0:00

It's like, shouldn't you be a better actor

0:02

if you're acting for God and not just because

0:04

you want to get a part on a soap so

0:07

you can buy that condo?

0:09

Welcome

0:15

to You're

0:20

Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall, and

0:22

today we are talking, I am both

0:25

sad and happy to tell you about

0:28

Sound of Freedom with Michael Hobbes.

0:31

This week we have a trifle of

0:33

an episode for you, a bit of a layer

0:35

cake, if you will. First

0:38

you're going to hear this introduction I'm giving you right now,

0:40

then

0:40

you're going to hear a conversation between

0:43

me and living

0:45

legend You're Wrong About former co-host

0:48

and forever co-founder Michael Hobbes

0:51

about Sound of Freedom, a movie that

0:53

a lot of you have been asking or

0:55

wondering what both of us think

0:57

of this summer. And then after

0:59

that, you're going to hear a re-release of

1:01

our human trafficking episode from 2019. Sound

1:05

of Freedom is a movie that represents some

1:08

of the most powerful and insidious myths

1:10

of human trafficking, many

1:13

of them the ones we also see weaponized

1:15

by QAnon. As

1:17

a result, it's a movie that

1:20

strives to put its

1:22

audience through kind of an emotional ringer and

1:25

our goal in doing this episode for you is

1:27

to

1:28

talk about a piece of media that's working

1:30

with that subject matter, but not to

1:33

make you the listener, do that kind of

1:35

thinking or

1:36

have that kind of an experience

1:39

with what we're making. We want to bring you a

1:42

safer way to experience

1:44

what's going on in the culture right

1:47

now. So we're talking about all

1:49

of the aspects of human trafficking, child

1:51

trafficking, child sexual abuse

1:53

and trafficking

1:55

that

1:55

we are seeing represented in

1:58

the fictional world of the this film

2:00

where Jim Caviezel is a great action hero,

2:03

but to the greatest extent of our abilities,

2:05

we're not

2:06

dwelling on difficult

2:09

topics and imagery. And we're really

2:11

trying to get into the minds of the people making

2:13

and consuming this film.

2:15

So hopefully that makes the experience as

2:17

easy as it can be. And the same is true

2:20

in the episode that we

2:22

then are bringing to you in re-release. What

2:24

we're really trying to talk about is how

2:27

we hide the truth from ourselves and how we can do

2:29

a better job of looking at it. This

2:32

was a really fun conversation for me to

2:34

have. I think talking about it

2:36

with Mike is the only way I could have been persuaded

2:38

to discuss it. And if you wanna hear a little

2:41

bit longer version of our conversation with more

2:43

of our evergreen topics

2:45

coming up, then you can hear that on Patreon

2:48

or Apple Plus subscriptions, if you like.

2:51

Also on Patreon and Apple Plus

2:54

for you guys, if you wanna check it out, is

2:56

a little concert film we made

2:58

when we did one of our springtime shows. This

3:01

one was at the Bell House in Brooklyn. We had

3:04

just an amazing time, did some

3:06

fun outfit changes. We

3:08

had a little bit of splatter, we had music,

3:11

we had

3:12

laughing and crying reported

3:14

by many audience members. And if

3:17

these were live shows when we were touring a few

3:19

months ago that you wanted to see, but

3:21

couldn't for whatever reason, then

3:24

this is our attempt to just bring the show

3:26

into your living room. Rest assured that

3:28

you will be watching tiny

3:31

little versions of us acting it all

3:33

out for you anew, as if in

3:35

a flee circus.

3:41

Thank you so much for listening. Enjoy

3:43

the episode.

3:44

Thank you. I

4:00

love most to torture them with the topics

4:02

they like least and with me

4:04

today is Michael Hobbs. I

4:07

only get 15 minutes out of the Downtown Hotel at a time. I've

4:10

been imprisoned. Thank you for letting me have

4:12

this time together. You're actually calling me with

4:14

a Canadian quarter

4:15

in the lobby.

4:19

An operator voice is going to cut in at any moment. Someone

4:21

is singing, God, I hope I get it. I hope

4:24

I get it right next to you.

4:28

You did say when we were texting

4:30

about this that you like it when the worst

4:32

moral panics just stick around forever. I

4:35

feel like that's what we're back to talk about. I

4:38

mean, I don't like it, but I'm just like, what

4:40

do you know? What do you say? Check it out.

4:42

Here it is. Nothing

4:44

ever dies. Nothing ever dies,

4:47

which also means that all the great things

4:50

will never die. Question mark.

4:53

Maybe as

4:54

long as Netflix leaves them up. Michael Hobbs

4:57

for people who don't know, you

4:59

are the daddy of this show. You are

5:02

the alpha and omega. You are

5:04

the very modern

5:06

model of a very major debunker

5:09

in general. I don't know musicals, but yes,

5:11

that's how I introduce myself. I'm the alpha and omega. You

5:14

are wrong about. Yes. How have you been doing?

5:16

What have you, what are you up to these days?

5:19

Well, I'm having a very weird week because I have

5:21

like very severe carpal tunnel in my hands.

5:23

I can't like do anything with my

5:25

hands, but like my life as

5:27

a podcaster means that I can like talk

5:30

into the internet to unlimited extents

5:32

now, regardless of my hands.

5:35

So this is actually perfect that you got in touch that we

5:37

can just like talk about stuff. Like luckily

5:39

that's my job. My job does not technically

5:41

require any hands. I never thought of it

5:43

that way, but that's true. My

5:45

hands are just like, like primly folded

5:48

in my lap and I can just like talk into my little microphone.

5:50

I feel like I want, I want to just like give

5:53

you an introduction for people

5:55

who like, I don't know, need to spend

5:57

more time with your Irv or for people

5:59

who don't.

5:59

It's just nice to hear things you already like

6:02

described to you. We started this show

6:04

specifically in 2018 because,

6:07

well,

6:07

I don't know if you started it because of your love

6:09

of debunking stuff or if that followed more.

6:12

I know that we started it because I had this

6:14

treasure chest

6:15

of stories about women road killed

6:17

by the media that I had not found other

6:19

outlets to talk about. Yes, the bimbo portfolio.

6:22

Yes.

6:22

Exactly. Yeah. But

6:25

what about you? Stuff that the media

6:27

got wrong and then I think we had the

6:30

naive idea that it's like we're going to do a

6:32

show like setting the

6:33

record straight. We

6:35

realize that it's like no nothing like no one ever

6:37

just stops lying like these stories

6:40

never stop circulating. So it's like, oh, we just have

6:42

to keep doing the same episode over and over

6:44

again to debunk the same bullshit forever.

6:48

Yeah, I got that's really

6:50

true. It really speaks to

6:52

like how 2018 2018 felt at the time.

6:56

And this is just a function of every year being

6:58

worse than the last at this point

7:00

in history. But at the time it felt

7:02

like the cutting edge of how bad things could

7:05

be. And now you look back and you're like, oh,

7:08

I know about

7:10

your younger self.

7:11

Do you remember the 2016 memes

7:13

that were like, oh, when is this year going to be over?

7:15

Like can't wait to say goodbye to 2016. And

7:18

it just has been worse. Like what did we think

7:20

was coming? Every year

7:21

has been worse. But it was fun

7:23

because you could do a little Twitter macro of

7:25

it. You could get the start of this year. I was

7:28

Charlize Theron looking cute and

7:30

young adult. And at the end I was Charlize Theron

7:32

in Mad Max very road. I know. And

7:35

now

7:35

we're just like, it's just going to be like this forever. One

7:38

of the things that emerged that was

7:40

already brewing when we started this show,

7:42

but that has been incredibly relevant to

7:44

the past five years of American life has been

7:47

the overlap

7:48

in the overlapping worlds

7:51

of over the top theories

7:54

about child sex trafficking and

7:56

claims about how human trafficking

7:58

slash sex trafficking. happens

8:01

up to and including all those signs in bathrooms.

8:04

Yes. Especially the ones that

8:06

say, no, the signs of human trafficking. And

8:08

then don't say what the signs of human trafficking

8:11

are. There's a joke about

8:13

this in Jamie Loftus's raw

8:15

dog. And once you notice it, you never stop

8:17

noticing it. They're like, no, some signs.

8:20

OK, bye. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, most

8:22

people interpret that to mean like a child who has a different ethnicity

8:24

than their parents. Because God knows that

8:27

never happens in America. Yeah, exactly. Like

8:29

the whole point is to fuel like people calling the cops

8:31

on people who look different from them. Yeah. So

8:34

in a way, the posters are

8:36

work is intended. Right,

8:38

exactly. They're working as intended

8:41

to support the conservative American agenda of calling

8:44

the police at random on

8:46

mixed race families. Yes. But that's

8:48

not what they're claiming to be doing importantly.

8:51

And when we talk about like how

8:53

to live effectively in a post-apocalyptic or mid-apocalyptic

8:55

world, I guess, because what we're now in,

8:58

I would say, I don't know

9:00

if people are using that term, but I think it's correct. I

9:03

have been trying to go see a lot of summer

9:05

movies, partly because it is so goddamn

9:07

hot

9:07

in Portland. What is it like in Seattle? It

9:10

is 94 degrees right now and it is noon. So

9:14

we're like a preaching a peak of 105 in a few hours. I

9:18

don't know how you guys do it. It's bad here, but it's not

9:20

it's not inland Portland bad. We don't do

9:22

it. People die.

9:24

But the other night I went to see the

9:26

Road Warrior, the second Mad Max

9:28

movie. It came out in 1981. And

9:30

this also leads me to the fact that this movie

9:32

I found so inspiring and really made me think,

9:35

made me think about what I'm trying to do with this very show

9:37

of ours is that this

9:40

movie stars Mel Gibson and he's really good at playing

9:43

the Road Warrior. And also, oh my God,

9:45

is

9:46

he, you know, a mainstream

9:48

anti-semite culture maker for the ages and for

9:50

the today's. No

9:54

one ever really gets canceled, do they? It's

9:56

pretty incredible. You can

9:58

call someone

9:59

sugar tits. on tape and

10:01

be uncancelled like four years later and say like much

10:03

worse things that I don't want to say. My mom

10:06

has given up on Mel Gibson. So you know,

10:08

that's something. He's lost the

10:10

Carol vote. But it's true. I

10:12

mean, you like, maybe your star

10:14

falls. Maybe you feel like you've

10:16

lost everything. But what that probably means is

10:18

that you've lost a little bit of

10:21

your power and safety in the world as you know

10:23

it. And I don't think anything can ever really take Mel

10:25

Gibson down. And it's

10:27

interesting to sort of work our way to our

10:29

inevitable topic today.

10:32

VML Gibson, which is of course,

10:35

sound of freedom. Yes. But

10:37

I reached out to you last week.

10:39

And I was like, do you want to re-release

10:41

our human trafficking

10:42

episode? Because it came out a while ago.

10:44

It's a really wonderful piece of work by

10:47

you. And because human trafficking

10:49

is like, it feels like it's just always, you know,

10:52

it's always somewhere in the news. But it feels like

10:54

it's having a spike this summer. And part

10:56

of that is both allowing the

10:59

success of, and then driven by the success

11:01

of, sound of freedom. And

11:03

I was like, do you want to talk about sound of freedom as

11:05

well? And I was like, no. Absolutely

11:09

not. Yeah. You were like, yes, if I don't

11:12

have to prep for it because I'm incredibly busy.

11:14

And I was like, I know you are incredibly busy.

11:16

But also like,

11:18

you should avoid seeing sound of freedom if you

11:20

can. I think that's good.

11:22

Yeah, it just pumps me out so much. Well, it should.

11:25

I feel like the whole moral conundrum

11:27

of the kind of work that we're doing is like,

11:30

it puts you in a position where you just have to fucking repeat

11:32

yourself constantly. And

11:34

nothing has changed. This isn't a real thing.

11:36

All of these organizations are extremely sketchy.

11:39

The underlying conditions in America

11:42

that drive things like youth sex work

11:44

have not changed. It's all the same kind of stuff.

11:47

But then some new

11:47

thing happens. And what is the stuff,

11:50

by the way? Well, just like, it's mostly, I

11:52

mean, as we get into in the episode, it's mostly just like, a

11:54

lot of it is just like runaway kids that

11:57

end up on the street and they don't have anywhere

11:59

to sleep. and they don't have any options.

12:02

And so they end up agreeing to

12:04

have sex with somebody for a place to stay

12:06

that night. And under the law, which defines

12:09

any trading of anything of value

12:11

for sex by a child as human trafficking, that

12:13

is technically human trafficking. I will have sex with you if you let me

12:15

stay on

12:16

your couch. That technically is human trafficking.

12:18

So when we get these statistics, they're like, human trafficking

12:20

is all over the place. And then we get these sort of

12:22

police driven crackdowns.

12:25

But we don't need to arrest these

12:27

kids. We just need to give them shelter and we need to

12:29

give them a safe place to stay and

12:31

safe adults to be around and resources.

