Adrenochrome Diaries

Tim Ballard, film tropes, leadership by narcissism, and Sound of Freedom

A winnowing moment

Some time back, in the interest of pursuing a charitable attitude toward those with whom I may disagree, I began acknowledging those areas with which I share common ground with some who might be called conservative. I began paying much more attention to all my past ways of dismissing arguments ad hominem or embracing guilt by association fallacies. I adhere to that process as both intellectually therapeutic and ethically restorative, and I’ve been appropriately merciless in my criticism of sectarian leftists, censorious establishment liberals, and the mavens of pop-monoculture.

A recent controversy about the popular film, Sound of Freedom, ignited my interest, when it was reported to have “triggered” the aforementioned liberals and cultural mavens, delighting many on the right, including some conservatives to whom I have (until now) generously granted a certain sobriety. A red line is within view again. I’ve said before that I shut down on people from “the right” when they deny or celebrate biospheric disruption (“climate change”). This indicates either confirmation bias that pegs the stupid-meter or outright intellectual dishonesty (Unherd, are you listening?). My red line for today is the reflexive right-wing defense of Sound of Freedom, a mountainous accumulation of bullshit that’s about to pave the right’s funky path to the upcoming US election season.

It may actually work — the film is enjoying box office success — but I’m crying out in this cultural wilderness nonetheless.

Owning the libs

Sound of Freedom is a highly fictionalized account of a highly fictionalized “true story” about Tim Ballard, former Homeland Security employee turned media paramilitary commando (think Mormon Dog the Bounty Hunter), who claims to conduct daring missions to rescue trafficked children. His whole shtick is a kind of special ops film trope. Some of it happens in Haiti. Given these reference points to special operations and Haiti, and the fact that I have a fair amount of first hand experience with both, I figured this one is squarely in my wheelhouse.

Before I lay into this ridiculous movie, let’s look at some of the headlines from the right.

“The Fight Against Worldwide Child Slavery and the Sex Trade” (Jordan Peterson)

“Trump Calls for Death Penalty for Human Traffickers — Praises Sound of Freedom” (Forbes) (NOTE: Tim Ballard was feted by Trump when Ballard publicly supported Trump’s border wall proposal.)

“Sound of Freedom Update: ALL LIES DEBUNKED —Latest Suppression Effort EXPOSED” (Coach’s Archives)

“Why the Media Hates Sound of Freedom” (Smart Christians Channel)

“Media FREAKS at Sound of Freedom Success” (Breaking Points)

“Tim Ballard: Pedophiles ‘salivating’ at media outlets ripping ‘Sound of Freedom’” (Fox News)

“Why Hollywood Elites Don’t Want You Watching Sound of Freedom” (Valuetainment)

“The Most Important Film of My Lifetime” (The Man of Many Men)

“The Global Elite Blood Harvesting and How They and How They Extract Chemical From Children” (Shawn Ryan Clips)

One has to rake through the bullshit of the right-wing and the bullshit of their antagonists in the technocratic establishment to separate out the scraps of truth, the instrumental fallacies, the insinuations, the lies, but most of all, the hidden agendas.

I try to remember what H. L. Mencken once said: to beat people engaged in chicanery, one must refrain from fighting them when they’re right. I’ve been right there to say that we should acknowledge when someone as demonstrably awful as Trump or Jordan Peterson says something that happens to be right. Being a bad actor or a bad thinker doesn’t mean one is incapable of ever being right. Automatically believing that just because we don’t like someone that we have to reflexively oppose everything they say is the essence of stupidity, intellectual and tactical.

I am saying now — as someone who despises the cultural production establishment, the reigning technocracy, and the so-called mainstream media — that just because they oppose Sound of Freedom doesn’t mean that they are covering up for a secret cabal of child traffickers. It could mean (and does, in my view) that they are right in this instance: this is a dreadful film that feeds into insanely irresponsible and quite possibly dangerous conspiracy tropes. No, I’m not advocating censorship. Russiagate was horse shit, too; and these people are still lying through their teeth about the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. But I’m saying this is the reason I’m writing this for the ten people, maybe, who give a shit what I write. Don’t fall for guilt-by-association fallacies.

Special ops chic

Certainly, much of the acceptance and embrace of this silly-ass film has to do with the forerunning social imaginary of the raid-and-rescue fiction trope. Sound of Freedom and Tim Ballard’s “raid-and-rescue” mystique will get the benefit of the doubt by many on the right, because they just don’t know any better and they love this kind of macho morality fable.

Most people (across all political spectra) lack the experience with actual so-called special operations required to discern the silliness of cinematic representations of the same, on par with the verisimilitude of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I’m here to help.

Those representations are by-and-large just absolute horse shit. The problem is, it’s horse shit that holds a strong appeal to boys and men as a kind of performative hyper-machismo — always big on the right. The other problem is more general: we’re a highly infantilized society in which a great many people have lost the critical capacity to differentiate between cinematic representation and reality.

I have a strong reaction against hyper-machismo, I’ll admit. Even when I was in the Army, I suppressed it in subordinates as a form of dangerous feeble-mindedness. What triggered me more than anything about Trump’s most ardent armed cult followers was the unoriginal macho energy of gun-boys. Cosplaying exurban idiots adopting the “special ops” vogue. I despised these same idiots when they were actually part of special ops as the vast majority of the cosplaying halfwits never were. Combining this with so-called “Christian” nationalism makes it all the more offensive. It’s the spearhead of some great regression into latchkey suburban childhood, where kids were babysat by their fucking TVs, ambidextrously stretching their dicks and picking their noses in front of Steven Seagal movies. I have the same reaction to 501(c)(3) cinematic special ops chic paramilitaries peopled by drug-addled has-been celebrities and Mormon real estate agents undergoing early midlife crises.

