SOUND OF QANON

From Herb Scribner and Will Sommer's 7-7-23 WASHINGTON POST article entitled "‘Sound of Freedom’ is a box office hit whose star embraces QAnon":

A casual moviegoer might not get why anyone is upset about “Sound of Freedom,” a surprise hit inspired by the real-life exploits of Tim Ballard, a former Department of Homeland Security agent who stages sting operations to catch child sex traffickers.

It’s a fairly standard American action thriller — gritty, violent and hopeful — in which Ballard (Jim Caviezel) fights to save abducted children in the Colombian jungle. The partially crowdfunded film opened this week to a solid review in “Variety,” and vied with the latest Indiana Jones sequel for the top box-office spot on July 4.

But “Sound of Freedom” has been accused by some critics of warping the truth about child exploitation and catering to QAnon conspiracy theorists — something its distributor, Angel Studios, denies. The Guardian’s critic called it a “QAnon-adjacent thriller seducing America.” And the film’s star, Caviezel, has openly embraced the extreme movement, suggesting at media events that a shadowy international cabal is kidnapping children to consume their organs [...].

[T]he movie has [..] been promoted on QAnon message boards, and some accuse it of playing into the movement, which is based on the false belief that a highly organized network of global elites are kidnapping children, having sex with them and harvesting their blood.

That’s partially because Ballard and the actor who plays him, Caviezel, have both expressed support for some of the QAnon’s movement’s wildest claims.

Ballard once entertained a viral theory that claimed the online furniture retailer Wayfair was selling children, sometimes packing them into overpriced storage cabinets. “Law enforcement’s going to flush that out and we’ll get our answers sooner than later,” he said in a July 2020 Twitter video. “But I want to tell you this: children are sold that way.” There is no evidence to support the theory, which has inspired threats against employees and impeded actual child trafficking investigations.

A month after that video, Ballard described conspiracy theorists’ support for his organization as a mixed blessing in an interview with the New York Times. “Some of these theories have allowed people to open their eyes,” he said. “So now it’s our job to flood the space with real information so the facts can be shared.”

Caviezel — who says Ballard recruited him onto the film after seeing him star in“ The Count of Monte Cristo” (2002) and Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” (2004) — has espoused even more extreme theories.

The actor appeared at a QAnon convention in Las Vegas in October 2021, giving a speech that quoted Mel Gibson’s final speech in “Braveheart” and included one of QAnon’s main slogans, “The storm is upon us,” which refers to the movement’s fight against the imagined pedophile cabal.

He has focused on one QAnon belief in particular while promoting “Sound of Freedom”: the idea that child traffickers drain children’s blood to harvest a life-giving substance called adrenochrome.

Speaking at a QAnon-affiliated conference in Oklahoma in 2021, the actor said Ballard wanted to join him but “he’s down there saving children as we speak, because they’re pulling kids out of the darkest recesses of hell right now, in … all kinds of places, uh, the adrenochroming of children.”

The moderator asked him to elaborate. “If a child knows he’s going to die, his body will secrete this adrenaline,” Caviezel said, his voice catching. “These people that do it, there’ll be no mercy for them. This is one of the best films I’ve ever done in my life. The film is on Academy Award level.”

In reality, adrenochrome is a relatively mundane chemical compound created by oxidizing adrenaline, though the author Hunter S. Thompson portrayed it as a kind of super-drug popular with pedophiles in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”

To read Scribner and Sommer's entire article, click HERE.

From Miles Klee's 7-7-23 ROLLING STONE article entitled "‘Sound Of Freedom’ Is a Superhero Movie for Dads With Brainworms":

[M]ainstream accessibility makes [SOUND OF FREEDOM] valuable as a recruitment tool [for QAnon], much as generic “Save the Children” campaigns proved gateways to far-right conspiracy theories about a secret cabal of evil elites conducting blood rituals. On the QAnon message board Great Awakening this week, adherents celebrated the movie’s box-office success (it quickly made back its modest budget of around $14 million and out-earned the latest Indiana Jones sequel on July 4, its premiere date, after the franchise blockbuster had been out for several days) while crowing that “demons,” including movie theater employees annoyed by the demographic it pulled in, were miserable at their victory.

“Do you see how more powerful we are than the legacy news?” wrote one board user. “We are the news now!” On a different thread, someone attempted to prove that Donald Trump‘s endorsement of the film on Truth Social on Thursday was connected to a random Q post from 2018 (because of the time stamps on each). Some discussed efforts to get “normies” who are “in need of awakening” to see Sound of Freedom, including with the assistance of a promotional program that allows customers to buy tickets for strangers. “Crimes against children will unite us all. Eyes are opening,” read one optimistic post, while another was more emphatic still: “We are witnessing true divine intervention.”

It matters, too, that Sound of Freedom almost never saw the light of day. Completed in 2018, no studio would take it for fear of losing money, according to producer Eduardo Verastegui — with Netflix and Amazon among those who passed. It finally found distribution thanks to Angel Studios, a Utah-based media company that crowdfunds original films and TV series that “amplify light.” (Although founded by Mormon brothers who originally created a content-filtering service to prevent children from seeing violence, nudity and profanity, it claims no formal church affiliation.)

To read Klee's entire article, click HERE.