The Sound of Freedom

[Nice Guy Eddie 13507]

I would argue that there is not a pedo sex ring at all in America. Zero. At any level. Not 800K kids disappearing and not even 1 in terms of a ring of people. Is it possible hypothetically that some group is kidnapping kids, or have kidnapped them in the past? Yes but even when a similar situation is uncovered, it makes the national news.

One incident is one too many but this situation is being pursued like how satanic cults were pursued in the 80s. No one ever discovered one.

The real victims are at-risk kids taken advantage of by teachers, coaches, preachers or even family. Perhaps the kid is not sold like in this made-up stories but the abuse is very real. Of course to stop this abuse, we need more govt intervention which the Right won't allow.

[Ten Bears 2479]

Man am I the only one that has to take a shit 10 minutes after shooting up some adrenochrome?

[Nice Guy Eddie 13507]

The closest that I can think about in terms of an actual pedo sex ring was the Dean Corll story in Houston. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Corll 

[hayden_horn 11362]

7 minutes ago, Ten Bears said:

Man am I the only one that has to take a shit 10 minutes after shooting up some adrenochrome?

 

[Biff Tannen 45661]

1 hour ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

I would argue that there is not a pedo sex ring at all in America. Zero. At any level. Not 800K kids disappearing and not even 1 in terms of a ring of people. Is it possible hypothetically that some group is kidnapping kids, or have kidnapped them in the past? Yes but even when a similar situation is uncovered, it makes the national news.

One incident is one too many but this situation is being pursued like how satanic cults were pursued in the 80s. No one ever discovered one.

The real victims are at-risk kids taken advantage of by teachers, coaches, preachers or even family. Perhaps the kid is not sold like in this made-up stories but the abuse is very real. Of course to stop this abuse, we need more govt intervention which the Right won't allow.

This

[wildcat09 29338]

14 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

I would argue that there is not a pedo sex ring at all in America. Zero. At any level. Not 800K kids disappearing and not even 1 in terms of a ring of people. Is it possible hypothetically that some group is kidnapping kids, or have kidnapped them in the past? Yes but even when a similar situation is uncovered, it makes the national news.

One incident is one too many but this situation is being pursued like how satanic cults were pursued in the 80s. No one ever discovered one.

The real victims are at-risk kids taken advantage of by teachers, coaches, preachers or even family. Perhaps the kid is not sold like in this made-up stories but the abuse is very real. Of course to stop this abuse, we need more govt intervention which the Right won't allow.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was someone like Epstein that liked to connect rich friends with girls who are 14-17 or so. Hell, we know Matt Gaetz and his friends like to party with barely legal (and maybe underage) girls. And shit like that used to be very common in Hollywood and in the rock scene, among others.

That kind of shit was and is awful, but it's also very different from the types of conspiracy theories QAnon peddles.  If anything, the QAnon type theories of sex trafficking distract from and make it harder to prevent real sexual abuse and trafficking.

[hookemATL 11700]

14 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

The closest that I can think about in terms of an actual pedo sex ring was the Dean Corll story in Houston. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Corll 

Man, I dont mean to offend anyone with this take BUT Dean Corll was a real jerk.  There I said it.

[Pancho 44686]

🤣

 

 

[Hermanator 7031]

I'm sure it's a shitty movie but it's not going to do any more damage than a couple of decades of fox news, newsmax, oan, etc. propaganda and a decade of trump insanity hasn't already done. The destruction has already occurred. We're way past the point of some movie corrupting minds. 

[MC Fresh Breath 4074]

20 hours ago, hayden_horn said:

 FOR DRINKING ADRENOCHREME

 

I'm pretty out of the loop.  Did they really watch (I know they didn't read the book) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and come up with a conspiracy theory based off of it?

[Whitewater Horn 968]

13 minutes ago, Pig Bellmont said:

Oh and let’s all collectively forget about the harm Trump’s administration did by separating hundreds of children (some breastfeeding infants) from their parents for families seeking asylum. Some of whom were never reunited with their families.
 

