QAA Podcast - Episode 238: Sound of Freedom feat. Dave Anthony, Anna Merlan, and Tim Marchman

Episode Date: July 12, 2023

After years of delays, the film “Sound of Freedom'' has finally hit theaters. The movie stars majorly pilled QAnon-promoting actor Jim Caveizel. He portrays Tim Ballard, the founder of the anti sex trafficking organization Operation Underground Railroad. This film is bound to be a big boon for Tim Ballard. He is a former Department of Homeland security agent, but starting about a decade ago he made a name for himself thanks to stories of bold, daring missions helping rescue abducted children and arresting traffickers. Sex trafficking is in fact a very real and serious problem that is being actively fought by many governmental and nongovernmental organizations. But investigations into Ballard discovered that he exaggerates or sometimes outright fibs about his role in helping victims of trafficking. Similarly, Operation Underground Railroad claims partnerships with law enforcement and corporations that aren’t actually real. To discuss the film, we are joined by Dave Anthony of the Dollop Podcast. To dive into Operation Underground Railroad and its founder Tim Ballard, we talk to Vice News reporters Anna Merlan and Tim Marchman. Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to ongoing series like 'Manclan' and 'Trickle Down': http://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous QAA's Website: https://qanonanonymous.com Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz. Guests https://twitter.com/daveanthony https://twitter.com/annamerlan https://twitter.com/timmarchman REFERENCES https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/12/technology/qanon-save-the-children-trafficking.html https://www.wsj.com/articles/sound-of-freedom-jim-caviezel-857639bf https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/sound-of-freedom-the-film-you-almost-never-had-the-chance-to-see Reporting On Tim Ballard From Vice News https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7a3qw/a-famed-anti-sex-trafficking-group-has-a-problem-with-the-truth https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvxev5/inside-a-massive-anti-trafficking-charitys-blundering-overseas-missions https://www.vice.com/en/article/akgq8a/anti-trafficking-charity-operation-underground-railroad-has-another-murky-rescue-story https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7zjyg/operation-underground-railroad-touts-non-existent-partnership-with-american-airlines https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3apm/anti-trafficking-group-with-long-history-of-false-claims-gets-its-hollywood-moment

What's up QAA listeners? The fun games have begun. I found a way to connect to the internet. I'm sorry, boy. Welcome listener to chapter 238 of the Q&ONANANANANANANIS podcast, the Sound of Freedom and Operation Underground Railroad episode. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakatansky, and Travis Vue. After years of delays, the film's Sound of Freedom has finally hit theaters.

The movie stars majorly-pilled Q-Anon-promoting actor Jim Caviziel, and he portrays Tim Ballard, the founder of the Anti-Sex Trafficking Organization Operation Underground Railroad. Now, the film is going to be a big boon for Tim Ballard. He's a former Department of Homeland Security agent, but starting about a decade ago, he made a name for himself thanks to stories of bold, daring missions he allegedly undertook, helping rescue abducted children and arresting traffickers. Now, obviously, sex trafficking is a very real, very serious problem that is actively being fought by many governmental and non-governmental organizations, but investigations in the Ballard have

discovered that he exaggerates her sometimes outright fives about his role in helping victims of trafficking. Similarly, Operation Underground Railroad claims partnerships with law enforcement and corporations that aren't actually real. Vice News reporters Anna Merlin and Tim Marchman from Vice News, have done great work fact-checking, Operation Underground Railroad, and later in the show, we'll talk to them to get a more nuanced view of what they have done. So, Jim Caviziel, been a long-time fixture of this show. Most notably, in episode 143, Enter the Cvortex, featuring guest Dave Anthony. That includes original reporting from sources who had worked with Covisial on his CBS show,

person of interest, and it is to date one of our most popular episodes we've ever done, mostly because of the absurd behavior of Caviziel that Julian reported on. This included Cavizial being totally unable to remember his lines, even simple lines like the word no, and being so dangerous that they wouldn't even give him a gun with blinks. It's good stuff. Julian couldn't make this episode, unfortunately. He's taken a few weeks off to deal with some personal matters. But to discuss Sound of Freedom.

We are again joined by Dave Anthony from the Dalup podcast. Dave, thank you so much for entering the Cvortex yet again. with us uh i guess thank you for having me it's kind of uh it's hard to say that because you it is torture what happened this last time you just told me stories of him and he he doesn't think he's a human so that's great yeah this was making me go somewhere and watch a film and that was not nice that's true i gave you a homework assignment i apologize for that yeah i mean especially with uh you know movie ticket prices, you know, at where they are, you know, to force Dave to spend his own money, to sit in a dark theater alone on an afternoon to watch this, this film.

Not a short film, too. Not an hour and a half tight action thriller, no. That was the thing. I sat down in the theater. And first of all, Travis hooked me up. He said, here's where you can get a free ticket. They're doing a pay-it-forward thing. And so I didn't pay for it.

But then I sat down. And I think I audibly was like, fuck, when I looked at the time on my phone. Not to mention the fact that they make you watch, like, I think there was easily half an hour of previews at the screening that I went to. And like five of those movies were other angel studio films that are like, you know, clearly religious, but also surprisingly high budget looking. I mean, not good, not good at all. Yeah, they're making a lot of money. This is a legit studio making a lot of money. Because they've been making terrible religious movies for years, but they always looked bad.

And now these guys have figured it out and they're going to make a fortune just cranking out garbage to idiots. Yeah, Dave, I don't know if you've heard the breaking news, but Sound of Freedom starring Jim Cavizal upset the latest Indiana Jones film at the box office. Sound of Freedom.

Let me repeat that again. Sound of Freedom made more money this weekend than the final installment of the Indiana Jones franchise. in what world do we live in I know but come on like that what's that one called enter the casket like he's so fucking old I don't want to see grandpa Jones out there like what before we start talking about the film itself I thought it'd be useful to talk about how the film came the theaters because it's been a long time coming years and years and years of delays so the

film is directed and co-written by Alejandro Gomez Monte Verde and Monteverde and Monteverde and Verte Verde graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with an undergrad degree in film. After directing a few short films, commercials, and documentaries, he made his feature-length debut with the 2006 film Bella. It's a romantic film about a New York restaurant chef who quits in solidarity after a pregnant waitress is fired for being late, and the two spend the day in the city pouring their heart out to each other. So the film received mixed reviews for its confusing motivations of the characters and plot holes, but nonetheless won the People's Choice Award at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival. So the New York Times review of the film said this. If Bella is a mediocre

cup of mush, the response to it suggests how desperate some people are for an urban fairy tale with a happy ending, no matter how ludicrous. So it sounds like something that's kind of like saccharine and kind of ludicrous and doesn't pay attention to plot holes. I feel like this is the perfect director for this particular film. Yep. So, Sound of Freedom itself was originally developed by 20th century Fox International and completed in 2018. But when Fox was acquired by Disney, they, for some reason, had no interest in distributing

the film. And lots of people have pounced on this fact, the idea that Disney was like covering up, you know, these harsh truths about human trafficking. Which Disney has always been doing. I mean, let's be honest, they're a full-on child prostitution. cover. Yeah, the original bakers. I mean, we found sex in the dust cloud

after Simba sits down on the cliff. We've seen the dildo on the front of the Little Mermaid box cover. I mean, this is known stuff. Yeah, nine dwarves or nine boys? After more than a year, Disney

released the rights of the film to producer Eduardo Verastigy. He tried to release the film in theater in 2020. COVID hit, you know, put the theater going, experience in turmoil. And according to an interview with The Washington Examiner, he then tried to get distributed through Netflix and Amazon, and they both passed. So finally, Veresta gig caught a break. Last fall, he met with Neil Harmon, the co-founder and CEO of Angel Studios. Angel Studios is the crowdfunded media company, famous for distributing The Chosen. This was a TV show about the life of Jesus Christ.

And more recently, the film, His Only Son, this is a movie based on the Old Testament tale of Abraham. Angel Studios has an interesting backstory, and this was reported by the Wall Street Journal. It was started by two Mormons back in 2013 called Vid Angel. Which, let's be honest, I mean, that sounds like, you know, a studio that might be in North Hollywood, you know, making a certain type of adult picture. Yeah, it really does. Well, this is actually the opposite, because what VidAngel did was at the moment. They, they were a business that scrubbed nudity, profanity, and other potentially offensive content from popular movies and then streamed those movies to customers online. Edging. That's video edging.

Video edging. Obviously, you can't just recut movies and streamed them for profit without permission from the copyright holder. Oh, that's weird. Yeah. So they were sued. They were sued in the bankruptcy and they settled with the studios in 2020 for $10 million. In the wake of that settlement, the founders, they launched Angel Studios as a separate company, and instead of just cleaning up other studios content, they decided to put out their own, which gave us the Jesus and the Abraham movies and now Sound of Freedom. They realized it was much easier to just write movies without any nudity in them than having to go and digitally composite it out of existing films.

So, smart business move for them, I think. I kind of want to see one of those movies now. I want to see it edited out, nonsense. I mean, you see it a little bit on TV. but this sounds like it'd be really awful. That's good. I want to see Vite Angel Pulp Fiction. That should be interesting.

Yeah, I would like to see their version of Boogie Nights. Yes. Oh, my God. That'd be amazing. The movie is like 13 minutes long. The studio showed Sound of Freedom to Investors. They are very enthusiastic, and it agreed in March to distribute the movie. So this distribution plan was formed just four months ago.

So after years and years of delay, And what's really crazy about this is that they managed to get distributed nationwide in theaters. Like, not just like Christian film festivals, not just streaming services, not like, you know, DVDs at gas stations. Like for a movie that's basically been on the shelf for five years, that's a pretty impressive win. That really is. Yeah. I mean, usually these things like never see the light of day. And like, Dave, as I'm sure you know, the horror, the horror of this all is that they can now go to other studios and say,

look at this massive success we made and look at, look at what we did. And we beat, we beat Indiana Jones. And it's like, well, you can't like argue with those numbers. Like, I'm worried that, you know, other sort of like, you know, big time production studios are going to be like, oh, well, maybe we should give these guys a chance. I mean, they've got a really good track record. They will 100% get other people knocking on their door now to make films. Yeah. And they'll get other stars. Like, this opens up everything for them. Yeah, totally. And the lead up to the release of the movie on July 4th, man, there was just a huge promotion advertising blitz. Tim Ballard and Jim Cavizio, they went on just about every single,

like conservative media talk show. You know, they were like, they're on like every daily wire show. And the company also bought a ton of ads on Twitter. If you were on Twitter, you saw the Sound of Freedom ad pop up in your feed. They also have an unusual way of encouraging ticket sales. Like Dave mentioned, so people who want other people to see the movie can buy many tickets in bulk. So other people can get free tickets. And they're doing this because they They don't see it as just like entertainment. It's like a message movie. And they think that it's a kind of activism to buy free tickets for other people to see.

Yeah, I mean, I think I'm the target audience. I've been trafficking people for a while. And this changed my mind. I don't want to do it anymore. I think it's bad now. Well, yeah. Well, one person saved by the sound of freedom. Already taking down the traffickers.

Good job. Before we talk about what's in the film, I think it's notable to discuss what not in the film. And that there's no mention of adrenachrome. There's no scenes where Jim Cavizial is like running around and deep underground military bases. There's no secret revelation that actually Hillary Clinton was the leader of the global pedophile ring. Like all the fantastical elements of the conspiracist worldview are surprisingly absent. Yeah, that's what I was really expecting. And that's what I was most excited about was those scenes, the, you know, drinking the baby's blood and whatnot. It was very disappointing because

I'm betting it's been shot and it's on the cutting room floor somewhere. I hope a director's cut comes out someday. That's possible. I think you're going to get your wish. I think you're going to get the 4K Blu-ray with the adrenachrome farms in it. And it's actually, they basically used footage from their original vid angel company for their version of the Matrix, where instead of like, you know, the thousands of rows of like, you know, pink goo that, you know, Neo is kept in. It's just going to be like a bunch of kids in a different kind of pink goo maybe? I would love it. They started just taking those scenes of people eating and consuming children and they're just splice them into other films to do the opposite.

But yeah, I mean, this was my thing too. I like, you know, when we're gearing up to see this, I was like, I wonder, are we going to see? Because Beasel has been going around and he's been saying adrenachrome in every single interview that he's in. So my feeling was like, has got to be in the movie. We're going to see it. We're going to get our first big budget sort of QAnon scene. And, you know, the film probably would have been a little bit more interesting had they included that. But, but it was, as Travis mentioned, totally absent. Yeah. The other theory that I'm kind of operating from about why the hell Jim Cavizio was just constantly talking about Adrianicrome for years on like when he's like attending Q&on conferences and shit, is that like,

it's like the kind of like sent out Jim Cavizio like as a, as a magnet for conspiracy. to drum up interest in the movie because they figured maybe the Q&N community is a natural audience for this kind of thing. And one of the reasons I think this is that Tim Ballard has a very different relationship with conspiracy theories and every other leader of like an anti-trafficking organization. So it is true that Operation Underground Railroad issued a statement distancing themselves from conspiracy theories, saying that the org, quote, does not condone conspiracy theories and is not affiliated with any conspiracy theory group in any way, shape, or form. But at the same time, Tim Ballard sees conspiracy theorists as a good audience for his message, even explicitly told the New York Times this, saying this. Some of these theories have allowed people to open their eyes. So now it's our job to flood the space with real information so the facts can be shared.

He's like, conspiracy theories really loosen these guys up for the truth. What you need to do is get a bunch of people on meth to just babble shit. And then we come in with the truth afterwards. I mean, yeah, we can actually see how he put this idea into practice a few years back when, like, the Wayfair conspiracy theory was popular. This was based on the absurd notion that children were secretly being sold through the home decor website Wayfair. Oh, yeah. And so it was actually really horrible, like innocent people were being harassed. But Tim Ballard thought it was an opportunity to promote his organization.

So here's how he responded to that conspiracy theory in the video. Tim Ballard here, CEO of Operation Underground Railroad. I want to respond to a lot of questions we're getting about this whole Wayfair thing. Look, bottom line, law enforcement's going to flush that out, and we'll get our answers sooner than later. But I want to tell you this. Children are sold that way.

