Why are our cultural elites so terrified of the blockbuster movie Sound of Freedom?

Is it perhaps because the global scourge of human trafficking is not only very real, but involves an industry that is in bed with elite culture itself?

I finally went to see the movie Sound of Freedom on July 30, which the United Nations has proclaimed as “World Day Against Trafficking in Persons”.   It was an early Sunday matinee, but even when arriving ten minutes before show time my wife and I got the very last remaining tickets. 

Against all odds Sound of Freedom, an indie flick by the upstart Christian production company Angel Studios, has in the less than a month become a smashing commercial success, outpacing in box office receipts most of its standard-issue, CGI-driven, Hollywood summer blockbuster competition.   

The film, based on real life story of a former Homeland Security agent, who rescued two Honduran children from captivity, was extremely well-made, cinematically effective, and quite authentic in its cultural contextualization of how human traffickers and their victims operate.  I, along with countless movie goers, gave it not only a thumbs up, but one of the top ratings of films I’ve seen in the last few years. 

For the record, I do not make such a judgment casually, as for over three decades now I’ve been involved, partnered, or consulted with numerous with anti-trafficking entities around the world (including the United Nations) as well as local, national, and international law enforcement personnel.

I’m quite familiar with both the hard data and the various forms of hype and disinformation regarding human trafficking, much of which I regularly incorporate into my own university classes on social justice in a global context.  I can say with a high degree of confidence that Sound of Freedom did just about as good a job as any movie for a mass audience could do in peering into the belly of the beast of “modern day slavery”, as it is called. 

It was certainly more realistic than the 2008 action thriller Taken about a fictional CIA agent who travels and single-handedly takes out bad guys across Europe to rescue his daughter from traffickers, who was abducted through a dating ruse in Paris. 

One common criticism of Sound of Freedom is that it leaves the false impression human trafficking can be readily disrupted by Rambo-style special operations such as the one shown in the movie and has become a trademark of the actual HLS agent Tim Ballard and his non-profit organization Operation Underground Railroad. 

That may be true in a certain sense, but it ignores the fact that the aim of the movie is to raise public awareness about the abomination of human trafficking, and that the artistic leveraging of a single heroic, or tragic, incident is a common Hollywood technique to bring previously underrepresented social problems to our attention. Films  such as Erin Brokovitch, The Thin Blue Line, or The Day After Tomorrow immediately come to mind.

The makers of Sound of Freedom, in fact, have self-consciously tried to market the film as the latter day equivalent to nineteenth century abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which made the public acutely aware of the evils of black chattel slavery.  The overwhelming popularity of the novel, published in 1851, reportedly prompted Abraham Lincoln himself to describe Stowe as "the little woman who wrote the book that started” the Civil War. 

Stowe’s book was considered highly “controversial” in its day, largely because it outraged Southerners and commercial interests who protested that Uncle Tom’s Cabin exaggerated the horrors of slavery and was little more than what today sociologists would dub a “moral panic”.   Today, of course, only the most extreme racists would hold to such a view.

So one honestly has to ask why in God’s green earth, once the rapid uptrend in theater receipts had become public information, there was such a backlash among news reporters and commentators from left-leaning media outlets.  Why would the very same activists who are constantly demanding that societies acknowledge and make amends for the devastation of slavery from more than a century ago in the same breath go out of their way to pooh-pooh concern for its contemporary manifestation?  

Even the United Nations itself has declared that “globally, more than 40 million people are still victims of contemporary slavery”.

The Guardian branded Sound of Freedom as a “QAnon-adjacent thriller seducing America”.  Rolling Stone sniffs that the movie “is designed to appeal to the conscience of a conspiracy-addled boomer.”  A critic for The Jerusalem Post warned it echoes “anti-semitic QAnon Conspiracies”.

Virtually all of these slams are as tenuous and ridiculous as one can get.  There is nothing in Sound of Freedom that even remotely promotes QAnon other than the fact that the main actor Jim Cavaziel has reportedly at times suggested some cogency for aspects of the well-known conspiracy theory. 

Of course, that in itself is quite a stretch, insofar as many Hollywood actors off-camera have indulged routinely over the years in extremist political bluster on their own time, which except for a few political diehards rarely dampens audience enthusiasm for, or ratings of, the particular shows in which they perform.

