It is lazy to just mindlessly trust anything, especially authority figures, and I was wondering while watching the new very good movie, The Sound of Freedom, how the real-life Tim Ballard did it, blending in with the cartels to act like one of them so that trust could be earned to break open the pedophile rings of modern slavery that are so much a modern problem.  You’re hanging around drug dealers and the scum of the earth, and you are trying to win them over.  There would be no way to pull it off being straight as an arrow; otherwise, they would never trust you.  You’d have to show an interest in kids and pretend to be attracted to them, which Tim Ballard had to do at the beginning of the film when he was trying to get into the mind of a significant pedophile consumer.  The movie lightly touched on that kind of life and focused excessively on the Christian side of reality.  It purposely made Tim Ballard into a hero and glorified his efforts almost to the point of a John Wayne movie.  I personally enjoyed the results.  I wanted to see a hero.  I wanted to see someone who was so firm in their convictions that it could make the tough subject matter of the movie go down easier.  But I’ll have to admit; I had doubts that Tim Ballard’s life was so heroic.  He’s likely had to see and do many things that are very embarrassing to gain the trust of the world’s scum bags.  And I’m sure those things didn’t feel very heroic to him.  But would we ever catch any of these people if he didn’t do those things? 

I gave Sound of Freedom a great review; I think it was a top-notch movie, and it’s worth seeing, for the subject matter was very serious.  But I’m also proud of many people who have let me know that there is a serious possibility that this entire movie has been a CIA operation to attempt to restore their tarnished brand with the targeted religious right.  And it would be a common trick by those types of intelligence agencies to hide much more serious crimes behind misdirection efforts.  After all, the criminals in Sound of Freedom are nobody, dime-a-dozen scum bags from Columbia and Mexico.  Nobody will miss them if they are arrested and thrown in jail forever or killed in a gun fight upon arrest.  The sex trafficking of children would continue, and life would continue as we know it.  And that was the entire point of the Tim Ballard true story, to show how deep undercover and into the danger zone he was willing to go to save a couple of kids from that terrible life.  But people have been quick to point out that the money trail does trace back to Clinton supporters and that when the CIA asked Tim Ballard to become part of Homeland Security to take on this human trafficking role because he was a person of faith and they felt that would give him a lifeline out, and back to reality without falling apart, its entirely possible this is the kind of chess game they had in mind all along.  That the story Sound of Freedom would give the religious right some red meat and hope it appeases them and makes them go back to sleep.  Because the actual crimes were in the Beltway among the rich and famous.  The Hollywood culture that likes to consume adrenochrome for its pursuits of immortal life, their own Epic of Gilgamesh in Beverly Hills.

In that regard, The Sound of Freedom played it very safe.  The bad guys were terrible, and everyone could agree on who they were.  And the entire movie was about chasing down a few of those types of people to the ends of the earth.  But it didn’t deal with John Podesta’s Pizzagate controversy and the high-end user debacles of Epstein Island that are undoubtedly major problems in the news, and to what role the CIA plays in feeding this criminal network, just as they have been caught doing with the illegal drug network.  The cartels have risen to fill a market need.  So why is there a market need?  Sound of Freedom points out the problem in a way that essentially says, “hey, look over there, at those bad people deep in the rebel-held territory of Columbia.  But don’t look at the safe house in Washington D.C. that is feeding these kids to consumers in Chevy Chase, Maryland, while dad sneaks away from the home, telling the family he’s working late.  But what he’s really trying to do is have sex with kids hoping to psychologically turn back the clock before he has made a bunch of unforgivable mistakes in life.”  And then how do intelligence agencies and corporations use such compromised people to gain power in the world through extortion?  Some huge questions in Sound of Freedom are deliberately pushed off to the side for narrative convenience.  If the movie did tackle those topics, it would likely be very depressing, and it would be hard to justify the price of a ticket. 

I personally think the CIA uses people like Tim for just these kinds of purposes.  And the role that Angel Studios plays in the distribution of this movie I think is sincere.  I love The Chosen and think the family who set up that studio are good people trying to do good things for all the right reasons.  But are they all being used to contain the message of child trafficking to acceptable limits determined by the CIA?  Well, probably.  This is a story that props up government efforts against sex trafficking and makes you want to cheer on the good guys punishing the bad guys.  But it’s pretty safe in the stereotypes.  The CIA has no problem throwing a few lowlifes under the bus for their own preservation.  And I’m glad people are talking about the Sound of Freedom in such an “awake” way.  It’s good to be skeptical.  And it’s good to question Tim Ballard’s and his wife’s integrity.  I want to believe there are people like him in the world and that we aren’t all being played for suckers.  But experience says that such people don’t exist.  Either way, The Sound of Freedom is a movie worth telling to an audience that needs to hear it.  But trust in government and government workers in Homeland Security and the CIA is a bridge too far.  There is a lot more evil going on in the world besides the terrible circumstances of this movie.  And when the CIA starts standing for good in the hard cases and busting the rich and famous on moral grounds of right and wrong, we can have a different conversation.  But as of now, we must scrutinize everyone because institutionalism tends to corrupt everything it touches, even the good people who work within it with an “ends justify the means” mentality.  Playing nice with the bad guys usually means doing bad things too.  And that’s not something to celebrate.  It’s something to punish. 

Rich Hoffman