For 17 years, I've worked as an undercover operator online. No question about it. Children are sold on social media platforms, on websites, and so forth. So I'm glad people are at least waking up to it. I don't think anybody here can deny that, right? You can buy kids through Walmart, Ikea, all the big box stores, for sure. Some bodegas are getting into it. Look, I try not to get them from IKEA because the children are very tough to assemble.

The instructions that come with it, there's a lot of, you know, it's very, it's very, so I prefer, I prefer Wayfair to kind of send it all at once. You know, everything together, working, you know, ready to go. Yeah, that makes sense. I like how this guy, you can't see this if you're listening, but he set his camera shot up so there's an American flag in the distance waving over his shoulder. Yeah, there's also somebody who like peeks in from the background and kind of notices that he's recorded. It's almost like a big foot siding. It's like, they kind of peek around the corner and then they're like, oh man, this guy's doing something serious. Like, I better get out of his viewfinder.

Look at this guy. He really looks like he looks like he stepped out of a football field. Yeah. He's nothing like, I mean, Kavisel is. nothing like him in the film. I mean, Kavisel, I think, has been crying for the last two years. And the movie is, is no exception. I mean, there are many, like, close-ups of, like, out of focus on his eyes, out of focus on his eyes, a single-tier forms. Now we're in focus on the tear rolling down his cheek. Well, the number of times that they just put the camera on him

and he didn't do anything was astounding. And I thought back to when you said he didn't remember his lines, because it seemed like there's just a lot of blank stare moments. And if they cut out all those, the movie would be 45 minutes less. Yeah. Well, and And that was like, and maybe we're going to get into this, but like, that was kind of my main gripe with it was that all of the emotion in something that should be highly emotional, you know, have high levels of conflict. There was nothing. There was just absolutely nothing.

There was no, it almost operated under the assumption that it's like, hey, you watching the movie, like you know how bad human trafficking is and we know how bad it is. So you just supply the emotion based on like your own. beliefs at how bad this is, as opposed to, like, using the film to really hit home, like, how, you know, how visceral and, like, awful this, this thing is. It was very weird watching this, watching this movie. It was for sure. And I don't know how big of fans are people on the right of this guy. Is this guy one of the main characters in their sort of fantasy thing that they have going on? Tim Ballard? Oh, yeah. Tim Ballard is, yeah, he's pretty big, actually.

He, like, he went to the White House and talked to Trump. He did test. And Moni, he's a big celebrity. Like, yeah, on the right, definitely. Because it felt like, it felt like people went there to watch this the way people would go watch a Spider-Man movie or a Marvel movie. It's something that is based on a comic book and they wanted to see their favorite scene and see their favorite moment. Yeah, totally.

And they walked away disappointed, not seeing either Hillary Clinton, the eating of children and or the adrenachrome farms. It would have been great if they'd done that after the credits. Yeah, that's like the hidden credit scene instead of Jim Caviesel being like, please, I'm, I'm really begging you, you guys got to tell your friends about this movie. One thing I do want to know is that, like, on a basic, like, technical level is, is better than the kinds of movies we usually watch for this podcast. Like, my standard for, like, a conservative message movie is like my son Hunter. And, like, you know, like a basic competence level, not the storytelling wasn't great, but like stuff like the lighting, the shots, the music. You know, that stuff was, I think, pretty well done.

It was filmed on location in Columbia. And sometimes they had, like, you know, really kind of neat looking sets and stuff. But, like, yeah, other than that, you were talking about this earlier, Jake. It's like, one of the big problems is that, like, Tim Ballard is totally uncomplicated. Like, he starts out as a good person who wants to do good and is dedicated to helping children. And he continues to do good with, like, no friction throughout the film. Yeah, I mean, to me, like, I think that there were probably three or four scenes of conversations with Miros Servino, who plays his wife, that were completely edited out of the film. Because what's left

of what would be the conflict, which is, you know, hey, I want to quit my job to go find these kids. And you go, well, you can't quit your job. You know, you're this many months away from your pension. And what are we going to do for health insurance? We have 11 children, which you do see in the movie. They do show a shot of his family. And it's like 100 kids. And now that, yeah, I know that he's, uh, he's Mormon. That makes sense. But like, you know, he basically says, I'm going to quit my job. I'm going to go find these kids. And she's like, you go find those kids and it's like a 30 second if that scene they often just would like cut into these like weird like basically a couplet of dialogue between cavizal and and mirro sorvino and then fade into there was a lot of fading you know where you would get a flat and the timeline and the structure see to me that's where like yes it looked good they have actual like establishing shots and they're on location and there's real costumes and real actors I actually thought that the performances in the movie were overall pretty good, especially the kids. The kids were really good

in the movie. That was like one thing that I was like pretty surprised at. But like the actual structure and the writing of itself, you know, I found myself like kind of bored. And I was thinking about this. I was like, okay, well, you know, why is Taken so popular? This is essentially a more grounded, you know, less action-centric version of Taken. You know, why does this feel like not as exciting? And I think I figured out what it is. In Taken, you know, the main character, Brian starts off as a total loser, right? He's working shitty security jobs. His wife has left him for this, like, kind of like dorky, rich guy who is paying for all of the stuff that his daughter wants that he couldn't afford. And, you know, everybody looks at him like he's this kind of loser. And so

when, you know, when the daughter gets kidnapped and it falls on, you know, Neeson to really take the matter into his own hands, we're really rooting for him because we want him to prove himself to these people who doubted him or people who didn't value him and you know you end up like you're at the edge of your seat really wanting him to win and there's nothing in the movie in the writing that positions ballard as like you know really wrestling with anything other than he's like really you know cares about these kids and he like really wants you know really wants to rescue them but there's no there's no conflict it was really bizarre i don't know if you guys picked up on that at all yeah there was a total lack of conflict and they didn't because if you do

If you have a lack of conflict, maybe you can get away with something like and taken where it's his daughter that's taken. So there is a connection there, but that's not something that exists. It's just children. And then he specifically is all about one child. And they tried to set it up at the beginning to make it make sense, but it was too quick and just didn't, you didn't understand any of the characters who they were, what they were doing. And so all of a sudden it's just like, it's like what these, these cute people think. It's like, oh, kids are being stolen, go. And you're like, you know, there's more to it in a movie.

You can't just go, babies are being stolen. Now, okay, now we have a start. That's not the start. Exactly. Yeah, it works in real life, but not in a movie. A movie has to, you have to have an emotional arc that you follow the character through. And like, even stuff that you think would have been this sort of inherent sort of like inward struggle where, you know, in the very beginning of the movie, you see Ball.

pretending to be a pedophile so that he can get more information from a guy that they've arrested and hit him with trafficking charges as opposed to child pornography charges. And like, that's something that you could play with is the weight at which and looking into the darkness and how it's affecting him, you know, having to pretend like, you know, he's one of them, what it's doing to his soul, how it's affecting his relationships, yada, yada, but it's just, it's just a plot point. It's just something that the writers needed to happen so that they can get you to the next sort of like element of the plot.

Yeah. So let's, uh, let's, let's, let's walk through some of the, uh, basically the plot of the movie. So can I say what happened when I walked in the theater? Yes, yes. Yeah, tell a story. So I'm still, I still mask, uh, you know, I'm still one of those guys just want COVID. And, uh, I walked into the theater with my mask on and a person sitting right by the aisle went, you're in the wrong movie.

Oh, oh, my God. And let me guess it was a person who also brought a blanket from home because the movie The theater is too cold. God damn. I had those in my theater. I started laughing so hard. Oh, it's the best. You're in the wrong movie.

This is a Christian movie, sir. We don't mask here. Yeah, your mask is no good here. You'll get COVID, whether you wear it or not. So when I walked into the theater, you know, I was like, I know this is going to be somewhat of a slog. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to get a big cherry Coke and a big buttered popcorn.

I'm going to put the ancillary butter. that they, you know, that they offer at the condiment stand. And there was another guy and, like, maybe his girlfriend or wife and exactly the kind of dude you would imagine, you know, big chunky cargo shorts, white t-shirt, you know, Foxgear hat. And like, I sort of happened in on their conversation. And she was like, oh, well, I really shouldn't put this extra butter on, but I know we're going to be, I know this is going to be a stressful movie. And she was like, and your friend, she turned to the guy she was with it.

She was like, and your friend, he worked with them. I was like, oh, well, yeah, my buddy is, you know, he fundraises. He's, yeah, worked alongside him. And he goes, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's scary stuff. You know, I've done a lot of my own research. And I was like, oh, my God, I'm like, here it is. I'm like in the, you know, I'm in the covortex.

These people at the popcorn line, not even that, at the butter line, they're talking about it. They've done their own research and they're scared to see the movie because it's going to affect them so much. But the funniest thing was I sat down in the theater and about five minutes into the film, a group of kids came in. clearly, you know, theater hopping. They had gone to see, you know, they had gone to see, like, you know, Spider-Vercer, the new Transformers or whatever, all movies that I saw on the posters that I wish I was there to see. And they walked in, and they sat down, and, like, within about 10 minutes, they all got

up and left. They were like, ah, this shit is fucking boring. Like, we picked the wrong one. So talk about being in the wrong theater. Oh, that's one of the worst movies to ever hop into. Oh, God. I didn't know. Just Cavizal's like huge blown-up face, just like misty-eyed, like looking lost.

All right. Let's talk a little bit about the plot in this movie. So it opens in Honduras and with the story of a father who is told by a famous beauty queen that his son and daughter might have what it takes to make it in the entertainment industry. So already we got, you know, I guess the South American version of the Hollywood sickos. So the two kids are dropped off by their dad in the building where many children. children are having their photos taken, but when the father comes back, he discovers that the entire operation has vanished without a trace along with his two children. They are all whisked off to God knows where, while the confused panic father just runs down the street. And honestly, if I could

jump in really quick, this part of the film, I thought was the most effective. Yeah, it was pretty good. Seeing the girls being forced to do kind of model poses, there's a scene where she, the trafficker takes, you know, the main girl's headband off and puts lipstick on her. I started to emotionally engage because this is a thing that I know that this industry does. And it was at that point, I was like, maybe, maybe this is going to be good. Maybe they really do know what they're doing in terms of filmmaking. But that was it. I mean, that was, I think, maybe the most emotional scene in the entire thing.

Yeah. Then we cut to America where we see our hero, Tim Ballard, played by Caviziel, waiting in the vehicle for a pedophile to download illegal content. And then as soon as he does, Tim Ballard, he bust down the door, the whole team. Rosh that's raided and arrests him. And while Ballard has his pedophile in custody, he hatches a plan to use him to find traffic children because he's just so sick of just busting the pedophiles here, not actually, you know, rescuing the children.

So he gets cozy with the pedophile. He arrested by pretending to be a pedophile himself. And we learn that this is a book-writing pedophile. He what? He's a book-writing pedophile? You don't remember that? Yeah. No, I missed that.

To me, I couldn't get over the fact that he looked like a very budget. it Adam Driver. I was like, I was kind of like, is that Adam? Did they get Adam Driver for this? Like, oh man, 64 BC must have done really bad, but then I realized it was not him and just some guy that kind of looked like him. He looked like a pedophile blank a patch to me. Yeah. I really feel connected to you. Like maybe you'll understand. I need to know. Can I trust you?

I need to know. Can I trust you? And then he lights two, like they're on a date. He lights two sigs in his mouth and then offers one to the pedophile who he's let out of his cell. I guess because there are security cameras in the cell and he doesn't want the higher ups to know that he's pretending to also be. I guess that's like illegal maybe for police officers to do. Yeah.

Okay. So to set this up, he's working on a weekend and they act like homeland security is shut down on the weekend. So Homeland Security is a Monday through Friday job. Everything shuts down on the weekends. There's nobody in the whole building. And then he goes to talk to his pedophile. It's the weirdest shit. And this is the point in the movie where I'm told where I'm, I'm like, they are very, uh, they're very good. Like you said, with lighting and music and all that. But there's no extras or they've used their extra budget for later. And if they're shooting it in a South American country, I doubt they would have had to pay people that much.

I'm sure they could have gotten away with very little money. Yeah, or at all. Yeah, it's just off-putting. At this point, it's like this movie is a complete joke and clearly not based on reality. Is this in the book? Is he like, and then on weekends, it's just me because I'm burning the extra. I go on overtime on pedophiles. Nobody else.

I'm the only guy who works on a Saturday. Well, yeah, I didn't even think of that. I was like, yeah, I guess there's, like, no other guards in the facility, like, whatsoever. I also thought it was weird that when they bust this guy at first, it's just two cops. Like, if you're executing a raid, I'm sorry, it's a whole SWAT team. They're busting the door down. They're not, like, breaking into this guy's house and sneaking through his living room,

just two guys using hand signals. Like, come on. No, there are, if there are cops. If someone pulls over a car, there's three cop cars. If there's a chase, there's 500 cop cars. If they're doing construction, there's a, cop car and now they're going to bust a pedophile and they're like nah nobody wants to go the whole force would be there yeah just our two our two most elite agents it's all we need so ballard then he gets

the pedophile's trust by getting them released from jail and then the pedophile returns the favor by gifting ballard a signed copy of his book and then arranging for ballard to meet with a child who soon will be trafficked across the border and the child happens to be the young boy who was snatched away in the opening scenes. So, this culminates in a scene in a restaurant where Ballard reveals that, obviously, this is all part of a sting operation. My God, he's so little. This time tomorrow, that little boy is going to be yours for the whole weekend.

Eric Millstone. He hung around your neck. And he be cast into the sea. and that you shouldn't ever hurt one of these little ones. What is that mean? You're under arrest for crimes against children. I'm trying down I'm

I trusted you I trusted you Never trust a pedophile He just called himself a pedophile. I just want to point that out. Instead of a line like, well, I'm a cop. It's like, yeah, don't trust me, I'm a pedophile. It doesn't, the line didn't make sense.