Children should not play with guns.

First of all, even among real former special operations guys — speaking as one myself — there are plenty of loony bastards, adventurists, mental adolescents, and sociopaths mixed in with actual more-or-less sane adults (I wrote a short free novel about this). The military can use them for the same reason they can use a clueless eighteen-year-old as an infantryman. The military provides well-funded and well-refined training, and the trained person is then contained and constrained by a strict bureaucratic organization that is itself answerable to fairly well-educated leadership, and that leadership is likewise answerable to civilian authorities who — in the best of circumstances — are sensitized to the many possible ramifications of actual operations.

In the Army, we carefully issued weapons to troops, and we closely monitored the state and use of those weapons. A joe wasn’t even allowed to insert a magazine, much less chamber a round, without permission.

It’s true, the military can fall into the hands of nitwits like George W. Bush or Donald Trump, or into the hands of murderous intellectuals like Barack Obama; but the fact remains, they never operate as independent small units run by crackpot charlatans like Tim Ballard, who’ve combined it with crackpot “Christianity.”

Another big issue for me — apart from those who’ll make political hay out of the film’s success — is cinematic militarism (currently the special-ops trope and its cultural consequences. I’ve beaten that to death elsewhere.

Actual military operations — “special” and otherwise — have a tooth to tail ratio that cannot be replicated by ad hoc collections of gun nuts and post-adolescent adventurists. That is to say, before anyone with a gun kits up, there is a long, expensive preparatory process involving feasibility studies, impact assessments, intelligence gathering and analysis, inter-agency and intra-agency coordination, and logistical preparation. Then there are political considerations. The tail at the end of which are the teeth — the last brief act. Oh . . . and even then, more special operations missions fail than succeed.

The grift gift & the grifted

Tim Ballard is a self-marketing con artist, who’s now marketed himself to Angel Studios, the company that produced Sound of Freedom. Ballard is not an anti-trafficking warrior; he’s a fraud who exploits people’s best impulses with an elaborate grift, a one-man cheap fiction.

The guy who plays the self-fictionalized Ballard in this film is Jim Caviezel, whose last good role in his last good film was The Thin Red Line, adapted from James Jones’ novel and directed by Terrance Malick. Caviezel played Private Witt in this almost meditative wartime exploration of the relationship between nature and grace. Being a good actor one time in a good film does not in any way guarantee against said actor being as crazy as a bag of cats. Bizarre derangement runs through Hollywood like pin worms in a kindergarten.

Caviezel long ago went off the deep end, even before he was associated with Mel Gibson — another deranged Hollywood personality — and Caviezel has discovered a deep affinity for the exploitative narcissist, Tim Ballard. What both of them share — Caviezel for sure, Ballard possibly as part of his perfomative con — is a belief in the adrenochrome conspiracy — a kind of newly demented gloss on “blood libel.”

Check out Caviezel’s conversation with Shaw Ryan — a former SEAL, I guess, who’s as batshit crazy as Caviezel, where they go down the rabbit hole of “adrenochrome” — a supposed life-extending drug used by “elites” that’s harvested from the blood of children (sacrificed children’s blood is also used to make assassin chemicals aimed at your DNA profile).

Apologists for Sound of Freedom will cite a disingenuous denial of Q-Anon adjacency by Tim Ballard and the film’s producers, a kind of tightrope act (think Donald Trump’s barely-legal distancing from the January 6 insurrection), in which they dog whistle to conspiracy loons to retain that element’s support while equivocating for a broader audience who will “want to believe” the Sound of Freedom message, because it squares with our culturally-implanted cinematic (male) fantasies. Nonetheless, last year Caviezel delivered an unhinged recitation of Braveheart lines to a Q-Anon convention in Las Vegas. (We’ll get to the latest reanimation of Braveheart’s star, Mel Gibson, momentarily.)

The producers can deny, but they know good and damn well how this stuff is received.

One tweet from Truth Justice ™ @SpartaJustice was re-tweeted 12,100 times as of this post shows how the film actually works, despite the warily spun denials of Ballard, himself an adenochrome conspiracist.

