MAGA Antichrist Religion Cinema: Making Ed Wood Look Like Steven Spielberg

Some of my readers may remember last summer when all Good Christians[TM] were commanded, on pain of being libeled as Supporters of Human Trafficking, to go see SOUND OF FREEDOM, starring QANON Jesus, purveyor of 100% reliable information:

On the Charlie Kirk show, Jim Caviezel claimed adrenochrome is harvested from the blood of tortured children. pic.twitter.com/e2OFdBxSRY

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) July 11, 2023

Yessirree, we were all assured that the only conceivable reason people who had been fighting sex trafficking for years wanted to warn people off the movie was because they were part of a sinister media campaign to “silence” opposition to sex trafficking.

And so, the Greatest Christians of All Time–wrong about everything, wrong all the time–characteristically joined yet another Right Wing Panic du Jour and stampeded off yet another cliff in their ongoing crusade to be so wrong about so much so many times for so long that only a fool would trust their judgment.

The result was as predictable as sunrise:

Marine Veteran Sues Tim Ballard and OUR Over Sexual Assault Claims, Injuries Suffered In Training

“OUR only focused on allowing its celebrity founder, defendant Tim Ballard, to live the lavish lifestyle of a wealthy sex tourist and sexually manipulate and abuse employees, contractors, and volunteers,” the suit reads.

Bree Righter, a Marine veteran and social worker who previously spoke to VICE News under a pseudonym about her experiences with Operation Underground Railroad, has filed suit in Utah’s Third District against Tim Ballard, the group’s founder; OUR; an OUR subsidiary called Deacon, Inc.; and Matt Cooper, who worked for years as OUR’s director of security. A copy of the complaint reviewed by VICE News alleges, among other things, that Cooper committed sexual assault and battery; that Cooper, Ballard, and OUR conspired to commit battery; and that Cooper and Ballard committed fraud.

Righter is represented by the attorneys who have filed a series of previous lawsuits against Ballard and OUR. The first was brought by women who say they were subjected to sexual coercion while on purported anti-trafficking missions with Ballard. A married couple has also filed suit, alleging that Ballard and OUR’s behavior led to their separation. Righter’s lawsuit centers on sexual misconduct she says took place while she was volunteering for OUR as an undercover operative and on the disastrous eye and facial injuries she sustained during a training exercise conducted by OUR in 2021, in which her orbital bone was destroyed. 

Ballard, a PR representative said to represent him, and the SPEAR Fund, a new anti-trafficking organization with which he’s affiliated, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Nor did Cooper or OUR.

Ballard has previously defended the use of what he calls the “couples ruse,” in which women would, he has said, pose as male OUR operators’ wives or girlfriends on missions to prevent the male operators from having to sexually touch trafficked women and girls. The women, for their part, say this was a pretext for Ballard—who, they say, invoked the authority of God and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—to exploit them sexually, coercing them into intimacy which he said was necessary to save children and fool traffickers. 

Righter previously outlined her experiences to VICE News, the first time she’d ever spoken about this series of events to journalists. She recounted a trip to the British Virgin Islands with Ballard and Cooper in which, she said, Ballard relentlessly tried to get her to have sex with Cooper, to whom she had been assigned to as a couples ruse partner. Righter also said that the trip was essentially a luxury vacation, with the group quarantining on a private island owned by OUR allies. Following that, Righter says, Ballard and his couples ruse partner spent hours in bars, massage parlors, and strip clubs across the islands, supposedly looking for evidence of trafficking, while Righter and Cooper trailed them in a car. Righter also said that on the apparent say-so of God, Ballard impulsively assigned her to be the primary operative communicating with a suspected trafficker, texting with him from the United States on a burner phone given to her by OUR. Righter told VICE News that she came to believe that OUR’s methods were “creating a market” for trafficking victims; the man did not appear to have access to trafficked women or underage girls, and she feared that asking him to find young women for a party would lead to women or girls being trafficked who had not been previously. 

OUR has previously denied creating demand for trafficking victims.

Disquieted by this experience, Righter returned to the United States and resolved to only remain involved with OUR if she could work on a team that was not headed by Ballard. That led to her attending a training at a CrossFit gym owned by OUR, where she was kneed in the head during a grappling exercise where operators were instructed to dive for a fake knife at the center of the mat. Cooper took her to a hospital, and OUR eventually paid medical bills resulting from the accident.

The description of events in the lawsuit mirrors what Righter has previously described to VICE News; the suit also accuses OUR of being reckless with the safety and wellbeing of its operators, who were central to the group’s public image and fundraising success. 

“It became very evident to Plaintiff that OUR only focused on allowing its celebrity founder, defendant Tim Ballard, to live the lavish lifestyle of a wealthy sex tourist and sexually manipulate and abuse employees, contractors, and volunteers under the guise of saving children by implementing the COUPLES RUSE,” one section of the suit reads. “OUR’s focus to be worshiped as ‘celebrity heroes’ was so intense that it overrode concerns about the safety and welfare of the very operators at the center of OUR’s fundraising.”

