None of the ferocity of the attack, which I wrote about at length here on the ‘Sound of Freedom’ film by the mainstream media and entertainment publications has let up.  In fact, the attacks have become increasingly bizarre with some criticising the film for being too religious (despite there being only a single “religious” reference of “God’s Children Are Not For Sale”); some (the publication next to it on the shelf) criticising it for not being religious enough (“if you are going to do religion then do it full throttle”); others criticised the film for being mediocre and just who is going to watch it (the theatres are half empty because we have just counted the empty seats in a Times Square cinema at 4pm on a Thursday), yet it has still made over $180 million in the box office, so the pay-forward scheme which brought them all that money must be a scam; but its receipts have now succeeded in surpassing Indiana Jones and Mission Impossible on the domestic US release, just how are they going to spend the money? So, it must be about the money for those greedy film distributors, but then Angel have paid back all the investors in the film at 120% of what they put in; 20% sure is a good return at the moment.

Still others criticised the film for sensationalising and misrepresenting child trafficking by a vigilante organisation despite the film being very tightly based on the life story of a specific operation in conjunction with two national governments which explicitly invited the participation of that organisation and the featured individual was an ex-government HLS agent, an expert who has rescued over 5000 women and children from slavery and often child sex slavery specifically, working exclusively by invitation from the authorities in the areas they work in, making very clear freely and publicly where the script had diverged from what actually happened or where the timeline of events had been modified for dramatic effect; with even the full documentary available and referred to for those wanting to know the precise context of the film.

Anyone who has watched that documentary will realise how closely they followed one particular aspect of a highly complex, multi-threaded operation which would have required a much longer film and a much bigger budget to try and dramatize as a whole, far outside the scope of an independent film company.  One of the most bizarre attacks was because one of the six thousand investors who I think had invested about $500 in the film which had about a $15m budget (i.e., 0.0033%), became involved in a “kidnapping case” and had “imprisoned” a child; therefore, the whole film must be corrupt, unethical, and dishonest supported by those it was supposed to be exposing; it was facilitating trafficking!  In fact, it turns out it was a complex custody battle this “major investor” had been involved in, but no one reported that detail once it came to light.  Scraping the barrel for negative stories about anyone or anything connected with the film would in any other context seem hysterical, desperate, and dishonest.  For example, Donald Trump hosted a showing, it must be bad, not worth watching as a mediocre, Far-Right QAnon Adjacent “embraced by conservatives” film despite being finished long before QAnon made its first appearance.

Yet, despite all these attacks and owing to its enormous success, streaming platforms are fighting quietly over the rights to the film.  What is even more bizarre is the amount of extant coverage that has also come to light up until 2018 when the mainstream media gave enormous positive coverage to the same organisation and the very same operation dramatised in the film, that they now label immoral and vigilante.  As one popular podcaster colourfully noted, it seems that the one unifying topic remaining that could cross bipartisan party lines was preventing harm to children and breaking up people trafficking rings, but in just five short years it has divided along party and political lines, worldwide.  In the US, not a single Democrat came to a showing in Congress.  This would seem to be utterly inexplicable, but I finished the previous article concluding the real problem critics had with the film was an ideological one, and this controversy was just smoke obscuring a deeper agenda on the part of the detractors, it is to probe that more as the issues have become clearer which is the subject of this article.

The focus of the film is on child trafficking and in particular child sex trafficking.  This gives us the clue as to the sudden about face of the cultural mainstream because a lot has gone on with respect to liberating the “child” from “sexual” taboos and the concerted attempt to enforce an ideology based primarily on sexual identity.  The UN released a report earlier in the year, which was marketed as being written by a team headed by a retired white, South African judge who made a point of indicating that the report had been heavily influenced by his experience as a “gay” man, who we can but extrapolate had insufficient access to the expression of his gay sexuality he felt he had a right to; he was a victim of the cis-hegemony.  This “gayness” obviously made him an expert in this area of liberating a minor in the area of sexual consent; there is a very short distance between this ideological gayness and MAPS sexuality which we will consider a little later.  There was a section of the report that explicitly stated that there were situations where sex with a nominally underage minor could be deemed “consensual” despite it being outside of the statutory frameworks of the jurisdictions.