THE SOUND OF FREEDOM: Exposes The Pedophile Economy enslaving millions of innocent children around the world to a life of rape, torture and murder. Tim Ballard, former Homeland Security Special Agent confirms Adrenochrome is real. They take the children’s blood and they drink it. The U.S. Department of Labor and the United Nations estimate that there are over 6 million innocent children who are forced into sex slavery, labor slavery and organ harvesting. It is absolutely a real thing. The United States is the number one consumer of child rape materials and close to number one in production. 85,000 unaccompanied minors were let into the United States and delivered to a Sponsor without the Sponsor being vetted, DNA checked or having a background check. Thousands were under the age of five. This is the Economy of Pedophilia in the United States. There are baby factories, real cases where they have kidnapped women as young as 13 year old children and impregnate them, they rape them and they make babies. Then they take these babies and sell them for their organs, sell them for sex and sell them for satanic ritual abuse. This is very real and it is really happening. Why is the Mainstream Media ignoring these horrific crimes? Tim Ballard says: I think it is because if there are 2 million children forced into commercial sex a lot of people are involved. There are people who don’t want this exposed because they are involved in it. Tim Ballard goes on to say that there is something called Adrenochrome where they are taking the children’s blood and devouring it. It is very real, they take these children, they take their organs, they take their blood and they drink it. They take the genitals of children and hang it over the rooftop of their businesses thinking the dark gods will bless them. These are real things happening to innocent children. Tim Ballard was with the CIA for one year and then transferred to the United States Homeland Security Investigations Division as an Undercover Special Agent. During his time with Homeland Security he was asked to join a newly formed Child Crimes Unit. During his first assignment in the Child Crimes Unit Tim was so shocked by what he saw, he would never be the same. In his first case in 2002 he was given VHS videos and hard drives that he had to look at. While explaining what he saw during this interview Tim holds back tears remembering the very first images he had to see. He saw three little boys, 7, 5 and 3 years old who looked like his own children, who were being raped by a Pedophile. He was so shocked, that he dropped to his knees and dry heaved in a waste basket thinking he was going to throw up. He suffers from PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder) because of seeing the horrors being done to innocent children. Child rape videos have increased by 5000 percent recently. After viewing these shocking images Tim Ballard could never see the world in the same way. He had to come to grips with the fact that there are millions of people who are Pedophiles, only millions of Pedophiles could justify a demand for millions of child exploitation materials and videos. Ernst Oshinsky the real Pedophile who was arrested in the Sound of Freedom movie had over 2 million pieces of child rape material in his house. Tim had to be confronted with the reality that there are millions of people on this planet who want to indulge in watching 5 year old children be raped and sexual assaulted in ways unimaginable. To watch children’s bodies actually break in the act of sexual assault, acts that your mind couldn’t imagine, but is real, is so shocking to the system it changes your life forever. When Tim Ballard says children’s bodies actually break in the act of sexual assault he is referring to the pelvic bones of the innocent children breaking apart as a result of being brutally raped by an adult male. Children’s bodies were not designed to be raped by an adult. This is the most horrific crime a child must endure. Pedophiles include all walks of life Tim says, he has arrested educators, lawyers, law enforcement and clergymen. These Pedophiles have normalized raping and torturing children. He says something has taken over them which scares him when he looks into their eyes. They believe their behavior is normal he says. Jim Caviezel says it wounds God in the greatest way when you take these innocent children who have done nothing, who have no sin and kill the most innocent. He goes on to say very emotionally that he hears the screams of these children in his heart because of the agents that he worked with. He was weeping so hard by the horrors of what he saw. He viewed this evidence because he had to know the pain and suffering of these children in order to share this truth with the world. He goes on to say the Media and the 3 letter agencies are not telling the truth. Jordan Peterson asks Jim Caviezel how has this movie changed you? Jim says “I would give my life in a heartbeat. I am less concerned about myself. I will tell you this right now, I would absolutely die, if this were to change the world and get rid of trafficking and pornography and all of the 8 arms of this Octopus that has to be destroyed. The only way you can destroy it, is to take the head off. If that happened, I would give my life in a heartbeat.” The Head of this 8 armed Octopus that Jim Caviezel is talking about is the Committee of 300. A Scripture that Tim Ballard remembers and recites to help him stay strong and focused on his child trafficking rescue operations is “Better than a millstone be placed around your neck and you tossed to the bottom of the sea than you should hurt one of these little ones.” God clearly stands against children being abused, raped, tortured and murdered. There is righteous violence coming to those who hurt children. Our innocent children are being targeted like never before Tim says. There are groups trying to get rid of the name Pedophile and call themselves Minor Attracted Persons. At the same time they are sexualizing children in schools, teachers are giving them pornography to read, things we used to be able to arrest them for in the past. Now children can consent to Transgender mutilation which will lead to children consenting to having sex with a Pedophile. Our culture is enslaving millions of children to a future life of rape and torture. If we do nothing to stop this, we are all guilty of these horrific crimes.

There’s the lunatic-telegraph, the conflation of conspiracy nuttery with woke-panic narratives, and the film’s political playbook, all wrapped up in one neat package.

If you fail to endorse this bullshit, or this bullshit movie, then you’re guilty of pedophilia. At the very least, you care nothing about the plight of trafficked persons. Children are a minority fraction of trafficked persons, but with children you can play the pedophile card against critics.In fact, trafficking is a far more complex phenomenon than its Hollywood representations, which always tend toward the most salacious and sensational, amply exaggerated and over-represented.

Tim Ballard’s money-machine non-profit, Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), is not only spoken in a Hollywood idiom, it’s full or misrepresentations of trafficking, including outright lies and off-the-cuff nonsense “statistics.”

The whiteboard below is from one of Ballard’s 2019 meetings with his OUR staff. It diagrams how the cinematic tropes of his so-called rescue operations are the gateway to funding. “Take the sizzle of the Rescue — lead them to the Covenant [Ballard’s book].” The “sizzle” leads you to a web site for collecting contributions, with arrows pointing at OUR and his other shadowy “non-profits,” where money goes off grid.

Many speculate that Ballard intends one day to run for office. Stand by, after the success of Sound of Freedom.

Vice has done a series of investigative reports on Ballard and his money machine. By 2021, Ballard’s organization netted $47 million, and Ballard awarded himself an annual income of over $500,000, in addition to eating and sleeping luxuriously on expense accounts and the provisions of his many well-appointed hosts (I use that last word in both its hospitality and parasitic senses). Ballard claimed that much of that money was spent overseas, either on these “missions” or in support of law enforcement agencies, but there is no way for anyone to confirm where the money actually went.

His so-called rescue operations in which he claims “thousands” have been freed are unsubstantiated. Many of them, as reported by people who were initially taken in by Ballard, were just some guys going to bars in foreign countries and asking around for teen prostitutes. Other actual anti-trafficking organizations note that what Ballard was doing added to the problem by creating the demand.

“The sizzle.”

In 2021, well before Sound of Freedom came into being as the right’s new political gambit, Anna Merlan and Tim Marchman of Vice took a deep dive into these “missions,” and what they found was farcical blundering — exactly what can be expected of these cosplaying outfits.