Or what about the children who died in Texas’ foster care system? Not some made up conspiracy but actual harm to actual children. 
 

Disingenuous bullshit. “SAVE THE CHILDREN!!!1! Oh, ew, not those ones”

This something that boils my blood about this tribalism based around MAGA and the new brand of conservatism embraced by much of the mainstream Republican Party.  
 

My family has a long history of adoption and involvement in the Texas foster care systems across several generations. I even adopted my own children out of foster care and have been heavily involved in advocacy and volunteer activities for almost 15 years. Unfortunately, I’ve seen a lot of the horrors of child abuse and neglect up close. Some of those things have required a good deal of therapy to keep from going full psycho vigilante on these monsters. My own daughter suffered unspeakable and rage inducing abuse and neglect for the first five years of her life. A part of my heart will be forever broken after a single reading of her case file. I’ve done my damndest to make her feel safe and loved, to try to be a living example of a good man and positive role model. She just graduated high school in May and is more happy and well adjusted that I dared to dream 15 years ago. 
But part of me still screams and rages for what her first five years of life were like for her  

The point I was getting to is that I’ve seen these victims and the criminal perpetrators close up and often for many years. The majority of people abusing kids do not fit the narrative being pushed by Qanon and MAGA. It’s complete deflection. So many of these pieces of shit try to hide behind phony Christianity and phony patriotism. It’s maddening that this nonsense has any traction at all. 

[chainsaw 9850]

They aren't interested in saving children. They are interested in cashing in on hypothetical valor.

[Whitewater Horn 968]

2 minutes ago, chainsaw said:

They aren't interested in saving children. They are interested in cashing in on hypothetical valor.

That is so much more accurate and succinct point than my dumb, long-winded ass is capable of making.  

[Gatorubet 30183]

21 hours ago, hayden_horn said:

so a family member was talking to me about this. this family member is pretty conservative, pretty much a wide-eyed christian who is also maga. it's weird. a very good person, but full of strange contradictions. .

I’m not sure you can call them a ‘very good person’ if they support simply hateful and terrible people and policies with great consistency.

But that’s just me.

[chainsaw 9850]

1 minute ago, Whitewater Horn said:

That is so much more accurate and succinct point than my dumb, long-winded ass is capable of making.  

Your post was great and provides an important perspective.

The reality of the filthy world of child exploitation is that much of the real necessary work to combat it in no way resembles an action movie and is performed by nameless, overworked staffers sitting somewhere in an underfunded, forgotten cubicle farm with high turnover. While important, it's also "boring", unglamorous, and perhaps most damning of all (to the Q/MAGA crowd) calls for skills and values conventionally seen as soft and feminine, such as: child care, nurturing, trauma counseling.

The criminal justice system is working just fine, if you want to see people get punished. If you want children not to be exploited or abused, maybe you shouldn't have spent decades devaluing social work and underfunding the programs intended to get children out of dangerous situations. 

[Hermanator 7031]

41 minutes ago, MC Fresh Breath said:

I'm pretty out of the loop.  Did they really watch (I know they didn't read the book) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and come up with a conspiracy theory based off of it?

I'm pretty sure. I thought I remembered watching an interview with Thompson where he stated he invented adrenochrome (as a psychoactive substance harvested from living humans) for the novel. 

Edited July 12, 2023 by Hermanator

[MC Fresh Breath 4074]

I should have read the thread quicker, sorry.  Yeah explained here:

 

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-qanon-became-obsessed-with-adrenochrome-an-imaginary-drug-hollywood-is-harvesting-from-kids

 

Not just Hunter.  Monster's inc as well.

Quote

For conspiracy theorists, adrenochrome represents a mystical psychedelic favored by the global elites for drug-crazed satanic rites, derived from torturing children to harvest their oxidized hormonal fear—a kind of real-life staging of the Pixar movie Monsters, Inc. “QAnon also likes to say that Monsters, Inc. is Hollywood telling on itself,” says QAnon researcher Mike Rains, “because the plot of scaring kids to get energy is what they really do.”