12:34

We can't send in Liam Neeson and solve

12:36

a social problem like kids

12:39

who are forced to sleep with somebody for money because they

12:41

have no other option. Although

12:43

wouldn't it be amazing if there

12:46

is a Liam Neeson movie where

12:48

he takes over a government

12:50

agency because he's so good at

12:53

typing in shorthand and infrastructure

12:55

and he it's like a drama movie

12:57

about him or like creating a new filing

13:00

system for them, which then enables

13:02

them to do really helpful stuff. This

13:04

is our spec script.

13:05

Just like Liam Neeson takes over an administrative

13:08

agency. Yeah, it's called organized.

13:14

It's called mate. No, it's called methodology

13:17

queen. It's called methodology queen. Or

13:20

it can be called methodology

13:21

king because Liam Neeson

13:23

demanded a rewrite. Yeah. And ultimately it's going to be heteronormative.

13:26

We need to keep the gender roles straight. Yes. We don't

13:28

want to confuse anybody. Unfortunately,

13:29

Neeson's people needed

13:32

that. Yeah. And sound of freedom to give

13:35

people an introduction. I feel like

13:37

this is like very big in the news right

13:39

now. This came out on July 4th.

13:41

It was the only new movie

13:44

to come out that weekend. So

13:47

it had a good pre-sale head start

13:49

and then it also got to be the number one

13:51

movie in America that weekend through

13:53

scheduling luck, which got

13:56

it off to a really good start. It has since

13:58

made,

13:59

according to Bob. box office mojo. It

14:02

hasn't been released internationally yet. So

14:04

domestically and in general, it's grosses 172,813,722

14:06

dollars. God,

14:13

I didn't know movies made that much money anymore.

14:16

This one does. Yeah. And

14:18

I think for a while it was ahead of Mission

14:20

Impossible, the new Mission Impossible movie,

14:23

Dead Reckoning,

14:24

part one. That's bleak. We

14:26

should be spending our money on like a Scientology

14:29

weirdo, not a trafficking weirdo. Yeah.

14:32

Well, let me tell you, I like yesterday, I was like,

14:34

okay, Sarah, you're recording this tomorrow.

14:36

You're recording at noon. You can't see the movie

14:39

tomorrow morning. You have to do it tonight.

14:42

You have to go to the theater and

14:44

just see this stupid movie. And

14:46

so I gritted my teeth and I went

14:48

to the theater and then- Wait, you saw the

14:50

movie? You saw Sound of Freedom? Yes.

14:53

What? Sarah. Yes. However,

14:56

I got to the theater and I was like, I

14:59

can't yet.

15:00

I need to do something for me. And so I saw Mission

15:02

Impossible, Dead Reckoning. Did you really?

15:04

Did you do a double feature with that and the trafficking

15:07

movie? Yeah. And then I got two junior

15:09

whoppers. And let me tell you, those

15:11

junior whoppers are very junior. They're

15:13

not in charge of anything. They're so small.

15:15

Did you theater hop or did you pay

15:17

for both tickets? Well, I have a regal

15:19

unlimited membership. So each

15:22

movie cost me 50 cents technically,

15:24

which is part of how I

15:26

feel less gross about seeing Sound of

15:28

Freedom. Yeah, fair. Yeah. Really

15:30

marginally supporting it. Well, God, what

15:32

was it like? Well, first of all, Mission Impossible,

15:34

Dead Reckoning part one was great. Okay.

15:37

Oh, it's part

15:38

one? I did not even know this. Yeah, they're doing like a Deathly

15:40

Hallows thing with it. But what you need to know

15:42

is that there's this whole great action

15:44

chase sequence in the end on the Orient

15:46

Express.

15:46

Fuck, dude, those movies are

15:48

so dumb and I love them so much. Listen,

15:51

Ethan Hunt has to jump

15:53

a motorcycle off of like an Alp

15:56

in order to

15:57

parachute into a train.

16:00

Love it. Give it to me. It's so good.

16:02

I cannot wait. So I saw Mission Impossible

16:05

Dead Reckoning Part 1, and I was like,

16:07

well, that was...

16:08

I saw a good movie today, no matter

16:11

what happens. And I went to see Sound

16:13

of Freedom, the movie that has made 172 million dollars

16:17

to give people a little more context. Sound

16:19

of Freedom

16:21

was made by its director,

16:23

Alejandro Monteverde, in 2018.

16:25

It stars

16:28

Jim Caviezel, who many

16:30

of us know is the guy who played Jesus and

16:32

Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ,

16:35

a movie which, while he was filming,

16:37

the word on the street is that he was struck by lightning

16:40

twice while they were making that movie. Oh,

16:43

OK. That doesn't sound real, but OK. Yeah. And, you

16:45

know, The Passion of the Christ is an interesting one because

16:47

like,

16:48

I didn't see it because I like

16:51

non-religious horror movies famously, but

16:53

I remember when it came out, there was this

16:55

kind of a public debate about like, is it anti-Semitic?

16:59

Yeah, I remember that too. Well, technically, but like probably

17:01

in actuality. But there was like plausible deniability.

17:04

Yeah. Which of course now they're no

17:06

longer is due to the direct statements of

17:08

Mel Gibson himself. But it's like, it

17:10

feels like a classic,

17:13

like the tea party stuff as well, how

17:15

like stuff that happened in the

17:17

aughts, that there was plausible deniability

17:19

around, then kind of is coming out

17:21

now as like completely,

17:24

explicitly linked to fascism,

17:26

which unfortunately for the director, this

17:28

movie is with the intention

17:31

of basically everyone, but the guy who

17:33

made it actually, I think. There

17:36

is a weird thing in American culture now where like it

17:38

constantly happens that you say something and everybody's like,

17:40

you're crazy. That's way out of line. And

17:42

then like a

17:43

year later, it's just like factually confirmed.

17:45

And you're like, wait a minute, this, what

17:48

I was saying was true, but you're still yelling at me and I don't

17:50

know why. So what is it actually

17:52

about? Is it like a kind of normal three

17:54

act structure action movie? There

17:56

is, okay. So I'll tell you what it's about. And then we'll talk

17:58

about kind of what's behind.

17:59

it because that was the order that I learned this in. So

18:02

it is based on the true story,

18:04

according to our opening title card, of

18:07

Tim Ballard, who works for Homeland

18:10

Security. And he busts

18:12

this guy who looks like I wrote in my notes,

18:15

Mr. Gumby, because he looks like

18:17

Mr. Gumby from Monty Python. And

18:19

he has big greasy bangs and he is

18:22

charged with possession of

18:24

a ton of

18:25

child images. And

18:28

here's the first thing about this movie is

18:30

that I went in thinking of it as

18:32

a Christian movie because people

18:34

have debated this and in this variety write-up,

18:37

they're like, it was called a Christian movie by NPR

18:39

without explanation. And I was like, well, it is a Christian

18:42

movie because they talk about God

18:44

and it's distributed by Angel Studios. And there's

18:46

this recurring tagline of God's children

18:49

are not for sale, which is

18:51

the actual tagline of Operation

18:53

Underground Railroad, which is

18:55

the

18:55

organization that, you know, who's

18:59

recently ousted leader this

19:01

movie is about. So like, I think

19:04

it's like,

19:05

it's fair to say that this movie is part

19:08

of a Christian agenda, even without direct

19:10

directorial intent. Yeah, that's

19:12

one of those like, I'm not crazy for saying this. Like,

19:15

it seems quite like,

19:17

plainly in the text of the film. And also

19:19

like, I've been on our Underground Railroad's

19:21

website at various points of the years and like, yeah,

19:23

it's also quite explicitly Christian. Right. Because

19:25

they're not screaming it throughout the movie. It's

19:29

like they can call you

19:31

accusatory and illogical

19:33

for noticing it, which is, I

19:35

think, a really frequent tactic. And so because

19:38

I was expecting Christian media because

19:40

it's distributed by Angel

19:43

Studios, I was immediately

19:45

shocked by how not unpleasant

19:47

it is to watch. Because the thing about

19:49

Christian media, I feel like you'll agree, is

19:51

that like, if a production company is

19:53

Christian,

19:55

they literally assume that the godliness

19:57

of their work means they don't have to worry about acting.

20:00

or audio or editing or anything.

20:03

Yeah, it's like porn. It is. Get

20:05

me in, get me out. We're all here for the same

20:07

thing.

20:07

Yeah, don't need to spend too much time

20:09

like tweaking the levels. Yeah. Right.

20:12

And like, would you say it's like really remarkable the

20:14

like amateurishness of like media

20:17

produced by extremely wealthy Christian

20:19

organizations? Yeah, I mean, there's no

20:21

reason for it to be good, right? Because there's no

20:24

actual, like they're not selling it in like the marketplace.

20:26

They're basically just gonna make it. It already makes money before

20:28

it comes out. And then it doesn't have to

20:30

like turn a profit through ticket sales. They just like then

20:32

distribute

20:32

it to mega churches or whatever. Right.

20:35

And then it gets seen by literally

20:38

a captive audience in fact. Right.

20:40

It's like those restaurants in like super touristy areas

20:43

where it's like the food doesn't have to be good because

20:45

you're paying for the fact that it's like next to the fountain

20:47

or whatever. Because your kids are cranky and they

20:49

need chicken tenders. And we have all

20:51

these little cups of marinara sauce

20:54

and you want them.

20:55

And it's also interesting because like you could argue

20:57

that the glorification of God

20:59

is a reason to make something good.

21:02

Sure. And yet people aren't doing that.

21:06

It's like, shouldn't you be a better actor if

21:08

you're acting for God and not just because

21:10

you

21:10

want to get a part on a soap so

21:12

you can buy that condo?

21:15

It's kind of disappointing that the movie isn't terrible.

21:17

I was kind of hoping that it would be like laughably bad.

21:20

I know. And so many things like this are.

21:23

So many things you watch and you're like, ugh,

21:25

but like I was impressed from the beginning

21:27

that this is a film

21:29

made by a filmmaker. Like

21:31

this feels like it's made by somebody who cares

21:34

about cinema. And as a

21:36

result,

21:37

it is very overbearing and

21:40

it is made in a way where there's like enough

21:42

art and enough intelligent filmmaking going

21:45

into it that it is like, you can feel also

21:47

the manipulativeness of it. Where

21:49

like there's enough skill going into it that you

21:52

like literally cannot not care.

21:54

Okay. Right. Because like the camera

21:56

spends,

21:58

I would say at least.

21:59

15% of its

22:02

time lingering on the extremely traumatized,

22:05

sometimes crying faces of

22:07

these very talented

22:09

child actors. And there's two

22:12

little kid main characters who this movie

22:15

is about, who are a brother and sister,

22:17

who are eight and 11 for

22:19

most of the movie, and who we

22:22

like open looking at the little girl, like

22:24

playing the drums with her flip-flops.

22:28

She has a single dad household,

22:30

which

22:31

seems like part of why any of this happened,

22:34

but she was singing in the marketplace

22:37

and

22:38

this polished, hot

22:40

lady saw her and came by and

22:42

was like, hello, daddy,

22:44

I just wanna take

22:47

your daughter to an audition for this

22:49

modeling agency, so she can

22:51

be paid a lot to model and have a great future.

22:54

And oh my goodness, your son just came home.

22:56

Hello, cutie. So it is like the

22:58

version of

22:59

trafficking that essentially doesn't exist. Yes. That's

23:01

like the airport poster version of trafficking, where

23:04

it's like you're lured through like their charming

23:06

wiles. Yes, like a complete

23:08

stranger, like sees your child on the

23:10

street,

23:11

either just grabs them or goes through like a

23:13

somewhat more complicated

23:15

scooping up. And then

23:17

she'd

23:18

like bring them to an audition and then

23:20

come back to pick them up at seven and the dad

23:22

comes back at seven and the audition room

23:24

is empty. And

23:27

his children have been spirited away and they're put

23:29

in a shipping container. Of course,

23:31

got the aesthetics. And

23:33

shipped to Columbia. And this is

23:35

in Honduras

23:36

that the first part is happening. Okay. Jim

23:39

Caviezel finds out about all this. Okay,

23:41

and then he like goes in and like rescues

23:44

the kids, I guess. He saves the

23:46

brother and then he spends the rest of the movie

23:49

trying to spend the sister because it

23:51

also occurs to me,

23:53

and I'm not saying this in an accusatory

23:55

way, I'm just saying this in like a noticing

23:58

way that like making movies.

23:59

about rescuing little girls from child

24:02

sex trafficking by some really evil

24:04

guys allows you as

24:06

the hero to be obsessed with a little girl.

24:08

Yeah. You know,

24:10

and also, I mean, I haven't seen the

24:12

movie obviously, but there's also this element of like wallowing

24:15

and like, it's like you're, you're conjuring up

24:18

the worst crime that you can think of and then

24:20

like solving it. It feels like very

24:22

cheap catharsis to me.

24:23

Yes. And we open on

24:26

Jim Caviezel's character. He has this younger partner

24:28

and his partner is like traumatized

24:30

by the material they have to review because they've done

24:32

this bust on Mr. Gumby. And

24:35

this is where they find out about the two Honduran

24:38

kids who the movie is about. And

24:40

so we see Jim Caviezel decide

24:43

as a rogue Homeland security agent,

24:45

the protagonist

24:47

American needs to

24:50

befriend the pedophile. They've just arrested

24:53

and pretend that he too is a pedophile and get

24:55

the

24:55

guy to like give

24:57

him a child to abuse. Okay.

