Jim Caviezel, best known for his performance as Jesus in the shockingly violent, Mel Gibson-directed The Passion of the Christ, has long since gone over to the dark side of QAnon. Caviezel has a long history of antisemitic and conspiracy-promoting behavior, so it isn’t too surprising he’s now fully red-pilled. In 2021 he spoke at the “Health and Freedom Conference” (where election truther Lin Wood was also a speaker) on the topics of D.U.M.B.s (Deep Underground Military Bases) and the “adrenochroming of children.”
In his newest film Sound of Freedom, which hit American theaters on July 4, Caviezel plays Tim Ballard, a man with a not-so-good record of “rescuing” trafficked children. Directed by the ultraconservative Alejandro Gómez Monteverde, Sound of Freedom claims to be based on a true story. Ballard is indeed a real person and human trafficking is a serious issue that should not be taken lightly, but beyond that, everything in this film is a mess.
In 2013, Ballard started a group called Operation Underground Railroad, with the intended goal of rescuing children from trafficking. O.U.R. is supposedly a non-profit organization, but has not released its financial records for review. Ballard claims to have worked with the Department of Homeland Security before that, but this is questionable. An article published in The Atlantic stated that “spokespeople for the CIA and DHS said they could not confirm Ballard’s employment record without his written permission, which he did not provide.”
Sound of Freedom is essentially a love letter to Ballard, praising him for work that may or may not have even been done. Ballard’s mission in the film is to recover two children who have been kidnapped and trafficked, a brother and sister from Mexico. The first perpetrator he arrests has a Jewish last name and looks like Marilyn Manson without the makeup. Every pervert in the film looks like the stereotype of a pervert you’re thinking of right now. Sound of Freedom uses the words “pedophile” and “pedo” so many times that if it were a drinking game, you’d be taken out of the theater on a stretcher before the film’s end.
QAnon is definitely represented in Sound of Freedom, but not in a frontstage manner. Butterfly symbols are seen onscreen a few times, which have became part of the long-debunked but still popular PizzaGate conspiracy theory (which acted as a precursor to QAnon in 2016.) Butterflies were also used to push another QAnon precursor, Operation Monarch, which is supposed to be a mind control, government-run sex slave continuation of MK-Ultra. Those who “know” will easily recognize the symbolism.
Ballard is able to recover the brother before the sister, and he’s taken to a hospital and given an examination. The doctor reports that the young boy had been subjected to sexual abuse. There’s actually a very clever QAnon reference in this scene, when the doctor references a specialist who puts kids back together after they’ve been subjected to such abuse. In a later QAnon “documentary” Out of Shadows, a pelvic floor specialist claims it’s her job to put kids back together after they’ve been used by Hollywood elites.
In Sound of Freedom, Ballard undertakes a long, complex, expensive mission to befriend several powerful pedophiles in various South American locations. As part of the “sting,” he asks them to help create a sort of “pleasure island” populated by young children. The whole film gives the feeling of an intricate backstory someone might come up with in case they themselves are ever caught with child sex abuse materials. In fact, the number one excuse people give when they are busted in real life is that they were doing citizen investigator work.
The biggest shame of Sound of Freedom isn’t the bad acting, dialogue, or hyperbolic representation of human trafficking — it’s the damage it potentially does to groups (unlike O.U.R.) who are actually trying to help people caught in the web of this very real and tragic evil. Anyone who went into this film without knowing about Caviziel’s love affair with QAnon, or Ballard’s apparent love affair with himself, could easily walk out and see predators everywhere. Vigilance is a good thing, but hypervigilance can lead to dangerous vigilante civilian “operations.”
One of the main tenets of QAnon is that the ever-present cabal that runs these trafficking operations is so powerful that they control everything else as well, including Hollywood and the media. Ironically, the fact that Sound of Freedom even got made disproves everything QAnon believes.
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