There Are No Girls on the Internet - Moral panic over trafficking gets a movie; The writer who criticized it gets death threats. Interview with Rolling Stone’s Miles Klee

Episode Date: July 26, 2023

Rolling Stone’s Miles Klee has become a target of an extremist harassment campaign after publishing a review of the new movie Sound of Freedom.    ‘Sound Of Freedom’ Is a Superhero Movie for Dads With Brainworms https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/sound-of-freedom-jim-caviezel-child-trafficking-qanon-movie-1234783837/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Just a quick heads up. Today's episode talks about trafficking. Just enjoy this kind of like straw man enemy instead of, dealing with the rot within their own circles. There are No Girls on the Internet as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. Human Trafficking Hotline has identified 82,301 cases of human trafficking since its inception back in 2007. And as important of an issue as trafficking is, it's also true that it's become a moral panic

completely untethered from the reality of what trafficking actually looks like. To the point where Carly Russell, the 25-year-old woman in Alabama, who lied about being abducted by traffickers, repeated a pretty well-worn urban legend that traffickers use babies to lure women as part of her hoax. Traffickers are probably not using babies or strollers to lure women into being trafficked. And no one is probably putting anything on your car to mark a car

to mark you for being trafficked. And no, your child is not likely to be snatched from a target parking lot by a stranger and souls into an underground trafficking network. Yet, viral conspiracy theories online would have us all believe that this isn't just a common occurrence, but that the most powerful people in the country are also involved. And that the only person who can stop it is a rugged white man coming to save the day. In the new film Sound of Freedom, Jim Cavazel, who you might remember as crowds, from Passion of the Christ, stars as a fictionalized version of Tim Ballard,

formerly of the kind of anti-trafficking organization Operation Underground Railroad. The movie has become popular in part because of the moral panic around trafficking. And rather than showing a realistic portrayal of what trafficking and the work that goes into preventing it looks like, it leans on the same kind of misrepresentations that fuel the online moral panic around trafficking, turning the whole thing into a big hero fantasy. I'm Miles Klee. I am a culture writer at Rolling Stone, focused mostly on the internet.

Miles writes about how conspiracy theories like this one take off online. How did you come to be someone who covers conspiracy theories and all of these weird pockets of the web? Like, what draws you to them? Yeah, you know, I probably started covering the internet about 10 years ago when I was working for a website called the Daily Dot, which was totally internet-focused. And I really got into weird niche subcultures.

I always loved memes and how they were created and kind of tracing the origins of a lot of that kind of stuff. And, you know, conspiracies are something that travel very much in the same way. They go viral. They get these web forums. They get these communities that coalesce around them. This is something Miles and I have in common, the internet. More specifically, explaining some of the weirder, darker, pockets of the internet and why what's going on in them is worth paying attention to.

As a reporter, I always liked to explain what was going on in these really kind of like niche and sort of sort of impenetrable communities that get built around a lot of, a lot of jargon and a lot of ideology that, you know, the casual reader, if they're just encountering a website like that for the first time, they have no idea what's going on. And sometimes these places are also hard to find or, you know, these conversations are happening in weird little pockets of the deep web. So people don't even know that they're happening. For example, you know, unless you're on the Q&on telegram feeds, you're not going to see the conversations that are happening there and when what people are saying. So I like bringing that stuff into the light for a larger audience

and explaining as best I can, how these movements get started, why people get drawn into them and radicalized by them. And, you know, in this case, what we're going to talk about, you know, how recruitment doesn't always reflect, you know, the truth of the really dark stuff going on, because on the surface, it can be one thing. It can be saved the children, anti-trafficking, and then that leads you down the path to a much more dangerous sort of belief set. What is it about trafficking, sex trafficking, that has become this, like, very sticky thing, this very sticky, like, conspiracy that draws so many, like, especially extremists on the right.

Like, why do you think that is such a sticky conspiracy and such a good entry point to some of these extremist beliefs and thinking? I think it's interesting that when hardcore conservatives talk about trafficking, they're only talking about child sex trafficking, which is one very specific thing that is not really the large section of the problem. adults who are being forced into labor and, you know, not children being explicitly sexually assaulted and all that. The reason they focus on children, I think, would bring us back to something like the 1980s, Satanic Panic, which had a lot of the same themes.