25:00

And so he bonds with the guy and then he bust him

25:02

at a diner and that

25:05

is how he rescues the little brother.

25:08

And then that leads him to go

25:11

to

25:12

Cartagena to team

25:14

up with a guy played by

25:16

Bill Camp, who is called Vampiro

25:19

and he is an ex-cartel guy who

25:21

buys children so he can set them

25:23

free. Okay. Oh, it's like medical

25:25

debt. Okay. Like Claire Danes with the

25:27

birds and broke down palace. Yeah.

25:30

I saw this was like a 9 30 pm

25:33

screening. And when

25:35

I got my ticket, I was the only one in there and I was

25:37

like, great, I'll be by myself. I can take notes

25:39

and use my flashlight. And then

25:42

10 other people came in, including

25:44

like two different couples,

25:46

as far as I can tell. And then

25:48

like

25:49

some moms and their young kids

25:52

like out to see it. And I was watching it and

25:54

I was like, boy, this, this

25:56

just feels incredibly like a

25:59

bad idea. to bring your little kids to. And

26:01

luckily the kids were like kind of talking

26:03

and tittering the whole time. So I think I were

26:05

mostly bored by it. Okay. But

26:08

it's like, it's so menacing.

26:11

If I watched it as a small child, I

26:13

would be terrified to leave my

26:14

house for a year. Yeah. Also

26:17

those other couples in the theater were definitely podcasters.

26:20

In Portland, Oregon, at least 50% of the people

26:23

seeing this is for podcasts. It's

26:25

also really funny to think of

26:28

someone being like, Hey baby, let's go

26:30

see Sound of Freedom. I really like this girl.

26:33

I'm trying to make the next move. I'm going to take

26:34

her to a movie. Put your

26:36

hand on my leg during Sound of Freedom.

26:39

A movie that encourages a bare minimum

26:41

of cuddling. But

26:44

the filmmaking is all like, it's very

26:46

effective. It's a little bit too effective.

26:48

It's kind of overscored. There's frequent

26:52

use of a menacing child choir

26:54

singing in what sounds like Latin

26:57

or something.

26:59

Can you imagine that? I

27:01

would be very interested to know what

27:03

you think of this movie if

27:05

you ever watch it, which I also hope you don't

27:08

because it's a wildly unpleasant

27:10

experience. You're just watching

27:12

kids being menaced.

27:15

I always feel kind of bad for the tone

27:17

of these kinds of episodes where it sounds like we're sort of laughing

27:20

our way through this story of

27:22

something really horrific happening to children. But

27:24

it's like, I do feel like

27:26

people need to be more aware of the fact

27:28

that the kind of thing that they're talking about in this movie

27:30

essentially does not exist. There's all

27:32

kinds of exploitation of poor people and poor

27:34

children that happens all over the world. Migration patterns

27:38

are a big part of it, but children being

27:40

kidnapped and taken on airplanes

27:41

to other countries, essentially

27:46

hasn't really been a confirmed case of this by

27:48

a stranger. People get kidnapped by their parents as part

27:50

of custody battles all the time, but

27:53

this sort of model of it, what they're

27:55

talking about is just sort of like outlandish.

27:58

And so that's why we're laughing. laughing our

28:00

way through it or why it feels

28:02

kind of campy to us is because this

28:04

is very clearly propaganda aimed

28:06

at getting a specific political outcome.

28:09

It's not something that actually cares for the welfare of children because

28:12

this movement sort of evangelical Christians,

28:14

if you look at what they do rather than what they say,

28:17

this is not a movement that has contributed all

28:19

that much to the actual dynamics

28:22

of why children are being abused. This is

28:24

not a movement that has tried to prevent that in any meaningful way.

28:27

In fact, you could argue the opposite, but that's not even necessary.

28:29

It's like what policies have they advocated

28:32

for? It's mostly like harsher sentences for

28:34

these kinds of stranger danger crimes. It's not really

28:36

like let's clean up the

28:39

people who have power over children and can use that power

28:42

for genuine evil. Well, right.

28:44

And also arguably, I think, and I think we've

28:47

talked about this a lot in the past on the show

28:49

that if you construct this outlandish

28:51

supervillain who you are standing in opposition

28:54

of. Right. So if Tim Ballard, the real life

28:56

leader of Operation Underground Railroad,

28:59

which is hard to say, by the way, yes,

29:02

he receives more leeway in kind

29:04

of doing whatever he wants or needs

29:06

to, including

29:08

taking an annual salary of over

29:10

five hundred thousand dollars when donations

29:13

were declining or

29:14

saying in an official statement that the best

29:16

thing the Trump administration could do

29:19

for the welfare of the children was finish

29:21

building a border wall.

29:22

Great. Of course. You can do whatever you want

29:25

and you can also be part of a faith

29:27

that in many iterations in America,

29:29

you know, talking about fundamentalist Christianity specifically

29:32

protects people who abuse children

29:35

institutionally, sometimes sexually.

29:37

And I think is able to see that as more

29:40

something you can cover up, something you can apologize

29:43

for, something you can push into the shadows because

29:45

no one is being put in a shipping container.

29:48

So it can't be that bad. Yeah, totally.

29:50

Or your queer child running away because

29:53

you have or you know, you kicking them out of the

29:55

home and them ending up in survival

29:57

sex work like you were talking about. You don't

29:59

have to.

29:59

So yourself is connected to, you know,

30:03

something on the scale of this Kim Caviezel thing.

30:05

Right. This is an insight that I have

30:08

like stolen wholesale from doing this show

30:10

with you, how much, how

30:12

much people are acting out basically like their feelings and

30:14

their anxieties and a lot of these moral panics, rather

30:16

than looking at the actual state of, you

30:18

know, the situation, the state of the statistics. I

30:21

feel like there's just a lot of like kind of emotional needs

30:24

going into this typically, especially in these movements

30:26

that they're really only looking at

30:28

the harm of children to the extent that

30:31

they can weaponize that against societal

30:33

others, right? Like this is about the evil

30:35

people that prey on children, but then it's like, as soon

30:37

as it's somebody that is

30:38

any way connected to them, like, Oh, it's the youth pastor actually.

30:40

They're like, Oh, was it really abuse? Like, Oh, I

30:43

don't know if it was that bad, right? Or like, well, you

30:45

kids asking for it, et cetera. It's

30:47

about

30:48

punishing out groups. It's not really about

30:50

protecting children. Right. Yes,

30:53

completely. Yeah. Well, and then to wrap up

30:55

how this movie ends, basically they figure out

30:57

that the little girl they're looking for has

31:00

been sold to a cocaine

31:03

guy, boss who lives in the forest.

31:05

And so interestingly, because this movie was

31:08

made in 2018, Jim Caviezel

31:10

and his friend pose as doctors

31:13

who are coming to inoculate people

31:15

against an epidemic. Oh, so

31:18

everyone will be nice to them now, right?

31:20

Ha ha ha. Throw

31:23

some anti-vax stuff in there. So I'm like light

31:25

anti-vax shit. And so they, they gain

31:27

access to the cocaine compound and

31:30

Jim Caviezel is like, and it's so, it kind

31:32

of speaks to

31:33

what you talk about in this episode. We're going

31:35

to listen to where

31:37

Jim Caviezel like enters the town. This

31:40

is his name is cause Kim Caviezel. There's also a thing,

31:42

his name is Tim in the movie and he's introducing himself

31:44

to the little boy and he's like,

31:46

Tim or Timo Teo. And the little

31:48

boy is like, Oh, and he's like, what? That's

31:50

my name in Spanish, isn't it? And the little boy is

31:52

like, I have a St. Timo Teo medal.

31:55

St. Timo Teo rescues children.

31:57

Oh. And then obviously he gives

31:59

him.

31:59

the medal, his sister gave it to them

32:02

when they were in the shipping container, when they're

32:04

being shipped. They're being shipped. And,

32:06

you know, Tim, he's no longer

32:08

just Tim, he's Saint Tim. Oh

32:11

my God. And also, and I

32:13

feel very comfortable laughing at this, Mira

32:15

Sorvino gets pretty high billing in this movie

32:17

and I was like, oh God, I'm stressed about

32:19

Mira Sorvino's level of involvement in

32:22

this movie. And guess what? She's

32:24

probably in it for 45 seconds. She

32:28

has three scenes, she has

32:29

one line per scene, she's on screen

32:32

for 10 to 20 seconds. Okay.

32:35

Sometimes you wonder if they sign up for these things without like reading the whole

32:37

script or like,

32:40

I want to believe is what I'm saying.

32:42

Right. I really find myself

32:45

empathizing with the director and all this because

32:48

his story is that he saw something

32:50

on the news in 2015, he wanted to

32:52

do something on child sex trafficking

32:55

as he understood it based on the news, which

32:57

Mike, you've pointed out many times

32:58

before is often telling exactly

33:01

the kind of stories that are in this movie.

33:03

And then while writing the script, he found Tim

33:05

Ballard who had left the Department

33:07

of Homeland Security so that he could more

33:09

freely, you know, undertake independent

33:12

and highly publicized raids of

33:14

alleged child

33:16

sex trafficking situations. And

33:18

so the director,

33:19

Alejandro was like, yes,

33:22

I will do a story about this guy. And so they

33:24

did a story based on him. He made

33:26

this movie. It has a happy ending.

33:29

It's like highly emotional. It feels like a very

33:31

earnest attempt to bring

33:33

attention to

33:34

something that the director believes to

33:37

be going on at least.

33:38

So you think he did it totally earnestly? Like he doesn't necessarily

33:41

know all the context around it. He's just like, wow, this is like hurting

33:43

children. I want to make a movie about how bad that is. It feels

33:45

incredibly earnest to me. You know,

33:47

I can't guess intent, but like it has the

33:49

feeling of a very earnest project. And

33:52

what he said, that's interesting because he's come out

33:54

very recently and done interviews and been like, it's

33:56

not a QAnon movie. Like my intent

33:59

was never like.

33:59

when I made this movie QAnon didn't even basically

34:02

exist. But the thing is

34:04

Tim

34:05

Ballard, who the movie is about, and

34:07

Jim Caviezel, who played him, are both

34:09

into QAnon. And so what do you

34:11

do when you make a movie about a guy before he

34:13

gets into QAnon, but then kind

34:15

of as a natural consequence of his belief

34:18

in the existence of highly organized, gigantic

34:22

child sex trafficking rings, or

34:24

his need to believe that they exist in order

34:26

to promote his fairly lucrative

34:28

job where he also gets hero worship

34:30

and sex. There's a Vice article

34:33

that points out there is a painting of Tim Ballard

34:35

where past abolitionists,

34:38

including Harriet Tubman,

34:40

are kneeling in order to

34:42

honor him as he walks down a railroad

34:45

holding a child. Oh, geez.

34:49

So what do you do with this guy who you made a movie

34:51

about because you're like, well, maybe he has some

34:54

troubling qualities, but it's a good story.

34:56

Then it's like, I'm totally on board with

34:59

this conspiracy theory that matches with my

35:01

past beliefs that you made this movie about.

35:03

I will say, I mean, I don't know what happened in this specific

35:06

case, but I will

35:06

say that in general, for conspiracy

35:08

theories to spread, it doesn't just require

35:12

full-on goblins. It also requires a

35:14

lot of rubes. People who

35:16

end up spreading this stuff without really knowing what

35:18

they're doing or don't really look into

35:20

it, or they're like, oh, I think I'm helping. I

35:22

think a lot of the Save the Children rallies

35:25

in the summer of trafficking,

35:26

whatever summer that was, a lot of the people that

35:28

were really well-meaning people and were like,

35:30

my understanding is that kids are

35:32

being kidnapped, hundreds of thousands of kids are being kidnapped

35:35

and sold into sex slavery and I'm a human

35:37

being, that's really worrying. And so they

35:39

show up to these rallies without knowing that it's

35:42

super QAnon and what these people

35:44

are pushing for is these really odious

35:46

policies that

35:46

have nothing to do with kids at all. But

35:48

yeah, a lot of the people who were there were just nice

35:51

people who were like, oh my gosh, I've read about this thing and it seems

35:53

really troubling. Right, and that's like

35:55

the level that this movie is working on as

35:57

well, right? The same way that Save

35:59

the Children.

35:59

became a slogan of kind

36:02

of like a shibboleth of yes, I believe in conspiracy

36:05

theories about QAnon. Yeah.