The line totally throws you off. Yeah. And also, like, after this scene, like, when the police sirens show up, Kavisel smiles, like, he's just taken a fresh hit of heroin. He goes, like, full Joker smile, like, the moment he sees the pedophile sort of, like, realize that, like, you know, he's been caught. But it doesn't make sense, right? Like, at this point, is this actually Tim Bauer's?

story that this is how he got the pedophile to talk? Or are we off? Oh, of course. No, no. This part is, as far as I understand, just completely for the movie to sort of lead up to, yeah. Okay, because it's really poorly done. So, uh, yeah. Yeah, it's too easy. It's like it would have been too much to shoot and too difficult to write a believable scenario in which Cavizel follows clues to, you know, discover that this guy,

I mean, they've got his whole computer. I mean, they had him. It just feels like this very unnecessary. You literally just busted the guy. He's in custody. You've got all of his record. Surely you'll find deals that he's making in other, you know, anonymous forums or something like that. Yeah, this was just so.

And I was like, why would you even do this? Why would you, if you're making this shit up, why would you make up that, like, Ballard even toys with the idea of, like, pretending to be a pedophile and doing enough research so that he can be believable to this other guy? It's just like, why would you want to add that in? It shows his dedication. He's willing to go to the darkest places to get his men. See, that's like a third act thing.

That's what he needs to do in the final act to rescue the sister is that he has to go this extra step, you know? Because for the rest of the movie, he's very comfortable with pretending to be a pedophile. It would be amazing if the extra step was him, him like making out with a five-year-old. Oh, okay. I'm sorry.

Someone had to do this. This was always going to be a problematic episode. All right, so Ballard intercepts the child at the border and is able to reunite this boy with his father. That still leaves the whereabouts of the boy's sister. And Ballard wants to rescue her, but she's in Columbia. And Ballard's supervisor at the Department of Homeland Security thinks that's just way outside of his mission. Who's played by Kurt Fuller, by the way, who very famously appeared in Ghostbust He is the mayor's, like, slimy assistant who gets all the Ghostbusters thrown in jail.

I cannot believe that they got him for this. It makes me a little bit sad. Rosio, Aguilar, the boy sister. Now pull up on the reins here, son. We're going to hand this case to the prosecution, and we're going to let the Colombians mop up Columbia. You mean, she'll disappear. Sir. For Homeland Security, you know, we can't go off rescuing Honduran kids in Colombia.

Columbia. Look, the boy is packed with his father. That's a career captain. Take it and move on. But of course, the supervisor relents and then agrees to let him go on this Columbia adventure, saying that he'll claim that Ballard just went to go on a training seminar and that he's using discretionary funds. Now, this part, I don't think actually happened because now they're, if it was true, then they're admitting to doing basically black ops, black off the record, sort of ops with government funds. While in Columbia, Tim Ballard connects with a man known as Vampiro, and Vampiro is an ex-cartel guy who now uses his wealth to free-trafficed children. And Vampiro was played by Bill Camp, and I honestly thought he offered one of the best performances in this movie. He was actually really great to watch. Yeah, he was. And it's guys like that that elevate the movie to a place.

Like, they had some good actors in the Hunter Biden movie, but no one could elevate it. It wasn't possible. But him, the scenes he's in, you're totally watching him and it's fine. Yeah. Yeah, he's great. The scene where he talks about the reason why he left the, you know, why he left the cartel and started doing good is like a good monologue. I mean, it's one of the few moments where I found myself like actually engaging in the

story of the film. And it's so interesting that a lot of this stuff comes from the side characters and not Caviziel himself, who is the main character and driving the story. It's, you know, these little pieces of. emotion just come from these, you know, just legitimately good actors who are doing a good job with the material that's been given to them. So here is how Vampiro is introduced in the movie. There are two things you should know about Vampiru.

He ran the Cali Cartel, Money Laundering operations in the 90s. He did time in prison. And the second thing, he buys children. But then he sets them free. He puts these kids in safe houses. He gives them a new chance of life. He's a mass murderer. I mean, if he worked for the Calais cartel, I'm just, you know.

So Tim Ballard talks with Ampero, and then Ballard gives his, like, his personal, knowable, spiritual reasons for devoting his time to helping children. Now, Tim Odeo, the kid, Miguel, back with his father, huh? Yes. and that make you feel giving a child his freedom felt good

like background good or chicken wings good what kind of good are we talking about here the kind that gives hope come on amigo

you've been at this for 12 years why are you doing it because God's children are not for sale so I'm not religious like I don't really believe God makes children and stuff it's just bad to fuck kids I actually don't need a whole

God's children to blah blah you can just go with it's not good to fuck with kids that's bad yeah it could have been a good laugh in a movie completely devoid of any kind of humor whatsoever which I understand it's a very serious topic but in a movie you gotta have a chuckle or something

to sort of relieve the tension that's just good writing you know Cavizal could have said like what answer do I need other than it's not good to fuck kids and everybody would have been like Yeah. Yeah. How about that? But again, the people going to this movie, the people this is made for, they can't separate the two. They are God's children. So they come up with a plan to basically lure in a bunch of traffic children. Tim Ballard will pose as an American looking to buy a high-end sex hotel that offers clients access to dozens of children. But before he can execute on this plan, he gets cut off by a supervisor who is sick of his lack of progress. Plus five support agents for a month in country, uh, the penthouse in Bogota, the mansion

in Cardahania on and on. And yet somehow, somehow you have failed to bring me one real world lead. Or one in the Arkin Child or one American trafficker. What reason D.C. would let you within a million miles of this day. Climate shots of Ms. Cartagena don't count. She has a girl. And I say the girls in Russia probably wrong. It's over, Tim. Close up. Get on the plane and, uh, and come back. of course he believes in this mission so much that he quits his job and decides to you know do it solo and he calls his wife played by mirro servino and uh she just supports him fully no friction there at all just well let me let me ask you guys this what would you do

what would you do in this i think we'd all quit our job think about it i mean yeah i mean that would be that would be the righteous thing to do but that's like my complaint is like there's always a righteous decision to make in this movie and like Tim Ballard always does it. It's always uncomplicated. But there's also no I mean, there's no sense of like real like stress or sacrifice in this. Like a supervisor does mention

that like, oh, it's like, wait a minute, your pension's going to invest, uh, what is it, divest or whatever. It's 11 months. 11 months from it or something like that. Yeah, 11 months. And it's like, well, no, I'm quitting anyway. And that's like, that's the only like mentioned. But like, okay, but what kind of strain? I think this could have been made more interesting if there's

like more like, oh, like you have like a bunch of kids you got to take care of. Like, whose kids are you really, are really important to you? It's like, you need to come back home. You're a father to young children who need you. There would be more stress about, like, how he's spending his time and how he's spending his career and how he's spending his money split between the necessity to be a good family man to his real family and his, maybe his God-set mission to save children in South

America. That would be a more interesting tension, but it's not present at all. Yeah, I think it would have been great at this point is if they showed his kids being put into foster care. At this point, I'm looking, as a dad, I'm like, oh, this guy's a terrible father. He's literally just blowing off his kids, and it seems like a long time. Like, how long do we think this took place over? This seems like months, and he's just not there for his kids.

It's total absent dad, the salesman on the road shit, and he's just like, my job's more important. And you're supposed to think, well, he's saving kids. But it's like, no, his kids are there without a dad. And I think that's how kids have become pedophiles when they grow up, but I'm not sure. Yeah, I mean, this is supposed to be the dark night of the song. soul, right? When it seems like all hope is lost. Like, we need scenes of Mirosorvino sitting at the, sitting at the kitchen table with two crying kids in high chairs. She's going through bills, you know, overdue, past due, collection notice, all of this stuff. And then you could also have,

like, you know, for the last act of the movie is the actual government agency, you know, saying, hey, this guy's gone rogue. Hey, Tim, by the way, they're asking about you. They're asking where this money is going. You could have, there is a potential to create these subplots, you know, for the final act of the movie that feed into the conflict and the drama and that way you feel something when he decides to go after these traffic kids, you know, and sort of put his family on hold. There are all these moments that they could have used, I think, to, if they're just making some stuff up anyway, if it's just based on a true story, you know, you would think that they would use a lot of the stuff that they are kind of setting up, but like, it's no big deal.

Like a great example is they tap this like really wealthy sort of like entrepreneur guy to basically buy this island or buy this mansion or rent it or something so they can use it, you know, as a like sort of dummy house to set up this raid. And like, you know, when the government pulls the plug out, there's this like very short scene where the guy is like, no, like the part of this was that it was government backed. Like, it's no longer government back. Like, I don't want to do it. Now, in a regular movie, there would be a sequence where they have to show Cavizel and the people he's working with a sort of winning back this guy. You know, maybe they do, you know, maybe they do something. Maybe they make it personal for him somehow. But instead, what

happens is like a couple minutes later the guy just shows up at his hotel room and he's like I'm in you know it's like the conflict that should be there that they actually take the time to set up they don't use it at all which is like my biggest pet peeve like when it comes to writing films is like when people set up something that okay cool okay I see like potentially how you're going to use this and then they don't cash in on it at all it just left you feeling just sort of like okay of course so like by the last act of the movie I was like I know he's going to get the girl I know he's going to get her. There's no way he's not. That's, that's not what this movie is. There's, you know, it became very predictable. Yeah. And the thing with his kids is they're used more as

photographs than they are actual characters in the movie. Like, you just see them. Like, there's no, there's no point where Mayor Sorvino is talking to one of the kids go, why is dad not here? Well, dad's doing something important. Just basic stuff you would put in a movie like this. Yeah, totally. Like, is daddy ever coming home? And then you have this, like, very real conflict of like this sort of paradox of like, do I? I show up for my kids at home who I know are safe, or do I abandon them to rescue a child in danger? That's human stuff. Hey, that could work in a movie. But like you said, there's none of that. I would have loved to see a scene where Mira Sorvino has to explain to a child, like,

what is happening? And, you know, you bring in the innocence of children. And that makes this whole topic of kids who are sexually abused and traffic hit even harder. But they totally, like, they just gloss over that. Yeah, it's more just shots of a gym staring at the camera. Yeah. As opposed to her going, where's my daddy? He's with the pedos, honey. He's with the pedos. I mean, it could have been more explanation, but that's what I would have said. Yeah, you've got Mira Sorvino. It's like, she's a good actor. Like, why aren't you using her? Why aren't you using that? In this entire film, she's like nothing more than like a dream sequence or like a flashback or a picture in a photograph with like, you know, army of Aryan children who are, you know, just like stacked on top of each other, like Russian

dolls. They're like, because we've showed it to you, you can infer the emotion because, you know, you know what we're going for. We don't have to tell you. Yeah, the pedophiles and everyone else have more character development than the, than anybody else. Yeah, problematic at least. Yeah, so they, uh, so with the help of this billionaire backer, Tim Ballard and crew, develop a new plan to, like, host a party on the private island with a bunch of perverts and then have dozens of traffic children delivered there, then the Colombian Marines will raid the island and free the children. You know, after a couple of snags, the plan works basically, but the specific girl that Ballard was searching for isn't there. And they finally learned that the girl that they're looking for is

deep in the Colombian jungle, in territory controlled by heavily armed rebels. Now, after realizing that a raid on the rebel camp is out of the question, they devise a plan for Tim Ballard to pose as a doctor with the UN who is working to control a cholera outbreak. And this is, I mean, I understand why this is a very noble reason that they're doing this, but they're also ensuring that any UN doctor who works in this area in the future will be killed. Yeah, they're totally fucking up all vaccinations for, for years. You know, like the CIA actually does. So, okay.

Well, it's okay, fair enough. Fair enough. There's also that, like, wild scene, too, where they give them those syringes and they're like, you know, this is a GPS that track. And they're like, okay, so like, you know where we are. And they're like, or you can inject it. And they're like, oh, so they can find our bodies. It's like, even this thing that's supposed to add this kind of like element of sort of like danger and suspense is kind of fumbled through. Like, what you really needed is that the CIA guy coming in and being like, here's this and here's this. And what it contains this liquid. And what it does is it allows us, it has a tiny bit of this in it. And it allows us to track your GPS coordinates. And they're like, so you will be watching us after all. And the CIA. agent goes like, well, no, it would just to be to recover the bodies. Boom. Then you cut to Jim Cavizal's, you know, scared, worried, you know, tearful expression. And like, it hits harder.

So like, yeah, they just don't know what to do with any of these moments, which is weird to me. And I also think they're trying to save money on what we would call under fives, people who talk a little bit, but not a lot in films. It really felt like this movie was trying to have the least amount of speaking parts as possible. But that's exactly the guy you need in this scene. Yeah, exactly.

So Ballard goes undercover, gets permission from the rebel leader to inspect the camp for disease, and he eventually does find the girl. But he isn't able to rescue her right then because the rebel leader kind of like intervenes and directs Ballard away from him to like inspect the other soldiers in this rebel camp. But that night in the rebel leader's room, right before he's about to like rape the girl, Tim Ballard intervenes and then gets into a climactic fight with him. And this is really the only like, well, besides the, Chase scene that comes right after. There's only like action that comes in the scenes. Like it's kind of

built as like as an action thriller. But there's really, there's not a lot of action besides this. There's a fight and this fight, it kind of has an unusual gimmick to film it. So the terrified girl alternates between watching the men fight and closing her eyes. And when she closes her eyes, the screen goes black. So that all you hear is the sounds of fighting. I was thinking about why they did this. And based upon what we've learned before about Cavizio is that it sounds like it helps if you have really short takes for him. And so this helps, this helps make the takes nice and short so that you sort of like see him and then cuts the black and see him and cuts the black. It's like making a film with someone who has dementia. Yeah. Yeah, it's like we only have to shoot 11 seconds of

this fight scene. I was confused by that actually because, you know, you would like, it took me a second to realize like, okay, they're doing something like kind of artistic here because it's from her POV. Then the screen goes black. Then it's from her POV again. I think. it would have been more effective if you were, you know, like a medium on the girl, you see her close her eyes. And as she closes her eyes, the screen goes to black, you know, set that up a little bit more. Because I appreciated that they were trying to do something like a little bit artistic with this and kind of go from her POV. But yeah, I don't know if you guys felt the same way, but it took me a second to kind of like realize like what was going on. I thought

maybe the movie, they uploaded the wrong version and like, you know, there was like missing footage or whatever. Yeah, it was really, it was really poorly shot. I mean, especially from, I mean, take away the emotional side of what they're doing with her. It just, it's an action scene. And you just don't know what in the fuck's happening. Yeah. So Ballard defeats the rebel leader, then runs away, makes off in the boat, and the rest of the rebel forces fire him as he tries to escape. But Ballard, of course, makes it out.