Children are a great sort of talking point to use if you want to demonize and dehumanize your enemy, you know, crimes against children, like what could be worse than that? That's what a lot of the rhetoric is focused on is that, you know, anyone who disagrees with them is, you know, pro child abuse. They're in on it. They're probably traffickers or they probably have child porn on their computers and all that. It was a lot of the same kind of demonization you would see in the satanic panic in the 80s, which was also, again, focused on this idea that children were being abused on this massive scale. Trafficking is a hot button issue anyway. And when you make it about children and when you make it about sexual abuse, you ensure the most extreme possible reactions. And

yeah, because it's a horrible thing to consider. They know that they can play on people's emotions. And, you know, a lot of the responses I've gotten for doing a negative review of this film are extremely heated because these people have imagined a version of trafficking that is specifically focused on hurting children, harvesting their organs, drinking their blood, all this nonsense stuff that got brought up in the satanic panic in the 80s as well. So they are, you know, they're flying off the handle. And they got involved in the first place sometimes because of, you know, harmless sounding campaigns like hashtag save the children, which was really just a front for Q&ON,

because once you get people believing that, you know, two million children are, you know, they are always making up these numbers, two million children are just kidnapped off their street corners every year. They have all these crazy statistics. Once you start believing in that, then you believe in your prime to believe in a much crazier conspiracy theory. Trafficking and child sexual abuse is like a real issue. It happens. It happens. it's a serious thing, but the people who are the loudest in talking about, I guess I won't even say that, like things that are sort of seemingly related, they're invested in this fantasy version that almost never happens, right? It is extremely unlikely for a child to be snatched

out of a target parking lot or off of the street by a stranger and then sold into trafficking. And yet, the people who talk about this the loudest, they are very invested in this fantasy version and never invested in what is actually more likely, right? Adults being being trafficked for, you know, having their labor exploited, you know, children being preyed on by people they know, people in their communities. Those are not necessarily issues that they seem very loud about, despite the fact that those issues are quite a bit more common. Why do they, why do they lend themselves toward the fantasy that's like not happening? Yeah, I mean, part of this is just denial of about the reality.

You know, in the 80s, it was sort of thought that people got the idea that, like, you know, daycare and nursery school teachers were abusing children ritualistically because they were unable to deal with the fact that, you know, it was becoming much more widely known that a lot of this abuse happens within the family. And if you are a religious person, if you are a rightly and a conservative person, it's really hard to accept the fact that this thing that you kind of worship this nuclear family, like this can be the thing that creates harm to children.

That's a really hard thing to accept. And by the same token, you know, Jim Kavitzel, who in this movie is a very devout Catholic, it's about Tim Ballard, who is a devout Mormon. Both the Mormon Catholic Church have had indescribably huge sexual abuse scandals related to children. They don't talk about that at all, seemingly. And I think their attempt to turn attention to their fantasy version has a lot to do with not being able to face the abuse that is in their own communities and that they maybe even feel subconsciously complicit in. Yeah, you could be doing a lot of work to try to expose pedophiles within the churches and within these conservative institutions, honestly. but they don't do that because that would be too hard.

That would be admitting that they are on the wrong side. So they make up a boogeyman of cabal, a cabal of pedophiles that are Democrats, they're liberals, they're Satanists, they are totally outside those conservative circles so that they can just enjoy this kind of like straw man enemy instead of dealing with the rot within their own circles. For folks who might not know, if you've not heard of this film, then I envy the life that you live on the internet. But for folks who might not know, what is the Sound of Freedom? So the Sound of Freedom is a theoretically a thriller drama based on the life of Tim Ballard, who's a real guy.

And he is the founder of something called Operation Underground Railroad, which is a Utah-based anti-trafficking or organization, which is focused on something called the rescue model, or it's often criticized as the rescue industry by other anti-trafficking groups, as something that's sort of counterproductive, exaggerated. You know, the real work of fighting trafficking, as a lot of these orgs say, is slow and bureaucratic and, you know, takes into account, you know, care for victims after they are brought out of these situations, a lot of counseling, a lot of psychological work. Whereas OUR, is focused on the PR of heroics or apparent heroics because they exaggerate all their missions and so on. They are styled as a sort of, you know, paramilitary that goes into these third world

countries. They can't operate in the U.S. obviously. So they go abroad and they claim to be, you know, at best sort of helping local law enforcement in these other countries. But as I say, they have really distorted the truth of what they do and been criticized by almost every legitimate human trafficking organization while sort of not completely endorsing Q&A ideas but not really doing that much to distance themselves either. So the movie focuses on Tim, he's played by Jim Kavitzel. It is supposed to be the story of how he went from being a federal agent who did bus of guys who were doing, uploading child pornography to the web, went from doing that to ultimately trying to hunt down actual pedophiles, usually by posing as one himself, which makes for an odd hero in the

movie, I have to say, he's 75% of the time he's supposed to be, like, acting as a pedophile. So a little weird to be reading for that guy. They're just trying to ensnare these, you know, various nefarious people down in Columbia. and in the end he's really trying to go after this one girl because the first boy he rescues in the film is the brother of this other girl who is still missing and he has to go deeper and deeper into foreign territory ultimately like into a jungle controlled by Colombian rebels to rescue this girl all of which is made up and it is being treated this film as I should say almost a documentary.

It says, you know, at the beginning, based on a true story, you know, which, you know, there are elements that are true. There is a guy named Tim Ballard who pretends that he does this stuff. And, yeah, it really hammers this message that child sex trafficking is really bad, which I don't know why you need a movie to tell you that. Obviously, that's not good. we don't need to see it sort of depicted over and over as it is in the film. It's very lurid.

