Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 835 | 'Sound of Freedom' Sabotage: What’s Going On? | Guest: Tim Ballard

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV

Starting point is 00:00:36 or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Tim Ballard is an anti-sex trafficking advocate who has conducted multiple rescues of children who have been kidnapped and sold for sex. His story is the center of a new box office hit, The Sound of Freedom starring Jim Caviesel, shining a light on the horrors of the global sex trafficking industry. The media, though, are not happy about the film and its success. They're calling it a part of the Q&ON conspiracy theory. Ballard is here today to discuss the film and the media's troubling reaction to it. Also, a couple things, if you're watching on YouTube, you'll notice that his video feed is a little off.

Starting point is 00:01:20 The audio is perfectly fine, though. And also, if you're listening or watching to this, you know it looks and sounds a little different. I am recording remote, but this is an awesome conversation. You're not going to want to miss it. Wow, there's so much, so much to be learned from the discussion that we're about to have in this movie. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to Go to GoToad Ranchers.com. Use Code Alley at checkout.

Starting point is 00:01:44 That's goodranters.com. Code Alley. Tim Ballard, thanks so much for joining me. I'm sure it's been a very exciting couple weeks for you. A lot of media coverage about Sound of Freedom. First, just tell us about it. Tell us why you made this movie for people who may not know. Well, I spent 12 years as a special agent with the U.S. government undercover operator working child crimes cases.

Starting point is 00:02:18 Ten of those years were on the border, a southern border with Mexico. And I just got frustrated with the bureaucracy, the inability to, to, you know, to do my job appropriately because, you know, child trafficking knows no borders and boundaries, and yet sovereign governments do. And so that creates a conflict. And I was working a case in Columbia in 2012, also one in Haiti. I thought I could make them both U.S. cases. I over-extended. It probably went a little further than I was supposed to go. And ultimately, I had to make a choice, either finish these cases that I believed would end in trial rescues, or or come home and keep my job.

Starting point is 00:03:02 And my wife and I ultimately decided to quit the government job so we could do these two rescue operations. So the sound of freedom is basically that story. That's kind of how it kicks off. In the end, it ended up being one of the largest rescue operations that we know of in Columbia. And that was, so that's kind of the basis for the film. I never dreamed they'd make a movie about this.

Starting point is 00:03:25 But when the producers saw the story, in the news they came and asked us if we would let them do our story on a future film. So here we are. And here you are. And how close is this to your actual experiences, the movie? So of course they take liberties. You know, I'm very open about the fact that they make Jim Caviesel. Caviesel makes me look way better than I am, way close.

Starting point is 00:03:57 cooler. But I will say that all the good guys are real, all the bad guys are real, all the kids are real. These are all true stories with liberties taken, of course, but what happens to these kids is actually what happened to them, or worse, frankly. So it is an accurate depiction of how this operation goes and how others go as well. Right. And the movie has done extremely well outperforming Indiana Jones, Angel Studio, Sound of Freedom took the top spot at the U.S. box office on July 4th, beating out Disney's recently released and highly anticipated Indiana Jones and the dial of destiny as the, as it was being reported, the new film scored 14.2 million at the box office versus Indiana Jones 11.7 million. I mean, that is pretty

Starting point is 00:04:49 darn incredible, especially for a movie. movie that people may describe as not exactly being mainstream because it's not this big Hollywood production, even though it's very well made. It's something that, you know, really a contingency of Americans supported and wanted to see. And wow, it's been insanely, insanely successful. It has. In fact, the recent numbers through this weekend were now at $40 million in box office ticket sales. And what's interesting, Allie is Disney actually owned this movie for a while. Fox made it.

Starting point is 00:05:29 Disney popped Fox and Disney was going to shelve it. I mean, we were freaking out. They're like, we don't have any interest in putting this out. I mean, this movie's been done since 2020. It was supposed to come out in 2020. So the producers wrestled it away from Disney, got it back. And then finally, we connected with Angel Studios. And now we have this strange, almost poetic justice.

Starting point is 00:05:53 Disney had the film and the film's beating their own, you know, they're Indiana Jones and not by a little bit in the theaters where, you know, where we're competing. So it's kind of an interesting story. Yeah, it is really interesting. And it just goes to show that this is something that people want to know about. I mean, it's the most really disturbing subject that you can really think of. I'm not sure if anyone could conjure up anything more evil than child sex trafficking.