36:07

And also, I guess to

36:09

QAnon is like such a buzzword now, it's like

36:11

hard to kind of remember exactly

36:13

how it started. And it's worth

36:15

pointing out that kind of originally, you

36:18

know, the main function of QAnon was to

36:20

be like, listen,

36:21

President Trump may seem to

36:23

not know what he's doing, but he is in fact playing

36:26

the long game. Yeah. And he is

36:29

bringing down all of the major child

36:31

sex traffickers. Yeah. And

36:33

the storm is coming and he's going to crack

36:35

down on this international

36:37

conspiracy of elites,

36:40

including the Clintons and the Obamas

36:42

who have been both sexually trafficking children

36:45

and also torturing them

36:47

in order to harvest adrenochrome,

36:49

which is a drug they get high on. And

36:51

when you

36:51

harvest adrenochrome from a child, their

36:53

skin turns red. And that's why sometimes

36:56

you see a woman

36:58

in the Democratic Party wearing Louboutins.

37:00

They're not a brand

37:03

of couture shoe. It

37:05

means that Democrat women

37:08

know how to make shoes and they're making

37:10

shoes out of the children they've killed. I'm not

37:12

kidding. This is part of it. No, I know. I

37:15

love, I always love the links

37:17

between these insane

37:19

accusations of like they're harvesting

37:21

children for parts. And then the evidence of it is

37:23

like a woman's wearing red shoes. Well,

37:27

that applies to like a number, like a large

37:30

number of women on any given day.

37:31

Red is a striking stylistic choice.

37:33

Sometimes people like a color. There's

37:35

only like seven of them. So, you

37:38

know, either they like red or they're

37:41

harvesting something from children that may

37:43

not meaningfully exist. Yes. Yeah. Those

37:45

are the two options.

37:46

And I guess I love the idea that like

37:50

Huma Abadiyan or whoever is like

37:53

going home and it's like,

37:55

all right, kids, don't bother me. I have

37:57

to make shoes. Yeah. I

38:01

got 80 kids in the basement. Keep it down down

38:03

there, come on. I murdered a child

38:05

three days ago and I gotta use it or

38:07

toss it. So I just gotta, you

38:10

know. The thing is he

38:12

got busy and he had more skin than I know

38:14

what to do. Good God. So

38:18

anyway, that's just, it's one of my favorite parts

38:20

of it because it's like, if you were told,

38:23

especially in like the kind of

38:25

high pressure

38:26

emotional appeal way that causes

38:28

people to lose money to phone scams, like

38:31

children are being trafficked right now and you have to do

38:33

something about it. Share this article

38:35

or something, then like you can pass on

38:37

something that includes something that, you know,

38:39

leads to a conclusion,

38:41

such as democratic women

38:44

are making shoes out of the

38:46

children they've killed. That if someone came

38:48

and shouted at you on social media,

38:50

you would, you know, there's a reason they don't lead

38:52

with that part. Right, right. And

38:55

also that kind of stuff is probably not in the movie. Like does the

38:57

movie feel conspiratorial at all? Well, that's the thing.

39:00

I mean, the movie doesn't get into QAnon stuff,

39:02

but it does show how like

39:05

basically taking a form of child

39:07

trafficking that like,

39:09

like the children in a shipping container

39:11

thing, like as far as I know, there has never

39:14

been a case of that occurring. And

39:17

there's a reason that people don't do that,

39:19

right? Yeah, it doesn't make sense. If

39:21

you're trafficking

39:23

children to people who wish to

39:25

abuse them, then like wherever you

39:28

are, there is a gigantic

39:30

number of children

39:32

who you can do that with who are right

39:35

there. Yeah, people do not have

39:37

the skills necessary

39:39

to like import children in large numbers

39:42

because that tends to attract attention and requires

39:44

like all kinds of like upfront funding. And then the main

39:46

thing is if you're looking for like poor

39:49

children who are easy to exploit, we

39:51

have a lot of those here, unfortunately, right?

39:54

You wouldn't import kids from

39:56

Columbia. We have a lot of people who are like undocumented immigrants

39:58

and like really desperate.

40:00

and really vulnerable because they don't meaningfully

40:02

have the protection of the state. And so you

40:04

can just like tell them go do this and I'll give you $500

40:07

and then not pay them. Like there's all

40:09

kinds of very easy ways to exploit people

40:12

domestically and locally. It doesn't require this

40:14

like vast network. And like that's the saddest

40:16

thing about sort of debunking these things is it's

40:18

like the exploitation is happening

40:21

in

40:21

some form, right? And the violations and this

40:23

really horrible shit is happening. But

40:25

it just isn't happening in this up

40:27

in the clouds, vast mustache

40:29

twirling conspiracy kind of way. It's

40:32

much more like quotidian. It's just like asshole

40:35

dudes

40:35

who find like poor, maybe addicted

40:38

teenagers and like try to

40:40

have sex with them by trading something or like beat them up

40:42

or like the sort of the normal shit

40:44

that we've all maybe become like too used

40:46

to. Yeah. Or say, you know, if you're

40:49

addicted to drugs and you need drugs

40:52

and you have a child.

40:53

Yeah. Right. And you can use

40:56

the child in order to get something that

40:59

you need. Like the thing about these conspiracy

41:01

theories is that they require this amazing amount

41:03

of effort and organization on the part of the

41:06

abuser, which I think distracts from the fact

41:08

that

41:09

the fewer resources you have, the more

41:11

likely you

41:12

are to create

41:13

or end up in abusive

41:15

situations for your child or situations

41:18

where abuse is all but inevitable. Right. You

41:20

know what I think about all the time. In

41:22

our Kitty Genovese episode, the

41:26

murder where the alleged case is

41:28

that like people saw this woman being stabbed and like, nobody

41:30

cares because like who cares about being stabbed in

41:32

cities. Then we got all this like decades of like reactionary

41:34

stuff about how bad cities were. In the early

41:36

stages of the murder,

41:38

what people thought it was, was like a domestic abuse

41:40

incident. And like, that's why they ignored it.

41:43

And it's sort of like in some ways, the

41:45

myth is true, right?

41:47

Because it was a form of violence that people were kind of

41:49

turning their heads away from, but it was like

41:51

this every day form of violence. I'm

41:54

just like, I am, I might be like a man to his girlfriend, like shit,

41:56

we're just gonna leave that on its

41:58

own. But then it's like, oh no, they were.

41:59

They were ignoring this kind of more stranger danger

42:02

form of violence. And that is seen as

42:04

like this huge like it says something

42:06

about society. But I guess it says nothing about

42:09

society that we're like, might just be a guy abusing

42:11

his girlfriend. Right. Well, right.

42:13

And then in 1964, you could that's

42:15

the lens. Right. You're like a man abusing

42:18

his girlfriend,

42:19

his wife, none of my business.

42:21

He knows how much to abuse her. Right.

42:24

And how to not kill her. But

42:26

a stranger. Right.

42:28

That's unacceptable. But it's the same, you

42:30

know, they're committing the same violence. Right.

42:32

And the same thing here. It's like this kind of everyday

42:35

like exploitation of children, like kids in horrible

42:37

foster care situations, kids dealing

42:40

with like trauma and abuse. There's not

42:42

the resources necessary in schools, etc. It's

42:44

like there's kind of these everyday forms

42:47

of like hurt and trauma that are

42:49

being imposed on to children. But it's like,

42:51

no, no, no, we want the shipping container. Yeah, we

42:53

want the exotic ones. We want one that

42:55

implies like a finger pointing at some sort

42:57

of societal other that we can do something about.

43:00

Right. That we can have this like

43:01

punitive response to. Whereas

43:03

if it's like, it's their parents or like the soccer coach

43:05

or something like as it's a bit more complicated

43:07

in those cases. And it's like so much of this is people

43:09

trying to look away from these like more everyday

43:12

tragedies that are happening. Yeah. And then, well, and

43:14

also crucially, it's creating this

43:17

problem as the kind of crime that

43:19

is best solved by high profile busts.

43:21

Yeah. Which is what a lot of this movie is about.

43:23

The thing that I was also surprised about by this

43:26

movie, aside from like how watchable it

43:28

is, which I think makes it more dangerous

43:30

is propaganda. I know I'm sorry. I

43:33

was really expecting it to be more like the

43:35

Gerard Butler film plane,

43:38

which I didn't see, but meant to when it came out, where

43:40

it's like guys in the jungle hacking

43:42

through

43:42

vegetation, doing, you know, commando

43:45

stuff. But most of it is a lot

43:47

more like Argo. Oh, yeah.

43:50

Oh, really? Like aside from the really

43:52

heavy, like traumatized child scenes,

43:56

which I think are so effective because they

43:58

show like again.

43:59

Like I think really quite good child

44:02

actors, like acting

44:04

to

44:05

show like someone truly devastated

44:07

by something that then you are left to imagine

44:10

in a way that is pretty haunting. Then

44:13

like the kind of middle part of the movie is

44:15

like, we're setting up a sting operation and

44:17

making a fake resort for pedophiles,

44:20

which we will then get the supplier

44:23

who targeted the little girl at the start of the movie

44:25

to bring like 60 children

44:28

to and will arrest the traffickers

44:30

and save the children. And so that's like the middle part

44:32

of the movie. So it's kind

44:34

of, and there's

44:35

like, there's good mic drops. It's

44:37

got a weirdly good soundtrack aside from

44:39

the overbearing sad strings. So

44:41

they do this bust and then they rescue the little

44:43

girl finally from the like cocaine

44:46

layer. And something that connects to

44:48

stuff that you talk about around this topic

44:50

is that like

44:51

Jim Caviezel infiltrates the jungle as

44:53

a fake doctor. He saves the little girl,

44:56

but he also sees like probably 50 people

44:59

who are working on this coca farm and

45:02

who logically have also been

45:05

trafficked there. And he's just like,

45:07

whatever, I got the little

45:10

girl. Yeah, I feel like these, the ideology

45:12

behind the sort of movements that are pushing

45:15

this is very like laissez-faire. Like they're

45:17

against government intervention unless government

45:19

can send in like law enforcement or like war

45:21

stuff. Like if the government is not doing violence,

45:24

they're against it. As long as the government can do violence,

45:26

they're like, yeah, I'm okay with a little bit of government action. And

45:29

the movie also makes, you'll be thrilled

45:31

to hear statistical claims, both

45:34

in the form of monologues throughout,

45:36

including also a monologue by Bill Camp

45:38

that includes the line, when

45:40

God tells you what to do, you cannot

45:43

hesitate,

45:44

which I think is terrible advice.

45:47

I think when God tells you what to do, you should really

45:49

sleep on it. Yeah, what do you mean? Let's define

45:52

our terms, Bill. Let's think that's true. So

45:55

in the midst of this movie that also

45:57

is making the case that a rogue homelands,

45:59

security officer

46:01

whose department is too conservative

46:04

for his

46:05

needs, conservative in terms of not letting

46:07

him bust people. Why won't anyone care about the

46:09

children? That's always like the premise of these things that like, you're

46:12

like hundreds of children, like innocent children

46:15

are being like kidnapped and murdered. And the whole

46:17

bureaucratic apparatus is like, eh,

46:19

I don't see it. Yeah. He has

46:22

to have a boss who's like, well,

46:24

look, it saved me an American child.

46:26

Yeah. It's just like so

46:29

fundamentally conspiratorial. Just like when

46:31

will someone finally care about the children? I

46:33

know. And I, you know, I hate to

46:35

protest too much at times like this, but

46:37

like, I do care about the children,

46:40

you guys. Yes. We also

46:42

care. SJWs like the

46:45

children. Yeah. Single Jewish women.

46:50

Um, so, so we got statistics as well,

46:52

which is so great. And so at one

46:54

point early in the movie, Jim Caviezel

46:56

remarks that 22 million new

46:59

child pornography images appeared in the

47:01

past year. This is something you specifically

47:02

debunked, I think in a different episode.

47:05

Yeah. Do you remember that? Yeah.

47:08

I mean, we talked about this in our sexting episode that there's

47:11

been a lot of claims about the proliferation of child

47:13

pornography online. My understanding

47:16

is that it all comes back to the definition because of course

47:18

any image of anyone under 18

47:21

is technically child pornography. And

47:23

so as we talked about on our sexting

47:25

episode, like there's a massive proliferation

47:28

basically of like teenagers like sexting

47:30

each other.

47:31

And so sometimes those photos end up in kind of

47:33

the wrong hands and they get, you know, posted on like revenge

47:35

porn websites and it's like awful shit. But

47:38

sometimes it's just like teenagers like sending

47:40

photos to their boyfriend and being like, here's

47:42

my boobs or whatever. And so it's

47:45

a difficult thing to talk about because it sounds like you're minimizing

47:47

child pornography, but it's like the category

47:50

of child

47:51

pornography includes like the really dark

47:53

shit that like sort of conjures

47:55

up in your mind when you hear about this. But

47:57

then also includes like consensual.

48:00

photos of like a 17 year old like texting her

48:02

boyfriend. And so there needs

48:04

to be like some sort of delineation between

48:06

those two things. And like, people do go

48:08

to jail on like child pornography charges for

48:10

like consensually receiving

48:13

photos from like someone they're dating like, you know,

48:15

the guy's 19 and the girl 17. And

48:18

he goes to jail like that. This is an actual thing that

48:20

like, I don't think is like what people have in mind

48:22

when they say like, crack down on child

48:24

pornography. I don't think that's like, like an outcome that

48:27

anybody wants. It would be great if there is

48:29

a Jim Caviezel movie where he like appears

48:31

in your window when you're about to take a topless

48:33

selfie and is like, don't do it, Jessica.

