Child safeguarding is now an alt-right thing
Apparently, caring about and fighting against child trafficking has become a “far-right” issue.
A commentary on “Key California Assembly committee blocks bill to make child trafficking a ‘serious felony’” (published on Yahoo!News on July 12, 2023)
In early July 2023, at the start of summer movie season, a small production took first place at the US box office quite unexpectedly, causing public outrage in Hollywood: Alejandro Monteverde’s Sound of Freedom stars Jim Caviezel as Tim Ballard, a former Homeland Security agent gone rogue who makes it his mission to destroy a child trafficking ring on his own. Grossing a whopping $14.2 million on its opening day on July 4, the thriller even beat Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny that day. Within the first 30 days of its release, Sound of Freedom brought in over $155 million, which is ten times its production cost – an unusual box-office hit, especially considering its stomach-turning subject matter, which might be why it had been shelved since 2018.
But what’s even more interesting than these impressive box office numbers are the media reactions towards the movie’s success, which some critics apparently didn’t approve of. Particularly bizarre was a review by Charles Bramesco for the British Guardian, whose sole purpose was apparently to place the movie – about child trafficking, mind you – in the right-wing or extreme right-wing corner of QAnon and other crazy conspiracy theorists. In a review that says little about the quality of the movie itself, but rants about various potential conspiratorial ideas, Bramesco throws around pompous words1 and does his best to allege that Sound of Freedom is fabricated, implausible and untrue nonsense. Using a variety of bogus arguments, he accuses Caviezel of “conspiratorial thought targeting the Jewish and transgender communities” and implies that he strongly doubts the veracity of Ballard’s story on which the movie is based – however, he doesn’t present any facts or arguments to back up these doubts.
It is quite remarkable how many of Bramesco’s colleagues jump on the bandwagon of denouncing the movie, whether it’s Rolling Stone, Slate and the Washington Post (which is at least a little bit more nuanced) in the US, or Süddeutsche Zeitung, Welt and Berliner Zeitung in Germany2. It is basically impossible to google Sound of Freedom without stumbling across words like “QAnon”, “conspiracy theory” or “right-wing”. To quote The Critical Drinker, a wildly successful and sharp-witted YouTube movie critic: “You’d think a movie that sheds light on the hidden nightmare of child trafficking would be a pretty admirable cause worthy of support. But apparently not […] Why don’t they want this movie to succeed? Why is Hollywood so defensive about it?”
The vehement pushback against Sound of Freedom, which focuses on a both horrendous and extremely important topic, is indicative of a generally disturbing trend concerning child safeguarding. Only one week after the movie’s release, the Californian Assembly Public Safety Committee made an extraordinarily alarming decision: The Assembly voted against bill SB14 which would have classified child trafficking as a serious felony in the state of California. This would have kept repeat offenders behind bars and would have made it impossible for them to be released from prison early. Having passed the State Senate with a unanimous bipartisan vote, none of the six Democrat members of the Assembly voted for the bill on July 11, 2023, thereby outvoting the remaining two Republican Assemblymen.
You would think that child safeguarding should be neither a left- nor right-wing issue – it is so fundamental that it transcends political lines. The Assembly’s vote can only be met with utter bewilderment, as did abuse victim Odessa Perkins, who had testified before the State Senate in favor of bill SB14 and, after it was voted down, asked: “Why are you against something that could save children?”
The answer to this question lies in the overall tendency that fundamental values have been successively eroded. This must be understood as the logical consequence of the postmodern movement to liberate society of all taboos, which have supposedly become obsolete as they are considered patriarchal, oppressive norms (see Michel Foucault, Judith Butler et al.). But what began as a rebellion to shake off and fight conservative and traditional norms has, over the past decades, transformed from a bold transgression of outdated boundaries to the total deconstruction of all basic values and categories – most especially in the sexual realm. Jordan Peterson summarized the problem in an interview with Jim Caviezel and Tim Ballard as follows:
“All sexual expression is essentially pure and good in its most fundamental form and it’s all warped by social pressure and if we were just allowed to express ourselves in every manner that we saw fit that everyone would be free and we wouldn’t suffer anymore from the constraints of tyrannical society. And it’s just convenient for the bloody pedophiles to […] justify them doing whatever the hell they want to children who are obviously too young to consent.”
Total disinhibition, total entropy. Nothing is forbidden, everything goes.
Educators and teachers who teach gender ideology in kindergarten and primary schools – not a taboo anymore.