That's basically the end of the movie. So he hops in a boat, he goes up the river, whereas the two guys are waiting for him, and they get in the Jeep. And once they're, you know, a little bit away from the river, they have to go through a town, a guy shoots at him. And then that's it. They're free. Like, that's absolutely not how this, like the whole time. I'm like, so they're going to get stopped, right?

They're driving through winding mountain roads. And you're like, they're absolutely not free. These are fucking rebel guys. They're not, there's no way. It's just the fantasy of how this works is just so crazy in this movie. It also takes like a couple bursts from the AK-47 of the pursuing, you know, the pursuing rebels to break those. back windshield on the van I was like waiting for it to break I was like all right the

windshield's gonna break the glass is gonna shatter on them and then I was like waiting and waiting I was like did they not pay for the for the glass break like are they not gonna do that and then it came but like yeah that was your chance for a long extended scene in which you could have seen you know how good the director was at an action movie what he wanted to make he he didn't know what he was doing and then it just doesn't make sense geographically the whole time you're watching you're like but so there's one town they get through and that's it. It's just weird. Yeah, I thought for sure when the vampiro character turns to the driver and he goes like, are you hit? I thought for sure that we were going to see

that guy slump over and I was like, oh, he got hit, he got hit. But the guy's like, I'm good and he's like, everybody's good. It's just like, yeah, it's like set up this dramatic conflict and then they just escape it. It goes, I mean, let's talk about Indiana Jones a little bit here since this film has beat it out of the box office. You know, when Lucas and Spielberg and Marshall were originally breaking story on Indiana Jones. Lucas came to the table with his mathematical equation, and he basically was like, if the movie is this many minutes long,

well then every seven minutes, I wanna get my characters into a cliffhanger, and they have to get out of it believably. And then the next cliffhanger is going to be bigger than the next. And if you watch the original Indiana Jones, you can time this to a clock, that first it's all the spiders in the thing, then it's the booby traps,

then it's him lifting the, you know, having to weigh the sand and make the right weight of the idol. Then it's the boulder coming down. Then it's the snake in the plane. It's all of these things. You know, you realize that's like, okay, like if you put your characters into a cliffhanger, you have to get them out of it believably. And this, they just, you've got a whole army, a whole jungle,

so much so that the army and the police are afraid to go in here. That's established in the film. And yet a quick boat trip and a ride through a quick little town is like, that's all you need to do to shake these guys? Like, then what's the army so afraid of? It just, like, doesn't add up. No, it doesn't add up. You could have got in there with 20 guys and freed everybody. Yeah, you could have freed all the children.

That was the other thing that I was like a little bit weird about is I was like, clearly there are other children that have been trafficked here. They're all in the in the muck pit stamping on tea leaves or whatever it was when they found, you know, the main girl that he was looking for. But he's only going to rescue like this one? I mean, what would have been amazing and it's been done. in other movies, but he gets to that town, he sees her, and then he realized that there are many more traffic. He goes to get her in the middle of the night, and she goes, I won't leave

without my friends. Yeah. And now Cavizal is by himself, and he has to get all of the children out. Now, that's compelling. That's really, like, you're setting yourself up for something, like, truly dramatic, but he, like, just grabs the one because he, like, knows her father, I guess. And he's like, well, sorry other kids who have been, like, trafficked here and are probably being, like, abused horribly, like, I have a relationship with this particular young lady's father. So she's going to, she's going to get out and all of the rest of you are just going to have to kind of wait and see. Well, there's the lack of humanity thing that's a real problem when they're on the island and they save the 50 some odd kids. And he's just

like, yeah, but that one girl's not here. Whereas in reality, be like, holy shit, we just save 50 kids from fucking pedophiles. Like, and also there's the weird thing of when he's like, I've got to, like, one guy is going to take a boy and abuse him, and he stops him. And it's like, these kids have been abused for fucking months or years or whatever. So they're trying to create this moment where he saves them. And it's like, there's no saving them at this point. They're already in it. It's already happened.

You can stop it and turn their life around. But they're acting like there's heroic shit going on. When it's not heroic shit going on, you're just fucking trying to stop the horror. Yeah. And I'm pretty sure that on the gun that the, the, the hen, Benchman puts to Kavisel's head when he tries to stop the head honcho from taking the kid off into the woods. I'm pretty sure you can see like Acme Toy Company written on the side of it. Like it did not look like a real gun at all. There was also that whole bizarre thing where they, that I like had

to sort of piece together afterwards where they try to frame that guy as the one who sold out everybody. They're like, oh, make sure he doesn't go off in handcuffs or whatever, which is like totally a plot point then that is completely dissolved. Like, what does it matter? Who cares? Like literally everybody is going to know that they're not going to deal with you guys anyways because you literally set up a pedophile mansion that got raided. Like even if you're a true blue pedophile, like they're not going to work with you again. You got caught. So this whole like hink of morinky do about like, you know, making sure they don't look like the guys that sold

everybody is just, it was so bizarre. They spent so much time on the wrongest shit, you know, it's like. They did. They really did. So before the movie like really ends, we see the giant face of Jim Caviziel. morph into the face of the real life, Tim Ballard, which was like, I felt like it was a, it was just a way for the film to communicate.

It was like, oh, you know, those, you know, those good feelings you have as Jim Caviziel, as the hero of the story, well, here's the real guy you should be, you know, you should be giving all your money to. There was a young woman in front of me who was sitting in the row in front of me who pulled up her phone and was Instagram storying that part of the movie.

Like, just the text at the end, I could tell. She was loading up a real, a real loaded post. I was just like, oh my God, where am I? So the film also ends with a, during the credits, with a special message from Caviziel himself. He compares Sound of Freedom to Uncle Tom's Cabin. This is the 19th century American novel that shocked the nation with his depictions of the cruelty of slavery and help fuel the abolition's cause. He then offers a call to action, not to do anything tangible that might help abuse children, rather to encourage others to watch the movie. Sound of Freedom is a hero's tale, but I'm not talking about the character I play.

It's the heroic brother and sister in this film that work to save each other. They are the true heroes. The most powerful person in this world is the storyteller. Together, we have a chance to make these two kids and the countless children that they represent the most powerful people in the world by telling their story in a way only that cinema can do for a couple of months. Once, while Sound of Freedom is in theaters, these kids can be more powerful than the cartel kingpins or presidents or congressmen or even tech billionaires. We believe this movie has the power to be a huge step forward toward ending child trafficking,

but it will only have that effect if millions of people see it. You're out of your fucking mind. What are you talking about? It's a movie, dumbass. What the what's happening? I feel like Taken did more for international awareness. of, and hey, they got four of those. We're totally going to get Sound of Freedom

2, 3, and 4, by the way. It's definitely happening. I mean, yeah, it's basically Coney 2012 activism. Yes. It's the same shit we've seen for years and years. And that was the same, that was based upon the same premise, is that there's this evil man in Uganda who's abusing children, don't you want to save the children?

In fact, his organization is called invisible children. In fact, this is something we've seen over and over and over. There was like, for the series trickled down, I talked about a work of journalism in the Victorian England called the Modern Babylon. And this is basically this journalist claimed to expose the horrors of child prostitution in London. And like a lot, yellow journalism, there were elements of truth, but it was also highly exaggerated

because the point was the sell papers not to actually help children. And this is just an easy hack if you want to get a lot of attention for yourself and drive people towards a cause, is take the real problems that, you know, neglected and abused children face. amplify them, make them about yourself, and then turn them into a media spectacle. But look, this is all about them, right? At the end of the day, this is a movement and something that came about because these people couldn't come to grips with the fact that they were a part of and gave money to. And for years, sanctioned and backed the child fucking rape palaces of their churches.

I mean, that's where this is fucking coming from. This whole fucking movement is about their guilt and their horror of association that they can't come to grips, they still can't dismantle, that they still can't actually go after on a level. They're not going after the fucking Baptists, are they? They're not going after the Mormon Church. They're not going after the Catholics. No, now they're going after Democrats eating babies and South American cartels of child stealers. This is all about their own fucking shit, every single part of it. Oof, that gave me goosebumps. I think the real question is, how did the Q&ON community react to the film? Now, I think it's fair to say that the reaction

was mixed, specifically because it wasn't quite as billed as they were hoping for, like we were mentioning. So here's one comment from a Q&O promoter on Twitter that I thought was kind of representative of the attitude. The movie is clearly a big conversation starter. While many would argue there are other resources available that are much better and are free, they just aren't mainstream. While other resources, I would say, are more educational, such as out of shadows when it

comes to learning, the sound of freedom is a mainstream way of reaching the audiences that otherwise would never go down that proverbial rabbit hole. The movie had heart-wrenching moments at times, and I admit I had a few allergies rolling down my cheek here and there, but I think that had to do more with my vested understanding more than the average normie. The movie for me acted as an accelerant to the flames that were already burning in me. While child trafficking was heavily highlighted in the movie, it mainly portrayed it being an issue abroad and not really an issue here in the United States. Other than a few subtitles at the end and some random context in between, one might watch this film and think the U.S. only suffers from the consumption

of petto material rather than the U.S. actually partaking in crimes against humanity. There was also no mention about adrenachrome or organ harvesting, which I was hoping there would be, especially after Jim talked about it constantly in context to this movie, a missed opportunity in my opinion. So this is very interesting. So Jim Cavizal has actively, you know, turned some viewers off by heavily promoting the film using language like Adrina Crom and organ harvesting, and then it doesn't show up in the film. This is like the very similar thing happened with the popular QAnon slogan, Where We Go One, We Go All. It is based off a scene from the trailer of White Squall where all of the kids on the ship are yelling, where we go one, we go all, that doesn't

make it into the movie. So here we have yet another example of false advertising leading to disappointment when it comes to consuming the final product. Yeah, they probably thought this was their giant delivery of the message, right? They think that this is the thing. And then I can't imagine not being able to see that in there. It must be really horrifying to them. What a tragic letdown. I'm sorry. I feel bad for them. Yeah, you get to like, you know, two hours and seven minutes and you go, wait a minute, wait a minute. I haven't seen Hillary Clinton once in this. I haven't seen Barack Obama a once in this. They don't even, they don't even mention him. What the heck? Totally. Like, you know, it's like that moment where you're watching the scene, you're like, oh, I can't wait

to see the scene from the trailer where Thor, you know, shoves the lightning bolt up the guy's ass. And then you're watching the movie. They're like, where was that scene? It wasn't even in there. Like, what the fuck? And there's nothing about Democrats, right? There's nothing about liberals. It's an apolitical movie from that aspect. Totally. But we all, having watched the movie, we all know the character that would have eaten the babies, right? The guy with the little mustache. Oh, that guy. Yeah, the meth head. Yeah. Yeah, that guy. That's the baby blood drinker right there. At first, I thought that was that actor. I'm blanking on his name. He was in Tiger Land. He always kind of plays like the wild, like, cartel guy. He's really good actor. Fuck, it's just on the tip of my tongue.

Oh, well. I did find out the movie cost $14.5 million to make. I mean, that's not on the screen. It's not. I mean, I assume a lot of went to the actors. because the number one thing is the lack of extras in the movie makes it feel super bizarre and weird all the time. Yeah, that's not there. Yeah, I've seen movies with $3 million budgets that, you know, are compiled more competently than this and look like they're a $20 million movie or something.

Look, $14 million is a lot. You know, a lot of studios nowadays, like they won't touch you unless you can make, like, something that's like genre or horror for like $3 to $5 million. Like, that's the sweet spot. So the fact that they got, you know, nearly $15 million. I mean, Ghostbusters was only like 30 million, I think, in 1984, you know. It is. I agree with you that this felt like a $1.5 to $3 million budget. And if that had been the case, I would have been impressed. But finding out that it was 14 is surprising. Well, it's already made its money back. I mean, I'm looking on the Wikipedia. It says that it's already done, they say it's already done $18.3 million at the box office. So this is a massive, this is a massive success. And as news articles, come out that say, hey, this beat Indiana Jones, and this did a lot better than everybody was

expecting. People are going to get curious and they're going to go and see it. And the thing is, is like, on the one hand, while I don't necessarily think this movie is sort of the, has the pilling effect that, you know, even the QAnon commenters claims about like out of shadows or pandemics, you know, something like that, I do think that what could happen is that if somebody goes and sees this and they're affected by it and they Google human trafficking, they are going to inevitably come across Q and on content. And it depends where they're at in their own life. Maybe, you know, who knows?

Maybe they decide to chase that rabbit hole further. So I don't want to say that I don't think this movie, you know, is not effective because I think it could very well be. But like Dave was saying, it's not the big tent pole. They didn't get to see all the things from the stories that they want. They didn't get all the lore. And that's a good thing. And it's also a bad thing.

Because if it had all the lore, if it had Adrenachrome, if it had the human, and, you know, if it had Hillary Clinton, you know, sipping, drinking a wine glass of blood, it would be easy to label as a far right QAnon movie. Don't go see this. This is propaganda. This is that. This is the other thing. It would be very easy to write off.

But it was very smart of them, I think, to not contain that because you can't write that article about this movie. You can't at all. This is no different than the Ashley Judd movie trafficked almost. It's like. Right, right, right. There's nothing else there that they need. They need so much more.

I mean, they've been doing meth and running around in the bushes in New Mexico, you know, they're they need more so you know rating this movie like for like for a conservative message movie it really is like an eight out of ten it's like one of the better ones just because it's competently executed but generally yeah they just because the story fell flat I don't know I'd give it like a three or a four Dave final thoughts how many how many adrenachromes out of origins would you get this done I think it's two I think it's a two out of like five Adrianicromes, it's, it's just not there. There's nothing, it's like you said, there's no conflict there.

It's slightly competent, but it's, at the end of the day, just a A to B to C movie, everything you think's going to happen, happens, and it's a boring film. And I, I just expect more crazy when I go into a movie like this. I expect a lot more crazy. I mean, from our perspective, people who don't believe in the Q stuff, it's also wildly disappointing. Yeah, just as a thriller, you know, you go in looking for thrill. and you don't really get any.