So did American Crime Journal.

The necklace

The Sound of Freedom origin myth is sometimes called “the necklace story.” In this tale, Ballard’s transformation into Rambo begins when he’s employed as an ICE agent [not an “undercover agent”] at the Calexico border crossing in California in 2006.

What Ballard and the movie say happened:

Ballard “rescued” an eight-year-old Honduran boy named Pedro as he was being smuggled across the border with Mexico to the United States by a sex trafficker named Earl Backman (based on the real person, Earl Buchanan), who was going to sell Pedro into a commercial sex ring. Pedro is so grateful to Ballard for his rescue that he gives Ballard a necklace with a dog tag inscribed with a quote from 1 Timothy. The necklace will become the catalyst, the epiphany that tells Ballard he is on a mission from God. Pedro and his eleven-year-old sister had been lured into their abduction by a fake talent agency, then sold into sexual slavery to a pedophilic Colombian guerrilla/drug lord. Inaction by the US government who employs Ballard compels him — after his epiphany — to mortgage his house in order to finance a rescue operation. He puts together an elite strike team (“jump team”).

What actually happened:

When Ballard told this tale during an interview, he rhetorically invited his audience to “google it,” it being the Earl Buchanan story, to confirm its legitimacy. An old newsman named Lynn Kenneth Packer took him up on it . . . googling, that is. His podcast on Ballard et al is here. What Packard found was the story was horse shit from its opening scene to its credit roll.

As an old investigative journalist, Packer first sought out the police reports and court records. Buchanan was stopped at the Calexico border crossing on July 3, 2006 with a boy in the car. A border patrol agent (not Tim Ballard) did find videotapes of Buchanan having sex with the boy. Ballard was called to the scene . . . only later. The boy had not been kidnapped, and did not leap into Ballard’s arms. Buchanan had forgotten to bring the boy’s ID, which was the reason for the stop. Buchanan had groomed the boy, who thought of him as a friend. The boy (Jose, not Pedro) was a US citizen and Ballard’s neighbor (living with his grandmother, who may or may not have known about the grooming) in San Bernadino. In Ballard’s account, a kind of divine providence led the agent to make the stop. In fact, the stop was made because the boy’s ID had been left at home. In Ballard’s account, he was first on scene, and the boy clung to him in fear of Buchanan. In fact, Ballard arrived only later, and the boy never at any point showed even a whiff of fear of Buchanan. In Ballard’s recounting to Trump — in support of the border wall — he told the President that Buchanan was forced to go through the customs station where he was detained after having tried in vain to get past the wall and that the boy had been “found” hiding in the van. In fact, Buchanan tried no such thing. He and the boy had entered Mexico legally and were returning legally. Buchanan was not hiding the boy in his van. What tripped Buchanan up was forgetting Jose’s ID. Jose did have a sister, a 14-year-old, named Yanelli who lived in San Bernadino with Jose and their grandma. Yanelli was never kidnapped, nor was their any indication she had ever been sexually abused by anyone. In Ballard’s fiction, Yanelli had given her co-abducted brother this necklace upon their howling separation, who then gave it to Ballard, which then channeled God’s mission to Ballard, telling him to form a paramilitary unit. The whole thing was well-reported by the Southern California press.

Google it.

Buchanan was a serial sexual predator. It’s a good thing he was caught (without the raid-and-rescue “sizzle”). But Ballard’s account is hogwash. OUR and Sound of Freedom have further embellished the account with a scene where Buchanan was thrown to the ground at gunpoint. That was when the child leaped into Ballard’s arms. The film blurb says “this was one of the toughest cases Tim Ballard ever worked,” implying that this was the culmination of an investigation Ballard was heading about children being smuggled out of Mexico.

Not one word of it true.

Buchanan was casually handcuffed, no gun-play necessary, before Ballard even arrived; and Ballard was not in any investigation remotely connected to Buchanan — who was not smuggling anyone “out of Mexico.”

The lies continue: Ballard and other agents then raided a child sex slave compound and rescued eleven more kids, who the keenly discerning Ballard recognized from the Buchanan sex tapes. Bullshit, bullshit, and more bullshit. Buchanan had a grooming site set up in a building project in Bloomington, California — video games etc, with a film set-up, execrable to be sure — but no child was ever trapped and confined there. When the place was discovered by law enforcement, there was no one there at all.

Paul Hutchinson, a wealthy investor (there’s the key!) who had participated with the “jump teams” and helped write and finance the film, admitted that (a) the necklace story was “theatrical liberty,” (b) as many as six “rescues” (some in which Ballard had no role) have been “combined” to make the Colombian “rescue” tale, (c) Ballard had gone into a jungle once, in Haiti, not Colombia. Ballard didn’t pose as a doctor to infiltrate a Colombian guerrilla-drug lord’s base where the pedophilic leader kept the young sister as a sex slave. Ballard didn’t kill the bad man and rescue the enslaved minor. None of it, absolutely none of it, ever happened. Nonetheless, the film is unabashedly promoted as “the incredible true story of a former government agent turned vigilante who embarks on a dangerous mission to rescue hundreds of children from sex traffickers.”

Nope, nope, nope.

Haiti

The Haitian jungle thing refers to an utter goat-fuck called the Gardy Marty mission. By the way, anyone who’s been to deforested Haiti knows goddam well there’s hardly anything remaining that remotely qualifies as a jungle.

Haitian jungle, bring your machete and snake-proof boots

Let’s see what that “mission” was.

