Explaining the Media’s Bizarre Reaction to Sound of Freedom

The surprise summer blockbuster Sound of Freedom exposes the dark reality of liberal open borders policies and paints Christian virtue in a heroic light – two things the modern left and the mainstream media simply won’t tolerate.

Over the Fourth of July holiday weekend, Sound of Freedom dominated at the box office, beating out Disney’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and shocking many Hollywood executives. The film recounts the story of Tim Ballard, a former undercover agent for the Department of Homeland Security who left the agency to start his own organization dedicated to rescuing children from the underground sex slave trade.

Ballard is portrayed in Sound of Freedom by actor Jim Caviezel, who has been tops on the media’s hit list ever since starring as Jesus Christ in The Passion of the Christ (2004). Most of Hollywood effectively blacklisted Caviezel after Christ, and the 54-year-old said he lost two agents and a lawyer over his decision to star in Sound of Freedom.

Both Caviezel and Ballard, as well as writer and director Alejandro Monteverde, are strong Christians, something which plays a prominent role in the film. Caviezel’s stirring catchphrase in the movie, “God’s children are not for sale,” has already taken on life of its own and become a rallying cry to draw more public attention to the issue of child sex trafficking.

Many fans of the film pointed to its Christian messaging as a big reason why it took so long to be released. Sound of Freedom was originally a product of 21st Century Fox, and was completed all the way back in 2018. But upon Disney’s acquisition of Fox in 2019, executives canceled the film’s scheduled release with no explanation.

The movie also exposes how open borders policies act as a catalyst for child sex trafficking – shining an uncomfortable light on the disaster currently unfolding at the U.S.-Mexico border. Ballard explicitly pointed to that fact as a reason for the media’s visceral reaction to the film in a Fox News interview, saying, “I think that the left, these media outlets — they don’t want to have a discussion about what this film is going to compel, a discussion about why 85,000 children showed up unaccompanied at the border and got released into the interior of a country [the United States] that is the highest consuming country for child exploitation material on the planet.”

In total, the film grossed some $40 million in its first six days, far surpassing expectations. It has also dominated conversation on social media, with clips from the movie going viral around the world.

For the left, all of this is a nightmare scenario – a popular film with heavily Christian themes that functions as an effective criticism of Democrat policies. This likely explains the deluge of criticism and baseless claims about the film that came with its box office success.

Following the film’s gangbusters July 4 weekend, for instance, several media outlets slandered Sound of Freedom as “Q-Anon adjacent,” pointing to previous comments made by Caviezel – all of which were completely unrelated to the movie itself. Ballard has called these criticisms “absurd,” saying that he had never even heard of Q-Anon when work first began on the film back in 2018.

In one representative headline, far-left publication Jezebel called Sound of Freedom a “fantasy fit for Q-Anon.” Rolling Stone dismissed the film as “a superhero movie for dads with brainworms.”

Movie reviewer Charles Bramesco, meanwhile, writing for The Guardian, calls the film “paranoid” and a “snare of wild-eyed falsehoods.” Bramesco then mocks the pro-life movement – another subtle theme of Sound of Freedom – writing that Sound of Freedom “pretends to be a real movie, like a ‘pregnancy crisis center’ masquerading as a bona fide health clinic.”

Several commentators were quick to point out the irony in the fact that, as recently as 2018, The Guardian was running feature stories about how widespread child sex trafficking was, yet is now calling such narratives “paranoid.”

Unfortunately, official data suggests the disturbing events portrayed in Sound of Freedom are far from exaggerated. According to the U.N., there were 27.6 million people trafficked worldwide in 2021, 12 percent of whom were children. The National Human Trafficking Hotline, which just tracks the United States, reported nearly 11,000 instances of child sex trafficking that same year.

As Sound of Freedom also highlights, child sex trafficking is becoming one of the biggest illegal industries in the world, generating an estimated $150 billion globally each year. Yet, as some alternative news outlets have reported, the Biden administration seems to be de-prioritizing the issue.

Despite the left’s best efforts to discredit Sound of Freedom, it is still drawing big crowds at theaters across the country. Once again, it seems, the public is seeing through the media’s dishonesty and making their own judgements about who the heroes and villains are in this story.

Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Southwest Ohio. You can follow him on Twitter @ShaneHarris513.