And it's not like Argo or something where the dialogue is so good that it's this kind of slow burn that really culminates in this big heist or whatever. It's missing all of that. And so, you know, I think it is competently made, but that is only in comparison

to the other sort of like Christian, you know, right-wing conservative films that we got, like the Hunter Biden movie or the left behind to Rise of the Antichrist, which was very, very, very. bad, and that had a lot of crazy in it, but very, very bad. So, like, yeah, I would say, I would give it like a, I would give it like a two and a half out of five, I think. It's a five out of five from the grift perspective, because the producers, you know, I don't know

if people know this, but like I had a, I had a buddy who did a pilot once, and he'd done a bunch of pilots. And at the end of it, the line producer walked in and gave me a check for, I think it was 200,000. And he goes, that's our split. And he goes, what are you talking about? He goes, well, I saved 400,000 from the budget. And he was like, no, I wanted that in the goddamn product but that's what these people do they right so they got a bunch of investors the investors kicked in and then they and then they save a bunch of money and they write themselves checks at the end of the day that's that's what a lot of this movie looks like it was which is what the right wing's doing it's all a grip that's his ballard's doing it's a grift yeah

Dave thanks so much for joining us in the kovortex one more time so where can people learn about your wonderful tweeting and podcasting yes I'm at at Dave anthony on Twitter I'm a blue sky also now My podcasts are the Dallup, and I have a newer one called The Audit, which we are on The Lever, which is Sirotus News thing. And we tackle different sort of right-wing media. We just finished covering Prager You for about 10 episodes, which is just... Oh, God. Oh, that sounds fascinating. Mind-blowing.

Well, they're getting, Prager U is getting involved in my school district, so it's a whole... Oh, Jesus. It's a whole thing. Yeah, I'm in Glendale, so if you've seen the fights on the news... Oh, my God. Yeah, I've seen the news. Yeah, the news reports about the violence. It's horrifying.

Yeah, yeah. I was down there. It was fun. Oh, you were? Yeah, I was right there. Oh, my Lord. You know me. I'm not one to shy away from shit like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I was up in Nazi faces and all that shit. Holy shit, dude, man. Well, good on you. Yeah, fun times. Now, to get a more complete picture of the real Tim Ballard, we are now joined by Anna Merlin and Tim Marchman from Vice News. They have tracked Ballard for years and have done the very difficult work of fact-checking his extraordinary claims and several reports.

And his latest piece is titled Anti-Trafficking Group with Long History of False Claims gets its Hollywood moment. So thank you so much both for talking to us today. Thanks for having us. A pleasure. So Tim Ballard, he founded Operation Underground Railroad 2013, and he has since claimed his operations have rescued thousands of children. Now, personally, I'm hard-pressed to think of a more noble way to spend your time than rescuing children from sex trafficking. It's certainly more noble than podcasting. So what exactly inspired you to scrutinize Ballard's claims and his operation more closely?

So we first started looking at OUR in 2020 after our colleague, David Vickson's fan, who writes about wrestling, wrote about essentially like a W-W-E referee's support for OUR. And some of the claims that OUR made that were sort of repeated in some of the materials that that WWW wrestler was sharing were just somewhat just piqued our interest and we wanted to get more information about the group. And so we started, as I recall, corresponding with a spokesperson for the group and just asking for a list of countries where they operated. Tim, does that all sound right as far as you remember it? Yeah, one of the things we were interested in finding out was what countries it was operating in and what law enforcement agencies it was partnering with. There had been coverage of its collaboration with state cops in Washington State that summer. So we just wanted to find out where they were working. And one of the early things in our reporting was that they sent us over a list of, I think, 21 law enforcement

agencies that they worked with. And so we just kind of called or emailed a bunch of those departments. And several of them had never heard of Operation Underground Railway. And when we pressed the point, it would turn out that they had, for instance, bought a canine dog trained to sniff out electronic devices with money from a multi-level marketing company that sells essential oils, mainly to Mormon women. And that because OUR was partnered with that MLM, it was basically claiming this as a law enforcement partnership. So if that agency caught someone out in the chat room doing something they weren't supposed to do or caught something with something on their computer that they shouldn't have had there. OU.R. would then say that this,

you know, this arrest was the result of its work in collaboration with law enforcement agencies, that kind of thing, which obviously right from the start, that sort of thing raises your eyebrows a little bit. So law enforcement agency catches some people who, you know, allegedly did some very bad things online. And they got a dog from a pyramid scheme that is partnered with Operation Underground Railroad, and through that elaborate series of connections, essentially Operation Underground Railroad claimed credit for those arrests, basically. Yeah, that's the long and short of it. And we actually ended up talking to agencies that said that they were going to start rejecting the money going forward. It wasn't worth the

headache of having people get in touch with them about OUR or their reputation being tied to OURs. And that's, you know, we've been reporting on this organization for a few years now. And that's actually kind of a common pattern where there are organizations that they'll claim to be working with, they're affiliated with who, when you look into things, tends to be a little less closer relationship than this described. Yeah. One thing that you mentioned your very first piece back in 2020 about Operation Underground Railroad is love, their claims are just very difficult to fact check. And why is that? So OUR kind of has two things that it does. One are these domestic operations where they claim to partner with law enforcement.

Most often, as Tim says, by providing money to, you know, by these dogs, you know, these dogs who can sniff out like SD cards when you're trying to search somebody's home for exploitation material. The other thing that OUR does, though, is that they claim to carry out rescues internationally. And this is kind of the subject of Sound of Freedom and a lot of their kind of most glowing press coverage. They claim to, you know, literally get groups of operators who are people like ex-military and ex-Navy seals to go into foreign countries and carry out these daring raids and rescues where they rescue, you know, women and children who are being sexually

exploited. Those are by nature really difficult to check in part because OUR doesn't provide a ton of detail about, for instance, where a lot of these operations take place, which you could certainly make the argument is for like operational security and for the privacy of victims. But it does mean that the stuff that is done internationally, sometimes you have to rely on OUR's word about what they say that they're doing. And so in our first story, in, you know, one of the most kind of dramatic cases that they talked about a lot that we were able to fact check what we found was just simply not at all what OUR had depicted. This is like when, um, you had a friend in junior high and they would go away to summer camp

and they would come back and they would be like, oh, I had the hottest girlfriend and, you know, I lost my virginity and, but it all happened at summer camp. So it's not anybody you. You guys are ever going to meet or see it's exactly like that and talking to their representatives at times is like talking to representatives of government agency you ask for any verification of a claim and you know they're basically saying that's classified you know we can't tell you what country we're operating and that'll give the bad guys right the ability to do counterintelligence or whatever which is funny you know you are's case because sometimes they have a habit of being really specific with details when they're in friendly media settings and then very

evasive when they're in a more adversarial setting. So I want to back up a little bit and talk about, you know, it's talking about difficulty fact-checking about Tim Pallard's background, his own personal background, because he says that he worked for the CIA for about a year, and then he worked for Department of Homeland Security, specifically the Homeland Security investigations, and there he spent his career investigating crimes against children. So how much of that story can be independently verified. So that's a really good question. So he does claim to have been a CIA officer. I checked before I came on and on his LinkedIn. To this day, it says officer CIA. So what we can tell you is that the CIA cannot confirm that without authorization from Ballard. We've repeatedly asked

Operation Underground Railroad to get him to ask the CIA to release those records so we can verify the claim he was a CIA officer. He hasn't done so. We have spoken to sources in the intelligence community who are familiar with the way CIA works. And they say that given his age at the time he was supposed to be an officer and the one year term of his, you know, tour, he would almost certainly have been an intern or a trainee or something functionally equivalent to an intern. He certainly wasn't, you know, running around in the Czech Republic kicking doors down under deep cover or anything of that nature. Right. So like the CIA version of summer camp, basically.

And then we do know that he worked for Homeland Security Investigations, which is a division of ICE, though that's not typically how he describes it. But again, his sort of more specific claims about belonging to like a sex tourism jump team and working as an undercover agent while he was at HSI, those are very difficult claims for us to check again without him agreeing to ask the agency to release his employment records. Yeah, we also, we've checked through court records, for instance, if you have, you know, if you have a law enforcement agent who's involved in undercover cases that are leading to people's prosecution, there's typically a paper trail because they will have to give affidavits. We haven't found a ton of those. We have found, I think there was at least, there was at least one case we found where he provided an affidavit showing that, you know, he had investigated a case.

There may well be many more. We simply haven't been able to locate. But, you know, I think it's fair to say he doesn't have the paper trail associated with somebody who was doing the things that Jim Caviesel apparently does in Sound of Freedom. Sure. Yeah. If you watch the movie and you don't know, if I was just going into the movie and I didn't know anything about this, I mean, you would see that he definitely worked for HSI and he definitely was a big player there. There's scenes of him with the, you know, his sort of like superior. And, you know, there's a couple scenes of raids where they've got the HSI. police, you know, across their flack jackets and stuff. So the movie it's no gray area. Definitely he did and for sure

100%. Yeah, he certainly worked for them, what the balance there was between paperwork and you know, kicking doors down with a gun in your hand. Very difficult for me to say. That's very strange. You know, especially since someone who is, you know, who is as keen to drum up

publicity for himself as Tim Ballard is so wary about releasing specific details about his work for the government. It's very strange. Yeah, I mean, his sort of stated biography, of course, is that he stopped working for the government because he was frustrated that he couldn't do more in foreign countries. And that tends to be the part of his bio where he picks up with great enthusiasm, where he talks about quitting HSI because he wanted to rescue children in ways that he would not legally have been allowed

to do as a representative of the U.S. government. That's the story in some scenarios in other settings, he will say that God told him to find the children around this time. And I don't think these are mutually exclusive. They can certainly be viewed as complementary explanations for his move into the world of private anti-slavery work. But that's where the trail becomes a lot clearer because he's working in public for a nonprofit. Right. And the latter is definitely showcased in the movie. There seems to be very little conflict in the film over, you know, whether I quit my job and I lose these benefits and, you know, how is that going to affect my family? They almost don't even, they don't even touch on that. But there is like a major scene where he talks

about God telling him, you know, what to do and that he had to listen. Yeah. Mr. Ballard is a very devout Mormon and, you know, has said that both when he was working for the government and when he quit, you know, that he felt led, led by God, you know, and that this was really a mission that he could not refuse because it was coming from a higher power. Yeah. So Tim Ballard also said, that he was inspired to find ways to help children in foreign countries after learning about the story of a missing boy in Haiti named Gardi Marty. So he allegedly tried to find this boy and how did that turn out? Right.

So what OUR and Mr. Ballard have said about Gardy is that he learned that Gardy's father, Gassnow, was looking for him and that Garty was technically a U.S. citizen because he was born in the country while his parents were here on a fundraising mission. So Ballard says, you know, at the time he was working for HSI, he didn't have the authority to take the case, and that he started thinking, okay, well, what if I started an organization to, you know, find children like Garty in other countries? So he has claimed that he and a group of operators headed to Haiti to find the boy, but that he was never found, and that OUR continues to search for him and to raise money to get his family out of Haiti after it became unsafe for them to stay, and that in the course of

looking for Garty, they have found a lot of other children. So as recently as I believe 2019, they were still running sort of online fundraisers saying that they were raising money for the Marty family. Yeah, they were selling hats that said find Garty at one point. And there's there's some curious stuff about that. I am certain that they have been searching for and we can tell you in great detail about one paramilitary raid they carried out in the search for Garty. But one thing I ran across the other day that I'd forgotten about was that as late as, God, this was 2018. OUR was running a GoFundMe for the education of Garty's sister, which it was seeking $10,000. It raised $7,235. Why they couldn't come up with that out of the tens of millions

they've raised is perhaps a good question to ask them sometime. Sure, we'll get around to it. Was it this search for this particular boy that led them to relying upon? the input of a psychic medium from Utah? Great question. The psychic story is one that we found out about from former operators, which is what they call people who participate in these rescues, who, you know, were in a position to describe this scenario in detail. So, yeah, one of those missions, they were looking for Garty.

The people on the mission later learned that it was due to a tip from this psychic name, who had claimed that many children were being held near this village and that Gardi was among them. Both sources also told us that Ballard called Gardi's father, Guestno, to tell him that his son was coming home and asked him to come to the village. That's horrifying. And then, of course, when he got there, Garty was not there. And as far as we know, neither were any other missing children. So the way this raid played out as described to us by people who were there was really cartoonish in that they hired real medical personnel to go into the small village and go door to door and then Ballard and the jump team slipped in among them, which is a war crime, if it were

committed by, you know, an actual governmental agency. And they're going and they're looking around. They, of course, don't locate any children, but the elders of the village start becoming very concerned. They're wondering why these people are testing to see if people have some specific virus. They end up rounding up shotguns. They just get some old shotguns and bring those out for discussions while Ballard is running around with a camera crew. He was described to us as like a reality show producer, running around looking for these kids. And eventually through the strong encouragement of the shotgun wielding village elders, the entire crew jumped into their trucks and I tailed it out of there. Now, this is portrayed very differently in the film. If it is

the same, there is a scene in the movie where they go into, you know, what's supposed to be rebel territory disguised as doctors and it's like Ballard is is in there alone because they're you know guys with AK-47s who don't let his his partner in and he goes in alone and it's like a bunch of like drunk soldiers with like AKs and you know this one guy has like a scorpion tattoo on his neck you know you know it's kind of like Rambo I mean is like the best way I can describe the way it's sort of set up in the film Travis you know what I'm talking about right yeah yeah he goes in by himself unarmed in the belly of the beast to singularly rescue this child. Yeah, he gets into a fist fight with a guy and, like, you know, beats him to death,

essentially in front of the girl, you know, in front of the girl. And then there's like, you know, a high-octane chase scene as he, you know, runs out with a girl, you know, in his hand as like machine gun fire is, you know, going off behind them. They jump into the truck. The windows get blown out. I mean, sounds very, very different than what you just described. That's a lot different than what the people who have gone on these missions have described to us, to say the least. We should note that neither Tim nor I have seen the movie yet, which I'm certainly looking forward to.

That does sound, at least the beginning, does sound like the mission as it was described to us. But who knows, perhaps they were basing that scene on a different mission that we haven't heard about yet. Yeah, perhaps, perhaps. Although, you know, I mean, as soon as you said they went in, you know, and they blended in, with medical personnel. I was like, oh, it's got to be this scene, which is essentially the, you know, your break into the third act of the movie is this sort of like jungle sneak raid, you know, very metal gear solid style.