48:35

Hang on. Yeah, Kyle's gonna break up

48:37

with you before winter formal.

48:40

So it's very difficult

48:42

to talk about this stuff on the internet, because it sounds

48:44

like you're saying that like these kinds of horrible

48:47

images don't matter. And like they

48:48

obviously do, but it's just a very broad

48:51

category. And what we see with human trafficking

48:54

is this constant conflation of like

48:56

the kidnapping children, shipping containers, like the

48:59

really the most awful shit that you can like imagine happening

49:01

in a society with things like,

49:03

you know, people from India moved to Dubai

49:06

and they get jobs in like really exploitative working

49:08

conditions. And then we group all of that

49:10

together. And we're like, okay, 40 million people

49:12

get human trafficked every year. But it's like,

49:14

these are really

49:15

different phenomena and require really different

49:17

policies to fix. But it's

49:19

like we now have this giant number that encompasses

49:22

like crimes that are like totally

49:25

different severity, even though they're all pretty bad. Right.

49:27

And I mean, to talk about the child pornography

49:29

statistic, like I think this is part of

49:31

why it's important to talk about

49:34

media like this, because it then puts everybody

49:36

else into the bind of being like, well, I don't want to

49:38

come off as callous to child abuse,

49:40

but like I need to point out that

49:42

this is not a correct statistic. And like one of

49:44

the other ways that it gets inflated is

49:46

that I believe like there are

49:49

a lot of inflated statistics

49:51

on these images specifically floating around

49:53

that don't take into account the fact that a lot of

49:55

these images are duplicates of each other. Right.

49:58

I mean, the number is almost in a sense,

49:59

are

50:01

unnecessary to the point because the fact

50:04

that these images are circulating at

50:06

all,

50:07

you know, kind of genuine instances of

50:10

child pornography, the way that we

50:12

have been taught to think about it, like, that's

50:14

an emergency in its own right. And then you don't

50:16

need

50:17

to kind of add on to that with anything

50:20

that inflates the problem. And I feel like inflating

50:23

the problem really is more useful for getting

50:25

attention, getting money for your foundations

50:28

and passing laws for harsher sentences

50:30

that you might be otherwise incentivized

50:33

to pass partly because it allows you to keep an

50:35

elected position. Right. I do hate

50:37

the

50:37

fact that every time we talk about this, it puts

50:39

us in a position where we have to actually say, like,

50:41

I do think it's bad when children are abused.

50:44

I know. Part of me feels like I know that

50:47

I have to actually say that every time. We

50:49

have to be like, I'm not like you think

50:51

liberals are, where the standard

50:54

liberal, of course,

50:55

loves abusing children and belongs to

50:57

a child abuse hobby league that meets on

51:00

the weekends. Right. Like, yeah,

51:03

I just think it's like what I really object

51:04

to about this whole thing is that the sort of the right

51:06

wing framing of this is always

51:08

like, oh, well, you don't care about kids or whatever. But it's like to

51:11

solve a problem, you have to understand

51:13

the problem. And there's like a deliberate effort

51:16

to not understand the inconvenient

51:19

aspects of child abuse. Right.

51:21

Which is that a lot of it is driven by poverty. A lot of it

51:23

is not like the

51:25

dark evil hiding in a corner. A lot of it is like

51:27

this really everyday stuff. And

51:29

like it just isn't serious to

51:31

try to solve a problem while refusing to look at

51:33

it. Right. But what that does allow you to

51:35

do is to have a movie made about you where

51:38

you are heroically played by the guy who played

51:40

Jesus in the movie directed by the guy who

51:42

played Mad Max.

51:45

And so at the end of this movie, Jim Caviezel,

51:48

they have the closing credits and then they're

51:50

like special message in two minutes and 30

51:53

seconds. And I was like, oh, fuck, I got

51:55

to see this special message. Oh, they actually

51:57

tell you that an ending or like a post credit

51:59

sequence is.

51:59

It's a mid-credit secret.

52:02

Like, stay tuned. No, it's Kim Kavisl

52:04

showing up. He says that more

52:07

people are enslaved now than when slavery

52:09

was legal. Oh, we talked about that one,

52:11

didn't we? I think

52:12

so. I definitely researched that one. It's basically

52:15

if you define modern

52:16

slavery in, like, the

52:18

most broad

52:20

category possible. It's like anyone

52:23

who took a job and the job conditions after

52:25

they start are different than the conditions they agreed

52:27

to. Mm-hmm. Which is, like, most

52:30

of the workforce. Probably many people who

52:32

worked on that film. Yeah, I mean, yes, exactly.

52:35

Like, as the strikes show. And then also the population

52:37

is, like,

52:38

way larger

52:39

now than it was in the late 1800s. So

52:42

there's also that. Yeah. that,

52:45

again, has been debunked, like, 4,000 times. But,

52:47

like, it doesn't matter. It's just going to keep showing up

52:49

on these things. Right. Well, and then that

52:51

made me think about statistics. And I was like, okay,

52:54

what numbers are we talking about? And so in 1860, there

52:57

are about 31 million

52:58

enslaved

53:01

people in America. Mm-hmm. And

53:04

so to compare to that, there have been 6.9 million worldwide

53:06

deaths from COVID in the past few years. And

53:09

I would point out that, like,

53:12

I feel like most of us know someone

53:14

or knows someone who knows someone who

53:17

has died of COVID in America, where

53:19

the number is smaller than that total. Mm-hmm. Right?

53:23

Like, you can think of

53:23

people. Yeah. And I haven't met anyone

53:26

who's disappeared into modern-day slavery, to be honest. Right.

53:30

Not of this nature. Yeah. That's

53:32

always the thing with these is, like, they're so implausible

53:34

on their face. It's like the minute you stop and think,

53:36

which is most of what our show has been. It's

53:39

just like, hey, wait a minute. The stop and think show. The stop,

53:41

stop, drop, and think, which we could have called

53:43

it.

53:44

Let's think about what this would actually require. And,

53:46

like, yeah, it's all, you know, just like

53:48

the definition of trafficking itself. It's

53:50

just sort of fun with definitions. And, again, you

53:53

don't want to downplay, like,

53:54

really exploitative work conditions, especially

53:56

for migrants right around the world. A lot of people are not protected

53:58

by

53:59

domestic labor laws wherever

54:02

they go. But like that's much more an issue

54:04

of just like poverty and exploitation. This

54:07

isn't something you can like repel down from

54:09

the ceiling and like rescue people from in

54:11

the way that this movie kind of wants you to believe.

54:14

It sort of downplays like the actual

54:16

slavery. And then it also plays

54:19

what is going on now and the kinds of solutions

54:21

that we need. Right. And it's also like

54:23

at this time when there's obviously the

54:25

extreme conservative fear

54:27

of encroachment by the

54:30

dream of the theory of the concept

54:33

of black history or social

54:35

justice as a concept

54:38

taught in schools. And it's like, wait, don't

54:40

learn about

54:41

the actual slavery that happened in America

54:44

when read about these imaginary

54:46

children that

54:47

Jim Caviezel is rescuing. They're more

54:49

important. Focus on that. Right. And

54:52

there's also like some when I was

54:54

had not yet resigned myself to seeing Sound of Freedom

54:57

in a movie theater and I was

54:58

trying to see if someone who just put it on

55:00

YouTube, I had a reaction video

55:02

by a crying Russian woman

55:04

that I feel like could be totally authentic or

55:07

like an Astroturf

55:08

plant. Who the heck knows? But it was like this

55:11

woman sobbing, being like,

55:13

well, you are trying to figure out

55:15

what gender you are. This is

55:17

happening. And it's like, I really don't

55:19

think that people are losing so much time

55:22

thinking about their genders that they're failing

55:24

to stop child abuse.

55:26

Also, actual like gay and trans

55:29

people are the best argument against that, because like, I

55:31

don't know one gay or trans person who like doesn't

55:33

give a shit about like broader social issues.

55:36

It's not like, excuse me, I'm trans.

55:38

I can't think about the minimum wage right now. It's

55:41

not like you do one or the other. I

55:44

don't know how many like people you know in like Portland

55:46

and Seattle, but like that's not really the vibe.

55:48

As a Portlander, my friends are

55:50

always saying to me, gosh, Sarah, who's

55:53

the president? I thought I would find out today,

55:55

but then I

55:56

spent too much time thinking

55:58

about my gender. did gender

56:00

all day. Sorry. Oh, damn. Forgot

56:02

to open the nation.com. Oh, man,

56:05

I went on a real gender bender last

56:07

night.

56:08

So yeah, he

56:11

makes this direct appeal to the audience. And

56:13

he's like, hi, you know, this

56:15

movie was made five years ago, but it had

56:18

every possible roadblock

56:20

to come out. And this

56:22

movie is gonna be the Uncle Tom's

56:25

cabin of the 21st century. The

56:28

baton has now been passed to you.

56:31

The

56:31

most powerful person in the world

56:34

is the storyteller. Oh, my God. And

56:36

he's like, this movie needs to stop child

56:38

slavery, but quote, it

56:41

will only have that effect if millions

56:44

of people see it. So like this

56:46

movie ends with a direct appeal, which

56:48

again, I don't even think is the director's

56:51

fault. Right.

56:52

From Jim Caviezel, after

56:54

the studio that it ultimately

56:57

went to was distributing it telling

57:00

you effectively,

57:02

that if you do not support this movie

57:04

and promote it or use the QR

57:06

code on the screen to

57:08

buy a ticket for a stranger

57:11

who can't afford to see it, that

57:13

if you don't help this movie,

57:15

you will be failing to stop

57:18

child sex slavery. Oh, okay.

57:21

That's a lot to put on me. It is a lot to put on

57:23

you. I can turn off motion blurring on

57:25

my parents TV, but the other stuff is gonna be harder. It's

57:29

a lot to put on your cute shoulders. Yeah.

57:31

And so, so that's the movie. And

57:34

then I researched the

57:36

story behind it, much of which I have told

57:38

you, which is that

57:39

after making the movie, both Tim

57:41

Ballard and Jim Caviezel, Tim

57:44

and Jim, Jim, Tim, Tim, Jim, the

57:47

hero of the hour and the guy who plays him

57:50

both became big QAnon endorsers.

57:52

Tim Ballard appears to have been ousted from

57:54

his own organization,

57:56

which has, you know, been criticized

57:59

occasionally.

57:59

because nobody wants

58:01

to criticize the child saving nonprofit

58:04

for seeming to set up

58:06

bus, which they

58:08

video and put online in

58:11

order to imply that

58:13

they're

58:14

kind of going in like a commando

58:16

team and saving large

58:18

rings of victimized girls in

58:21

a way that is misleading at best

58:23

and possibly just fake. Yeah.

58:25

And using misleading statistics and information

58:28

in order to fundraise and also that

58:30

he advised the Trump administration

58:33

on human trafficking. So that's good.

58:35

Also, it's never quite clear

58:36

what they do with people after

58:38

they, quote unquote, rescue them. They

58:40

check them into a river and hope that they

58:43

swim out to sea. Right. Because it's like

58:45

if the if the fundamental driver of this is like basically

58:47

poverty and, you

58:48

know, trauma and abuse and all these other like kind

58:51

of boring structural components,

58:52

like you rescue somebody, but then then what?

58:55

Like they still don't have a house. They still have an income.

58:57

They still they're still dealing with whatever stuff they're

59:00

dealing with, plus the additional trauma of whatever you rescue

59:02

them from. Right. This whole rescuing

59:04

methodology. It's not serious as

59:06

like a way to address this problem.

59:09

It's like a great way to get funding and stuff. And you

59:11

can brag about like the number of kids that you rescue.

59:13

A lot of them, it's like, oh, great. You're just sending them back

59:15

to the home that they were running away from. Right.

59:18

It's like, what are we really doing here? It's sort of like the

59:20

nobody wants to answer the question like and then what?

59:23

No, right. Because the movie is over.

59:25

And the creepy child choir has finished

59:27

singing and you get to go throw out the rest

59:29

of your popcorn. Yeah. And I and

59:32

this is

59:34

I guess ultimately just a

59:36

very sadly predictable outing. I don't think

59:38

there's really anything about this movie that you couldn't

59:40

have guessed

59:41

was going to be in it aside from

59:43

it being like pretty attractive.