The OUR origin myth begins there in Haiti — a place with which I have a pretty strong familiarity, having been there twenty-one times, sometimes for months at a stretch. (My first book, Hideous Dream, was about my participation in the 1994 US invasion of Haiti.)

CPT Mike Gallante (left white guy) and me (right white guy) with some residents of Fort Liberte, inside a slave cell at Fort Dauphin — one of Napoleon’s coastal gun positions, 1994

It begins in Port-au-Prince, where Gardy Marty, a three-year-old boy went missing in 2009. The boy and his parents, Guesno and Majorie, were/are dual citizens of Haiti and the US. His parents are Mormons, and Gardy was born in Utah. They were in an LDS church when the boy was kidnapped “by two men on motorcycles,” for ransom. Kidnapping does happen in Haiti. Out of desperation, after failing to recover his child, the parents turned to Ballard.

LDS church, Port-au-Prince

Ballard formed what he called a “jump team,” which went to Haiti and began their “mission,” roaming aimlessly around the country, deceiving people that they were medical practitioners, and sometimes bullying total strangers. The boy was never recovered, because the leads they were following were from . . . wait for it . . . a psychic named “Janet.”

Nonetheless, a very successful fund was set up called “Find Gardy.” Ah, the money flowed in.

Fund Gardy cap . . . OUR merch

The absurdity of this whole enterprise not only did not deter Ballard, he doubled down with ridiculous and unverifiable claims. He says that — while using this deranged woman who believed she was a “medium” as his guide dog throughout Haiti, his bumbling “jump team,” which was once run out of town by angry villagers—they rescued many other trafficked children. No names. No places. No details at all. The musclebound web site looks like a movie marquee, though.

Oooooo, aahhhhhhh, white savior warriors! (Don’t the women make them ‘woke’ though?)

Lemme tell you why Haiti is a good place to try out a bunch of sketchy shit. It’s been permanently disabled by foreign interference — mostly the US since the 1930s — and its governmentally broken. I entered the country with two of my kids once without ever seeing a customs agent.

Jesse and Jeremy outside of Gonaives, as we hitchhiked and bussed from Port-au-Prince to Ouanaminthe, 1995

My friend, Jean-Frederique Theodore (“Freddy”) and I, at his bar in Ouanaminthe, 1997

Great place for Ballard to employ as a setting for his lyin’ ass stories.

Keystone Kommandos

Ballard’s shtick worked with a number of high-profile and/or rich donors, among them Glenn Beck and the Utah Attorney General. And, of course, Donald Trump. Beck was closely involved with the development of the OUR origin myth, including its many underwriting fabrications.

Ballard’s “jump teams,” he claims, employ former spooks, spec-ops dudes, et al; but in reality, they’ve included adventurist donor/tourists, second-rate celebrities, and wide-eyed, self-financing real estate agents. Their training, according to those who were unfortunate enough to have experienced it, was a joke — nothing to do with actual operations, but gimmicky shit you’d do as ice-breakers while half crocked at a self-help convention. Moreover, they have the “trainees” foot the bills, including paying for their phony “training.”

Witnesses say that their “operations” were mostly partying in bars, flashing cash, asking for girls, the calling the local cops when the girls showed up. Some, including NGOs that have actual knowledge and experience with trafficking, have pointed out how this practice actually made the problem worse. From one Vice article:

“They claim they have all these special operations guys and it’s complete and utter bullshit,” said one person with extensive experience working overseas with OUR. Like many people interviewed by VICE World News for this story, this person was granted anonymity both because they fear reprisal from OUR and because they operate in the anti-trafficking area and are concerned for their safety.

Both this person and another veteran who has worked overseas with OUR said that in their experience, nothing OUR did seemed recognizably informed by professional military or intelligence practice. There was, they said — contrary to the process for operations laid out on OUR’s website — no meaningful surveillance or identification of targets; no development of assets; no validating that people they sought to rescue had in fact been trafficked, or that people they were targeting were indeed traffickers; and no meaningful follow-up with people who had been rescued on the missions in which they took part.

“There’s basic safety stuff that should be in place, like knowing where the nearest hospital is,” one person who’s gone on previous OUR missions said. “None of that was in place.”

In a typical operation, as these sources describe it, OUR operators would head into a town in a country like the Dominican Republic and flash thousands of dollars at clubs and bars, saying they were there to party. (This basic method is consistent with what is seen in videos OUR has itself published and accounts of missions like this one by a writer for The Glenn Beck Program who went undercover for the group.)

“It’s laughable to call what he did ops,” a veteran who worked with OUR overseas said of Ballard. “They’d go and just push for pimps to show up with girls.” If presented with sex workers of legal age, OUR would insist on younger girls — a method that several experts said could, when combined with a lack of intelligence-gathering and vetting, potentially lead to girls being trafficked who otherwise wouldn’t have been.

“In my opinion that’s what he was doing: He was creating demand,” said one of the former military members who worked with OUR overseas. “Because you’d see the pimps show up with a weird mix of girls — young, but experienced — then there’d be a couple really young girls. It felt to me like they’d been roped in because Tim had flashed so much money.”

Typically, after arranging for the women and girls to be brought to them, OUR’s operators would call local police, who would make arrests. The operators would then leave the country.

One story featured on the OUR website is the “rescue” of Liliana — a real person. The problem is that this real person rescued herself, and her story is on record with the police and courts (oops). OUR didn’t have a damn thing to do with it. She’d been groomed at the age of 14 in Mexico by a local 17-year-old soon-to-be pimp, who eventually convinced her to accompany him to the US. After two failed attempts to cross the border, they made it into Arizona, and from there moved on to New York City. At their new digs in Queens, the “boyfriend” locked Liliana in and started turning her out to do tricks. Many in the guy’s family, it turned out, were also pimps — the family business; and they’d established a network of girls they’d coerced with dependency, violence, and threats to their families back home. When Liliana escaped, she did so on her own by calling a cab and disappearing, turning herself over to the care of law enforcement.