It's almost the audience I was watching it with was sort of just totally captivated with these scenes, these preludes to like a child being abused by an adult in a very voyeuristic, uncomfortable way. But for the people who see it and support the film, they come out of it thinking they've basically done activism by, by watching this and be raising awareness of of the problem and so on that is what they're in it for and they're in it for this white savior narrative of this guy Tim this Mormon blonde kind of you know a fat dude who says enough of the red tape in Washington I'm going down there and I'll do it myself damn it they just love this vigilante narrative so yeah that's the movie

even beyond, I mean, yikes, even beyond some of the, like, odious depictions of child sexual abuse, it just sounds like a movie where you have a lot of questions, like, the choice to make this, the hero, like, narrative questions, like, oh, the choice to make the hero pretend to be an abuser, but then you're supposed to be rooting for him, you know, a lot of, a lot of questions about some of the, some of the logic of the film. But you really hit on something with this idea that I think there is something very enticing to a certain audience of one white guy kind of going rogue and rushing in and bringing down an entire trafficking ring that is sort of enticing to right-wing extremists, right? I think it mirrors how a lot of them talked about Trump, like a lot of Q&O people especially talked about Trump. And I also think that, you know, when you talked about what some actual anti-trafficking work looks like, it's not a guy kicking in a door and, like machine gunning down rebels and grabbing kids and running out. And then as soon as the bad guys are behind bars, the kids are just fine and go back to their normal lives. The work is long term. It's probably pretty boring. It probably involves a lot of like working with counselors and

things like that. But that's not what these people are interested in. They're not interested in the long term boring work. If it's not somebody kicking in a door and shooting a gun, they don't seem that invested. Like, why is that narrative so intense? enticing. Because, you know, it's revenge. You don't, you don't actually want to solve a problem. You want to take revenge on these people and in a violent way. I mean, the QAnon Central Tenant is the coming storm, you know. They were hoping that Trump one day would just say, you know, ladies and gentlemen, the storm was upon us. I have arrested, you know, several million pedophiles who were in top government and media and entertainment positions.

And, you know, what they really yearn for as is made clear in some of the death threats I've gotten is like they want basically public executions of people that they think have touched children or whatever. That is very explicit in the feedback I've gotten and in a lot of Q&on lore. It is a pure violent fantasy. And yeah, I think I think it's that simple. I think it's a bloodlust and, you know, they've made, they've constructed the most unforgivable possible villains for their worldview in order to kind of justify what they

maybe wanted anyway, which is just to execute Democrats, right? Like, you can't, you know, you can't, it's almost like you can't muse about, you know, hanging Joe Biden from the gallows unless you do the work to convince yourself that he has sexually assaulted children. And so that's why they're always posting videos of Biden like sniffing kids or whatever their obsession is. Right. Like yeah, I think Biden's a weird, has a weird, touchy relationship with the public. But you do have to do some work to say, okay, and he's actually in on this pedophile cabal that's run out of the pizza restaurant in D.C. And we're going to round all of them up and we will all have like the best day in American history when,

you know, all these people are hung from the gallows. Yeah, they are trying to justify essentially what is already violent feelings towards liberals on the left by, you know, trying to prove that they're that they're guilty of the worst thing that any of us can imagine. Wow. I mean, side note, I live in Washington, D.C., and I will never forget the day that someone brought a gun to comet ping pong. And like, what a... I'll just never forget that day. It just was like something that I hadn't really spent that much time

looking into or like hearing about all of a sudden was like, oh, they brought, like, someone brought a gun? Like, it really was for me personally when all of this stuff that you were talking about before, like these online, weird extremist pockets of the internet became very, very real for me personally. Let's take a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite.

Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah.

Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, uh, you only got in because your parents, made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name.

The Harvard Yardt. They're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app,

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And we're back. Miles published a less than glowing review of Sound of Freedom for Rolling Stone, and afterwards became a target of extremists who argued that if anyone had anything negative to say about the film, they must secretly be involved in trafficking themselves. In fact, right before Miles and I spoke for this very interview, protesters were gathering outside of Rolling Stones, New York offices, with signs referencing Miles by name. So I want to talk about the review that you wrote in Rolling Stone. It's called Sound of Freedom is a superhero movie for Dads with Brainworms. Great title. After writing that review, which is like,

I think the title makes it sound like it's like jokey, but the review itself is actually quite measured and like thoughtful and well written. It's like clear that you deeply engaged with the film. This is not like a surface snark review. After that review was published, you've now been getting these, like, pretty intense attacks for that review. What has that been like for you to deal with? You know, people worry about me, and I get that, but it's always been more irritating than scary. These people, you can tell, you know, even the more, I shouldn't say reasonable ones, but even the less kind of threatening messages,

these people don't really live in a consensus reality that most of us would recognize. A lot of them think that I'm going to be arrested any minute or I'm going to lose my job any minute. No, I have bosses who, you know, wanted me to run this story and publish it for me and stand by me and stand by the review, which, you know, as you said,

it's not even that particular that extreme. It's just a negative review of a film that is nominally based on a true story, but it's mostly fictional. And, you know, a lot of the irate responses are boiled down to, no, this all really happened, you idiot. On the death threat side, it's pretty funny because what I see in them is a desire to become like the hero they're seeing on the screen. they want to become this avenging person.