59:46

So in the whole mixed experience, five out of 10. Rotten

59:50

Tomatoes. Well, and then the

59:52

Coda. And this is maybe something, Mike,

59:54

that people have been texting you about. They've certainly

59:56

been texting me about it is that

59:58

the headline, which actually,

59:59

I think has been pretty misleading is that

1:00:02

like one of the donors behind this movie

1:00:04

or one of the people who helped fund the movie has been

1:00:06

arrested for child trafficking. And

1:00:09

what in fact happened was that there was a very large

1:00:11

crowdfunding campaign for

1:00:12

this movie. Like I think they crowdfunded

1:00:14

about $5 million. And one

1:00:17

of the many hundreds of people

1:00:19

who donated was a guy named, I

1:00:21

believe, Fabian Marta, who if you read

1:00:24

the charges against him, appears to have

1:00:26

aided a woman he knew

1:00:29

in refusing to return

1:00:31

the children of whom she was the noncustodial

1:00:34

parent. Oh, there you

1:00:36

go. So it's like the kind

1:00:38

of kidnapping, you know,

1:00:40

missing children

1:00:42

case that actually happens, that inflates

1:00:44

the numbers and helps us make it look like stranger

1:00:46

danger if we want to. And the people, I think

1:00:49

Angel Studios

1:00:51

did kind of an amazing job responding

1:00:53

to this news because they were like, yes, it just

1:00:56

shows how widespread child trafficking

1:00:58

really is. Even one of our own

1:01:01

donors. Actually, we're correct.

1:01:03

It's everywhere, including here. Yeah,

1:01:06

that's one that I have deliberately avoided

1:01:08

looking into because I was like, this is too good of a story.

1:01:10

And like, I'm sure the details are

1:01:12

going to ruin it for me. So I'm not going to look

1:01:14

into it. So thank you for fully

1:01:17

ruining it for me. You're welcome. Yeah.

1:01:19

And kind of the interesting thing about this movie,

1:01:21

I think, or one of the ironies is that it seems

1:01:23

to be made by someone working in good faith,

1:01:26

not trying to promote conspiracy theories,

1:01:28

but by not looking hard enough

1:01:31

at the materials he was trying to depict

1:01:33

arguably or, you know, in some

1:01:36

way missing the point, providing

1:01:38

really fertile ground for conspiracy

1:01:41

theories that he himself does not agree with.

1:01:43

Yeah. And then the fact that

1:01:45

it makes a better headline for someone who made

1:01:48

this movie to be a child trafficker,

1:01:50

something actually not relating to child

1:01:52

trafficker as we know it being depicted

1:01:55

in an attempt to discredit this movie, but

1:01:57

still by using the same. misleading

1:02:00

tactics that this movie is using. Right.

1:02:02

It would be great if they did a press conference, but like, oh, we're actually

1:02:04

really disappointed at how you're taking this complex issue

1:02:06

and boiling it down to a one dimensional phenomenon.

1:02:09

I know. Really, Tim? Really? Oh,

1:02:11

OK. Mr. Nuance over here. Jim

1:02:13

Caviezel yells at you about nuance. It's

1:02:17

a bit much like they they get into

1:02:20

the math of like, how much can

1:02:22

you charge per day? And

1:02:24

how many times can you abuse a

1:02:27

child per day each time for profit?

1:02:30

And over how many years? And that's

1:02:32

why it's so profitable. And you're like, it's

1:02:34

not more profitable than drugs. It's

1:02:37

not more profitable than cosmetics. Not

1:02:39

by a long shot. That yeah,

1:02:41

that just doesn't I

1:02:43

mean, the nice thing about this is that

1:02:45

there is, in fact, not a huge market

1:02:47

for like sex with exploited

1:02:49

children. That is one of the things that is good. But

1:02:52

we would we choose to believe in a world

1:02:54

where there is a huge market for that. And that's

1:02:56

really it's I don't know.

1:02:59

It's worrying that like we embrace fables

1:03:01

that tell us that people who would

1:03:03

do that are everywhere when really,

1:03:05

you know, from what you talk about elsewhere,

1:03:08

like it is

1:03:09

hopefully a relief to know that it's really

1:03:12

a much smaller number than are depicted

1:03:14

in stories like these, a smaller number than it would

1:03:16

take to drive the fastest

1:03:18

growing criminal network in the world

1:03:21

are going to do this. Right. Also,

1:03:23

a friend of mine used to be a reporter in a small town

1:03:25

outside of Seattle. And there was a church that said they were the fastest

1:03:28

growing church in the entire state.

1:03:30

And they went from eight people to 12 people in

1:03:32

one year.

1:03:32

50 percent growth.

1:03:35

Those are just kind of like inherently suspect

1:03:38

to me. We are talking about problems that

1:03:40

exist, not because it is so profitable

1:03:43

to abuse children, like profitable on the scale

1:03:45

of a world economy, but just

1:03:47

because there are not sufficient resources

1:03:50

for children and because it isn't like sexy

1:03:52

and commando-y

1:03:54

and exciting to see a movie

1:03:56

about somebody working

1:03:58

on infrastructure and working.

1:03:59

on creating resources for queer

1:04:02

teenagers,

1:04:02

for example, who are one of the prime

1:04:04

victims of this and who, the

1:04:06

prime victims of trafficking as

1:04:09

it actually exists

1:04:10

and who we would prefer

1:04:13

to imply a world or to believe

1:04:16

in a world where it's all heroes

1:04:19

and children in shipping containers.

1:04:22

Jump a motorcycle over that, Tom Cruise.

1:04:27

I would watch it. Tom

1:04:30

Cruise has to jump a motorcycle over a mountain

1:04:32

of paperwork.

1:04:34

And that's how we dramatize him doing the

1:04:36

paperwork. Laptops full of Excel spreadsheets.

1:04:39

Yes. That can be your

1:04:41

biopic. Tom Cruise can play. The

1:04:45

Hobbes ultimatum. As a

1:04:47

person of the same height as

1:04:48

Tom Cruise, I think he is the perfect person to play

1:04:50

me. The resemblance is really striking.

1:04:52

Untrue, but thank you. Not

1:04:56

remotely true. So that's what that's the experience

1:04:59

of watching The Sound of Freedom. I had

1:05:01

a really it was very unpleasant.

1:05:03

I had a bad time. Seems like it

1:05:05

made me sad. It made me cry. I

1:05:08

knew that I was being shown the

1:05:10

worst kind of propaganda and

1:05:12

stories that cause people

1:05:14

to dig deeper into dangerous

1:05:16

and violent and conspiratorial

1:05:19

belief systems. And I was,

1:05:22

you know, also still could not help

1:05:25

being swept away by the tidal wave of

1:05:27

emotion in the movie, which is the worst way to feel

1:05:29

emotional during a movie where you feel

1:05:30

like emotions have been like burgled

1:05:33

out of your potty. Yeah. And

1:05:35

now we're going to hear our

1:05:37

original human trafficking episode. We made

1:05:40

this a couple of years ago. It was

1:05:42

sorely needed then. It's sorely needed now.

1:05:46

Unfortunately, nothing changes. People keep

1:05:48

telling the same lies. Pretending

1:05:51

to fight human trafficking actually

1:05:53

does

1:05:53

seem to be a pretty fast growing

1:05:56

ring of occasional. Yeah. Yeah.

1:05:59

Yeah. I

1:06:01

guess. It's

1:06:09

so easy to traffic people on the East Coast.

1:06:11

I mean, like, I have to go to New Jersey for

1:06:13

a Michael Bolton concert. Come

1:06:24

to You're Wrong About, the podcast where

1:06:27

we teach you how to

1:06:29

succinctly counter your relative's

1:06:32

Thanksgiving Day arguments. Ooh,

1:06:34

that's good. Thank you. The

1:06:36

succinctly is a little

1:06:37

ambitious, considering how long our

1:06:39

episodes have gotten. Yeah. Well, okay,

1:06:41

here's how I think this works. You have probably done, like, 100 hours

1:06:44

of research for this. We're

1:06:46

gonna talk for three to five hours for

1:06:49

an episode that's gonna be an hour

1:06:51

long.

1:06:52

And the people who hear this episode can boil

1:06:54

that one hour down to, you know, five

1:06:56

minutes of impassioned whisper

1:06:58

shouting over stuffing. Yeah, I like

1:07:00

that we've turned our listeners just as insufferable

1:07:03

as we are. Yeah, I think they were already insufferable.

1:07:05

They just, like, were wanting tools to become

1:07:07

even more insufferable, and that's what we're offering

1:07:10

them.

1:07:11

And today we're talking about human trafficking.

1:07:13

Yeah. So can you tell me, what

1:07:16

is your understanding of the term

1:07:19

human trafficking? So I want to try and connect

1:07:21

this to a recent news item. And

1:07:23

this is gonna be something that I vaguely remember, and

1:07:25

you can help me fill in the holes. But

1:07:28

basically, there was some female

1:07:31

conservative politician. Oh,

1:07:33

yeah. Who was it? If you're

1:07:35

going where I think you're going, it was Cindy McCain. It

1:07:37

was Cindy McCain. Okay, so it wasn't a politician,

1:07:39

but she's obviously part of a political family.

1:07:42

She was on a morning talk show, and she

1:07:45

told a story about seeing in an

1:07:47

airport or something like that, what she deemed to

1:07:49

be a suspicious situation with

1:07:51

an adult and a child who she presumed to be

1:07:53

in the act of being trafficked. Yes,

1:07:56

the evidence of trafficking was that

1:07:58

the child was a different ethnicity.

1:07:59

ethnicity than the mother. Okay. We

1:08:02

do not know if it was like a mother of color and a white

1:08:04

kid or a white mother and a

1:08:07

kid of color. Yeah, or like

1:08:09

a two non-white people of

1:08:11

different

1:08:12

backgrounds. But yes,

1:08:14

my guess is that that's not what she

1:08:17

noticed. Right. So my concept

1:08:19

of human trafficking is that, you

1:08:22

know, the posters that you see in airports and stuff,

1:08:24

which is that a white child is

1:08:27

somehow being exploited and

1:08:29

sold

1:08:30

probably for

1:08:31

sex or some other nefarious purposes.

1:08:35

That's my understanding of the Cindy McCain

1:08:37

version. Yes. Okay. This

1:08:40

is going to be a fun episode because this is like a medley

1:08:42

of all of our previous moral panic episodes. Like

1:08:45

there's some satanic stuff, there's

1:08:47

some repressed memories, there's

1:08:49

some bad statistics.

1:08:52

This is like when the carpenters would play a

1:08:54

medley. Take it away,

1:08:57

Richard. Yeah.

1:08:59

Where do you want to start us? Like what point

1:09:02

in time is the best place to begin?

1:09:04

So I think the place to start is that the version

1:09:07

of trafficking

1:09:07

that Cindy McCain is describing,

1:09:10

and that I think a lot of people have in their heads of,

1:09:12

you know, children being kidnapped, forcibly

1:09:15

taken from one country to the other. And

1:09:18

kidnapped in broad daylight, like, sipped

1:09:20

away in a public area. It's

1:09:22

not clear there has ever been a confirmed

1:09:24

case of that. So I have spent

1:09:26

the last two weeks calling human

1:09:28

trafficking organizations, speaking to sex

1:09:31

workers and advocates and people on

1:09:33

the Christian right. I've looked

1:09:35

quite hard and I have not found

1:09:38

a case of a child being taken against

1:09:40

their will

1:09:40

by a stranger on an

1:09:43

airplane. And we'll get into the reasons why. But

1:09:45

I think it's important to note that

1:09:47

like, when it comes to

1:09:50

children,

1:09:50

we are in the middle of a

1:09:52

stranger danger panic. Hooray.

1:09:54

Yeah. Like, Jesus, we just did

1:09:57

this. Like why do we have to go through

1:09:59

this?

1:09:59

through the same panic that we just had.

1:10:02

So to go through a couple of the statistics,

1:10:05

one of the things that's really interesting

1:10:07

is we have these giant estimates

1:10:10

of the prevalence of child sex

1:10:12

trafficking. So I saw one yesterday that said

1:10:14

there's 79,000 children in

1:10:17

Texas alone who are being

1:10:19

trafficked for sex. Another

1:10:21

phrase you hear is sold into slavery,

1:10:24

which again,

1:10:24

you can never say like, there's no

1:10:27

case of this ever happening because it's a big

1:10:29

country and literally everything has happened. And

1:10:31

that word means a lot of things. I

1:10:33

mean, one of the numbers that goes around is this is from

1:10:35

the US Institute Against Human Trafficking. There

1:10:38

are hundreds of thousands and potentially

1:10:40

over a million victims trapped in

1:10:42

the world of sex trafficking in the United

1:10:44

States. Because of the

1:10:47

hidden nature of the crime, it is essentially impossible

1:10:49

to know how many for sure. So

1:10:52

like, we don't

1:10:53

know, but it's more than

1:10:55

a million. We

1:10:57

have no way of knowing, but it's your worst

1:11:00

fear. Yes, exactly. And so

1:11:02

another

1:11:02

number that goes around is that one

1:11:04

in seven runaways are likely

1:11:07

victims of trafficking. That comes from the National Center for

1:11:09

Missing and Exploited Children,

1:11:10

who you may remember from

1:11:12

our Stranger Danger episode for propagating

1:11:14

all kinds of terrible statistics on

1:11:17

children's disappearances. And

1:11:19

so that claim, one in

1:11:21

seven runaways was fact-checked by

1:11:23

a Washington Post column in 2015 that

1:11:27

basically found no evidence for the claim. In

1:11:29

response to this fact check, the organization

1:11:32

added the word likely. So

1:11:34

they used to say one in seven runaways

1:11:36

are victims of trafficking, and now they say one in

1:11:38

seven are likely

1:11:39

victims of trafficking. It's

1:11:42

either a statistic or it's not. That's

1:11:44

like saying this milk is likely 2% fat. Yeah,

1:11:48

and then if they're saying the statistic,

1:11:51

then is that based on any numbers

1:11:53

of any kind, or is it just a gut

1:11:56

thing for someone? So I called up

1:11:58

the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

1:11:59

children. I talked to one of their researchers for more

1:12:02

than an hour. And the

1:12:04

methodology behind this statistic is essentially

1:12:07

when people call the hotline, their

1:12:09

missing children hotline, if there is any

1:12:12

whiff of trafficking, they

1:12:14

market as a victim of trafficking. What

1:12:17

is a whiff of trafficking when it's at home? What's

1:12:19

really interesting is they told me 83%

1:12:23

of their calls are from foster

1:12:25

care facilities or other state

1:12:27

institutions. These are super

1:12:29

at risk kids who have

1:12:31

run away for some period of time. If

1:12:34

the person who calls them says, James

1:12:36

has run away, we think he might be

1:12:39

being trafficked. That's enough. It seems

1:12:41

like this is a system designed to create

1:12:43

false positives, which is weird.