Starting point is 00:06:23 And yet, I think people look around and they see, this is a problem. I need to know more about it. Also, I want a message of hope that tells me something, someone is doing something about it. I think that's part of why this movie has been so successful. I think another part is because, I mean, the mainstream media has demonized it so much, has basically gaslit the American people into thinking sex trafficking is not a thing. It's not a big deal. it's just a conspiracy theory.

Starting point is 00:06:54 Don't go see this or else you're going to be linked to extremism. And instead of listening to them, I think a lot of people said, I think I'm actually going to go check it out for myself. What do you think? It's exactly what's going on. It's the most bizarre reaction by the left. I can't even understand this. This was never supposed to be political.

Starting point is 00:07:14 These are real children. And they're having a hard time. It's hilarious, actually, because they're trying to say, this movie is Q&N, you know, adjacent and all these things. But they can never go specifically into the film and say, here's the Q&N part. Because, you know, like, where's the part where Tom Hanks and Hillary Clinton are drinking the blood of babies or there's underground cities or these are real kids. And, you know, my message to those people, those critics, like the CNN commentator

Starting point is 00:07:44 the other night, you are not hurting me or Jim Caviesel. That's what you think you're doing. by disparaging this film, you are hurting real children who want their story told. These are true stories and that's what you're doing to kids. You're further abusing them by pretending that their story is somehow a conspiracy theory. It's grotesque what they're doing. And it just shows that they don't care about kids. Hey, this is Steve Deast.

Starting point is 00:08:16 If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe. believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos.

Starting point is 00:08:43 If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this Steve Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to come to any other conclusion when you've got a story about sex trafficking rescues. That's what this is about. It's not political and it's not, you know, it's not even ideological.

Starting point is 00:09:16 It's just saying this is a real evil that's going on that we all should be able to unite in pushing back against. And yet, for some strange reason, you've got people in the media demonizing it. And I can't come to any other conclusion. except for that they don't care. And I don't want to even say, I don't want to say this, but it's hard to see how it wouldn't even be described as a position of supporting the perpetuation of this kind of injustice. I mean, these are some of the headlines that we're talking about.

Starting point is 00:09:48 The Washington Post, Sound of Freedom is a box office hit whose star embraces Q and on. I mean, I don't even know if any of us can accurately, like, define what Q&ONN is, but it's you know, something this right-wing conspiracy theorists. There's a bunch of like Hollywood elites coming together to traffic children. That's what they would, that's what they would call it. The Washington Post says that Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post fact checker, found no evidence for your claim. Ballers claimed that 10,000 children are smuggled into the United States annually, a line that apparently made its way into Trump's state of the union dress in 2019. I mean, what do you say to something like that? Well, I mean,

Starting point is 00:10:30 Are you kidding me? We have, look, the United States, we are the number one consumer of child rape videos in the world. Okay, so I call that the economy of pedophilia. And now we have over the last two years alone, 85,000 unaccompanied minors that show up at our southern border. I was on that southern border for 10 years of my career. I'm intimately connected and involved with what happens. These kids show up. Thousands of these kids, by the way, according to the CBP statistics, are under five years old.

Starting point is 00:11:04 So what's a three or four-year-old kid showing up at the border alone, but they have a little piece of paper that's called their sponsor? And what health and human services is mandated to do is call that number, no background check, no vetting, nothing other than call the number. And it used to be that the sponsor has to come to the border to pick the kid up. Not anymore. Now our taxpayer dollars are putting those kids on buses and planes and sending them to what I think is completing, likely completing the final leg of a child trafficking experience. And then you add the other pieces here. We're the birthplace of this concept called minor attracted persons. We don't want to call them pedophiles anymore because that's mean. And so let's call them minor attracted persons. And also while we're at it, let's change our sex ed programs to provide what is really pornography. to children so we can make the little brains turn to sex robots. There's a whole movement. When you connect it all together, you see why someone doesn't want the truth coming out.

Starting point is 00:12:04 There's a movement right now. I think a lot of it, Ali, is spiritual warfare. I think when people act so insane, sometimes I can only chalk it up to that. We're playing with powers beyond our mortality even, because it's absolute insanity that the people that are trying to say this film is fake or whatever, are also the people who are saying pedophiles should be an accepted, protected class of people called minor attractive persons. So you put that together. And they're also the people that want the borders to be open, irregardless with the fact that all these unaccompanied small children

Starting point is 00:12:39 are being brought in and delivered to who knows who. So there's an agenda and it's sick and children are in the crosshairs. Yeah, according to the Polaris project in 2021, there were 10,359 trafficking situations reported a total of 16,554 likely victims of trafficking were identified. And those are probably undercount. So this is, I mean, this is a problem even far beyond, I think our greatest estimations can quantify. You have the Guardian saying, Sound of Freedom, the Q and on adjacent thriller, seducing America, Rolling Stone.