 

And yeah, it was pretty obvious Hunter was making that stuff up.  But then these people believe things like this:

Quote

The highest-profile adrenochrome incident took place in 2018, when Google CEO Sundar Pichai was questioned by the House Judiciary Committee about a conspiracy called “Frazzledrip.” (“Heard of Frazzledrip?” reads one comment on The Sisters of Mercy song.) The crackpot theory involved a mythical video, supposedly squirreled away on Anthony Weiner’s laptop, that if leaked, would show Hillary Clinton and her one-time aide Huma Abedin performing a satanic sacrifice in which they slurped a child’s blood while wearing masks carved from the skin of her face. 

Hunter lives....

[hayden_horn 11362]

i dunno that sounds pretty fucking metal

[Celery Man 20929]

Dems need to stop putting their crimes on the laptops of guys like Hunter Biden and Anthony Weiner wtf

[BrickHorn 18215]

21 hours ago, wildcat09 said:

The Q-Anon Anonymous episode on Jim Caviezel is one of the most hilarious and batshit crazy things you will ever hear in your life.

Came here to post this. Do yourselves a favor and give it a listen. Well worth it.

[SmokeyTheBear 5562]

I'd vote for Hillary again

[Pato del Muerto 52484]

1 hour ago, wildcat09 said:

anything, the QAnon type theories of sex trafficking distract from and make it harder to prevent real sexual abuse and trafficking

This is heading towards the direction of root cause. 

[Ron McKelvey 3]

The Critical Drinker recommends it. 
 

 

[SizzleChest 8283]

2 hours ago, hayden_horn said:

that's pretty much every golf cart in port a though right? 

i don't know how much longer i can keep saying how much i love this state but have to explain away its trumpiness. it used to be the people and the attitude that supposedly made this state so unique. 

maybe i was wrong about that all along fuck i dunno

Believe it or not, I don't see a whole lot of that when I'm in Port A.  Maybe I'm just lucky.

[mdmost 42997]

8 minutes ago, Ron McKelvey said:

The Critical Drinker recommends it. 
 

 

Don't forget this the next time one of the DT regulars posts this guy's stupid videos to support why they hate the latest superhero or Star Wars movie that dares to include characters other than white males. 

[Pam Cummings 9639]

Someone mentioned this in another thread here and i thought it was an amazing point, that these days we just worship the most mediocre people. Yes, in the past, we have put bad people on a pedestal, but there was always some sort of undeniable talent or intelligence with whatever that person was doing. These days, it's just shitty ass, mediocre people getting all this attention. Because hey, if this guy can make millions on youtube, or twitter, or whatever platform, so can i.

Edited July 12, 2023 by Pam Cummings

[hookemATL 11700]

3 minutes ago, Pam Cummings said:

Someone mentioned this in another thread here and i thought it was an amazing point, that these days we just worship the most mediocre people. Yes, in the past, we have put bad people on a pedestal, but there was always some sort of undeniable talent or intelligence with whatever that person was doing. These days, it's just shitty ass, mediocre people getting all this attention. Because hey, if this guy can make millions on youtube, or twitter, or whatever platform, so can i.

This is who this made me think of.  Literally famous for having a lawyer dad that repped OJ and/or having spunk blown on her back. 

[hayden_horn 11362]

9 minutes ago, hookemATL said:

This is who this made me think of.  Literally famous for having a lawyer dad that repped OJ and/or having spunk blown on her back. 

 

[hookemATL 11700]

I knew that clip was coming before I even hit submit.  Still makes me crackup.

[Ron McKelvey 3]

1 hour ago, chainsaw said:

They aren't interested in saving children. They are interested in cashing in on hypothetical valor.

You're wrong. Learn more about Tim Ballard and his organization.
 

 

 

[mchookem 16318]

ok, Tim.

[wildcat09 29338]

8 minutes ago, Ron McKelvey said:

You're wrong. Learn more about Tim Ballard and his organization.
 

