Tim Ballard attends the premiere of “Sound of Freedom” on June 28, 2023 in Vineyard, Utah.
Fred Hayes | Getty Images
Former President Donald Trump this month will host a screening of “Sound of Freedom,” the surprise hit film about rescuing sex-trafficked children that has been embraced in right-wing circles, his 2024 campaign announced Thursday.
Members of Trump’s golf resort in Bedminster, Latest Jersey, and other supporters can be invited to the screening on the club on Wednesday, the Trump campaign said in a press release that highlighted the film’s mixed reviews in mainstream media outlets.
The discharge also touted Trump’s record on human trafficking issues from his time within the White House and noted that one in all the film’s producers, Eduardo Verastegui, was a member of Trump’s Advisory Commission on Hispanic Prosperity.
The announcement comes as quite a few GOP presidential contenders — most notably Trump’s biggest challenger, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — have zeroed in on kid’s safety and connected it to other cultural wedge issues, corresponding to gender fluidity, public education and LGBTQ matters, corralled under the broad category of “parents’ rights.”
DeSantis has put those issues front and center in his campaign, leaning right into a fight with Disney that began after the corporate criticized Florida laws that limited classroom discussion of sexual orientation. The governor has repeatedly accused Disney of promoting the “sexualization of kids,” a claim that the corporate’s CEO Bob Iger slammed as “preposterous” in an interview Thursday with CNBC.
The screening also shows Trump once more embracing content connected to QAnon, a right-wing conspiracy theory that the film’s star, Jim Caviezel, has been accused of promoting.
The film, which reportedly cost $14.5 million to make, has seen an unexpected breakthrough on the box office: It raked in $14 million on its July 4 opening day, stealing the No. 1 spot from Disney’s “Indiana Jones and the Dial Of Destiny,” which got here out five days earlier. “Sound of Freedom” has made greater than $53 million as of Wednesday, Deadline reported. Only a handful of major publications, including The Latest York Times, have reviewed the film, based on Rotten Tomatoes.
Utah-based Angel Studios distributed “Sound of Freedom,” selling tickets through a web based “pay it forward” campaign. It was mostly financed through Mexican sources, The Latest York Times reported.
Purportedly based on a real story, “Sound of Freedom” follows former government agent Tim Ballard as he travels to Colombia on a mission to save lots of abducted children from sex traffickers.
The true-life Ballard is indeed a former Homeland Security agent and the founding father of Operation Underground Railroad, a nonprofit that goals to conduct sting operations to stop child exploitation. The group has faced accusations of exaggerating a few of its claims.
Ballard has testified before Congress about his efforts. In 2019, he was named to a presidential council on human trafficking. Ahead of the film’s release, Operation Underground Railroad put out a list of which parts of the film were true (the Colombian rescue operation and a few of the character portrayals, it said) and which were false (Ballard didn’t actually kill someone, the group said).
Caviezel, who starred in Mel Gibson’s controversial 2004 film “The Passion of the Christ,” and Verastegui have promoted his latest role on the podcast of right-wing media figure Steve Bannon, a former top Trump advisor. Other conservative outlets have defended the film from its critics, and Ballard has pushed back on those linking it to QAnon.
That outlandish right-wing web conspiracy revolves around the concept Trump was secretly fighting against shadowy, powerful rings of satanic pedophiles. People displaying QAnon-themed messages or espousing those views were often seen at Trump’s political rallies.
When he was asked in 2020 about QAnon, Trump said: “I do not know much concerning the movement, apart from I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate.”