Starting point is 00:13:16 Sound of Freedom is a superhero movie for dads with brainworms. And for those who don't know, brainworms is kind of a term used to deride people who you think are conspiracy theorists, says that there is a delusion of sex trafficking that foments moral panic, according to the Rolling Stone, for years over this grossly exaggerated epidemic of child sex trafficking. I happen to know that some of the journalists at the Rolling Stone, some of them have written hit pieces about me. their work actually does have a history of defending pedophiles. And so I'm not saying this particular journalist of this piece, but other journalists certainly at the Rolling Stone do have that history.

Starting point is 00:14:02 So you don't really have to leap that far. And then Jezabel is a left-wing outlet. Says Sound of Freedom is an anti-child trafficking fantasy fit for Q&On. And so again, I mean, it looks really, really bad, I think, for these journalists to basically just come out and say, look, this is not something we want to talk about. We don't want to shine a light on it. We don't want you to see the atrocity of what's going on. Of course, people are going to ask, wait, why? Why is this your hill that you want to die on? Why is this the thing that you want to defend? Why did this become political? Because if you're

Starting point is 00:14:40 telling me that it's now a right-wing position to be anti-child rape, anti-child sex trafficking, that makes me some kind of right-wing extremist. What they're going to find is that more and more people will then voluntarily identify as a so-called right-wing extremist because, yeah, most people are sane people, decent people are against child sex trafficking. It's really telling what side they're putting themselves on. It is. And, you know, in August we're planning an event.

Starting point is 00:15:10 These are real children. And this cooperation went down on October 11th, 2014. and they're young adults now, and we still are with them. We're still helping them. In fact, they form their own group of these kids that were rescued that you'll see in the film.

Starting point is 00:15:25 And they're going to come together and they're very excited about this story because it empowers them. And I would invite you reporters from the, this is my challenge to you, I'll invite you, you guardian folks, you Washington Post people, Jezabel, whatever.

Starting point is 00:15:40 I want you to come and look into the faces of these survivors who went through hell as depicted in that film and you tell them it's a Q&ON fantasy. Please, I would love to watch that exchange. You're all welcome. I'll make sure you get tickets to the event. I can't imagine the horrors that you have seen. I think even those of us who are distraught about the existence of this, like we even forget that these are faces, like these are people, these are little image bears of God who have really had these experiences. It's not just like, oh, this massive issue over here that

Starting point is 00:16:26 needs to be solved. I mean, we are talking about individuals, children, the most vulnerable people undergoing the like worst kind of torture and misery that we can even imagine. And I mean, it's just beyond me how other people's heart wouldn't break just as much over something like that. There's also been, I mean, there's been reports. I'm sure you've seen. There's been reports of people having like a difficult time seeing the movie at the theater. I'm not saying that this is necessarily something that's happening intentionally, but I just saw people talking about it online that they tried to go see the, they tried to go see the movie. And an AMC customer said that the theater discouraged her from seeing sound of freedom by saying that the air conditioning was out. And apparently that's happening at multiple theaters across the country.

Starting point is 00:17:23 I mean, talk about spiritual warfare. I don't know if that's really happening, but strange and crazy if it is. We are getting reports coming in. I've never heard of this. I've seen many movies in my life. People are getting emailed by the theater saying, we have refunded your ticket. Please don't come because there's some functional issue.

Starting point is 00:17:44 Yeah, air conditioning is one of them. And the people show up anyway and say, I don't want refunded. I want to watch the movie. And the air conditioning works. You know, and it's, I mean, Again, I'm a big believer in spiritual warfare. You know, you see miracles from God and you see the opposite of miracles and strange happenings that from the other side. And that's what this is.

Starting point is 00:18:05 And again, there's a mass movement. You know, I was at the, I was at the Hill, Speaker McCarthy's office. And they were asking us, how do we wake people up, the left, especially to what's happening on the border? And, you know, they say, we can't understand why they don't care about these kids. And I explained to them, you got to look at it through spiritual warfare. There's all these connection points from the sexualization of our kids with the material they're giving me in school to this crazy idea that a 13 or 14 year old girl can self-mutilate and have and consent to such a thing. Why is that concerning? Because there's nothing at that point that's allowing them to consent to have sex with an adult pedophile.