Addressing and relativizing various sexual practices, pornographic content and sex apps in “children’s books” – not a taboo anymore.
Talking about masturbation with students in class – not a taboo anymore.
Putting adult males in drag queen outfits, who go by stage names such as “Lil Miss Hot Mess”, in front of an audience of little children to read to them from “children’s books” such as The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish – not a taboo anymore.
Encouraging people to bring their children to heavily sexualized drag shows, with no age limit whatsoever – not a taboo anymore.
Putting children in sexualized outfits and having them dance at a strip club while adults are cheering them on – not a taboo anymore.
Using half-naked men in high heels in a job advertisement for nursery school teachers (see below) – not a taboo anymore.
Men who take potentially harmful hormones to be able to “breastfeed” their baby – not a taboo anymore.
Exhibiting pedophile “art” in a renowned Parisian museum, with the French President himself coming to the artist’s defense as people complain about it – not a taboo anymore.
Bringing your children to so-called “Pride Parades” where naked adults celebrate their sexual fetishes out on the streets – not a taboo anymore.
“Non-binary” men who encourage children to go “no contact” with their parents and do so-called “workshops” with them online – not a taboo anymore.
In the name of sexual liberation and under the guise of self-determination and self-realization one of the most important mechanisms of child safeguarding has come under heavy attack in recent years: the age of consent. Being able to consent means to dispose of sufficient physical and mental maturity to enable self-responsible judgment and thus the ability to act independently. Various postmodern thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, however, made the case as early as in 1977 for changing French Law so that it “acknowledge[s] the right of children and adolescents to have relations with whomever they choose”. But children cannot fully understand sexual topics, let alone judge them, because they are neither physically nor mentally mature enough to do so. Every person with an ounce of common sense knows in their heart that certain taboos that were socially accepted until about five seconds ago – children have no business in strip clubs, drag shows or around half-naked adults – have evolved for a good reason: to protect children from inappropriate content and potential offenders.
But where there are no more taboos, where nothing is deemed inappropriate anymore, the principles of child safeguarding become shaky. This is reflected in the utter political failure, if not to say political reluctance concerning child safeguarding as we are currently seeing in California. This failure can be interpreted as incompetence at best and criminal at worst. The rejection of bill SB14 can’t really be explained by the former; a particularly cynical mind might point out that Hollywood is in California and the Dream Factory cannot boast an especially exemplary record when it comes to child protection, but does have a very powerful lobby. Powerful players of the political elite are also entangled in pedophilia scandals time and time again, such as State Senator Tony Navarrete (D-AZ) or State Senate candidate Michael Letts (R-SC), or even involved in high-profile human and child trafficking cases such as Anthony Weiner and Hunter Biden (whose father President Joe Biden is said to have pedophile tendencies). You start to wonder whether this is just the tip of the iceberg.3
The dam has broken: Ten to fifteen years ago there was still bipartisan agreement that pedophilia and child trafficking were among the most heinous things humans are capable of, but now those boundaries have been continually undermined. Having removed the taboo from every single sexual practice in the book (queer theory, gender ideology and the transgender trend also play an eminent role in that), we have now arrived at the relativization of concepts such as the age of consent: Does the 13-year-old boy who is being applauded at a strip club for dancing like a drag queen have the maturity to decide whether he truly wants to do that? Can a little girl consent whether it is appropriate for her to watch half-naked men dance lasciviously on the streets? Anyone who questions this nowadays is considered “far-right”, “homophobic”, “transphobic”, “anti-queer”, “anti-feminist," etc. Of course, nobody wants to be called that way. And so, resistance is largely4 left to conservative media, activists and politicians, while left-leaning mainstream media either respond with silence or abstruse defamation of the opposing side as “far-right extremists”. A simple example for this: Where ten years ago mainstream media channels like CBS News and News.com.au were portraying Tim Ballard as a hero who was rescuing abused children from the hands of cartels, he is now dismissed as a full-on QAnon nut. You have to wonder: Why is that?