 

 

I have a great deal for you on oceanfront property in Arizona. Another guy has already offered me $10 million for it though, so I need to know in the next 10 minutes if you're going to beat his offer.

[Pescado_Rojo 19412]

2 hours ago, Ten Bears said:

Man am I the only one that has to take a shit 10 minutes after shooting up some adrenochrome?

That can happen if you get a kid that eats a lot of fast food. 

[pacman 7354]

7 minutes ago, Ron McKelvey said:

You're wrong. Learn more about Tim Ballard and his organization.
 

 

 

The guy is constantly under suspicion for scamming donors and horrible, ineffective tactics.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/chasing-the-slave-traders_b_7913104

https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7a3qw/a-famed-anti-sex-trafficking-group-has-a-problem-with-the-truth

 

If you want to champion somebody fighting this epidemic, try this guy.

 

[Biff Tannen 45661]

1 hour ago, Ron McKelvey said:

You're wrong. Learn more about Tim Ballard and his organization.
 

 

 

He looks like Cary Elwes on crack

[Nice Guy Eddie 13507]

Colombia asked him to set up a sting operation and then they would arrest the bad guys when he gets everything on film? As a private citizen I would be worried about protecting myself since I have zero authority and I'm the one buying children for $25K. Who's to say these children weren't flat out kidnapped BECAUSE Ballard was asking for them.

Or this entire story can be exaggerated.

[wildcat09 29338]

5 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

Colombia asked him to set up a sting operation and then they would arrest the bad guys when he gets everything on film? As a private citizen I would be worried about protecting myself since I have zero authority and I'm the one buying children for $25K. Who's to say these children weren't flat out kidnapped BECAUSE Ballard was asking for them.

Or this entire story can be exaggerated.

About that Colombia "sting":

Quote

I flew home from the raid alone. When the plane landed, I turned on my cellphone. There was a text from Ballard. He said he’d be happy to write a blurb for my book, whenever I got around to writing one. I was touched. A man called by God said he was going to endorse me. For a moment, I felt like I had a purpose.

When my husband picked me up from the airport, our two children in car seats in the back, I told him about the guns and the kids. “What the fuck was Ballard thinking? You shouldn’t have been in there,” he replied. I remember I thought he was being overprotective. I wrote an article for Huffington Post about Ballard’s heroics and the children’s new hope. When OUR released its first documentary, I attended the premiere. Before the movie started, everyone in the audience who’d participated in a “jump” was asked to stand up. I stood up. The crowd applauded.

But soon, Ballard’s aggressive sureness began to scare me. Anne Gallagher, whom the U.S. State Department called “the leading global expert on the international law on human trafficking,” published an essay critical of OUR’s tactics. She argued its raids showed an “alarming lack of understanding about how sophisticated criminal trafficking networks must be approached and dismantled” and called OUR’s operations “arrogant, unethical and illegal.” Ballard sent the article to me and called her a “bitch.” Then he asked me to write a rebuttal. (Ballard did not respond to detailed questions about his comments.) I had nothing of worth to say in response to a woman who’d dedicated her life to this work. How could he think I did? I didn’t write the piece.

Still, I was on occasional planning calls with OUR staff. They were mostly as inexperienced as I was. They believed in Ballard, too, and were doing their best to bootstrap his vision of salvation. The calls were fervent but flawed. Everybody wanted to “save the kids,” but no one really knew anything about these kids. We talked mostly about fundraising. The calls never addressed real things children need to be saved from. Toward the end of my association with the group, I told one person anxious about the recent bad press that I was concerned about an organization that relied so much on Ballard and his vision of the world. The other person was worried, too. 

OUR centered Black and Latino children in its fundraising work but ignored requests from Black activists to change the organization’s name. At the same time, Ballard called an Operation Underground painting by Utah artist Jon McNaughton “an early Christmas present.” McNaughton, who had famously painted Barack Obama burning the Constitution in 2012, depicted Ballard, his wife, and other white people carrying Black and brown children rescued from trafficking along a literal railroad. Harriet Tubman stands to the side in reverence along their path.