Starting point is 00:18:48 You know, all these things, kids are in the cross hairs like never before. And the film Sound of Freedom will convert people to see the truth that we need to put kids in a place of absolute protection. They should be the first and last thing we think about when we are devising any kind of policy in this country. Instead, they seem to be in the crosshairs of everything we're doing. Yes, I always say that kids are the unconsenting subjects of progressive social experiments or whatever it is, adults whims. it's like kids are always being asked to sacrifice their well-being, their safety. I mean, whatever policy we're looking at, whether it's abortion, their rearrangement of the family, kids are always being asked to sacrifice to do difficult things on behalf of adults who want to make

Starting point is 00:19:38 money, adults who want to fulfill their desires, whatever it is. And that is a disordering of society. That's exactly the opposite. The strong are supposed to sacrifice on behalf of the most vulnerable, not the other way around. and of course sex trafficking is the most grotesque example of that disordering. I saw this story. I don't know if you saw it. It came out yesterday from the New York Post that a U.S. Marine was taken into custody

Starting point is 00:20:04 after a missing 14-year-old girl found in Barracks at Camp Pendleton. So a missing 14-year-old girl who has learning disabilities allegedly ran away from home on June 9th was found recently inside the Brax at a Marine Corps base camp Pendleton in San Diego where she had been sold for sex and raped. And so, I mean, this is happening in places where I think a lot of people don't want to look. A lot of people just don't want to think about. And it doesn't always look like crossing the borders and in South America, which obviously is terrible. I mean, this stuff is happening in the United States with runaways, with young vulnerable

Starting point is 00:20:43 girls and boys, meeting predators online, being groomed. I just don't think there are enough safeguards in place because there's not enough awareness. That's exactly right. And in fact, I executed, produced a film, a documentary with DNA films that we just released, and it's available now on Amazon. It's called It's Happening Right Here. And we get into all those issues. We got so tired of people saying, oh, yeah, but that doesn't happen here. That happens in faraway places in Southeast Asia or, you know, the dark corners of Latin America. And we kept saying, no, it's happening right here. It's happening right here. Just as you described it, Ali, with these access points. Often they begin online, runaways, and we go through

Starting point is 00:21:26 the whole spectrum on how parents and guardians and teachers should be safeguarding their kids. Instead, the very cultures and laws that protect kids are being chipped away at. That's my biggest concern. I used to think that I might be out of a job someday because perhaps by some miracle we'd be able to rescue all the kids. Now I'm worried I won't have a job because all the laws required for me to do my job to protect children are being chipped away at as we're normalizing child sex in this country. So this culture war is what we have to win first to preserve even the ability to keep kids safe. You know, like we were saying earlier, if there's one thing that the left and the right should be able to unite over, it's this. It's that this is disgusting. This needs to

Starting point is 00:22:24 be defeated. There was another story that I just wanted to make sure that I mentioned, because I saw so many people talking about it. And we talk about it being right under, you know, people's noses. There was Franklin, in Franklin, Tennessee, there's a soccer coach, Camilo Hurtado Campos. He has now been booked on allegations of child rape and sexual exploitation of a minor. Police described to Campos as a popular soccer coach and a 20-year resident of Franklin, a city of about 87,000 people by Nashville. During off-hours campus frequent campos frequented nearby school.

Starting point is 00:22:59 playgrounds in both neighborhoods where he had lived where he approached kids and recruited them as players on his team after gaining their trust camp was invited many of the kids to his home where he drugged them and then raped them putting this on video i mean this goes back to what you're saying about the huge demand that we have for child sex abuse material here in the united states that is i mean it's enabled not just by some of the things that we're talking about but even just the mainstreaming of pornography in general porn hub all this stuff, the access to that, I mean, it just needs to be shut down completely. So there is no incentive for things like this.

Starting point is 00:23:39 That's right. In the last eight years or so, there's been a 5,000% increase in child rape videos just in the United States alone. This stuff is being produced in mass. And because there's a sex addiction that no one wants to talk about. And that sex addiction, the reason they don't want to talk about it is because it's fueled by Hollywood. It's fueled by the content of sex.