OUR’s account has her as an 11-year-old Central American instead of a 14-year-old (at the beginning) Mexican, kidnapped (she went with her groomer willingly), and rescued by OUR, who had not one thing to do with her liberation. Ballard even sold merchandise on his site, “made by Liliana” (out of gratitude, one might suppose), a completely fraudulent claim. He further and falsely claimed that Liliana had been taken to meet Ivanka Trump. This was when he was shilling for Trump’s border wall. (As two narcissistic men allergic to the truth, one might wonder what a conversation between Ballard and Trump would actually sound like.)

The outrageous and unsupported claims of having rescued thousands (I would just refer readers over to American Crime Journal’s excellent series for details), as well as the bungling, inept “missions,” are not the point of any of it after all. Tim Ballard is an ambitious, narcissistic, altogether irresponsible flim-flam man, who wants lots of money and probably aspires to political office.

Certainly, the conjuncture is favorable to him.

Stochastic narcissism & public lunacy

I’m not against anti-trafficking — which is most effectively pursued when it’s matched to trafficking realities (Google it). I’m against Sound of Freedom because (1) it’s bullshit, (2) it misrepresents the problem of trafficking, and (3) it cops to the Hollywood tropes of special-ops chic, white savior narratives, gunslinging redemption, and vigilantism. And I’m not against conservatives. I might be counted a almost a Burkean conservative (or Ruskin Romantic) myself. I see the embrace of this kind of Hollywood drivel by conservatives as indicative of the aforementioned infantilization of the culture instantiated as political propaganda. The most charitable interpretation is naivete, the least charitable, reserved for “influencers” . . . deceitful manipulation of a credulous public in pursuit of an authoritarian power.

The fix in which we find ourselves in these dissolute times is precisely fraudulence, which won’t be cured with more of the same. Our disenchanted counterfeit religions — modernism, capitalism, barracks-state socialism, postmodernism, transhumanism, and now its power-seeking counterpoints in fundamentalism, or integralism, with its pagan imperial Christ — is the fact that they are counterfeits, including the counterpoints. They’re fundamentally grounded in a desire for power, a thirst only satiated through manipulation . . . and when that fails, cold instrumental cruelty. It’s unfortunately true that many critics of the film are themselves overstating their cases, bundling their critiques into the programmatic menus of liberal political orthodoxy (“sex work is work,” for example), and employing their own guilt-by-association fallacies.

Tit. Tat. The power struggle tears at the truth like a leopard and a hyena fighting for a carcass.

Our impasse, it seems, is that the language necessary to cut through received opinion is inaccessible, even in its most popular idioms, because that received opinion is soundly imbricated within our daily material and semiotic lives. In merely describing our fraudulent reality, we inevitably reproduce it.

I realize that just as there are real conspiracies, which have nothing to do with conspiracy theories, the latter of which which is a kind of deluded storytelling genre. I further realize that one can call a person a conspiracy theorist as a way of dismissing legitimate questions and criticism; this involves suggesting the accused is employing the genre (based on false pattern recognition) when, in fact, they are not. The distinction can be discerned through close examination of the features of the “patterns,” in much the same way we’ve pointed out how Ballard’s “necklace” story falls apart when a guy actually “googles it,” gets hold of the arrest reports, and shows where Ballard is clearly lying. I won’t say “the right and the left are both guilty,” because what most people call left nowadays is half a continent away from any experience I had as a card-carrying member of the left. The Marxists, of which I was one and with many of whom I associated, were self-checking and self-critical to a fault. They didn’t fear new information, and they had a deeply skeptical orientation. What insulated us from the truth in most cases was ideological adherence, which is epistemological, not objective. We simply figured out how to fit new facts, trends, and developments into our elastic but ultimately unquestionable frame of reference. We didn’t make shit up; and we didn’t deny things that were obviously true. We called it as we saw it, but we made out observations from the same fixed grid coordinate on the larger map. We couldn’t see behind the other mountains. “The ‘new right’ and the technocratic liberals” (not right and left) would be closer to the mark for my critique here. Adrenochrome and Russiagate are the same genre, each told in its own ideological idiom.

In the Twitter rant above, we read: “Now children can consent to Transgender mutilation which will lead to children consenting to having sex with a Pedophile.” This inappropriately capitalized non-sequitur is an example of the amputation of our capacity for discernment. I wrote a long and, I think, rational argument for why we should reject “trans ideology” and the chemical-surgical mutilation of young people (and people in general) here, but in the ranting tweet earlier in this article trans ideology is now conflated with pedophile conspiracies (you can bet this interlocutor was a Pizzagate guy).

If I recall correctly (and I’m paraphrasing, probably badly), it was John Milbank who denounced our historical moment as one where society has embraced “an ethos of ceaseless narcissistic self-creation.” There’s a circular self-reproduction at work here between this ethos and our inability to achieve rational clarity. We can’t see outside it. Trans ideology’s self-invention frame is in many respects no different than Tim Ballard’s. This sets us up — explaining our current political milieu along the way — to be influenced and ultimately controlled by con artists, profiteers, and narcissists — the shifting sand of stupidity upon which our house is now built.

Catholics, speaking as one, are no more immune to obscurantist conspiracy-mongering than any other group. We all live in the same digitizing monoculture, dependent on the same money, exposed to the influences of the same demonic personage in his new clothes playing the old roles — deceiver, accuser, tempter. We’re likewise not immune to mental illness. I am convinced that both Mel Gibson and Jim Caviezel are fruitcakes.