They want to come and find me and kill me because they imagine me to be like the bad guys in the movie and they want to be the good guy in the movie. Which is funny because the whole movie is an exercise in larping. You know, it's like it's live action roleplay. It's like Tim himself, you know, has totally misrepresented what he does. He's acting like he's this savior that he's not. The movie then furthers that narrative.

and mythologizes him in a completely phony way to be this vigilante character. And then everyone who watches the movie gets to imagine themselves as that person. And one way they can do that is by finding someone who had a negative review of the film deciding that that person is also a child sex trafficker because why else would you write a negative review of this movie

unless you were trying to cover up something. they decide that I've like somehow outed myself which by the way would have been very stupid of me like if I were a child trafficker I probably wouldn't go anywhere near this movie but anyway then they get to send me these really horrible emails

where they are basically talking out of their ass trying to sound really tough and scary trying to sound like they're you know it's all like I'm your worst nightmare I'm coming to find you I'm going to enjoy our conversation You know, it's like they all try to sound like Liam Neeson and Taken, which is, you know, basically what the, you know, if you made a better version of this movie, that it would probably be more like that, like a Hollywood, like a real Hollywood action movie. Because by the way, this movie is so boring. It has like no real action or tension or narrative stakes at all. It's just, it's just like trauma porn essentially. So that's what they try to sound like in these, in these threats for the most part. Sometimes they're just trying to convince me that, you know, crazy Q stuff is real.

Sometimes they're just saying that I worship Satan. Yeah, there are some protesters, apparently right now at the, you know, Rolling Stone's offices in New York who have signs calling me and another colleague who wrote about, you know, trafficking in this movie calling us demons. So that it doesn't make their side look totally on kilter. You know, I don't know that you can really get new people, recruit new people to your movement if you are, you know, accusing somebody of drinking children's blood because of a movie review they wrote, it just doesn't comport with, like, your actual stated goals as, like, you know, it doesn't, let's say this, too.

You know, a lot of them, a lot of them think that trafficking is this huge problem. Well, does harassing me do anything to alleviate the problem of trafficking? No, it's just, that's, but that's what they're focused on. because they think they've done the work by seeing this movie. They think that they're part of the solution now. And so, yeah, they have plenty of free time to just yell at me. On this show, we cover a lot of harassment and hate campaigns, and particularly among people who are marginalized, but not all.

And something that is, we see time and time again, is how people who are whipped into a frenzy and targeting somebody, they will take really innocuous, harmless things from their digital life, their digital footprint, and then add this sort of conspiratorial sheen. So you posted an innocuous and very cute, shirtless selfie, and you said, like, oh, I'm having a slut moment. And people on the internet might, like, I'm not even sure what they're trying to say. Like, it's like, this is the person who is against, who doesn't want people to see this movie that's against sex trafficking. I'm not even sure the like through line that they're trying to make,

other than that like this totally innocuous normal human behavior of posting a picture of yourself online is somehow like nefarious because you posted it. Yeah, I guess they're looking for anything that they can use to paint me as some sort of sexual deviant. Like if I have, like if I express any sexuality at all, which I will sometimes do online. A human expressing sexuality? What? Are you okay? Yeah, you know, I like to mix it up.

I like to flirt online, all that stuff. And it's like, you know, I could even talk about having sex with an adult human woman. And that would be somehow construed as like me being a pedophile. Like they would have no problem going for that. The other thing is, yeah, they will try to just, they will just take random photos. You know, there's obviously a lot of photos of me around. And I don't know, they will like just put that up in their stories about me. as if it has anything to do with like what they're supposedly accusing me of.

It's just like a convenient thing for so that people can then harass me like based on how I look. Like a funny thing I've been getting is, um, is some real weirdos, some real far out weirdos are saying that like they recognize my like physiognomy as being like a like a pedo or a deviant or whatever. Like it's literally like phrenology for child abusers. They think that they can like look at my skull shape and know. that I am, you know, that I am like abusing children. Like they literally think that it's pretty fucking wild. Some of it is just, you know, baseline, like bigotry. Like, I do have people, I'm not Jewish, but I do have people, you know,

calling me like a blood-drinking Jew or whatever. I'm not gay, but I have a lot of people using homophobic slurs. So whatever, you know, it just happens to be that I, like, live in L.A. wear tank tops. So I guess I look gay enough to them. And yeah, so so a lot of the, a lot of the, like, spreading the pictures around is just to give people something to latch on to in terms of, like, what they're going to say about you or how they're going to use your physical appearance to try to argue, you know, their non-existent point. And sometimes having the pictures is just so that somebody can screen grab it and then email you your own photo and say, like, now I know