It doesn’t matter what you think of Tim Ballard, Jim Caviezel or Sound of Freedom – in the end, that’s not what it is about. Rather, it is about the atrocities they have brought to light and the message they want to spread, which may be very uncomfortable for certain people: pedophilia is on the rise – and the danger comes from certain parts of the political Left, which have pushed the normalization of child sex as a political goal for decades. In addition to the aforementioned disgustingly pro-pedophilia leftist intellectual milieu of 1970s France, whose members are celebrated and quoted in academic circles to this day, one can also look at examples such as Danny Cohn-Bendit and the Green Party in Germany, the Jongen Demokraten and the PNVD in the Netherlands (see video and quote below), or the recent statement of Spanish Minister of Equality Irene Montero (Podemos), who advocates that children “can love and have sex with whomever they want, as long as there is mutual consent.”5
Pedophiles exist on all sides of the political spectrum, but the political agenda to water down child safeguarding under the paradoxical guise of “child maturity” and radical self-determination has always been driven by parts of the Left. Here, ultimately, lies the answer to the question of why child safeguarding is now suddenly in the hands of the “alt-right”. In the current socio-political climate, where “right-wing” always equals “radical right-wing”, where “conservative” has become a slur (not only in the US to denote political orientation, but as an adjective in general), and where traditions and taboos have had their day, child abuse is declared to be child love and child trafficking a QAnon conspiracy theory. The end result is a political Right that pursues this issue with religious zeal (Caviezel, for instance, recently posted an image of himself with Donald Trump at a screening of Sound of Freedom and likened the former President to Moses), which means that the Left must refrain from it as a matter of principle. The children who are victimized and who need our help are thus degraded to pawns in a ghastly chess game for political sovereignty. In order to protect these children, however, non-partisan thinking and action are required: That is the only way to counteract this madness and return to a meaningful, healthy interpretation of consent and, above all, to social norms that vehemently condemn any pedophilic inclination.
“I had to study their literature [of the PNVD, a Dutch political party] and what I started recognizing is […] I call [it] the ‘Pedophile Network Doctrines’. They include things like: Separate children from parents because parents are a bad influence – the state knows best. Sexualize kids, let them see pornography. Take God out of Education because that just gets in the way. And: Consent, consent, consent. Children can consent to anything. At 12 years old, they should be able to vote, they should do anything. Now, my stomach is getting sick as I’m reading this […] Pedophiles are sitting back right now and going: We’ve been pushing this agenda for decades and now we don’t have to push it anymore because the Left is taking care of it for us in America […] And this whole trans voice on children – again, I’m libertarian. Adults, do what you want, I’ll fight for your right for whatever you want […] I’m talking about children and what they’re saying is: Children can consent to having their bodies filled with a chemical that will destroy their reproductive system. They can consent to ripping apart their genitalia. This is insanity, in and of itself it’s horrible. But what it’s going to lead to is what the pedophiles have been asking for: If you can consent to that, guess what, what’s more fluid than gender? Age.” – Tim Ballard
About the author: Born 1987, with roots in Germany and the Philippines, living in Spain. Constantly curious and eager to learn new things. Freedom > safety. Your own opinion > groupthink. Coffee > tea. Currently reading: “Burn All My Letters” by Alex Schulman.
Die deutsche Version des Artikels findet sich hier:
“… unsavory network of astroturfed boosterism among the far-right fringe, a constellation of paranoids now attempting to spin a cause célèbre out of a movie with vaguely simpatico leanings…”
Those who dare to dig deeper might find themselves in dangerous territory. Jim Caviezel’s claims about the production of natural adrenochrome – a substance secreted as a byproduct of adrenaline and said to have a rejuvenating effect – through the torture of children led to the abrupt end of his Hollywood career; he was declared a crazy person and defamed as a tin foil hat wearing member of QAnon. There are also conspiracy theories en masse about Tim Ballard. But hardly anyone has ever carefully researched whether there is any truth to their claims about the extent of worldwide child trafficking and the adrenochrome market – instead, they and other conservative media personalities are always met with the accusation of being conspiracy theorists, and that is the end of the discussion. It is interesting how in this case the media apparatus is siding with Hollywood and suddenly seems to have forgotten names like Jeffrey Epstein or Harvey Weinstein.
Gays Against Groomers is an important exception. Of course, certain media outlets have already defamed them as right-wing extremist, Trump-loving conspiracy theorists.
“Los niños tienen derecho a tener relaciones sexuales con quienes les dé la gana, basadas en el consentimiento.”
This was exactly my impression in the last days: They push it so far, that child protection and women's rights are now a far right issue. Extremely dangerous. Thank you for this text.
> The Assembly’s vote can only be met with utter bewilderment, as did abuse victim Odessa Perkins, who had testified before the State Senate in favor of bill SB14 and, after it was voted down, asked: “Why are you against something that could save children?”
To ask the question is to answer it...