These two met when Gibson was making the anti-Semitic blockbuster, Passion of the Christ. Caviezel has since claimed that while he played Jesus of Nazareth, and while he was “on the cross,” he was struck by lightning, which months later killed him (on an operating table), whereupon he was resuscitated (resurrected?). In the interview with the erstwhile Shawn Ryan, he recounted this experience, where — no shit — he claims he was given a direct personal message by God. I believe God reveals himself to human beings, but this narrative was like a bad script.

Gibson, for his part, has come center stage again — which I’m sure he’s basking in — with the release of Sound of Freedom and the conspiracy lunacies that orbit around it. Funny, Gibson once starred as a conspiracy nut in a film called Conspiracy Theory, in which it turned out, of course, in Hollywood’s own tongue-in-cheek way, that he wasn’t as crazy as a shit house rat (he did once say himself that he — the real Gibson — had bipolar disorder). Ballard claimed that Gibson did the final edit for Sound of Freedom, and Gibson claims to be in the process of making a Ballard-endorsed series on “the $34 billion trafficking industry.” Some years back, Gibson used the same number ($34 billion) to quantify Hollywood’s annual revenues, with dark suggestions about what “Hollywood elites” were up to. Gibson became infamous around thirteen years ago, after his recorded anti-Semitic remarks during a DUI arrest went public, and again after his unhinged and abusive rant at his girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva, was laced with racist profanity.

Excerpts of his messages to Grigorieva:

“You’re an embarrassment to me. You look like a fucking pig in heat, and if you get raped by a pack of niggers, it will be your fault.”

“How dare you act like such a bitch when I have been so fucking nice.”

“I am going to come and burn the fucking house down... but you will blow me first.”

Nice.

He called his torture-porn film project with Caviezel (Passion of the Christ) his healing process after these incidents.

On the margins of his recrudescence, conspiracy derangement sites are churning out childish (but widely received) stories about Mel Gibson’s role (from his rants of yesteryear) in “exposing” people like Oprah Winfrey as the secret heads of baby-blood cabals.

Mimetic contagion

My issue with the Tim Ballard’s of the world and my issue with the Mel Gibson’s and Jim Caviezel’s of the world and my issue with conspiracy theories about secret cabals of child traffickers are all different issues, but related to one another as a single larger issue.

I remember the McMartin Preschool saga, when Satanic panic spread through the country like highly comminicable brain virus. The longest and most costly legal action ever taken in the US — seven years and $15 million — which fell apart after ruining the lives of an entire innocent family and triggering a wave of persecutions and bullshit prosecutions across the US.

The “Satanic panic” was in many ways similar to the most conspiratorial accounts of “child trafficking.” The conspiratorial popular view inflamed by cinematic tropes is that trafficking and people-smuggling are synonymous, that the people involved are mostly dangerous and wily gangsters, that trafficking applies exclusively to prostitution and sexual slavery, that women and children are the principle victims, that deception and kidnapping are the main modes of entry, and that most of it happens in underdeveloped nations. None of these beliefs are true.

As we saw with Earl Buchanan — which is a terrible though typical case — child sexual exploitation, including street kids who are mostly adolescents, is not underwritten by trafficking, but by grooming. That grooming comes from adults the child already knows, or, in the case of street kids, runaways — who’ve often left behind intolerable home situations — begin selling themselves to survive and seek out “boyfriends” and pimps as protection, because tricking alone is so incredibly dangerous. Trafficking only very occasionally involves smuggling, much of it domestic to start with, and most border crossings are preceded by recruitment schemes which entail perfectly legal international transit. Most people involved in trafficking are not gangsters, but employers, often in collusion with cops and politicians. Trafficking certainly involves prostitution, but it just as often involves exploitative labor, and some organ harvesting (from live subjects). Men and boys are trafficked almost as frequently as women. Many trafficked people know what they are getting into — transit and employment that will result in a form of indentured servitude via a hefty debt to traffickers; but they calculate that this is better than their other options. Kidnapping is hardly every part of the equation, and “first world” countries have as much internal as they do external trafficking.

In a Rolling Stone article by EJ Dickson, she interviews actual trafficking experts:

Contrary to urban legends about kids getting abducted in Target parking lots by strangers, or anonymous figures snatching children from alleyways, the majority of child trafficking victims know and trust their traffickers, explains Teresa Huizar, CEO of the National Children’s Alliance (Huizar has not seen the film yet, but was able to provide context about the myths and realities of child trafficking). “Some are throwaway kids. They are kicked out of their homes and trade sex for food and a place to stay, and end up being trafficked by a pimp,” she says. “In a lot of these cases, the trafficker starts out calling themselves their boyfriend or girlfriend.”

Little history.

In 2014, a twisted, drug-addled thirty-two-year-old man living in Clemmons, NC, just outside Greensboro, named John Alexander Lawson, was convicted for his involvement in two murders.

John Alexander Lawson aka “Pazuzu Algarad”

Lawson had embraced “Satanism,” as he understood it from reading a few ridiculous books and watching movies. He took on the alias “Pazuzu Algarad,” Pazuzu being the name of the demon in the 1973 shock horror classic, The Exorcist. (Movies again.) His story was recounted in a documentary series called The Devil You Know (Viceland); but the in and the out of it was that this broken man and some of his cohort were caught up in a drug and crime spiral inflected by this “Satanic identity” he’d chosen as a form of rebellion. Lawson, like the Charlie Manson family decades earlier, makes for good entertainment, but these are one-off, highly unusual phenomena.