I think I saw a tweet from OUR this week saying, just clarifying that Tim Ballard has never killed anyone, despite that being depicted in the movie, which is true as far as, as far as we've heard, certainly. And I think that's an important thing for OUR to clarify is that they're not getting in shootouts and killing people in foreign countries. that would be that would be bad sure and nowadays you know when you see based on a true story at the beginning of any movie you you can assume that that there are some you know creative liberties taken so yeah now i want to know if jim kivisel was doing some script doctoring uh with all this all this

murder getting some opportunities to beat people we we know he's under that speaking of uh stories that would check out so one of the most interesting stories that i guess are those compelling stories that Tim Ballard has said told over and over and over again relates to a trafficked girl who goes by the name Liliana. And here's how he told that story in an op-ed. Not long ago, a 13-year-old girl from Central America, let's call her Liliana, was kidnapped from her village, then trafficked into the U.S. at a location where there is no wall or barrier. From there, she was taken to New York City, where she was raped by American men 30 to 40 times a day. The private anti-trafficking organization I founded over five years ago, Operation Underground

Railroad, eventually helped Liliana escape her hell, and she is now healing in our care as she prepares to take on her captors in federal court. Tim Ballard, he even told a variation of a story during a meeting with then President Trump. Yes, he told it several times. Also in congressional testimony, I believe. When we were working on this story, I think we found at least four different times that he had told versions of this story about the girl he calls a liana yes yeah yeah so even yeah so apparently even like in this testimony for the senate judiciary committee he claimed that he had been approved by the u.s. attorney's office to share the details of her experience so all sounds very official like i said this was a core of his

lot of its fundraising efforts it was core of the mythology of operation underground railroad but what what did you discover when you tried to dig into the real story of lilliana oh Right. So our first sort of clue about how we could look into this case a little bit further was that Mr. Ballard said that she would be testifying in federal court. And if you know anything about the way the court system works, there are a lot of records. And also a case like this involving a huge trafficking ring being busted up and people being brought to justice would be a huge deal. And we were like, well, surely there are going to be press releases about this. And there were. And we found them pretty much right away. But the story as we found it described in court

records and in you know statements released by the government was so different from what mr ballard had described that first we actually weren't sure if it was the same story um but ultimately did confirm uh the real story of the person that he calls liliana so what we know is that liliana was trafficked by a man that she first met in mexico when she was just about to turn 14 so he was about 17 at the time he kind of wooed her romantically you know told her that he was going to take her to the United States and that they were going to live a better life, which is very common among people who go on to be trafficked. This is incredibly common to have a trafficker who builds an emotional and romantic

relationship with you. So Lillianna moves in with this man and his family because she is actually fleeing, she testified sexual abuse at home. So this is somebody who's already kind of vulnerable and endangered. So they attempt to travel to the U.S. twice alongside other people. And both times, actually, they were caught at the border by U.S. immigration agents and return to Mexico, which is, again, not how Mr. Ballard described it. So the third time, in October of 2010, which you will note is 13 years ago, they made it

across the border. Lillianna doesn't specify how. So they travel from Arizona, where they made it across the border to Queens, at which point this man, who Lillianna believes to be her romantic partner, locks her in a house, leaves her with an iPhone and an iPad, tells her, you know, to call him when she's hungry, and she quickly realizes that the windows in the house where she's being left are barred. So already like a terrifying situation and pretty soon this man tells Lilliana that she is going to be expected to sleep with men for money. So she is sexually trafficked in every way that is true. But what we later learned was that Lilliana when she was 17 after three and a half years of being trafficked and abused, escaped on her own. OUR had nothing to do with it.

She told another woman that she was leaving. She called a cab, said she was going to visit family, and she left. Every indication that we have is that representatives from OUR, may have met Lillianna years later, but they certainly were not involved in helping her escape her traffickers. So I want to just hop in to talk in hopefully not too much detail about the reporting of the story, because this story in particular, because I think it tells a lot about OUR. As Anna said, when we were initially looking into it, it was pretty trivial to find the case. It was just that it differed so much from what Valerie described that we figured we would

have to be looking elsewhere. So we knew a U.S. Attorney's Office was involved. They put the cases they prosecute on press releases. So we're looking through all these. We're contacting prosecutors who would seem likely to have been the prosecutors involved. And it's almost like an Abbott and Costello routine because we're saying we're looking for this case where Operation Underground Railroad was so integral to your prosecution that, you know, Tim Ballard had to, you know, get your permission to talk about it to Congress, right? Like really intimately involved in it. Nobody had any idea what we were talking about.

They weren't even saying like, oh, we can't talk about this or that's really sensitive or anything. but just literally had never heard of OUR, had never heard of Ballard. So we started calling around to Survivor Support agencies. There aren't that many, and they are pretty closely coordinated. It's a relatively small world. And ones in New York and, you know, the general East Coast and Mid-Atlantic where we were pretty sure this took place. And again, never heard of Operation Underground Railroad or Tim Ballard.

And we're just pretty taken aback by the information. We were able to provide them everything from the... the language that he used to describe her and what OUR was doing for her, which they said was, you know, in deep contradiction to the careful use of language that agencies like that will do so as not to patronize or retramatize people, power differentials in particular, a way that survivors can be re-traumatized. So, you know, these agencies are very careful in the language they use. They don't say we rescued people or we're saving people or we're, you know, saving them from slavery or anything that they refer to them as clients. And they say, you know, these are people we're

working with. Yeah, you wouldn't say that someone is in your care, like that specific wording actually raised a lot of eyebrows from people that we talked to. You would never say that. It's patronizing. It takes away their agency. And it, you know, indicates that they are just not sort of capable of their own self-determination, which is the opposite of what you want to do for a trafficking victim. Yeah. And so the biggest red flag for them might actually have been that in all these public appearances where he was talking about this, he was using it as an argument for a border mall, like a very political purpose. He was quote. including Liliana and saying, you know, she has said, if only there were a wall, I never would have been trafficked, which is to a person among trafficking experts that we've talked to in reporting on these groups. They say it's, it's just ridiculous. It's not a partisan issue to them. It's, if nothing else, the fact that it's trivially easy to traffic somebody through a port of entry. That's, you know, the physical border between the U.S. and Mexico just doesn't really come into it for them. And they insist that, you know, for any number of reasons that are probably beyond the scope.

of this discussion, you know, it would be actively harmful. So his using this story in these settings for that purpose is just incredibly strange for anybody who's involved in anti-trafficking work. In addition to the fact that nobody who does it either privately or with relevant public agencies, you know, on the East Coast had ever heard of this group. I mean, yeah, I mean, I know the way you phrase these things are very, it's very careful as journalists, but man, I think it's just, It's just really slimy to take credit for freeing a real trafficking victim who freed herself and then leverage that story to make yourself in your organization the hero and then also use that story to put and to basically get cozy with the Trump administration because you can use it to bolster the case for one of his for his agenda for a border wall. Just the whole thing is pretty slimy to me. We were definitely surprised by the way that OUR described what they had done.

Also note that Mr. Ballard consistently described Lillianna as being 11 or 12 when she was trafficked, which isn't true. She was about to turn 14, which is not a big distinction for most people. But because this happened so many years ago, by the time Lillianna was getting ready to testify, she would have been probably in her early 20s, you know, meaning that every time Mr. Ballard described her as a little girl, you know, at one point he says, I introduced this little girl to Ivanka Trump at the White House. You know, he's talking about a woman who at that point would have been in her 20s. And so even if OUR met Lillianna later on, say, and helped her prepare to testify against her traffickers, you know, she would have been an adult at that point. You know, in another time, he describes her living with a loving family and studying for her GED, which again indicates that she's younger than she actually is.

You also investigated another story that Tim Ballard has liked to tell. This is Operation Underground Railroad. They helped 10 Venezuelan women escape from what the organization says was trafficking. King assisted them in entering the U.S. with the help of the self-help guru Tony Robbins and the Trump White House and then gave at least some of them help in entering an academic program. And that sounds like nothing but good. But what exactly is the issue with that story? This is maybe the perfect Operation Underground Railroad story because everything you just said is true or true adjacent and yet the totality of the story is completely different. So this is a story

Ballard has told a number of times. He told it to Glenn Beck with whom he works on a different anti-traffing organization that's made extremely questionable claims of its own. He told it on the Candace Owen show as well details from it. And pretty much every part of that is iffy. So just to start with the basics, the claim was that 10 Venezuelan women were liberated from sexual slavery or the like. We have no way to confirm that. We know that in many cases involving groups using what's called the raid and rescue model, which is where you, you know, sensibly break into or infiltrate somehow a brothel and liberate all the women there, whether by buying them or pulling out guns and telling their traffickers that, you know, they can't hold people in bondage.

You've rescued them. In many of those cases, the operations have basically involved badgering women who are working by choice as sex workers to leave their place of employment or, in some cases quasi-kidnapping them. So when you start at the basics, their claims about the conditions in which the women were being held or being working, we have no way to confirm that. What is clear is the women were exfiltrated to another country, and then they found themselves with no way to get into the U.S., which is what OUR wanted to do, take them to the U.S. So in Ballard's version of the story, called a high-up person in the White House, said, I need visas for these women, visas were procured, they came into the U.S., they replaced an aftercare, which

is a term of art for basically social services and given entrance to college, one of them had already graduated college, you know, in quick succession. And of course, the Tony Robbins, a long-time OU-R donor, had been involved in this through having his private plane delivered the women to the U.S. So you can't call someone at the White House and get visas. It doesn't work that way. If you call Joe Biden on the phone right now and say, Diamond Joe, I need visas for these really wonderful people who need to be in the U.S., there's no one for him to tell we need visas right now. It literally doesn't work that way. So because it doesn't work that way, a Liberty University graduate who had worked in some questionable seeming anti-traffing groups of 400 in the administration

at that time named Heather Fisher, she had the portfolio for anti-trafficking, which as far as you can tell means one of the Trumps liked her. And she was not able to arrange visas for the reasons I just outlined, but she was able to get the women into the country on humanitarian parole, which is a completely different thing. If you have a visa, you have an established right to be in the U.S., you have the right to access a variety of services, you have a guaranteed timeline during which you're allowed to be in the U.S., during which time you can apply to change your legal status, a process that takes many years in most cases. Parole is inherently arbitrary. It can be withdrawn at any time for any reason. It doesn't give you any right to be in the U.S. for for any period of time.

It doesn't give you any right to access health care, mental health care, assistance with housing, any of the other services that women like this would need. So that rate there is a big difference. He didn't call the Trump White House and get these women visas. He called the Trump White House and got them in on parole. Very, very different thing. The care into which they were placed, the best we've been able to determine involved a Utah church that had several months before opened up, it sounds like a halfway house for women who had been rescued from bad situations. They used the word, they claim to use the restore model. So again, we're going to that language that established survivor care organizations specifically warn you not to use

the federal government, like the Office of Victims of Crime, specifically warns you not to use language like this. They were only accepting women between the ages of 18 to 34, and it was run by an audiologist who had no training in any relevant discipline. And when we asked for comments specifically said they don't provide aftercare. They also got the women, which was revealed first through reporting by the Utah journalist Lynn Packer, who is worth anyone who's interested in this topic looking up. He has some really, really, really cool videos in particular where he delves deep into Operation Underground lore. He found that they had been brought to Utah State University to participate in seed program. It was basically designed to give undergrad's experience in

entrepreneurship, the idea of being the undergrads would go to, you know, go to like Ghana or El Salvador or somewhere and find some people who need help building small businesses and help them out during a summer genre abroad. A really questionable utility for a group of sexually trafficked Venezuelan women. But after they had gone through training for this, Operation Underground Railroad arranged for a film crew to come film a graduation ceremony, which in concert with Ballard's claim muddy and somewhat opaque claims about graduation basically made it seem as if, you know, he'd gotten these women through college. The whole thing falls apart in the closest scrutiny. So we don't know where they are now. We talk to the relevant groups in Utah that would be,

you would expect to be involved in a group of nearly a dozen women being resettled. They didn't know anything about it. This is both private organizations. organizations as well as, you know, public ones. We don't know if they're still in the U.S. You know, we don't know what kind of situation they have if they are. And it's, again, an example of not only kind of inflating these stories, but using them for specific political ends, when you go on the Glenn Backer Candace Owens show and you're talking about how the Trump administration, which by every professional account I've ever heard, I don't know, maybe Anna has ever heard differently, but was a disaster for anti-trafficking efforts, you know, in large part because they really

throttled the number of visas that were even available to be given out so that survivors couldn't get into the country. He's using the story to show how in his telling, Trump White House cut through the red tape, did everything it could to, you know, help the real victims, the victims of sexual slavery, and by implication, make the case that the Biden administration isn't doing anything. And, you know, you can only trust Trump, you can only trust Republicans to take this issue seriously. It's a thing you can do, but, you know, really is once again an example of not only the, not only the story being really questionable and a lot more complex than what OUR is putting out, but then that distorted story, you know, being used for explicitly political ends,

which is really questionable activity for a 501c3 nonprofit to be getting into. I can just imagine, you know, these women like end up in this like halfway house church in Utah and they're like, uh, what's going to happen to, like, where are we? And Tim Ballard's like, shh, you're safe now. And they're like, but like, where are we going to go? Like, we're not even, we're on what? We're on parole. Are we in any kind of trouble?