you look like, like I'm coming to get you. And, you know, I'm not too worried about that just because these are the same people who think that all major American metropolises are war zones that they would never sniffed in. And our head of security has, you know, has tracked down a couple of the people who have sent me the death threats and said, oh, you know, this so-and-so never leaves like this hundred-mile radius of this small little, like, you know, middle America town that they live in because, of course not. And none of them really have the wherewith all our capability to find me, let alone, you know, carry out an act of domestic terror at my place of residence. So it's annoying and it's unhinged, but I will be okay. Have you ever experienced this kind of targeted hate campaign before, or is this like a new thing? Oh, sure. I mean, I guess the last big one would have been some anti-vaxxers. were very upset with me because if you call an anti-vaxxer, an anti-vaxxer, they view that

as the worst insult in the world. And so they'll harass you for like a good week. Yeah. And then, you know, over the years, there's just been various other groups that really gave it to me. Ironically, I think the funniest or the nastiest comments I ever got were when I went inside like a Facebook group for women who like shame other women's engagement rings. Oh, I know exactly the group you're talking about, actually.

I got in there and I reported on it and I was getting, and those wine moms were just harassing me for a week about that. That was pretty funny. So, you know, it's not always a conspiracy group. It's not always right-wingers. It's any kind of like extreme enough community if you report on them, honestly, they'll come after you. And yeah, I've dealt with waves of abuse before. On the right, another one was, you know, I wrote something about how companies that go woke don't actually go broke. And people have been still bringing that up and still getting pretty mad, you know, like, I'm sorry, Anhauser-Busch still exists. They're fine.

It's, you know, like, you're not drinking bud light. Who cares? They still get mad at that. But yeah, just about anything. Usually the attention like wears off after a couple days. Like they don't have, they're not super committed to this stuff for the most part. They forget. They find something else to get mad about.

They find other people to harass. And then they come back to me weeks later about another article, like just totally not remembering that they were mad at me like two months ago. So they start all over again. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan

to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. The worst singer in the group. The worst?

Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, uh, you only got in because you're, Terrence made a huge donation. The group.

The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yardt Yardt. They're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged, one erection.

Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message.

Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-8-4-I-Hart. What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano, and our podcast Point Game is about defining the odds.

Like LeBron heading into the playoffs without Luca and Austin Reed. And finding ways to win no matter what. He's the smartest player to ever play the game. His IQ is at a level that we've never seen before. And he knows. Without Luca and Austin Reeves, I got to manipulate the game. We get a player's perspective on the challenges of the playoffs. I think Joker's going to be exhausted this series

because when they don't have Rudy in the lineup, He has to really guard guys like Nas Reid. He has to guard Julius Randall. And then he has to give us everything he gives us on the night-to-night basis on offense. And when IT's friends stop by, like Quentin Richardson, we dive into some playoff history too. Steve Nass would get that thing. That man, hell get the flying. He run up the court licking his fingers while he got the ball.

Like, after you go through a training camp with that, Isaiah, you figure it out real quick. Get your ass up and down the court, and you're going to get the ball. So listen to Point Game on the I. Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get right back into it. Sounded Freedom is doing well at the box office. It made over $100 million, selling almost 9 million tickets. A new theatrical milestone for its production company, Angel Studios.

It's playing at AMC Theatres, the largest theater chain in the United States. But if you believe some theatergoers, this box office smash success has happened in spite of the best efforts of theaters to sabotage the movie. And this thing goes all the way from the bottom, the 15-year-old person selling popcorn behind the counter to the very tippy top, to AMC CEO, who, for some reason, despite agreeing to show Sound of Freedom at its 600 locations nationwide, is now trying to keep people from seeing the movie through nefarious means. Now, obviously, none of this is happening. It's just more conspiracy theories. In the fantasies of the target audience of Sounder's of freedom, the film is both being suppressed while also being wildly successful.

Movigowers have even taken to social media to complain that theaters are breaking the air conditioning, or turning the air conditioning up too high, or making the theater smell stinky, all in an effort to prevent people from seeing the truth. That is, seeing a movie they've already paid money for? Question mark? Here's what AMC CEO Adam Aaron had to say. Sadly, Conspiracy theories are so prevalent in America, so much garbage information is spread. More than one million people have watched Sound of Freedom at AMC theaters, more than any other theater chain on the planet. Yet, people falsely claim otherwise. It's so bizarre. And he's right. These are people who have been so taken in by conspiratorial thinking.

A movie theater being chilly can only be evidence of a grand conspiracy with them at the center, as both hero and victim. One big conspiracy theory about the film that I, I'm really curious for your take. It's that pedophiles and their protectors are like sabotaging showings of the film. So like the AC didn't work. The AC was working too well.

