Sound Of Freedom Fans Are Harassing Actual Trafficking Victims

perezhilton.com:

Well, it was bound to happen eventually. With enough pundits repeating the BS promo that this movie was “the truth the liberal media doesn’t want you to see” of course someone was going to believe it.

For those who don’t know, Sound of Freedom is a dramatized account of Operation Underground Railroad, a real-life organization which purports to free victims from human trafficking.

The group and its founder Tim Ballard have been called out in the past for embellishing their role in saving people (they claim to have saved THOUSANDS of victims), traumatizing children with their heavily armed (and often filmed) raids, and generally bumbling in their efforts.

It’s also disturbingly tied in with the dangerous conspiracy theories of QAnon. Ballard told The New York Times in 2020 about the theories (which have inspired multiple men to murder their children): Back in 2015, leading trafficking expert Anne Gallagher, Co-Chair of the International Bar Association’s Presidential Task Force on Human Trafficking, wrote that O.U.R.’s work was “arrogant, unethical and illegal.” She cited their “alarming lack of understanding about how sophisticated criminal trafficking networks must be approached and dismantled.” In other words, they’re a bunch of gung-ho dudebros who aren’t interested in saving and caring for victims so much as BEING BIG OL’ HEROES WHO BUST IN AND TAKE OUT THE BAD GUYS — AND GET SEEN DOING IT.