Starting point is 00:23:59 content that's just being, that's become completely normalized. And we know what that does to the brain. You know, it overstimulates the brain. It's the dopamine becomes less effective. The more they watch adult legal porn to the point that they have to kind of jolt their system to get that dopamine endorphin hit out of the brain. So they turn to kids and child rape videos and so forth. So that's why there's two million children forced into commercial sex because there's a demand it's that incredibly enormous and it's sex addiction like this guy can't pose i saw that story as well we're going to see more and more of this until we stand up and shut down uh the porn industry at the very least educate people educate little boys especially to know that if you look at this stuff you might

Starting point is 00:24:43 as well be doing crack cocaine because that's what it's going to do to your brain eventually yes and just now with social media too it becoming more and more accessible and the kind of violent material that young girls are being subjected to and are seeing and they're beginning to think it's normal, that that's a normal sexual relationship to engage in some kind of coercion or violence and this kind of perversion and depravity. As you mentioned earlier, it is all connected. It's connected with, I think, the depravity and deception of gender ideology. It's connected to sex addiction. It's connected to godlessness. It really is all connected. And then when you have people in the media seemingly going to bat for this kind of industry. I mean, that's when you know

Starting point is 00:25:28 that you're up against something really big and really dark. But give, I mean, give people some hope. I mean, what can they do in addition to supporting the movie and going to the movie and supporting your work and these rescue missions? Like, can people have hope that things are turning around and that we can rescue more and more kids and shut this thing down for good? I hope so. I do believe so because people are waking up. That's always the first piece. People have to wake up. You know, when Abraham Lincoln met Harry Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin for the first time, he met her and he said to her, so you're the little lady that wrote the big book that started this war. What he was saying was, you people got so loud that I've changed the purpose of the war to include liberating the captive. And we need that same movement. We need the media to get loud. And this film might be the first thing to do that.

Starting point is 00:26:28 I'm associated with several organizations that fight trafficking, rescues children. One of them I founded it called Operation Underground Railroad. The other one, which I'm the CEO of, was founded by Glenn Beck in 2014. It's called the Nazarene Fund. Those are two that people can go to, amongst others, and support. because we have our fingers all throughout the world, helping and supporting law enforcement and aftercare services.

Starting point is 00:26:56 And the more support we get, the bigger we get, the more we can support the efforts to rescue, rehabilitate, and then prevent this stuff from ever happening again. And if people want to see the sound of freedom, they can just go to their local theater and hopefully the AC is working and they can go see it there, right? That's right. Angel.com forward slash freedom.

Starting point is 00:27:32 freedom is where you can go. And it's really cool. Angel Studios sets it up to where you can buy tickets for yourself and then also you can pay it forward and buy tickets for others who may otherwise and not be able to afford it. And I mean, to this day, theaters are still sold out, which is great. It's resonating with people. And we hope this could be a mass movement to really up the game. Not only to just do the extraction kind of rescue operations you see done in the film,

Starting point is 00:28:00 but on a bigger scale, to understand the plight of children everywhere. I'm fearful, as we've discussed on this show, the children who seem to be happy in gated communities in this country. I mean, they're not safe. They're not safe going to public schools. They're not safe when they have the little device that mom and dad give them and don't pay attention. You know, there's so many access points now for the devil to get into our children

Starting point is 00:28:26 and access them. And I hope this film shines light on all of them. it so that we can protect kids once and for all. Yes. Well, thanks so much, Tim. Thanks for what you do and for taking the time to come on the show and shine light on something that you're right. People need to wake up about that is the first step.

Starting point is 00:28:45 So thank you so much. Thank you, Ellie. All right, guys. Hope you enjoyed that conversation. Let me tell you all about something really exciting that is happening this Friday. The Family Leadership Summit that Blaze Media is hoping. hosting with the family leader. It's a pro-family, pro-marriage, pro-life organization,

Starting point is 00:29:11 and they are hosting the first ever presidential forum. This Friday, it's being moderated by Tucker Carlson. You're going to hear from all the candidates, like where do they stand on the issues that specifically, like, relatable listeners really care about. And then you're going to hear a lot of amazing commentary from Glenn Beck and some of the other Blaze TV hosts and commentators I unfortunately cannot be there,

Starting point is 00:29:36 but you're going to hear incredible insight from my colleagues. Go to blazmediasummit.com, subscribe and use the code summit for 30% off your subscription. So blazmedia summit.com to subscribe, use code summit for 30% off your subscription. This is the way you're going to be able to watch this forum, moderated by Tucker, blazmediasummit.com, blazmediasummit.com. All right, guys, thanks so much for listening and watching. Marrow is going to be an amazing conversation. I'm talking to a woman that you've probably heard of.

Starting point is 00:30:10 Her story is now circulating who was coerced basically by these gay men who hired her as a surrogate to abort to the child that they had created and hired her to carry because she had a severe cancer diagnosis. And so we'll get into all of the details on. that tomorrow, you'll hear the gut-wrenching story and why this really matters. So we will be back here with that interview tomorrow. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort,

Starting point is 00:31:11 We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 835 | 'Sound of Freedom' Sabotage: What’s Going On? | Guest: Tim Ballard

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