1:12:46

Yes, 100%. And there's

1:12:47

no verification whatsoever. So

1:12:50

if I call, I'm a parent, I say, my kid

1:12:52

has gone missing. I think he might be a victim of trafficking.

1:12:54

He comes back two hours later.

1:12:56

There's nothing to take that off

1:12:58

of the statistics. So we now have

1:13:00

a person who's not a runaway and

1:13:03

not a victim of sex trafficking

1:13:04

being marked as a sex

1:13:06

trafficking victim. They also admitted to me that

1:13:09

the same kids can be counted

1:13:12

infinite number of times a year. So

1:13:14

if I have a really bad relationship with my parents

1:13:16

and they're really abusive, and I'm running

1:13:18

away from them five or six times a year, and every

1:13:20

single time they call and say,

1:13:22

Mike has run away, we think he's being trafficked,

1:13:24

that counts as six trafficking cases, none

1:13:27

of which are confirmed. God, like flood data

1:13:29

is just like, it's so frustrating

1:13:31

to realize that the solution to our

1:13:35

big social problems is just like, well,

1:13:37

we need more ones. And we need more people

1:13:39

who are just fixated on the details

1:13:41

and want to do the grinding,

1:13:44

meticulous work of getting

1:13:46

things right. Like we just cannot

1:13:49

skip that ever.

1:13:49

The answer is always more spreadsheets. I

1:13:53

also think it's important to note that these are not

1:13:55

all reports of runaways in the country.

1:13:57

These are reports of runaways that are reported. to

1:14:00

the National Center for Missing and Exploited

1:14:03

Children. Right, so it's a self-selecting

1:14:05

group. Yeah, there's all kinds of reports of missing

1:14:07

children that get filed to various law enforcement agencies,

1:14:10

maybe different NGOs. There's

1:14:12

all kinds of places you can report a missing child.

1:14:14

So this one in seven statistic only comes

1:14:17

from people who call them. So

1:14:19

it's like if you have the foreign objects

1:14:22

in Muffin's Bureau and people

1:14:24

are calling and they're like, I found a foreign object

1:14:26

in my muffin, or like maybe I did, it could be.

1:14:28

And then American consumers are like,

1:14:30

did you know that like half of

1:14:32

muffins have foreign objects in them? And

1:14:34

it's like, well, that's just the foreign object Muffin

1:14:37

Bureau

1:14:37

statistic. That's a little bit specific.

1:14:39

That's a better explainer than any of the academic

1:14:41

articles I've read on this all week. I

1:14:44

just want to say. I'm just hungry. Yeah.

1:14:48

One of the things that's really interesting about this is

1:14:51

the huge mismatch between

1:14:54

the numbers put out by NGOs

1:14:56

and the actual numbers of

1:14:59

arrests, reports. One of the

1:15:01

numbers I found is that in 2017, the whole year, the

1:15:04

Department of Homeland Security found 500

1:15:06

victims of trafficking nationwide, and that's adults

1:15:09

and children. So we've got numbers of

1:15:11

it. It could be more than 1 million. It's 79,000

1:15:13

children in Texas alone. And

1:15:18

then we've got 500 actual

1:15:20

confirmed victims. So

1:15:22

at that point, it's like if there's such a disparity

1:15:25

between the number of

1:15:26

people being identified by the authorities

1:15:29

and the estimates,

1:15:30

then how are you even getting

1:15:32

the numbers? It

1:15:34

doesn't connect to me based

1:15:37

on anything I know about any other

1:15:39

situation of this kind that you would be able

1:15:42

to have knowledge of these many cases

1:15:44

but not take action on

1:15:46

any of them, especially in a country

1:15:49

where we do not have underzealous law enforcement,

1:15:51

especially where border issues are

1:15:53

concerned. I mean, one of

1:15:55

the things that is central

1:15:56

to, I think all urban legends of this

1:15:58

type, like won't someone say that? save the children is

1:16:01

this idea that we're insufficiently concerned

1:16:04

about it, right? It's like, well, nobody's talking

1:16:06

about the child sex traffic. And you're like,

1:16:08

actually, a lot of people are talking about it. No

1:16:10

one cares about white children. Yeah,

1:16:12

exactly. It's

1:16:15

like, that is the one demographic that

1:16:17

we, I mean, we live in a terrible country

1:16:19

for child welfare across the board, but we

1:16:21

do talk about white children a lot. Yes.

1:16:24

We do do that. So I think to be fair, one

1:16:26

of the people I interviewed

1:16:27

this week was a prosecutor for King County

1:16:29

who prosecutes sex trafficking cases here.

1:16:32

His explanation for why there's this

1:16:34

huge mismatch between arrest numbers

1:16:37

and estimates of the prevalence generally was

1:16:39

that he says these cases are really difficult to

1:16:41

try because

1:16:42

a lot of these people come from very

1:16:45

vulnerable families. A lot of them have drug

1:16:47

issues. A lot of them have mental health issues. They

1:16:49

have criminal histories that the defense team is going to question

1:16:51

them about.

1:16:52

So it makes sense to me that

1:16:54

those numbers would be artificially low. Right.

1:16:57

So they would have lower numbers for this

1:16:59

than for other types of crimes that are prosecuted.

1:17:01

Yeah. Yeah. So

1:17:03

I think it's worth taking that seriously. Although I also, I want to say, you

1:17:05

know, this is a prosecutor, right? He is on

1:17:08

the other side of the tough on crime ideological

1:17:10

divide than we are. He's someone who

1:17:13

believes in trafficking. He believes it's really bad.

1:17:16

I was asking about the kinds of cases that he sees.

1:17:18

And first of all, he's never seen a

1:17:20

trafficking case with a prepubescent child.

1:17:23

He sees lots of abuse cases, but

1:17:25

the idea of children being sold,

1:17:27

you know, trapped in hotel rooms, he's

1:17:30

never seen it. Well, I can see there

1:17:32

being cases of that that aren't discovered

1:17:35

and that I think there's always all

1:17:37

things are possible. And as

1:17:39

you often say, it's a big country. But

1:17:41

you know, the issue here is not that these

1:17:43

things

1:17:43

aren't happening, but that if you

1:17:45

are taking a story

1:17:48

of, you know, this case that

1:17:50

is horrific because it is about

1:17:52

a prepubescent child because it

1:17:54

is about the specific kind of trafficking

1:17:57

and then using that to whip up a

1:17:59

public. sentiment that allows you to

1:18:02

unnecessarily penalize sex

1:18:04

workers, then like, that's the issue.

1:18:07

Not that this thing doesn't happen, but that powerful

1:18:10

people are using the existence

1:18:12

of a certain type of crime to police

1:18:14

a fundamentally different type of crime. Another

1:18:17

thing he said

1:18:17

about this that I thought was really interesting is

1:18:20

that when he deals with underage sex

1:18:22

workers, the vast majority of the clients

1:18:24

don't know they're underage because they're

1:18:27

lying about, you know, you ask a year 18, right? And

1:18:29

she says, yeah, yeah, I'm 18, but she's actually 17. Also,

1:18:32

if you're soliciting sex, like, you're

1:18:34

not going to entice someone to do

1:18:37

an illegal thing with you by telling them

1:18:39

that it's also illegal in a more

1:18:41

dire way. Yeah. I

1:18:44

think, I mean, I think there is

1:18:46

like, you don't want to defend men who are buying

1:18:48

sex with underage people, but it's

1:18:50

also the morality of it to me feels very

1:18:52

different than going into a hotel room where somebody's

1:18:55

in some way chained or bound and having

1:18:57

sex with that person. It's a very different

1:18:59

order of scale.

1:19:00

And I think it just

1:19:02

is not going to help any of us to

1:19:04

see complicated issues as

1:19:07

less complicated than they are. Like, I don't

1:19:09

think that ever improves anything. One of the other

1:19:11

really interesting things this tough on crime prosecutor

1:19:13

said to me was that most of the

1:19:16

actual cases of

1:19:17

quote unquote trafficking that he sees are actually

1:19:19

an extension of domestic abuse. What

1:19:22

this usually is, is people that have

1:19:24

a lot of vulnerabilities, they're leaving the

1:19:26

home because it's abusive or they get, you

1:19:28

know, they start dating somebody at 17.

1:19:29

There's a period

1:19:32

of abuse and then escalation

1:19:35

of the abuse. I actually interviewed

1:19:37

somebody who was homeless

1:19:39

in Portland and she met

1:19:41

a guy who was older than her.

1:19:43

And she says he was the first

1:19:45

guy that was nice to me. She grew up in an abusive

1:19:47

home. This is the start of so many stories.

1:19:50

And so she considered the guy her boyfriend. And then

1:19:52

he said, Hey, you know, do you want to have a threesome sometime?

1:19:55

And maybe we can have a threesome, but

1:19:57

I'm not

1:19:57

part of the threesome.

1:19:59

And you. have sex with this other guy and then it's kind

1:20:01

of like, well, maybe you have sex with this guy, like I

1:20:03

don't really know him, but... But I

1:20:05

need you to do it and I'm

1:20:07

your boyfriend. Yes. So she's still actually

1:20:09

not sure if money was changing hands behind the scenes.

1:20:13

At the time she didn't, but she now considers herself a trafficking

1:20:15

victim because that's basically

1:20:17

what it became, but it was an outgrowth of

1:20:19

all of this other abuse and her extreme

1:20:22

vulnerability. So even

1:20:24

this tough on crime prosecutor guy said that most

1:20:26

of the people that he sees are

1:20:29

ethnic minorities, they have child abuse in the home, they

1:20:31

have very young drug addiction. One of the victims

1:20:33

he's working with now, she was addicted to

1:20:35

hard drugs by 13 because her mother was

1:20:37

a drug addict. He says, when

1:20:39

he sees

1:20:40

sort of suburban kids like the Liam

1:20:42

Neeson myth, it's almost always

1:20:44

because they're queer, that creates

1:20:47

a vulnerability for those kids that kind of pushes them out

1:20:49

of the home

1:20:49

and pushes them into networks where

1:20:52

they're meeting boyfriends or girlfriends that

1:20:54

are able to coerce them because of the lack of self-confidence

1:20:57

that they have, the lack of support

1:20:59

systems that they have. And society kind of hating

1:21:02

them already, which certainly creates a good

1:21:04

substrate for being abused in your personal

1:21:06

relationships. Totally. Yeah. Well,

1:21:09

this is what's so fascinating to me about the way that this moral panic has

1:21:11

perpetuated itself in that if we're

1:21:13

thinking of the sort of, quote unquote, real

1:21:16

cases of human trafficking where teenagers are

1:21:18

coerced or manipulated into

1:21:20

engaging

1:21:20

in commercial sex work by their partners,

1:21:24

that's a very specific form

1:21:26

of abuse.

1:21:27

So why would we

1:21:29

be focusing on this one outcome?

1:21:32

The outcome of being forced into sex work by

1:21:34

a partner? Well, because, yeah,

1:21:36

there's now this army of trainers

1:21:39

that are going into schools. What did

1:21:41

they tell them about? They just told

1:21:43

us to not smoke weed until

1:21:44

we were 25. I feel like I really got off easy.

1:21:49

This is from Shared Hope International. This is their

1:21:51

warning signs that a teenager is being

1:21:53

trafficked. And absences

1:21:55

from class, overly tired in class,

1:21:58

less appropriately dressed. than before.

1:22:01

What? Sexualized behavior.

1:22:03

Oh my god. Withdrawn to press,

1:22:06

distracted or checked out, brags

1:22:08

about making or having lots of money. New

1:22:11

tattoos, tattoos are often used

1:22:13

by pimps as a way to brand victims. Okay.

1:22:16

Tattoos of a name, symbol, money

1:22:18

or barcode could indicate trafficking.

1:22:20

That's so weird. That's

1:22:23

so specific. The barcode one is so

1:22:26

hilarious. Like the barcode one shows up everywhere.