The sound was funky. Do these people no longer believe in a world where just coincidences or mistakes happen that like, you know, sometimes the AC doesn't work in an old theater, is everything part of a grand conspiracy where they are at the center? Yes. Well, they want to, first of all, they want to be the protagonist. They want to be the hero and the victim at once. That's an important thing. So not only is the film so successful, but also we're being persecuted and the movies being suppressed. They just have to have it

both ways. Always have to be the protagonist, always have to be the victim. And yes, they are living in a world where, you know, it is actually a QAnon catchphrase. There are no coincidences. That's that's, that's a tenant of the ideology. So no, they're not able to process anything that happens to them as anything other than connected to this vast web of conspiracy. So yeah, the mommy bloggers on TikTok who come out and say, oh, the AC wasn't working. I just had an email, a really deranged email from someone who insisted that AMC is spraying a bad-smelling chemical into the theaters that are showing this. And I don't know.

I think I've smelled something bad in a movie theater before and not really thought that that was part of connected to some larger plot. The movie has only been successful because it's showing in thousands of AMC theaters as the CEO has kind of crankly pointed out time and again. You know, I think, I wonder if he might be having some regrets about helping this phone get the distribution it did because, yeah, he's, they sold some, they sold some million tickets or whatever, but it's, it's not been a, not been a picnic for them. I know that if you go on Reddit, there's a really great subreddit I recommend where

movie theater employees chat to each other. And they are all just complaining about how terrible these audiences are, how rude they are, you know, trying to bring them in on the conspiracy beliefs. And, yeah, like, you know, one movie theater employee said they were not, they weren't interested in and the patron was like you. You're too woke. You need to go see this movie. It's important. And, you know, just really, just really curmudgeonly weird old boomers who are, who are, who are, who are, I think don't go to the movies that often anyway, or showing up for this one because I think it's their duty, their solemn duty to see this movie.

And then, you know, they encounter the mild inconveniences that any of us might experience at any movie showing. And, yeah, they have to build that into a drama and a drama that is part of the larger scope of all the very stupid things they believe. I feel so bad for like the 16 year old kids making a minimum wage serving popcorn at this theater just thinking like oh god these people are gonna come in and be the worst. Yeah and imagine thinking those kids are like CIA or something. Right. That they've been oh I'm sorry we planted we planted some high schoolers there to to project the film upside down and slightly blurry for the first five minutes before someone complained. It just boggles the mind. There is this real persecution complex happening that I find so peculiar where, you know, this idea that most people, whether they're in government or Hollywood or behind the counter at a movie theater, that most people are like pro sex offender, pro child abuse and that these people, well, they're the like minority few decent people who are fighting back.

I think most people would agree. Most reasonable people are like, oh, well, I obviously don't think abusing children is good. but yet they have like created this fantasy where everybody is pro child abuse except for them. Yeah. I think if you went by their estimates, probably like 90% of the country are pedophiles. Just like everyone, everyone in a major city, anyone who doesn't go to church, anyone who doesn't, you know, doesn't get in on conservative boycotts and, and vote for Trump and this, that, and the other. They are all in on it.

And, you know, that's just a way to, again, sort of other eyes and dehumanize your political opponents because, you know, they're not really satisfied with having a political or a policy disagreement, right? It's not good enough for them to say, oh, like, we think taxes should be like this, or, you know, we think welfare should operate this way. They're so beyond that. And, you know, I think it is just an element of the Christofascism that underlies QAnon that relies on, you know, not this is not really being a political dispute. It is, it is a moral and it's a religious dispute. And, you know, an element of, an important element of fascism is to, is to dehumanize your opponents.

and that way you are justified in taking, you know, the most extreme possible action against them. So it just so happens that they have to throw about 90% of the country in that bucket in order to do it. But, hey, they're all in on a grieved minority rule anyway. I mean, that's how Trump, you know, got elected in the first place. It's the angry minority trying to ride roughshod over everyone else. Something that really bothers me about this whole conversation is how it actually would be good to have, like, substantive public conversations about things like trafficking or child sexual abuse because those things are horrible and they do happen. But because these extremists just hijack these conversations and make them about fantasies and nonsense, we're not able to have them because it just turns up the temperature too much.

I'm thinking about the film cuties, which we've talked about quite a bit on this podcast, and how like I had not seen cuties and I, you know, completely. got, like, believed this horrible campaign that was like, oh, it's child pornography and this and that. And when I watched it for myself, I was like, oh, it's fine if somebody didn't like this movie, but calling it child pornography is just not correct. I looked into all of the ways that, like, that conversation was completely hijacked by people who were not based in reality and how easy it was for people who were just sort of casually following it to be like, oh, it seems like this movie was bad. Even today, I see. see so many people saying, like, this movie was proof positive that Netflix and Hollywood is run

by child abusers. Even when I was researching for this conversation, I saw somebody tweet like, oh, well, of course Miles didn't like Sound Deaf Freedom because he really liked this pervert movie and it linked to a Rolling Stone piece. I guess I wonder, are we past the fact where we can have public conversation about these issues that are so important in ways that are real? And that actually are grounded in what trafficking looks like and how to prevent it, or the kinds of pressure that young girls, like in the movie, cuties are actually facing. Everything seems to be just so skewed toward fantasy and inflammatory nonsense.