And he's like, shh, shh, you're safe now. And then he like walks out to like a, like a podium press conference. And he's like, they're safe. You know, it's just like. Yeah. So the thing about all these stories is that the version that Tim Ballard tells is really easy to condense into two minutes. It tends to be a heroic rescue story with a happy ending. You know, in his version, like these women got visas because he called someone at the White

House and they printed them out, like that, you know, like that they got visas in the time it took to press a button on the printer, which is again, like not how visas work. And so for us to explain as best we can tell what actually happened, it takes a really long time. It's really complicated. You have to talk to people who are experts in things like T visas and humanitarian aid. And it is just not as kind of like appealing and cinematic. and like emotionally compelling of a story. And so typically when we fact check stories from OUR and similar organizations, people get really upset with us,

like folks who are, you know, fans and donors to these groups because it is, you know, it can sound like we are just like nitpicking the good work of an organization who's trying to rescue people. In fact, you know, what the people that we talk to who are experts in anti-trafficking work are trying to convey is that like actually the work of, you know, helping people who have been trafficked takes a really long time is a lot more complicated

than how Ballard makes it out to be and it is way less about kicking down doors and it is a lot more about helping people for instance get into like job training programs you know so if they have been either labor or sexually trafficked helping them like find new skills

helping them find you know a way to make a living so the kind of fairy tale version of the story that OUR tells is very compelling and it's certainly very good for Hollywood but it just doesn't reflect the reality of the work of helping trafficking victims? Yeah, just to add to that one thing about job training that I shouldn't even say it's funny because it's not, but we've heard from all over

the world that there's a really consistent pattern of when organizations, not just using the Raiden Rescue model, but ones that are more generally organizations based around Western white men coming in somewhere and helping out whether or not they've been asked to. Their idea is always to get women making like handicrafts, like really simple jewelry or like woven bracelet. You'll find so many of these if you go and look, where some organization will be selling, you know, bracelets for five bucks that were made by women who have been rescued from sexual slavery. And, you know, a point that really consistently comes up with people who work for the UN or NGOs is just like, why do you think these women were sex workers in the first place? Like, they had rational reasons for that. And, you know, training them how to make summer camp bracelets is not going to provide a viable livelihood.

And just for whatever reason, you can tell the people doing this training, over. over and over again, that it's not a realistic answer to the situation in which women find themselves. And it's just, it's just kind of, you know, blanking comprehension. Nobody would willingly do this. Nobody would willingly sell their body. So this is not that. So this must be better. I guess it's the logic. Yeah. Well, it's also kind of like degrading in its own way. That's like, oh, you poor thing. Like the most you can muster is like putting these beads on this fishing wire and like we'll sell them for five bug. I don't know. There's just like something that inherently just sounds kind of like slimy.

It's pretty infantilizing, you know, like the idea that trafficking survivors are, you know, only capable of making bracelets and that they can feed their families and their children that way is just, you know, I think most people can kind of see the logical issue there. Yeah, well, especially when you, like, this story that you guys told of this girl who was able to figure out how to escape her captors like on her own, like planning that, figuring out when to execute it, you know, figuring, like, that's a lot of, you know, that's a lot of agency and a lot of, it takes a lot of guts, you know, to break free from any situation in which you are forcefully being held captive. And so, yeah, it feels like I, you know,

there's this trend of, like you said, Anna, like infantilizing, like, you know, some of these incredibly, like, amazing survivors. So Operation Underground Railroad, they have kind of like a call of duty approach to rescuing children, like you said, because it makes a better story. You know, the tough, macho operators bust down the doors and help naive, helpless, you know, children and victims. And so a tax form for the group says that, quote, rescue teams are comprised of highly skilled ex-Navy, SEAL, CIA, and other operatives. So this is something you call in one of your pieces the rescue model. And apparently they didn't come up with this idea themselves, but it came from a Christian group called International Justice Mission. Yeah, so this is the raid and rescue model, and it's worth noting that in more recent tax

firms, OUR is less specific about what they do and how they do it. But essentially, so the idea of the raid and rescue model is essentially that women and children and traffic people needed to be like physically saved. So international justice mission many years ago was doing these kind of raid style approaches, you know, that describe busting down doors at places like brothels and, you know, taking people out. And it was immediately controversial it's not like there was a time when people were like yeah this is a totally reasonable way to do things like almost immediately experts in like sexual violence and like helping people recover after sexual violence were like well this is quite traumatizing like

even if you are being held in captivity having armed people with guns you know come in is actually probably quite frightening but this raid and rescue model proved pretty popular because um for lack of a better word it was consumable the rescues were filmed or photographed and supporters and donors could kind of feel like they were part of it, you know? And so it became kind of a big approach for faith-based anti-trafficking organizations in the 1990s. At one point, IJM's former president had like a collection of padlocks that he claimed had been, you know, that were like scalps from rescue missions essentially. So IJM stopped doing this a long time ago and other kind of faith-based anti-trafficking organizations stopped doing it because it was just garnering bad

publicity. So these days, anybody that you talk to will probably tell you that IJM is more in keeping with the international standards of, like, how you would work with trafficking survivors. So one thing I would like to add to that is that while OUR has a really heavy emphasis traditionally in its marketing on these rescue teams, first off, they've backed away from that a little in recent years. But second, it is worth saying that as far as we can tell, that's complete nonsense. So we've talked to people who were legitimate and, you know, you know, verifiable former members of special forces, people who'd work with intelligence agencies, people who have, you know, legitimate skills that they could put to use for the A team, if they wanted

to, who heard about what these groups were doing, said, hey, this sounds appealing, volunteered, got involved, and were just appalled at the lack of professionalism going on. And the example that was cited to us was, you know, going into a situation that could potentially involve violence without knowing where the hospital was. Things like that, just no planning, no surveillance, no escape route, nothing. So when they do do those, as far as we can tell, it doesn't tend to go very well. And the people who have your legitimate Jason Bourne style skills, they're not generally staying very involved after they see how these things actually go.

But mostly, they don't even attempt to do that. The much more typical operation, and this is based on what people who have taken part in them have told us, as well as accounts by people who have gone on them, and even the films that OUR itself has, you know, just made and put up on YouTube, is that you get a group of people who have no qualifications whatsoever. Real estate agents, donors, random teenagers, people who have gone through a few days of training that basically involves, like, watching a video where a guy in a gorilla suit walks by it and then asking people if they saw the guy in the gorilla suit, this is like intelligence training.

They'll go to like a small town in, you know, like the Dominican Republic, or a tourist town in Thailand, and they'll go with money and they'll say, essentially, you know, bring me the underage girls. And if underage girls are brought, they'll say, I want younger ones. I want younger ones. Just flashing money, a lot of the training that the guys get, because these tend to be pretty religious people, is about like how to compartmentalize your discomfort if you're in a gay bar or, you know, is it okay for me as a Mormon to drink when I'm undercover on one of these missions. They flash the money. Sometimes girls are provided. In some cases, local law enforcement will then come and make a bust. That'll be filmed. It goes on YouTube. Fundraising comes in the whole

cycle repeats itself. And there are a bunch of really obvious problems with that. But maybe the most serious one and the one that was brought up, you know, has been brought up to us the most from a variety of people, people who are directly involved or experts who are just commenting on what they understand about the group, is that you're potentially creating demand. And this was actually something that was being investigated in a sense concluded law enforcement investigation that hasn't resulted in charges. But the idea is basically if you go in and you're, you know, you're asking for younger children, younger children are going to be provided. You're creating a market for it. There are accounts of, you know, there's at least one account of a guy who says that

he bought kids the way that Nick Christop did on behalf of OUR, which for, again, very obvious reasons is not best practice. If you go in and you make it clear that you're willing to pay 30,000, thousand dollars ahead to get kids out of out of bondage you're you're going to get kids to buy it 30,000 dollars ahead and so though you know there are reasons why this model is is discredited and has been moved away from by by reputable organizations or organizations that want to be treated as reputable so you've also investigated OUR's alleged corporate sponsorships and recently it was actually a couple years ago, once announced a exciting partnership with American Airlines and saying that a promotional video will play on flight. So they're pretty unambiguous about the nature of this supposed

relationship. So the full announcement on Facebook says this. For the month of June, OUR has partnered with American Airlines to share our mission and spread information about human trafficking and exploitation. We are excited to announce that this video will play on all domestic American Airlines flights all month long and encourage viewers to join us in the fight against human trafficking. We are grateful for this collaboration with American Airlines and look forward to the awareness that will come from this campaign. So what did you discover when you asked American Airlines about this partnership? Yeah, this is a much dumber controversy, thankfully. You know, some of the other stuff that we've investigated with OUR and similar groups is really dark. This is

just very silly. So we were surprised to see this. We reached out to American Airlines. and said, you know, what is the deal with your partnership with Operation Underground Railroad? And they said, we don't have one. That's not true. And we never have. Specifically, they said content from Operation Underground Railroad is not available on Americans in flight entertainment. We do not have any partnership or affiliation with the organization.

And we said, okay, well, did you previously? And they said, it was never true. We do not have any partnership or affiliation with them. And the content is not available on our in-flight entertainment. So it's very definitive. They also told us that they were going to ask, oh, you are to take these posts down, claiming a partnership with them. So, you know, that was interesting to us.

And ultimately, a spokesperson for OUR very kindly got to the bottom of this for us and told us that, in fact, OUR had bought an ad with a third-party service provider called Clearwind Media that essentially makes advertisements for in-flight TV and TV commercials. They call themselves a leader in-flight TV and TV commercial advertising. And they basically created this program called Companies on the Move, which they describe as an affordable way to increase your visibility and communicate your company's story. It's an ad. It's an infomercial. So OUR contracted with Clearwood media and made one. And we're told according to them that it was going to play on American Airlines. But it didn't. It just never did. And so once we reached out

to OUR, they said, okay, well, you know, we're taking action to remove these social media posts because, you know, the situation was not as we understood it. So yeah. An all too familiar Hollywood story, you know, You pay the big bucks to get your, you know, to get your advertisement, you know, in front of the eyes of people who are stuffed into airline seats, they can't move, they have to watch your ad, only to find out that you got cut from the real. I mean, this is, you know, we've heard this story a hundred times and I have to imagine that the Operation Underground Railroad team was very disappointed to find out that they wouldn't be, they wouldn't be showing their video. just after they tell you how to use the rubber slides if the plane lands in the ocean. It's really tragic. Well, in a way that this is also like a very good O-U-R story, which is like something that maybe technically could have been true on one level,

but in their telling was like inflated so much and turned into something else entirely that made it sound like they were heroically partnering with this enormous corporation, which then gets the attention of people like us. because that cannot possibly be true. It just doesn't make any sense. And OUR does not have a lot of partnerships with other organizations, period, but also especially organizations that are not faith-based and large companies. It just does not have the ring of truth, which is why we ask them about it at all.

And it's also, it's kind of how they communicate with their audience. And like they're kind of grandmaster narrative is that much of the world is indifferent to or, you know, in favor of child sexual slavery and they are a light in the dark We've been talking about them in terms of the anti-trafficking, but the language they uses less so in recent years, but slavery. They are abolitionists. There is a John McNaughton painting of Tim Ballard carrying a child with Harriet Tubman and Abraham Lincoln and other abolitionists bowing to him, like a full-on-on-Maconneoyle painting.

You can't buy a print anymore or I would have one of my office wall. Yeah, they took it down after we wrote about it, which made me kind of sad. But, you know, that is what they're doing. And so in this narrative of being, you know, the light in the darkness kind of besieged by an incomprehending cruel world, things like this are victories, right? It's like they're listening to us. American Airlines is partnering with us to become one of the few that's willing to speak out against sexual slavery. And, you know, I don't want to get into speculation about their motives, but it makes sense in that you want to be giving the audience, you know, consistent evidence that, you know, we're winning the fight or we're making advances and we're making progress. And this is how we're showing it.

You know, our cause is becoming mainstream. More people, even corporations as big as American Airlines, are coming out and saying, you know, sexual servitude for children is bad. And the way you can continue that, you know, success, those wins, is to support us. Again, like, it's very easy for OUR to tell their story because it is, it is a lot shorter than our version. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's what I was just, I was going to make this point about this airline, you know, quote unquote partnership because, you know, if they had come out and.

and said the truth. Hey, so by the way, we just want to let our audience know that we paid a company that does in-flight advertising to run an underground railroad ad. And they've told us that it could appear on American Airlines flight. So, you know, keep an eye out for it. That's going to be really exciting. That's not nearly as like cool and definitive sounding as, hey, we've partnered with American Airlines. I mean, and it's consistent, I feel like, with a lot of how OUR sort of frames their accomplishments is they like to tell the beginning and they like to tell the end. And kind of what happens in the middle, you know, everything that's sort of, you know, the actual meat of the story is sort of left out or glossed over. It's a little squishy. Yeah, it's a little bit

squishy. And the movie's kind of like that too. There's, when you see it, you'll, you'll know what I'm talking about. But there is for some, for a movie that is like so, it's supposed to be so visceral and so human and, you know, praise on our deepest fears and sympathies. There's actually very little humanity in the film. A lot of it is just like plot and the emotion is supposed to come from the fact that the audience knows that human trafficking is bad and that anybody trying to save them is good. So it is really interesting like seeing this pattern sort of emerge for them that they like to tell the beginning, they like to tell who was in trouble and they like to tell that they were saved and they ended up safe, but they sort of, yeah, it gets messy in the

middle of how exactly that went down and what in particular they had a hand in, as opposed to what was, you know, was completely independent of the organization. Right. Well, and the other thing that's important to make clear is that human trafficking is a huge issue and that there are tons of governmental bodies, NGOs, nonprofits working on solving it. And so OUR's sort of self-style depiction as being like the only light in the darkness is also just not true. You know, when we report these stories, we end up talking to tons of governmental organizations, places like the State Department, like, rest assured that human trafficking is a recognized issue that many, many, many people are working on and the process of getting somebody out of human trafficking and into, you know, the support of care that they need

to live a good, sort of dignified life where they are not held in any kind of servitude is the work of many people. And that is always what people emphasize to us. This is not something that one man or one organization does. Right. Like you go into any airport. Like, you know, I noticed, I've been noticing this over the past couple of years. You go into the bathroom at any airport and there are plaques on the mirrors that say if you or someone you know is being human traffic, please call this, you know, please call this government number. Right. It's one of many efforts made to specifically address labor trafficking, which is a huge issue. OUR tends to stress sex trafficking, but labor trafficking is a recognized issue and it's something that a lot of people are working on. I live in Pennsylvania and

along the turnpike, they now have signs before every rest stop that give a number you can call to report human trafficking. And a thing I keep meaning to do is just like FOIA the logs of those and see what they're getting because I'm convinced it's going to be at least 99% people saying I saw, I saw something shifty. There was a white girl and a Mexican guy. They were in line at Starbucks and I was maybe she's being traffic. I was at the local Chucky Cheese Pizza and I saw four kids playing on the plastic jungle gym unattended. I'm pretty, sure that I'm pretty sure one of those tubes leads to an underground dungeon. So I'm curious how you would describe the relationship between Tim Ballard and Operation

