason.
The attacks on the movie and its subject are something to behold. It is a full-court press, with both TV and print media attacking the premise that child sex trafficking takes place at all–a weird assertion given that the federal government and the UN both describe human trafficking and child sex trafficking as a problem, and that there is a national human trafficking hotline. The Human Trafficking Institute claims that there are 25 million victims of human trafficking right now.
The idea isn’t exactly outlandish. Slavery is as old as humanity, and we certainly know more than a little about it in the United States. Pretty much everybody knows that prostitution exists and that the majority of prostitutes in the world are “managed” by others and under some level of compulsion.
The Guardian itself, which called Sound of Freedom “QAnon adjacent,” just wrote a story in April about a 2 year(!!) investigation into how Facebook and Instagram are used for child sex trafficking.
How Facebook and Instagram became marketplaces for child sex trafficking https://t.co/oGT51wZ43i
— The Guardian (@guardian) April 27, 2023
But suddenly worries about child sex trafficking are so outlandish as to be laughable–the result of a “moral panic.” CNN spent an entire segment shooting down the idea that it was a real problem.
CNN: [Speaking on movie, Sound of Freedom, ONE DEPICTION of CHILD TRAFFICKING] “ these movies are created out of moral panic, their created out of bogus statistics, they’re created out of fear… it’s specifically looking at something like QAnon concepts” pic.twitter.com/xlf9YlmDgO
— NΛTLY DΞNISΞ (@NatlyDenise_) July 8, 2023
What is so remarkable is that none of the critics of Sound of Freedom can point to anything in the movie that promotes QAnon, and there are many reasons for that, not the least of which is that the movie was written and mostly shot before there was such a thing as QAnon. Caveziel himself, the star of the movie and its chief promoter, doesn’t see a parallel and is not pointing to any weird conspiracy theories himself. Everything in the movie and in his presentations is backed up with MSM news sources, and until yesterday the MSM has done positive stories about Tim Ballard, the hero of the movie.
In 2014 CBS did a segment applauding
Sound of Freedom ’s Tim Ballard’s work against child trafficking in Columbia.Almost 10 years later the same media is calling the film inspired by his work, “paranoid” and a“Qanon conspiracy." pic.twitter.com/91tLdnCJbA
— D. Scott @eclipsethis2003 (@eclipsethis2003) July 10, 2023
It’s almost like there is a major shift in the media’s attitude about child sex trafficking itself, and a need to dispute its existence and/or importance.
It is possible, of course, that the media is just fighting shadows. Many on the Left see QAnon around every corner, although I have yet to meet anybody who is an advocate for it. I actually believe its prominence in the public discourse is an invention of the Left to discredit the Right. It’s difficult to find anybody on the Right who takes the whole conspiracy theory seriously, and everybody on the Left appears to do so–not as truth, but as a group of whackos who are a deep threat to the Republic.
It’s convenient. And it’s especially convenient to have your favorite conspiracy theorist pushing a deeply unconvincing jumble of theories that are close to, but not quite the truth. And the truth is that the very same people who are making us fear QAnon are also pushing for the sexualization of children, but not through pizza parlors, but rather right in the schools, the libraries, at drag shows, and Pride parades.
Yes, because fighting to stop child sex trafficking is such a no-no in Hollywood. Disgusting.https://t.co/GAZw28F3Vj
— Fuzzy Slippers (@fuzislippers) July 12, 2023
When your school librarian is handing out books to middle schoolers explaining how to sign up for Grindr to find “tricks,” no complicated conspiracy is necessary to find kids for sex. When your academic and political elite are flying with Jeffrey Epstein on the Lolita Express to a private island staffed by minors, why bother with secret phone calls to get “pizzas” delivered or something weird like that?
We’ve all heard stories about how child actors are abused by their Hollywood handlers. It’s not a secret.
And it is certainly not a secret that Facebook and Instagram are hunting grounds for predators. Ask The Guardian.
The Guardian ran a huge exposé on child sex trafficking in Columbia in 2018. Now they're saying it's a conspiracy theory to watch a movie about child sex trafficking set in Columbia.🤨🧐 pic.twitter.com/d8SPH7XaQd
— ♠️Dezirae♠️ (@DesiraeQoS) July 9, 2023
The media freakout about Sound of Freedom is instructive because it tells us what the MSM and the Elite find disquieting, and apparently, the wrong people focusing on child sex trafficking is very disturbing indeed. It is all well and good to have abstract discussions about this, but when an emotionally compelling movie focuses attention on the problem suddenly it must be “debunked.”
Ironically, all the attacks have created a “Streisand effect,” where the more the Left tries to debunk the movie, the more curious everyone is to see it. The movie is doing well, and the story rings true. There is nothing that connects the American Elite to the trafficking, but lots of people are going to wonder why the Elite here is so determined to have nobody see it.
I personally doubt that many Elites are looking to import sex slaves from South America–their efforts have been focused on sexualizing American children right here. The Biden Administration has been aiding human trafficking at the border, of course, having lost 85,000 unaccompanied children, many of whom are working off debts to the cartel.
But that is probably incidental. The project of the Left is to loosen the laws more than expand the supply right now.
Perhaps that is the answer to why they hate the movie so much; it portrays pedophiles in a bad light.
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