However, there followed a pushback on this particular passage once it became news, with the author responding by saying he was not seeking to undermine those individual jurisdictions but was recognising and establishing them – yes, but he was recognising them as established obstacles to consensual sex with those who are presently considered minors.  His whole ideological point was that why are we so sensitive on this topic of sex with children, should not a child be “liberated” to engage in consensual sex, both with other children and “adults” (or even adults that self-identify as prepubescent children)?  This is precisely the logic of other parts of the UN championing sex education for kindergarten and 3–7-year-olds, so that they can make “responsible” and “informed” choices regarding consensual sex, we can only assume from 4-years old.  Some are even brazened enough to discuss sex-education curricular for 3-year-olds where in their “me time” they can touch themselves and one another.  There is a “healthy” academic literature on this subject should you doubt.

That is, it is the elevating of the right and the cognisant ability of the child to consent.  This becomes very clear with the transexual ideology; certain jurisdictions (e.g., California) are on the brink of introducing legislation that would categorise as “child abusers” parents who “refused to recognise and affirm their child’s gender identity”.  That is, the choice of the child overrides any parental right or responsibility to offer guidance if they perceived their child was struggling with gender identity.  It would be criminal to challenge their child’s self-perception, it would be a violation of the child’s autonomy.  In effect, the child ceases to be a member of the private family but becomes the protected property of the State, as President Biden announced to his nation, “LGBTQ+ children, we have your back”; the implication being we have your back when your parents do not.  Once the child has decided, that establishes an absolute right; that includes the right to consent to irreversible bodily changes.  It is particularly here that we see the strong links between the ideologies, if a child can consent to these bodily changes at puberty or are judged cognisant to block their own puberty, can they not consent to use their bodies for consensual sex (including with adults) at puberty or before puberty.  Perhaps, it is then no surprise that the ACLU has decided to fight to help maintain laws that permit underage marriages in certain jurisdictions and communities.  This is despite all the empirical evidence pointing to the fact that it is the women and children that get exploited, abused, and trafficked by men in these “marriages”.

The broader ideological point is that this is just a natural part of sexuality, and it should be embraced, not forbidden.  The ideological issue with the Sound of Freedom film is that it “conflates consensual sex with exploitation and genuine sex work”.  The “conflation” is said to occur because it focuses on “sex tourism” out of the US and classifies it as “exploitative” when it emphasises that the US is the largest consumer of child-sex material (and by child-sex material we mean pornographic and hard-core pornographic material) and that Mexico is the largest provider, with certain other South and Central American countries and South-East Asia operating trafficking and sex-tourism hubs.  The objection is that sex tourism is as legitimate as any other form of tourism.  If a host country provides you with its local culinary dishes or excursions around its cities and countryside, why could it not offer you sex with its children or sell its children to those who can facilitate the greater earning potential of the children in the biggest market in the world?  The trafficking process is legitimate sex work, because for some families, it provides valuable subsistence, and it is just cultural prejudice and taboos that prevent its legitimisation.  Pimping is a valuable social service and should be legalised.