Have we lost the ability to have these real conversations? Yeah, I don't know. I think it is something we have to really concentrate on fighting. You know, the irony of the whole cuties thing, by the way, I've never seen that. I didn't write that article. That's just another Rolling Stone article from before I worked here. And I did get a lot of responses of, you know,

you must have loved cuties, whatever. You know, which I think, you know, was accused of sexualizing the children, but doing it from a satirical point of view. I don't know. But the funny thing is, Sound of Freedom is also sexualizing children. There's an entire scene of this trafficker woman who's kind of getting the girl dolled up like she's getting, you know, doing a beauty. which I think is what Qaeda is about, right?

She's like, she's, you know, she's doing her hair. She's putting, she's putting lipstick on her, even though she's only like seven years old. You know, this is all, they're doing the same thing in a sense. They are sensationalizing this and they are enjoying the spectacle of, you know, these children being trafficked. It's really horrible. On the, on the ability to have the conversation, yeah, we are too many people are really caving, I think, to these outside pressures. I was just reading a story about in Michigan,

about this woman who ran a nonprofit for children who were sexually abused, and she'd run this for about 25 years, doing really important, really good work to help these children who had been traumatized and so horribly treated. She was basically forced to retire early by a mob in the and the county that was, you know, calling for her head because the nonprofit had happened to support a pride campaign. So these anti-groomer lunatics showed up, you know, city council, just demanded that she go. And, you know, this is someone who is like, going to retire, like, maybe next year. She's like, she's like, fuck it. I'm just leaving now. I'm, I don't want to deal with this. And that is something we have seen in school boards and local governments all across the country is

a lot of reasonable people don't want to sit there and be screamed at by conspiracy theorists like at every public meeting. So they just leave and then the crazies take over. So that's a real problem and that's part of the reason we're not able to have these conversations is that a lot of these institutions are being taken over by people who believe this crazy stuff. I mean, I did get a threatening email from a guy who is literally on like a mental health board. in the county where he's from. So I had to forward that to like his boss basically and say like, you know, it's this guy okay. Imagine sending you that attached to your real name.

He had his phone number in the email. Like it's just, I don't know. It just goes to show you how far gone they are and how, you know, how detached they are from the consequences of what they're saying and doing. Because they think they're right and they think they will be, vindicated in the end, but, you know, that storm is never going to come. They're never going to get the big finale they're waiting for, but they can just keep putting it off forever and keep doubling down and keep accusing everyone else of all the stuff that, you know, oh, actually, like, you know,

it's probably the youth pastor in your town who's abusing kids, but, you know, sure, keep emailing me. You know, you write in your review that the film is, like, for the most part, kind of grounded in our universe as opposed to being like completely completely over the top and like overtly Kuanani. Do you think that that is to sort of draw more people who might think of themselves as more moderate into all of this? Well, to be clear, the movie was finished before Kuanon really took hold. I think it was finished in 2018. So they didn't really even have the opportunity to make it as crazy as, you know, some of the stuff that Jim Kavitzel says, because Kavitzel says that they're drinking children's blood and harvesting their adrenochrome.

all that. There was never going to be that kind of stuff in the film because it's just it was made too long ago. What is useful about that from the point of view of recruitment is yes, it does seem more reasonable and it does seem like a more grounded cry for justice. The average person who went in there without any context would maybe think the movie was like a little bit slow and depressing, but they would not think to immediately connect it to like some wilder conspiracy theories. It's useful because it taps into the same ground level fears that get people into QAnon, you know, save the children campaigns, that kind of thing. if you can be convinced that this is a problem the way Tim Ballard and his organization

had described it, then you are much more susceptible to believe the crazier and crazier things that have emerged basically since they finished making this movie. Because that, the crazy QAnon stuff is built on the original conception of just, oh, there's two million children get snatched off the street every year. you know, that was the starting point, you know, when OUR was founded in like 2013, that's the narrative there. And we need to have a rescue industry. We need to parachute in there and get them. That was the starting point.

And that was, you know, all very catered to a religious crowd, to a right wing crowd. And it eventually mishastasized into the Q&ON we know today. So in a way, what you're seeing with this movie is a predecessor to a lot of the views that followed. and at that sense, it could very easily be the thing that gets people down the rabbit hole. Do you see it being used as a recruitment tool long term? I was joking with some friends on another podcast because I think everyone has, at least anyone who went to public school has the experience of, remember when they showed us this movie in health class for some reason because it was supposed to teach us something.

I mean, I remember learning about like menopause and menstruation, both from two different special episodes at the Bill Cosby Show. So we were joking that like that someday this is going to be shown in like schools. That

that a you know, possibly even well-meaning health teacher and maybe a conservative area would say oh I should I should show like my ninth graders this movie to warn them about the dangers of human trafficking or you know something like that.