The problem, as journalist Elaine Godfrey writes in The Atlantic, is that America can’t bring itself to take a hard look at what should be a compelling non-partisan social issue, which the rest of the world takes very seriously, other than through a grossly blinkered culture-war lens.  “If people on the left are repelled by this movie,” according to Godfrey, who most likely leans toward the progressive side, “it’s for the same reasons people on the right feel so obligated to see it.”

The title of Godfrey’s article is “I Saw the Movie ‘They’ Don’t Want You to See”.  Why would anyone want you not to see it? 

To begin with, the global scourge of human trafficking – unlike, say, global warming or systemic racism – cannot be blamed on the usual “right wing” policy preferences or value sets.  

Quite the opposite!

For example, there has emerged over the years a strong correlation between the legalization of prostitution and sex trafficking, as the U.S. State Department acknowledged in a 2004 report. 

Moreover, a report to the Secretary General of The United Nations itself states that “the demand for prostituted sex is the engine that drives the worldwide crisis of trafficking in women, ” even while the American Civil Liberties Union just last month declaimed that “it’s time to de-criminalize sex work”. 

The ACLU argues that laws and negative attitudes against prostitution “prevents sex workers from accessing health care and other critical services, feeds an out of control mass incarceration system, and further marginalizes some of society’s most vulnerable groups, such as trans women of color and immigrants”.  

As a matter of historical record the EU country of Austria, where UN headquarters for human services and policy-making is located, legalized prostitution in 1989 with the objective of mitigating the AIDS epidemic.   The move backfired spectacularly, as numerous local professionals engaged in anti-trafficking work whom I have interviewed over the years indicate.

These professionals emphasize that legalization of prostitution has made it much easier for global organized crime syndicates to use trafficked women as legitimate fronts for complex racketeering practices that also include illegal drugs, money laundering, and arms supplying enterprises. 

Even though Austria’s criminal justice system is one of the least corrupt in the world, the country has become, according to The Global Organized Crime index, “both a destination and transit country for human trafficking and human smuggling”.

Those who come down the most for sexual freedom and the rights of sex workers are more than casually responsible, according to those I’ve interviewed, to the loss of freedom for millions of impoverished and exploited migrants from developing countries.  The blatant hypocrisy of the West’s cultural and progressive elites when it comes to the question of sex trafficking stinks to high heaven.

Another crucial factor is the explosion of the global pornography industry.  Most child exploitation and child trafficking is for the perverse pleasure of pornography consumers. 

The U.S. Justice Department reports that “technological advances, in particular the Internet and mobile devices, have facilitated the sex trafficking of children by providing a convenient worldwide marketing channel. Individuals can now use websites and social media to advertise, schedule, and purchase sexual encounters with minors.  The Internet and mobile devices also allow pimps and traffickers to reach a larger clientele base than in the past, which may expose victims to greater risks and dangers.”

According to the Federal Human Trafficking Report, “in 2018, over half (51.6%) of the criminal human trafficking cases active in the U.S. were sex trafficking cases involving only children.”   The United States is the world’s number one consumer of kiddie porn, as the publicists for Sound of Freedom accurately state.

But the child pornography industry in the past has been in bed with prominent representatives of the political establishment, which may help explain why much of D.C. is so threatened by the film. One of the most egregious cases for which few journalists, wittingly or unwittingly, have failed to connect the dots involves the conviction in federal court in 2020 of Wall Street con artist Jason Galanis on charges of defrauding an impoverished South Dakota Indian tribe out of “tens of millions of dollars in connection with the issuance of bonds”. 

Galanis, whom Forbes magazine once described as the “king of porn”, made millions from his invention of “the largest processor of credit-card payments for the purchase of dirty digital pictures”.  In 2005 he was charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission for perpetrating accounting fraud with “adult entertainment” publisher Penthouse International Inc.

Finally, he was convicted along with Devon Archer – yes, that Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s now infamous friend and financial partner as well as Democratic Party campaign contribution bundler.

Behind the global human trafficking industry lies a vast international network of corrupt wealth and undue influence, as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal brought to light.  The facts and data are not only overwhelming, but have been curated for years by highly respected researchers and government funded agencies in numerous countries.

The alarm over human trafficking can only be branded a “conspiracy theory” by those who either don’t know better or have a direct or indirect financial stake in keeping the public in the dark.  For whatever its faults or limitations might be as a film production, Sound of Freedom has been instrumental in shining a light in one small corner of the darkness.