The movie Sound of Freedom was both one of the best and worst movies I’ve ever seen. Best because the story was interesting, the protagonists were likable and engaging, and the plot moved quickly. But the worst part is that it was also very hard to watch because I went into the theater knowing that the movie is largely true.
The movie starts off with the kidnapping of a brother and sister from Honduras by a young woman posing as a talent agent. You then see the American Homeland Security agent, Tim Ballard, recover the little boy. After the little boy’s rescue, he asks Tim if he can find his sister, too, and most of the movie involves Tim trying to find out what happened to the little girl.
It’s an action story of a man trying to put a family back together; it’s also a story of Tim Ballard’s personal journey in leaving the security of a government job to do what he believes is right.
Here’s some background.
I watched Jordan Peterson’s interview with both Tim Ballard and Jim Caviezel, who plays Tim in the movie, and I recommend it because it adds a bit of depth to what was going through Tim’s mind. Tim’s wife is only a very minor character in the movie, but in his interview with Jordan Peterson, Tim tells Jordan that she was actually one of the major drivers behind his actions.
Tim is a devout Mormon and had six children of his own at the time he was trying to track down the little girl from Honduras. When it became clear that trying to find her would mean leaving his government job, he tells Jordan he almost wanted his wife to tell him to just come home. Instead, she asked what he’d do if one of their children was missing, and told him, “I’m not going to allow you to jeopardize my salvation by not doing this.” Tim’s wife said she was willing to live in a tent if that was what it took for them to live with clean consciences.
Here are some key takeaways from Sound of Freedom.
This movie provided so much food for thought it’s hard to know where to start.
The movie, combined with the Jordan Peterson interview, struck me in that it really shows what a strong marriage between two people firm in their beliefs can accomplish in society. I’ve been divorced for a long time, though, so maybe that’s made me more impressed by the couples who do get it right.
More than this, the movie shows how easy it is for little children to be dragged around, unnoticed, through seedy harbors and party towns and sometimes into the background of American living. The little boy is rescued at a checkpoint between the U.S.-Mexican border when it was more secure. Tim Ballard says in multiple interviews that this is how it actually happened; they had a photo of the little boy and his sex-offending “guardian,” and so were able to throw the offender in jail and reunite the little boy with his dad.
But this event took place ten years ago. Our borders are a sieve now, and things have changed.
In an interview with Redacted, Tim Ballard talks about how our border policies under Biden have made the problem of child exploitation so much worse. Because the border has been so much more open, more people are willing to take risks in heading toward the border.
Many smugglers work with “sponsors” in the U.S. They write down a name or phone number and pin it to a child’s shirt. When they arrive in the U.S., government employees turn the children over to these “sponsors,” who will put the children to all kinds of work.
Tim Ballard is not the only person making these claims. Tara Lee Rodas, who worked at an intake site in California, came forward and testified to Congress that this was happening.
We think that we’re being nice by letting everyone into the States, but we aren’t. There is absolute chaos at our southern border. And chaos engenders atrocities.
The thriving business of human trafficking
Human traffickers have been making more than $14 million per day smuggling people through the Mexican-American border. Human trafficking is the fastest-growing international crime trade, generating about $16 trillion per year worldwide.
Some places are trying to tackle this. A great deal of prostitution-related crime occurs in hotels. In 2019, Florida required hotels to watch out for trafficking schemes, and in 2023, they cut the time for hotels to get into compliance in half before issuing fines.
Other places just won’t admit it’s a real problem. California is one of the largest sites for human trafficking in the United States, and yet California Democrats just killed a bill that would make human trafficking a felony.
Human trafficking is big business, and it goes to the top of society. Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislane Maxwell are probably the most famous, and they were known for hobnobbing with the likes of Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew.
And maybe that’s why the MSM hates this movie.
Which probably explains why this movie ran into so many problems. It took five years to be released. The script was actually written back in 2015, and they finished filming in 2018. After the movie was filmed, the producers made a distribution deal with 20th Century Fox. However, in 2019 Disney purchased 20th Century Fox, and they sat on the movie. In 2023, Angel Studios obtained distribution rights, which is why we can see it in the theaters now.
Now that it has been released, audiences love it. Sound of Freedom has a 100% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. It even has a 77% critic score, which is somewhat surprising given all the negative press attention it’s received.
CNN claimed the movie fed into QAnon conspiracy theories despite the fact that human trafficking is a well-documented problem.
Oh, wait, CNN fired high-level employees Chris Cuomo, John Griffin, and Rick Saleeby after they were all arrested for crimes involving children. Maybe it’s not so surprising that the network is trashing a movie that portrays child molesters as the bad guys, after all.
It makes me wonder what Rolling Stone has to hide. They called Sound of Freedom a “superhero movie for dads with brainworms.”
We are at a strange time in American history.
When I was young, being in a homosexual relationship was scandalous. You could lose your job over that. When same-sex marriage was legalized nationwide, most people didn’t have a problem with it. I think a lot of us knew gay people that had some legitimate complaints surrounding health insurance and power of attorney for their partners, and it didn’t seem unreasonable to allow them access to the same kinds of benefits heterosexual couples enjoyed.
The trans movement’s been weirder. There’s not a specific set of legal privileges they want access to. Instead, they want other people to recognize their ideas about gender identity and play into their fantasies. The destruction of women’s spaces by letting biological men into women’s bathrooms and women’s sports leagues has turned the issue from ideological to physical.
And it’s still not stopping. It hasn’t been enough to destroy sexual norms and women’s sports. Have you seen the drag marchers chanting, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children”? They’re not joking. People with a wide variety of sexual preferences have always been around, but for a long time, behaviors were limited by cultural and religious norms. Those have been destroyed.
As I child, I had limited experience with some people that just assumed, “Well, kids that age don’t really understand anyway.” There are more perverts out there than most people want to admit. The majority of the population is not particularly violent or perverted, but they will just look away when confronted with ugly things.
Sound of Freedom begs people not to look away.
In case you were concerned, there are no scenes whatsoever of violence against children in the movie. They just do a really good job of having Jim Caviezel look upset at the right times, and the child actors also do a good job of looking scared at the right moments so that you can tell what’s going on without actually seeing it.
At one point in the movie, when Tim Ballard is trying to convince some wealthy individuals to help him, he tells them that child sex trafficking is the highest growing international crime syndicate, already passing up weapons dealing and soon to pass the drug cartels. He also tells them that, if it is not stopped, the pain of these children will spread until it reaches everything until it touches even the people that think they cannot be touched.
You really should see it, though you might want to buy your tickets early. I went during the middle of the week, thinking I didn’t need to worry about finding a seat, but the theater was packed. If you get inspired to take some kind of action or support Tim Ballard’s charity, that’s great.
If not, it’s still a really good action movie.
Have you seen Sound of Freedom?
Have you seen the movie? What did you think of it? If not, do you plan to do so? Why or why not? Do you have any thoughts on why the MSM is so adamantly opposed to the movie?
Let’s discuss it in the comments section.
About the Author
A lover of novels and cultivator of superb apple pie recipes, Marie spends her free time writing about the world around her. Article cross-posted from The Organic Prepper.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