The allegations against Ballard and OUR have also widened into increased scrutiny of one of their most high-profile allies, Sean Reyes, Utah’s attorney general. Reyes has participated in undercover OUR missions, defended the group’s use of intelligence from a psychic medium named Janet Russon, and listed himself on LinkedIn as a producer of Sound of Freedom, the heavily-fictionalized box office hit based on Ballard’s supposed exploits. State legislators have commissioned an audit into, among other things, whether the relationship between Ballard and Reyes compromised the latter’s judgment or led to the inappropriate use of state resources. Legislators have suggested that the audit could lead to Reyes’ impeachment.

To add to Ballard’s woes, the Salt Lake Tribune reported last week that Ballard is also under criminal investigation in Lindon, Utah, after one of the women suing him filed a police report there. 

I get that Con Men gonna con. And sure, some people will be suckered by cons. But the thing about the Right Wing Panic du Jour Machine and the suckers who fall for it is that they never seem to learn from their mistakes. Every. Single. Time. the Machine launches some silly moral panic the suckers never say, “Should I really let myself be stampeded into a moral panic after all the other dumb things I’ve fallen for? Birtherism? Adenochrome? Obama conspiring with Sandy Hook parents to murder their children so he can take away our guns? Vaccine nanobots? The return of JFK to reinstate Trump? Michelle Obama the transgender First Lady? How many times must I fall for visible-from-space fraudsters before even somebody as gullible as I am finally thinks, ‘Maybe I’m the sucker and not the Damn Libruls I constantly call ‘stupid’ and ‘brainwashed’?'”

Naturally, the accusers in the Party of Personal Responsibility immediately took responsibility for their error, apologized, retracted and corrected…..

BWAHAHAHAHA! Just kidding! The Cult did what they always do: memory-holing the whole thing as the chickens came home to roost:

These people, who endlessly prattle about “fake news”, don’t retract, apologize, or correct, because that would involve confession of wilful sin. Like the lying slanderers they are, they simply ghost on their record and double down on their tactics of stampeding suckers. Because victims are simply and solely human shields and stepping stones for use on the way to the only thing they really care about: power.

Speaking of the lust for power in right wing antichrist movieville, in 2020, the Righeous in the MAGA cult came out with a piece of propaganda that mercifully sank like a stone without making any impression at all on the moviegoing public. I never heard of it till November 2023. But having seen the clips below, a perverse part of me wants to see the whole thing for much the same masochistic reason I enjoy films of infinitely greater quality such as SHARKNADO or VELOCIPASTOR.

It’s called HEARTS ARE TRUMP and, well, here is the plot summary:

America finds itself at a crossroads. “Hearts Are Trump” explores that dilemma through three generations of a white family and two generations of a Black family. Their lives intersect as racial and political tensions ratchet up and both families seek to do the Lord’s will in sorting through the mess and decide whom to support on November 3 at the ballot box. Minds are changed as information and hearts are sifted through, and logic and common sense are applied to determining the truth in a vast ocean of emotionalism, information, misinformation, and disinformation.

Tempting, I know. But some of you may still be thinking, “Does this film insult my intelligence enough for me to really enjoy it though, Mark? What if it’s just not as dumb as the synopsis promises?”

I understand. We’ve all been hurt by movies we thought would be excruciatingly bad, only to find they have some redeeming features like one actor giving a good performance or a script that sometimes veers toward good writing. So let me ratchet up your sense of urgent desire for FOX propaganda drenched in pious American conservative religious jargon with this delectably horrible scene:

@enolls

Crazy Christian Movie Scenes – This is how christian movies distort history. #movie #film #christianitytiktok #christianmovies #christiantok #movieclips #moviescene #movierecommendation

♬ original sound – Nolls

As one of my readers put it, “This is a masterclass in scriptwriting. A really real conversation that would really be had by real humans with real reactions. For real.”

Or, take this scene in praise of the Man God Vaulted into the White House as a Beacon of Freedom and Old-Fashioned American and Godly Values:

Still not sold? Then check out these wrenching scenes of definitely real conversations wrenched from the wrenching headlines!

As 2024 rolls on, reflect on two things in this most consequential of election years:

First, we are no more out of the woods than Germany was when the Beer Hall Putsch failed. The blind suckers who still parrot the nuttiness of this stuff continue, by the millions, to fall down in adoration of the vengeful, lying traitor who is pledging to his Cult that he will round up the millions of “vermin” he (and they) regard as their enemies and deport, imprison, and execute them for “treason” (meaning disloyalty to him). His promises to “crush the existence” of his enemies is not a bug, but a feature for this Cult, whose serene assurance of divine favor makes it easy for them to regard all this as the Vengeance of the Lord. If this psychotic cult of Christofascism gains power, Trump’s pledge is that he will invoke the Insurrection Act on day one and turn the military against the American people. It will be the end of our Constitutional order.

But perhaps even worse than the concentration camps, authoritarian dictatorship, mass deportations and threats against us “vermin” who pollute the blood of the American people is this:

Movies like this might become standard and even required fare in Trump’s Reich.

It’s a prospect too horrible to contemplate.