Disillusioned and disturbed, I sought more understanding of the group’s place within the anti-trafficking world. I reached out to anti-trafficking experts. When I told an international anti-trafficking expert about the 2014 raid I attended, she immediately said, “Do you know how wrong all of that was?” The research, I learned, tells us our 2014 raid was most likely just another childhood trauma for those 26 kids. We made their lives worse.

But what she grasped in a moment, it took me years to understand. When Ballard called me into that house, he put me in harm’s way so that I could write a story about him. (Ballard did not respond to specific questions about the raid.) A condemnation of Ballard? Yes. But it’s a condemnation of me, too. I’d imagined myself the same way he did, or said he did—as a savior of these children. I tried to find meaning in my own life on the backs of exploited kids.

I began to face the truth.

Operation Underground Railroad is now famous for its international sting operations. They are a big fundraiser: In 2015, a Silicon Valley man funded a sting with $40,000 and watched it happen in real time. With the help of OUR, a rich person can become a vigilante hero for the day, their living room transformed into a personal situation room. For those who can’t afford the situation room, Ballard carries the drama with him to every interview and every fundraiser. That drama, and a real desire to save children, moves a lot of donors, whether or not it’s accurate. Vice recently investigated a few of Ballard’s stories and found “a pattern of image-burnishing and mythology-building, a series of exaggerations that are, in the aggregate, quite misleading,” and has detailed “disturbingly amateurish” operations like the one I attended.

The TV show never got picked up. But Operation Underground Railroad made a video of the raid I went on and posted it to its YouTube channel. It’s still there. You can see the terrified housekeeper when she opens the door to a man with a gun, me lying on the floor while police pace around me, and Ballard winking at the camera. The video ends with the line, “26 victims liberated, 8 traffickers arrested.”

I was told two of the children had been trafficked for the first time that day. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that OUR may have created a demand. After the sting, I asked people on the jump team where the 26 kids were taken. I was given only vague answers. Aftercare wasn’t really their focus, I was told, but they partnered with people who did it well.

I found out what really happened from a Foreign Policy report:

In 2014, after OUR’s first operation in the Dominican Republic, a local organization called the National Council for Children and Adolescents quickly discovered it didn’t have the capacity to handle the 26 girls rescued. They were released in less than a week.

Some testified, the article reported. The local organization lost track of others. All those kids in 2014 got from us was a soda and a swim—and Ballard came out ahead in the deal.

A representative for Operation Underground Railroad said, “O.U.R. remains laser focused on our mission to help rescue and protect victims of child sex trafficking and exploitation, bring their perpetrators to justice, provide survivors with life-saving aftercare services, and raise awareness of this worldwide scourge.”

The man is a media whore, he doesn't give a shit about saving children. If anything, he makes the problem worse by throwing tons of money around in impoverished areas, encouraging assholes to kidnap kids to sell to his group.

[RomaVicta 29893]

5 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

This is just confusing as all hell now.

Bottom line:  Qanon is alive and well within America.  Millions of idiots actually believe this stuff.  And a society cannot function this way.

And it won't. 

[Biff Tannen 45661]

Since this thread has kinda gone down the Q hole, here's a good interview with a guy who has basically been covering them from the beginning.

 

[SydneyCarton 48051]

Haven't heard of this shitpile movie before seeing this thread. I see it's up to 46 million earned on a 14 million dollar budget, which will inevitably include zero marketing spend of note, so that is all pure, unfiltered profile ladies and gents. When you include a few more weeks of box office (made 4 last weekend), and then throw in home video rentals and purchases, and god forbid it sells to a streaming service or something, this thing will probably made 80-100 million dollars or profit for the financiers. Maybe some of the talent.

This is proof that the grift works. Society isn't getting any better any time soon. Left Behind made a fuck ton of money as books and movies tapping into the same broken brained dipshits before QAnon became popular. This is just the next chapter in the same fucking story. 