Underground Railroad and Q&N and other conspiracy theories. Because from what I've seen, they kind of like, well, they don't openly endorse Q&ON. I don't think Tim Ballard's ever done that or anything like that. But they also don't want to discourage people from believing some of the more fantastical myths about human trafficking. And of course, they also allowed, you know, Jim Caviziel, the star of the movie, to go out and openly talk at QAnon conferences and talk about Andrena Cromo and stuff. And they didn't seem very eager to shut that down when he's out doing that. So like, it's just, it's just a weird kind of tenuous relationship. How would you sort of describe it? So, yeah, unlike Jim Cavizal, who is very openly talked about

ideas that are clearly connected to QAnon, like Adrenachrome and, you know, cabals and elites trafficking children, OUR and Tim Ballard's relationship is a bit different. So the big kind of incident that happened for them is you know a few summers ago and the idea the conspiracy theory was going around that wayfarer was trafficking children through their website like the furniture company wayfarer was overtly trafficking children tim ballard sent out a tweet essentially saying you know with or without wayfarer child trafficking is real and it's happening in a follow-up video he said you know children are sold on social media platforms and websites and so forth so it was kind of like indicating that something like this was maybe credible without saying it

right. So subsequently, OUR walked that back and said very clearly that they do not support conspiracy theories. They said we don't condone conspiracy theories and we are not affiliated with any conspiracy theory group in any way, shape, or form. Nonetheless, we do know that OUR has a pretty big fandom among folks who are also believers and tenets of QAnon. For some reason, those two things tend to run together. But OUR has said many times that they do not condone conspiracy theories. I think the best word to use to describe the relationship would be adjacent. Certainly, as Anna just outlined, they are vocally against conspiracy theories. They explicitly say, we do not support QAnon. On the other hand, first, a lot of the rhetoric that Ballard uses is, I think dog whistling would be strong,

but is loaded. He talks a lot about organ harvesting in the Middle East and work he does with the Nazarene Fund and the horrible things he's seen there as a major concern, which while organ harvesting is a real thing that happens, is not to my knowledge or that of any relevant experts. I've spoken to, you know, a major component of sex trafficking or something that's as intimately related to it as is sometimes intimated. Ballard personally also has not only done things like a peer with Caviesel at a conference with Lynn Wood, where Caviesel is talking about a but been tied to the kind of broader universe. There was a conference that he was advertised at that he ultimately didn't attend in Utah called the We Can Act conference, for instance. And that

had Michael Flynn there. It had Simone Gold and Peter McCullough and other people who were very tied up in the COVID denialism and anti-vaccine movements. Utah has a very strange political scene. That conference I just mentioned was put on by a woman named Tina Horlacker, was a member of the leadership body of the state Republican Party. So he's basically at the least involved with elements of the Republican Party that are very cue adjacent. Like when you're advertised, you'd be at the conference with Michael Flynn, but end up having to bow out or, you know, you're at the conference with Lynn Wood.

You know, I think you have to weigh that right alongside OUR's very voluble rejections of Q and on. And then there's a kind of softer connection between the two things, which is one of the things I find most fascinating about the anti-trafficking movement, which is the extent to which there's just a lot of overlap. The Save the Children hashtag that was used a few years ago to rally a lot of support for Operation Underground Railroad and other anti-traffing organizations. We know what that is. And when that is the marketing and that is the messaging, I tend to think there's a wink there. No one involved in this kind of wing of the anti-trafficking movement doesn't know what they're saying or the fears they're appealing to when they're talking about saving the children. And whether you want to describe that, messaging is, you know, soft QAnon or anything like that, that's up to you. But it's, there's, there's, there's a, there's a, there's a real relationship there. I mean, we can do all of the, uh, fact checking and exploring subjects with nuance that

we want. But we don't have a movie about us. And Tim Ballard does. And, you know, Sound of Freedom has been a long time coming. And it really portrays Tim Ballard as a totally uncomplicated, just a purely good hero, who is driven by faith and morality to save children when no one else will. And, I mean, what do you think this means for Ballard in Operation Underground Railroad, especially since they are so publicity and image conscious? Yeah, so, you know, this movie has been, as far as we know in the works since like 2018, I think is when it actually finished filming. They've been kind of promising their fans and followers that it was going to come out for years.

So this is a huge deal for the organization, not just that it's finally out, but that it is airing in mainstream secular theaters. It's not just playing it like faith-based film festivals and in church basements. It is a huge deal. It is getting reviews from places like variety and, you know, Roger Ebert's website. Like, this is a bona fide phenomenon. The Wall Street Journal wrote about how they were, you know, garnering ticket sales. Like, this is a big deal.

And not just because it, you know, obviously draws attention to the organization, but because most of the coverage that I've seen, you know, talks pretty explicitly about it being based on a true story and doesn't really problematize that narrative at all. So it is, again, kind of reinforcing the ideas about how I think OUR would like to be seen. I'd actually slightly differ from that in a way. I don't disagree with any of that. But there was a time when OUR was a very mainstream organization, not that long ago. They were anodyne enough that there was a profile done on, I think it was Sunday Night

Football. It might have been Monday Night Football. But it was an ESPN-produced documentary about how Mike Tomlin, the Steelers coach, you know, was really into OUR and it showed him in a helicopter, you know, going on some sort of mission, which is one thing the group is traditionally done. They'll bring celebrities like Tony Robbins and Mike Tomlin along on missions to get them involved in the cause. But that's as apolitical as you can get in America, is being safe enough to be, you know,

in a major NFL broadcast. They're not there anymore. They're appealing to a hard, you know, kind of socially conservative audience, a hard, right audience, a politically partisan audience, and you're seeing that in where it's being promoted, or Jim Caviesel in promoting the movie has talked about how this is a movie Hollywood doesn't want you to see. They don't want you to see this setting himself in OUR in opposition to those elites. I definitely think they're being exposed to a much bigger audience and one that's probably going to be really inclined to support them and to say, how could anybody be so devilish

to be against what these people are doing? That's all true, but I also think that they're painting themselves into a corner in a way, I think they've really tried to avoid and for a long time we're successful in avoiding of being part of the culture war or being identified with, you know, the fringe right and people like Michael Flynn and one would. This is now, you know, the success is like that even if it's not as big of, you know, that of the passion of the crisis. You're appealing to an audience that feels that mass commercial entertainment is not ever targeted at them and they're going to be really responsive to that and they're going to be really responsive to that cause. But the extent to which that could be a Pyrick victory to the extent that OUR had aspirations beyond that, I think we'll have to see how that plays out.

Well, one thing that OUR and Sound of Freedom can now claim is that they outsold Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny at the box office. And so now you're getting all of these articles. I just saw one in Newsweek about this amazing upset and this crazy box office coup that this independent movie about here. human trafficking has, you know, has made more money in its first weekend than the fucking Indiana Jones finale. Like, it's not good. And just like, you know, we were talking about earlier how Ballard and OUR in general are kind of cagey about, you know, directly signaling to QAnon, the movie follows suit.

You know, Travis and I had had a little bit of a gentleman's bet going on whether or not they would actually mention Adrenachrome in the film. I wanted to know, I wanted to know, are we going to. going to see Adrenachrome farms in the film because that's a big deal. And it doesn't. There's no mention of Adrenachrome in the film. There's no mention of QAnon or anything even close. And I think, you know, much like their sort of public stance on it, that is a tactical move so that nobody can point to the film and say they are showing Adrenachrome in this movie that's clearly made up. It's a Q&ON thing, you know, and be able to write it off. And like, I mean, yeah,

Yeah, it's, it's, um, I was a little bit surprised. I thought maybe that this, you know, as much as Kavisel had been talking about it, I thought, okay, well, maybe they will get to it in this, in this movie, you know, something in the vein of like, you know, the matrix when they finally, they go and they see all of the pink bubbles, you know, and the people, you know, the people being, you know, used as batteries in it, but there's nothing like that in the movie. So I am curious. I'm curious how, how effective it'll be.

That's great to hear. That's delightful. I think Ballard's cannier than to get involved in something like that. One of the weirdest things we found in all this reporting is we, you know, published it, but it's a white board that we're told Ballard drew. It was certainly something he presented at a meeting with members of his inner circle a few years ago. And it laid out the way all the various nonprofits and for-profits he's involved with are all connected. There are lines between nonprofits and four-profits with dollar signs next to them.

You know, it's basically a map of how he invented. vision to his empire coming to be. And there are a couple of weird things about that. One is, one is it, it calls the organizations that are involved with rescuing, trafficking survivors. It calls that the sizz. And there's a, there's a phrase, lead them to the covenant, which OUR has issued a no comment on, but it would be reasonable to infer that you're using the salacious nature of this rescuer to lead people to Mormonism. And everything in this big network that he's building is ultimately reflected into timballard.com and, you know, his brand as a public speaker as a kind of, you know, entrepreneur for one of a better word. And he's got a lot of

projects in that line. OUR was originally in some ways conceived as a reality show. He writes books of pseudo history about how various important people in American history were part of, you know, founding America on Christian ideals and making it a safe place for the Mormon faith. He's got his fingers in a lot of pies. And I would think that in making a movie like this, one thing he would have in mind is probably, you know, something like the Marvel Cinematic Universe of abolitionism, the prospect of more, you know, more films bringing awareness to this problem and his proposed solutions to it. But the idea of kind of entertainment barrendom, with that in play, it doesn't surprise me that there would be no adrianicrome farms as much as I want to see a good, big budget

Hollywood depiction of them. Right. I was reading the article before we jumped on, and I was looking at the picture of that whiteboard. And one thing that jumped out to me right away was the fact that he uses this word sizzle, which to me is, you know, is heavily enmeshed in both entertainment and advertising and marketing. You know, you use a sizzle reel to get people to buy into the bigger budget version of what you have or to buy into your idea or your brand. So the fact that he's using language like that, even, you know, potentially early on, I think does show that some of this ideology is rooted from a place of entertainment, even though he wouldn't describe it as that, right? And we wouldn't describe it as that. But yet, just the, just the language, you know,

it seems like from the jump that that was on his mind, you know, how do we use entertainment and media to lead people to the covenant? Yeah, and that's not even illegitimate. If you have, You know, I think you could look at that same set of facts and say, here's a guy with a cause he believes really strongly in that he wants more support for, that he wants more awareness of for very valid reasons. And, you know, he knows that you have to meet people where they are. And, you know, a movie starring Jim Caviesel is one way to do that. The same way, you know, writing a book that places himself in the line of great American abolitionists is a way to do that. Right. Right.

all, you know, things one might do to get the message out there. I think that's good. Is there anything else you really want to share about Tim Ballard Operation Underground Railroad? I don't think so. I think the only thing is just like we are definitely going to be looking out for more kind of Tim Ballard properties, as Tim said. I would not be surprised to see more things explicitly sort of focused on him and his career. I know he just launched a podcast and I would expect to see more stuff in that vein.

I think I have two things. One is just that I hope and do believe it goes without saying, but that, you know, any critical reporting we're doing on this organization, other organizations like it, you know, it doesn't diminish the gravity of human trafficking and all its varieties and how serious that is. You know, I think the criticism that people make of these organizations is more they're not effective than anything, but that doesn't mean that the concerns they're nominally pointed at aren't real and serious. The other thing is just something I think listeners might appreciate, which is that at one point, oh, you are a two for-profit subsidiaries. One of them was a really mysterious group called Deakin that seems to be involved in, you know, basically security work. But the other one is a CrossFit gym or a company that owns a CrossFit gym. And so, you know, to the extent that anything weird you look at will inevitably have some CrossFit tie in, there it is. There it is.

The intersection between operators and CrossFit. We're talking to Anna Merlin and Tim Marchman about their fantastic reporting for Vice News about Tim Ballard and Operation Underground Railroad is really grueling, thorough, difficult reporting. So we're going to put that in the show notes. Please check it out. I know that the state of social media has been in chaos right now, but where is the best place to find you and your work? For now, I guess Twitter and blue sky if you're on it. And at the moment, we still work at VICE. So, you know, feel free to check out our author pages on VICE.com.

Yeah, I'm trying to avoid using Twitter these days. I am on Blue Sky, Tim. Marchman, and, yeah, my author page on VICE. And if you have any information for us, Tim.marchman at VICE.com and Anna. dot Merlin at Vise.com. Anything you want us to look into, if you happen to have done CrossFit with an anti-trafficking operator or anything of the sort. Feel free to hit us up. Thank you both so much for coming on and sharing your time with us.

And like Travis said, all of this great reporting. I know we've all followed each other on social media for a while. And it was great to actually get to sit down and talk with you both about this important work that you're doing. Thanks so much for having us. Very fun time. Thank you. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Q&ONONANANANANIS podcast.

You can go to patreon.com slash QAnonananonymous and subscribe for five. dollars a month to get a whole second episode every single week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes. If you're already a subscriber, thank you very much. It helps us stay advertising free and editorially independent. We've got a website, QAnonanonymous.com. Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you. It's not a conspiracy. It's fact. And now, today's auto queue. The Q&ONN stuff. Jim's QAnon.

Well, let's look into that because that could be really evil. Somewhere in Congress, they said Q&N is racist. Okay, we don't like that, right? But so is the Ku Klutz K. And that's another letter. It's a K.

We don't like the letter Q. We don't like the letter K, but they don't go after the letter K. I started looking into Senator Bird and he was a grand wizard. Hillary Clinton's tied to him and Joe Biden's tied to him. Now, understand, this is a clue

Klutz clan now. And there is a lot of data that can prove that the Ku Klux Klan is an evil organization. And so are the Nazis. One could say that they're also racist, but they don't go after those. Only the QAnon. Now, if I, by way of analogy, if I were, if I were the Apostle Saul and I'm a Pharisee, I'm going to go after the Christians. I'm going to take them down. Now, remove Christians and let's make it QAnon. I'm going to destroy them because the Roman told me they're evil. I'm going to destroy them because my own church staff, my Pharisee, fellow Pharisees, said, evil. I'm going to take them out. And then find, then you find out, it's not QAnon. It's Q and Anon's. And Q and Unons. And Q puts out a question. And you're not

allowed to ask questions anymore. Not allowed to. And the Anons, they look it all up. And they start looking and investigating this stuff. I never knew about them while I was doing this movie, Sound of Freedom, has nothing to do with our film. It's really interesting that they pointed to this immediately and said, that guy is one of them, he's bad.