The “Satanism” of Lawson and a few others over time is anything but some social epidemic. Nonetheless, around the same time that Lawson was living in his own feces, three very young men in West Memphis, Arkansas were being convicted of the “Satanic” murder of a child, who it now appears most likely died at the hands of his step-father. But the moral panic surrounding “Satanism” found fertile ground among West Memphis evangelical nationalists, and these boys were convicted on shaky evidence, some of it likely planted by police working with an ambitious and ethically-challenged prosecutor. “The West Memphis Three” also became the subject of documentaries and even one film docudrama. The West Memphis jury took its decision a decade after another judicial travesty: the McMartin Preschool trial.

Satanism is a recent invention, something cooked up by yet another charlatan, Anton LaVey, circa 1966, when a lot of foolish shit was making the rounds as part of a zeitgeist of unfocused rebellion. It has not historical continuity — though perhaps some echoes — with the witch frenzies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, One of the seldom mentioned echoes with our subject today (Ballard’s mass scam) is that a driving motive for the witch trials, contrary to popular representations of them, was pecuniary. Lawyers and property pouncers were making mad money from the witch panics, as documented in detail by writers like Maria Mies and Silvia Federici. These trials were in fact artifacts of an emergent capitalist epoch.

One sixteenth-century chronicle stated, “In our times, jurisprudencia smiles at everybody, so that everyone wants to become a doctor in law. Most are attracted to this field of studies out of greed for money and ambition.” Witch trials were big business. Each one employed a host of judges and lawyers, who competed in verbal puffery with one another to extend and thereby raise the costs (and payouts) of the trial, which even included bills for the alcohol consumed by the soldiers who pursued and captured the suspects. Witch-trial funds were used to partially finance the Thirty Years’ War.

At any rate, the mass hysteria that accompanied witch burning re-emerged in response to LaVey’s grift, amplifying the size and potency of his followers, who were transiently rebellious teens for the most part who’d grow out of it after a brief time. It became an easy subsidiary con in whipping up paranoid conspiracy theories.

Two of the most effective fraudsters — who by the way wrecked many lives — were Kathleen “Kee” McFarlane and Wayne Thomas Satz. McFarlane was the unlicensed therapist who claimed some special expertise in interviewing the McMartin preschool children, who she coached, bullied, and cajoled into telling a raft of lies about ritual Satanic abuse in the preschool run by the McMartin family. Satz was the first reporter to gain fame and influence by spreading the “story” of Satanic abuse through the public, whereupon it ignited more than 12,000 similar and totally unsubstantiated allegations across the US. Satz and McFarlance, it was revealed as the case unraveled, were lovers. Two other grifters were tangentially involved, the authors of Michelle Remembers, a book on the bullshit theory of “recovered memory,” by Lawrence Padzer and Michelle Smith, that McFarlane had read and applied to her “interviews.”

“Kee” McFarlane

Wayne Thomas Satz

The cases allegations became so bizarre at one point — stories of the McMartin family having children cut off rabbits’ ears in secret tunnels and beating horses to death with baseball bats — that the first prosecutor on the case, Glenn Stevens, said to hell with it and walked off the case.

Satz died young of a heart attack, and McFarlane insisted for years afterward that Satanic abuse was a real and prevalent thing. I’m sure Ballard and his acolytes will do the same long after people wise up to him. He’ll be running for President by then.

Returning to my earlier point — I know I can ramble —this crap will have knock-on consequences, not the least of which are a crop of new and adjacent conspiracy fables. Already the loons are claiming that theater chains are suppressing its showings (as if, it’s making money). This is not only a lie, it is — as many lies are — a successful marketing strategy. People will go see it as their patriotic duty, an act of defiance against the tyranny of librul theater chains.

Concluding

Elect Tim — American hero

REAL RAW NEWS

Delta Force Raids Adrenochrome Warehouse

BY Michael Baxter, October 21, 2021

Delta Force operators on Monday raided an Adrenochrome storage facility in California and seized 600 liters of a substance that Deep State despots believe extends life, prevents illness, and enhances the libido, said a high-ranking official in the Office of Military Commissions under condition of anonymity.

At 3:00 a.m., Delta Force cut the lock on a barbwire fence that protected an 8,500-square-foot warehouse just south of Pier 33 near San Francisco Bay. Equipped with innovative weaponry and night vision goggles, the operators pushed toward the warehouse and, after failing to cut through a reinforced lock on the warehouse door, blew open the door using a shaped C-4 charge. They hurled flashbang grenades into the warehouse, stunning two chemists who had been hovering over an assortment of beakers and vials.

They subdued the chemists with zip ties, and then made a shocking discovery — 15 industrial freezers brimming with bags of chilled Adrenochrome, 600 liters in all.

Delta Force also found 100 bags of whole blood in a locked refrigerator.

Each bag was dated with an indelible marker, ostensibly reflecting the date it was filled. The most recent inscribed date was October 16, two before the raid.

One Delta Force operator described the scene as a “macabre mad science lab with beakers and test tubes and other chemistry gear covering several stainless-steel tables.”

Our source said Delta confiscated everything in the laboratory and transported the items to an unknown location for destruction.

“We took what we need for evidence; the rest has been destroyed. There’s going to be a lot of unhappy elitists out there looking for their Adrenochrome injections or infusions. It’s likely this was just one of many clandestine storage units and labs,” our source said.

Asked whether the military had been tipped off by a Deep State official, like the ones who had been tried and executed at Guantanamo Bay, he said the following: “No. I’m sure if criminals such as Hillary or Podesta knew the locations of these places, the stuff would have been moved immediately following their capture. None of them shared info on Adrenochrome storage. This location was not a mobile lab, it was fixed, and they’d been there quite a while.”

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