[Celery Man 20929]

3 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

I would argue that there is not a pedo sex ring at all in America. Zero. At any level. Not 800K kids disappearing and not even 1 in terms of a ring of people. Is it possible hypothetically that some group is kidnapping kids, or have kidnapped them in the past? Yes but even when a similar situation is uncovered, it makes the national news.

One incident is one too many but this situation is being pursued like how satanic cults were pursued in the 80s. No one ever discovered one.

The real victims are at-risk kids taken advantage of by teachers, coaches, preachers or even family. Perhaps the kid is not sold like in this made-up stories but the abuse is very real. Of course to stop this abuse, we need more govt intervention which the Right won't allow.

I was thinking to how this compares to the satanic cult craze of the 80s. "Paradise Lost" is on HBO/Max and is a documentary about the West Memphis 3. It is fucking maddening - one of the guys still has a case tied up in Arkansas just trying to get them to run the DNA and finally conclusively prove that listening to Metallica doesn't mean he's a murderer (and oh yeah by the way, someone else who didn't go to prison is a fucking murderer and has gone free).

[ConferenceRoom 6141]

1 hour ago, Biff Tannen said:

He looks like Cary Elwes on crack

I'll thank you not to besmirch the good name of Dr. Jonas Miller. 

[hookemATL 11700]

9 minutes ago, Celery Man said:

I was thinking to how this compares to the satanic cult craze of the 80s. "Paradise Lost" is on HBO/Max and is a documentary about the West Memphis 3. It is fucking maddening - one of the guys still has a case tied up in Arkansas just trying to get them to run the DNA and finally conclusively prove that listening to Metallica doesn't mean he's a murderer (and oh yeah by the way, someone else who didn't go to prison is a fucking murderer and has gone free).

That doc raised my BP to unhealthy levels. What an infuriating but sadly predictable story. 

[Celery Man 20929]

1 minute ago, longhornmatt said:

 

You’re both right.   They do actually believe it, but only because they’ve conditioned themselves to only believe what they want to believe and to completely dismiss/ignore any sort of inconvenient facts and countervailing arguments.  

In the “every accusation is a confession” column, a big one to include is the whole “postmodernism” thing where they argue leftists just choose their own truth instead of being bound by actual facts.  Are there plenty of people on the left who do this?  Of course.  But, like with everything else, the right wing ecosphere has seized on that idea and their response is, “Hey, this thing the Left does is bad … so we have to do it now to fight fire with fire or else the Left wins!” And they ALL fucking do it themselves while thinking it’s justified for them to do it, but another example of bad postmodernism run amok for the Left.

if you want a big brain, and are smart enough to recognize this obvious bullshit but too ideologically entrenched to disagree with your people, you simply point out that the mainstream left believed in russia collusion 

[Bozo_Casanova 26429]

On the other hand, Bill Camp is in the film, and he's a national treasure

[Longhorn_Fan68 33859]

the fix is in, y'all: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/sound_of_freedom

ah crap, I just saw Mira Sorvino is in it. *rips ice cream poster off wall*

[chainsaw 9850]

1 hour ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

Colombia asked him to set up a sting operation and then they would arrest the bad guys when he gets everything on film? As a private citizen I would be worried about protecting myself since I have zero authority and I'm the one buying children for $25K. Who's to say these children weren't flat out kidnapped BECAUSE Ballard was asking for them.

Or this entire story can be exaggerated.

He is by far the most persecuted person Caviezel has ever portrayed

[Longhorn_Fan68 33859]

lol, one of the characters (I assume the bad guy) is named Vampiro. Did they even try?

[Gatorubet 30183]

22 minutes ago, Celery Man said:

if you want a big brain, and are smart enough to recognize this obvious bullshit but too ideologically entrenched to disagree with your people, you simply point out that the mainstream left believed in russia collusion 

??? You think there was no Russian collusion? 

[Celery Man 20929]

7 minutes ago, Gatorubet said:

??? You think there was no Russian collusion? 

That is not what I intended to convey