Like I really do think it will be held up as this, you know, important message movie and like, you know, potentially, yes, you could use it on the path to like indoctrination as far as just trying to convince people young and old that this is the reality of trafficking. And, you know, you saw that on the Q&On boards too when it came out. They were very excited about some older audiences seeing this. they were pleased that it wasn't too crazy because it wouldn't it wouldn't turn off the average viewer right away they might be drawn deeper into into the conspiracy rabbit hole

I don't know I don't know how long-term successful it can be just because it is a really bad unpleasant film like on the face of it and it would probably be more effective. It was better made, more and more entertaining. Like, it's not a well-written movie. No, no. And I think we actually already have hit our upper limit on, like, who is going to see it. I think everyone who was going to see it has seen it.

So it will be up to those people to, I don't know, try to force it on their children, which is, again, when my friends and I were joking about it on another podcast, which is, yeah, can they keep it going? Can they sustain it as this like emblematic, you know, triumph? I don't know. I don't know that they would even bother to because they, again, they get so distracted so easily, they just move on to the next thing. And, you know, once they're done supporting this,

there's going to be something else in Angel Studios, you know, is gearing up to release a few more movies. And, you know, they're going to be the big, I think, right-wing. religious alternative to like Hollywood production. So we're likely to just get more stories and, you know, about other other themes that appeal to this demographic and they're just going to go to those movies instead and probably forget about this one. I could absolutely see this movie being shown to health classes in like five years time.

I went to school in the South. This is exactly the kind of movie they would have shown us. And I think I've said this on the show before, but before the first time I traveled to Europe, my dad was like, you've got to watch this documentary about staying safe overseas. And it was taken. It's like, this is not a documentary. One of my last questions for you is, you know, I've seen possibly like well-meaning people say that even if this film is not an accurate representation of trafficking, which it's not, it's still good because it raises awareness about the issue. And like any awareness is. good awareness, you know, what do you say to that? You know, awareness is overrated anyway. Who cares if you're aware? That's, it's a pet peeve of mine, honestly, to be like, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't even have to apply to this, you know, like awareness of breast cancer, like, okay, I'm aware of it, but like my awareness doesn't really contribute to solving the problem, right? That's one.

Two, I don't think awareness can have any value if the awareness you have is a misrepresentation of the issue. It doesn't help people to be misinformed, unless what this movie is. It's misinformation. There's a lot you could read, and there are a lot of other trafficking organizations you could listen to, but that's not just like a two-hour movie. You can plop down with your popcorn and feel like you've accomplished something. So no, the awareness is not helpful. Yeah, at all.

Miles is right. I think we've awarenessed the discourse around trafficking so much that the way we talk about it is no longer grounded in reality anymore. So how could that awareness ever be helpful? The actual red flags and warning signs have taken a backseat to fantasy and urban legend. When Carly Russell wanted to fake her own abduction, It's telling that she just recreated something that sounds like it's out of a movie. It tells me that our understanding of the issue has been completely warped by misrepresentations

masquerading as raising awareness. And in the end, it actually makes us all less safe. If you want to hear more of my thoughts specifically on the Carly Russell abduction hoax and what it says about our discourse around trafficking, check out our Patreon at patreon.com slash tangoody. So as soon as I heard her say that, I was like, this story is probably going to turn out to be more than it sounds. I didn't know the lengths to which this was a hoax at that point. Like I was like, you know, wait and see. But I saw people that I trusted retweeting that story.

And I can totally understand why. Even though I knew that something more was happening to this story than a woman. being kidnapped and trafficked. I still didn't want to openly be like she's lying or something is not right here. I think it's the same reason that a lot of people felt that when it comes to black women or other marginalized people,

we are not often listened to or supported or believed when we speak up about facing abuse, when something is happening to us, right? Like, we know that marginalized people are overwhelmingly, likely to be the victims of crimes, yet our stories are often underreported or not told at all. And so I think that's one of the reasons why,

even though I didn't think this story was like on the up and up, I wasn't going to be like, she's lying, whatever, because it's this weird thing where you don't want to be the person that is not believing of black women when we know black women are so statistically unlikely to be believed. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello at tangoody.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoody.com.

There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of IHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tarry Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio,

check out the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts. or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and Friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, S&L's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel,

help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas.

And I'm C.J. Toledano. It's our favorite time of the year on our podcast, Point Game, the playoffs. We're digging into the biggest surprises of the season. And I'm looking back on some of my greatest playoff moments. If we didn't talk ever again, I was calling you. You just understood. That's how personal it got. Wow.

Then after that game 7, Marquis keep coming to him. He's like, you know, I love you, dog. You know, it's all love. This was just playoffs. This was just basketball. So listen to Point Game on the I Heart Radio. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. There are times when the mind becomes a difficult place to live.

This is David Eagleman with the Inner Cosmos podcast, and for Mental Health Awareness Month, we'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety. I started living in my car, and then my car got stolen. I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic. This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations about what happens when the brain goes off course.

Listen to Inner Cosmos on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.