The Flight Of The Tarnished Superheroes

I've been following Cosmic Connie's blog Whirled Musings lately, and I came across a series of posts about a movie titled Sound of Freedom which was released by Angel Studios this summer.  Angel Studios is an arm of the American evangelical media industry, an industry about which I made a few comments in a recent post.  

The movie purports to document the efforts of Tim Ballard, a Mormon and former employee of the Department of Homeland Security who supposedly formed his own special private organization in order to rescue children from child-trafficking rings.  Both Ballard and the organization he founded are unabashed supporters of the Rethuglican (er, I mean, "Republican") Party and Donald Trump (who "protected" Mexican migrant children at the southern border by violently ripping them from the arms of their parents and throwing them into detention centers where some of them died).  The lead actor in Sound of Freedom is also a rabid Trump supporter and QAnon spokesperson.

The movie is an example of the longstanding strategy of the American right wing, in finding a group of people whom they can brand as monsters while claiming that the champions of the Right (and only they) can and will effectually deal with the monster they have identified.  Now I fully agree with those who say that the present operators of human trafficking rings (especially those which sexually exploit children) are monsters.  But for the Right to claim nowadays that its members are the pure and holy fighters of these monsters is laughable, especially when we see how the recent exposures of the sins of the Right (especially those of the evangelical/Protestant/religious members of the Right) have so severely damaged its credibility.  

This definitely applies to the makers and financial backers of the movie Sound of Freedom.  Let me summarize some of the points made in Connie's posts:

1. Both Tim Ballard and the organization he founded are guilty of factual distortions in their presentation of the problem of child trafficking and of the efforts of their organization in fighting it.
2. These factual distortions have actually made it harder for legitimate governmental organizations to fight child trafficking.
3. Some of the financial backers of Sound of Freedom are themselves involved in child trafficking or have groomed underage minors for sex or have trafficked in illicit drugs.
4. Some of these backers have also committed fraud against government programs.  Among these is Andrew McCubbins, the executive producer for Sound of Freedom, who pleaded guilty to Medicare fraud in the amount of at least $89 million (one source says $100 million) in September 2020, and who was indicted later in 2020 along with other defendants for defrauding the U.S. Government of an additional $4.5 billion in medical billing.  McCubbins has not yet been sentenced and has not yet gone to jail.

If you want all the details concerning these points, please read Connie's posts.  

I guess moviemaking is politics by other means.  (Didn't Clausewitz say that? ... Oh, ... he said it about something other than movies.  My bad!)  But here we are, not even out of the dog days of Summer 2023 and election year campaigning has already begun, courtesy of a movie made by the American religious Right.  As I have frequently already said, the American religious Right is interested in religion solely as a means for advancing white supremacy.  They themselves have no intention of obeying the New Testament.  This is obvious when we see how the white male defenders of "traditional morality" who come from the American Right keep getting caught engaging in pedophilia, fornication, adultery and homosexual behavior themselves.

And this is but one reason why I haven't been to church since March 2020.  Let me be clear about this.  I know that everyone has issues, and that anyone who wants to become a decent person will find himself struggling with his own besetting sins.  That is a tragic consequence of our fallen condition.  I also know that I can't point to others and say that I'm any better than them.  All I can say is that whatever our personal demons, we can band together to support each other in leaving those demons behind.  But when you willfully and deliberately use religion - especially the Bible and the name of Christ - as a political tool for promoting the supremacy of your own people and as a justification to enslave or trash or oppress me - simply because I am not a member of your tribe or skin color or ethnicity - then I say God damn you.  When you portray yourselves as perfect and the perfect upholders of God's holy Law in order to justify your continued oppression of people who haven't done anything to you, I say, to hell with you.  May God punish you not only for not leaving your personal demons behind but also for your hypocrisy in claiming that you and you only are the sole defenders (and thus the sole beneficiaries) of all that is good in the world.  God damn you to hell.