This legitimisation and sexualisation of children is directly challenged by the film, the film calls this sexual exploitation and trafficking of children, and wants to begin a discussion which focusses on this sexualisation of children which has been quietly and now not so quietly been making its way through the UN, up front and centre of the “new” Pride movement.  New Pride brings drag queens to primary school story hours, “family friendly” drag performances performing with your male children and makes a national celebrity out of a 7-year-old drag act.  The New York Pride march had voting tables for sex education in kindergarten and blown-up sexual toys that children could play with in front of the fountain, with “we are here, and we are queer, and we are coming for your children” the triumphant anthem that was sung for hours by naked and barely clothed participants.  I intentionally say “new” Pride because it is of note that some of the gay activists that began the Pride marches withdrew their support from those pushing a wider ideology that promotes the sexualisation of children on the back of the trans movement.  There is a huge gulf between arguing for a sexual preference such as “gay” or “straight” and arguing that there is no such category as gay or straight, male or female, and that is why we can be of “fluid” gender; then going further and seeking to drive businesses of dissenting persons out, persecuting or prosecuting those who refuse to accept the ideology.  Those early gay activists were famous for their libertarianism, you live your life the way you want to live, we will live our lives the way we want to live, let us respect one another. Similarly, some radical feminists are recognising that destroying the category of “woman” allows for the increased exploitation and abuse of women in the name of sexual liberation; thus, the denial of the category of “child” and of a “minor”, allows for the exploitation and abuse of children in the name of their sexual liberation.

Where this ideological lever has been most forcefully felt is with the repackaging of paedophiles as “Minor Attracted Persons”.  My own police service adopted this relabelling a couple of months ago.  With this repackaging comes legitimacy and the implicit assertion that it is just another sexuality, and this is a minority group that has been systematically denied its “sex-based rights”.  However, this is just not the case, as Martina Navratilova made the point to some trans activist athletes who were accusing her of denying them the right to lobby for their “sex-based rights” to compete as women as she had done for lesbian rights, there is a qualitative difference to what they are arguing about.  In the vast majority of the cases of MAPS, as in the case of trans men wanting to compete in women’s sports, this is about men as in biological males, getting what they want from women and children.

We mentioned earlier the short tether between ideological gayness and MAPS sexuality; this has long been established within the radical left, I used to watch the radical gay magazines in the 1990s where a section of the programme was always open for a discussion of the torments suffered by those MAPS delicately arguing for a “loving relationship between a child and an adult and how we are now fighting for our civil rights the way the gay community had to fight for theirs”.  The same language that was used to justify homosexuality is used to justify MAPS sexuality, “you cannot help who you love”, “love is love however it is expressed”, “I was born this way, it is my nature” are my favourite three.  If these were valid propositions, perhaps MAPS could claim parity as a sexuality; but the issue is these are utterly fallacious and lend neither as a claim to legitimate sexuality any validity.  We help who we love most of the time, especially if they are already taken and/or your life expectancy would be seriously reduced if their partner found out; there are distinctions between the kinds of love that are appropriate between different groups and between close family members; and we would be in a desperate state if we believed that our biology or inherited characteristics defined who we would be in life, that our intelligence, outcomes and status in life are defined by our biology; only the most radical and extreme behaviourists want to believe that.  We have the power of choice and the ability to make decisions and to overcome whatever genetic behavioural traits we might have, and those decisions apply equally to our sexual choices.

There has always been a stream of radical politics that has argued for “sexual liberation” and that “liberation” is from any constraints of conventional boundaries.  It is, and always will be a political and an ideological choice.  It is no coincidence that our British ACLU, the National Council for Civil Liberties shared a postal address with what was once called the Paedophile Exchange, a support network for that marginalised minority.  So, it is not a new position, it has just become mainstream as part of the new sexual revolution, with the San Francisco gay men’s choir making the tender refrain “your children can find us on the internet and there is nothing you [parents] can do” (my paraphrase), all sung in beautiful mocking harmonies a centrepiece of their work; nothing subtle about it.

Thus, to bring this discussion to a close, we can only understand the visceral hostility of the cultured elite to the Sound of Freedom because it is seen as a threat to the wider agenda of making acceptable the sexualisation of children in the name of liberating them, that has been working its way through the progressive elites.  It shines a light on the modern Pride ideology that asserts the right to decide gender identity for yourself as a child and thus the right to engage in consensual sex as a child.  It ignores the reality of the utter ruthlessness, violence and callousness of those who have been cheering on the sidelines for first the decriminalisation of sex work and then the emancipation of children.