1:22:28

Wouldn't you get that like iPhone scanner

1:22:30

thing at this point? Like no one's

1:22:33

carrying, anyway. I

1:22:35

do not doubt that people have done

1:22:37

this like somewhere.

1:22:40

But again, like this really plays into

1:22:42

the idea that we see a lot in conspiracy theories

1:22:44

that like everyone does it the same way and

1:22:46

there's some kind of national hierarchy

1:22:49

may be involved. And also the barcode

1:22:51

thing is really important because it's this idea

1:22:53

that like the numbers are so big that

1:22:56

you need barcodes to track all

1:22:58

the, like their tubes of toothpaste or something. So it's the

1:23:00

argument that these are functional barcodes

1:23:02

and that the pimps have little like self

1:23:04

checkout scanner guys that they're

1:23:06

using. Like. I also, I know

1:23:08

people at my middle and high school that got barcode tattoos,

1:23:11

but that's because they were anti-capitalist goths

1:23:14

and they got them as a kind of like fuck capitalism

1:23:16

type of tattoo. Yeah, so once again, we

1:23:19

have to suspect goths. Also,

1:23:21

aside from the barcode tattoo thing,

1:23:24

I think the warning signs of trafficking

1:23:26

all sound like being a teenager. Oh, totally.

1:23:29

Right? Like you're tired and you look more

1:23:31

promiscuous than you used to. I mean,

1:23:33

yeah. You know,

1:23:35

Florida just passed a law that every

1:23:37

school has to have an anti-trafficking

1:23:40

curriculum. Really?

1:23:41

Yes. I,

1:23:43

I really, this really bothers

1:23:45

me because I feel like we have

1:23:47

this narrative too that it's like,

1:23:49

that women and girls especially

1:23:52

aren't allowed to care about

1:23:53

staying safe unless the imagined

1:23:56

foe

1:23:57

is like a scary monster. We're not allowed

1:23:59

to talk about keeping.

1:23:59

keeping safe from normal

1:24:02

straight men, especially like

1:24:04

the ones that we marry. We're not allowed

1:24:07

to implicate them in

1:24:08

our fears for ourselves. But if it's about

1:24:10

a monster,

1:24:12

then we can talk about it and we can try and

1:24:14

keep people safe, but only from the monster.

1:24:16

Yeah. Yeah. Right.

1:24:20

And

1:24:20

it's also, it's so telling that these trainings aren't aimed

1:24:22

at boys. Yeah. And I

1:24:24

was going to ask you, have you ever seen like an, are

1:24:26

you being trafficked sign in a men's room? Ooh,

1:24:29

no, I don't think so. And like, aren't boy

1:24:31

children supposed to be being trafficked and

1:24:33

all this? Like, is it only girl children on top

1:24:35

of everything else that this is supposed to be happening

1:24:37

to? Well, this is the thing. It's like

1:24:39

a big sign of moral panic to me is when you hold all of these

1:24:41

contradictory ideas at once. So

1:24:44

oftentimes they'll say like, Ooh, it's, you know, it's usually

1:24:46

somebody close to you that's going to coerce

1:24:49

you into commercial sex work. But then the

1:24:51

next sentence they'll say, Oh,

1:24:53

you know, if there's men standing outside

1:24:55

your school trying to recruit you, don't speak to

1:24:58

them. That seems like common sense advice.

1:25:00

I mean, yeah, that's hard. Another

1:25:03

one of the source list statistics that goes

1:25:05

around

1:25:06

is that 70% of child sex trafficking

1:25:09

cases begin online. This really

1:25:11

is Santa's bag. There's something in here for

1:25:14

everyone. If you're afraid of the internet, if you're

1:25:16

afraid of the migrant

1:25:18

caravan, yeah, it's

1:25:19

great. It's

1:25:21

very diverse. One of the curricula that they're

1:25:23

going to be using in Florida apparently is called My

1:25:26

Life, My Choice. And it's

1:25:28

a 10 session exploitation prevention

1:25:30

curriculum designed to change girls'

1:25:33

perceptions of the commercial sex industry

1:25:36

as well as build self-esteem and personal empowerment.

1:25:38

How many perceptions of the commercial sex

1:25:40

industry do they have going into this training?

1:25:42

Well, this is the thing. It's like some

1:25:44

of the articles

1:25:45

about Florida's new curriculum mentioned

1:25:47

sort of paragraph 17 that

1:25:50

in 2017 there were only 65 human

1:25:53

trafficking incidents and there were zero

1:25:55

reports of minors being trafficked in Florida.

1:25:57

Oh, boy. And so it's like when we talk about what's. actually

1:26:00

endangering teens. Suicide

1:26:02

is now the number two killer of kids

1:26:04

under 18 after car accidents. When

1:26:07

you ask actual kids, and there's a lot of activism

1:26:09

going on around this, they need help with depression

1:26:11

and anxiety. No, no, depression is a sign

1:26:14

that they're being trafficked, actually.

1:26:16

I remember that from the list earlier. We

1:26:19

got the trafficking. Everything

1:26:21

will be fine. I think the counter

1:26:23

argument

1:26:23

to all of this is like, well, what's the harm

1:26:26

in focusing on sex trafficking? What is it really?

1:26:29

What's the problem with teaching kids?

1:26:31

And when it comes to sort

1:26:33

of the damage of this framing, I

1:26:35

think I mentioned on here that my boyfriend

1:26:38

manages a cafe in Seattle. And

1:26:40

one of the things they've been dealing with lately is there's this kid

1:26:42

that comes in who's like 17. And

1:26:45

he comes in sort of 3, 4 PM after school

1:26:47

would be getting out. And

1:26:49

he just sort of sits at the cafe. And

1:26:53

sometimes he's drunk. Sometimes he's drinking

1:26:55

something out of a thermos, and they're not entirely sure if it's alcohol

1:26:57

or not. They're not comfortable calling the cops.

1:26:59

So they've called the school

1:27:02

and sort of tried to get some information about this kid.

1:27:05

He's not homeless, but it seems there's some

1:27:07

reason why he doesn't want to go home. And

1:27:10

they don't really want to pry.

1:27:11

And when you think about

1:27:13

kids that are at risk, what

1:27:16

help is it to go up to that kid

1:27:18

and be like, are you being sex trafficked? Is

1:27:21

that kid at risk of sex trafficking? I

1:27:24

guess that's true if that's the way that you want to frame

1:27:26

it. But that kid's at risk of 100,000 things.

1:27:30

Putting him into this binary frame of it's

1:27:33

sex trafficking or else we don't care is not helpful.

1:27:37

Because if that kid says, I have a new partner

1:27:39

and he coerced me into sex,

1:27:41

well, that's not really trafficking, pal. Sorry.

1:27:44

Right. Or like my parents are abusing me. That's

1:27:46

not really trafficking. So I can't really help you.

1:27:48

Our organization

1:27:49

gives out gift bags to trafficking

1:27:52

survivors. And sorry, your parents

1:27:54

are hitting you and you don't want to go home. But it's

1:27:56

not trafficking. So it's not really our problem. Right?

1:27:59

It's this very narrow.

1:27:59

narrow understanding of

1:28:02

one of the risks. And really

1:28:04

what all of the other constellation

1:28:06

of things that that kid might be going through,

1:28:09

we need to have some way of

1:28:12

gathering information from kids of like,

1:28:14

how can I help? What do you need? And we need

1:28:16

to care about kids when they're not

1:28:19

the victim of the specific big bad that

1:28:21

we've decided to focus on

1:28:23

this decade. Totally. Totally. And

1:28:26

it's also, I mean, this transitions very well into the history of human trafficking

1:28:28

and how this is playing out for adults.

1:28:31

Act two. Yes. So

1:28:33

do you remember the case of Robert

1:28:35

Kraft? No. Do you know who

1:28:38

Robert Kraft is? Is he related to the

1:28:39

Kraft Mac and Cheese fortune? Oh,

1:28:42

not that I know of. I only know one fact about him

1:28:44

because he's a sports person. And so I have

1:28:46

to look up all sports related facts. Yeah. Otherwise

1:28:50

we'll get a bunch of replies about how you said someone played

1:28:52

the wrong position. Yes. Those

1:28:54

are still coming in. Thank you, everybody.

1:28:55

Yeah. That is noted.

1:28:58

So Robert Kraft is the owner of the New

1:29:01

England Patriots. Okay. So last year,

1:29:03

Robert Kraft was arrested in

1:29:06

a massage parlor in South Beach,

1:29:08

Miami. Oh. And this immediately

1:29:11

went into the sex ring trafficking,

1:29:15

evil criminal conspiracy type of

1:29:17

framing. So I'm going to read to you

1:29:20

from the New York Times article that came out. There was

1:29:22

like a feature story that came out right after his arrest.

1:29:25

On the lurid celebrity connection lies the wretched

1:29:27

story of women who the police believe

1:29:29

were brought

1:29:30

from China under false promises

1:29:32

of new lives and legitimate spa jobs.

1:29:35

Instead, they found themselves trapped in

1:29:37

the austere back rooms of strip mall

1:29:40

brothels, trafficking victims trapped

1:29:42

among South Florida's rich and famous. I

1:29:45

don't believe they were told they were going to work in massage

1:29:47

parlors seven days a week having

1:29:48

unprotected sex with up to a thousand

1:29:51

men a year, said Sheriff William D. Snyder

1:29:53

of Martin County. We saw

1:29:55

them eating on hot plates in the back.

1:29:57

There were no washing machines. They were sleeping

1:29:59

on the massage. Oh god. Sheriff

1:30:01

Snyder said he believed at least some of

1:30:03

the women were working to pay off debt owed

1:30:05

for what it cost to bring them to the United States. In

1:30:08

some cases, the women's passports were taken

1:30:10

away. Traffickers cycled women in

1:30:12

and out of parlors every 10 or 20 days,

1:30:15

Sheriff Snyder estimated. That seems like

1:30:17

a lot of turnover. I would never consider

1:30:19

them prostitutes. It was more of a rescue

1:30:21

operation, he said.

1:30:22

Oh my god. Right?

1:30:25

Okay. This is setting off a wuga noises

1:30:28

for you because it should have for everybody

1:30:30

else. Also note, all of the information

1:30:32

in this New York Times story is coming from a single

1:30:35

source. Oh no. Who

1:30:37

is the sheriff? Have they not learned since the

1:30:39

Kitty Genovese fiasco in

1:30:41

the early 60s? Right?

1:30:44

He also, there's a later CNN interview

1:30:47

where they're asking about trafficking

1:30:49

and prostitution and et cetera, and he says, I just

1:30:51

don't understand why women would go and allow

1:30:53

themselves

1:30:53

to be trafficked. This really

1:30:55

speaks to the binary that I feel like a lot

1:30:58

of men in law enforcement believe in about

1:31:00

women, which is that the two

1:31:03

kinds are rescue worthy and

1:31:05

prostitute. Yeah. There's also this great

1:31:07

thing too,

1:31:08

where we build up these perfect victims, but

1:31:10

then it's like, oh, they went and allowed themselves to be trafficked.

1:31:13

Right? So even when we find those stories,

1:31:15

it's like, oh, weren't they kind of at

1:31:17

fault a little bit? They let them

1:31:20

be right? It's like

1:31:20

someone got herself murdered. Yeah. Yeah.

1:31:23

And it's like, oh, that's how women works depending on the category of

1:31:25

person. I mean, I think it's also, so

1:31:28

every

1:31:29

factual claim in what I just said

1:31:32

is false. Great. Every single

1:31:34

one. So first of all, there's this

1:31:36

great Vanity Fair article that comes out months

1:31:38

after this, of course, where they

1:31:40

find that none of the women were from China.

1:31:43

Oh my God. At least got

1:31:45

the country right. How hard is that? I mean,

1:31:47

they were Chinese. Okay. They were already

1:31:49

living

1:31:49

in the United States. Yeah. And then part of

1:31:52

the massage par, they recruited them through advertisements in

1:31:54

Chinese language, magazines and newspapers

1:31:56

in Chicago and LA and

1:31:58

all these other places. It was like a new

1:31:59

normal sort of Craigslist ad that happened

1:32:02

to be in Chinese, like come to Florida, work at a massage

1:32:04

parlor. So none of them were trafficked from

1:32:06

other countries.

1:32:07

They crossed state lines, so I guess they did

1:32:09

violate the Mann Act, which people used to get excited

1:32:12

about in the 1930s. That's such a huge spoiler,

1:32:14

Sarah. We're going to get to the Mann Act. I'm very sorry.

1:32:18

That, to me, is a really important

1:32:20

distinction.

1:32:21

Yes. The number of people

1:32:23

who are brought to the United States against

1:32:25

their will, vanishingly

1:32:27

small. The much more common thing

1:32:29

is somebody wants to come to the United States,

1:32:31

they pay somebody to take them into the United

1:32:34

States, and then they are charged too

1:32:36

much, they are dropped in a place that they didn't agree

1:32:38

to. There's all kinds of structural vulnerabilities

1:32:41

with paying somebody to smuggle you into

1:32:43

a country and those people get victimized at

1:32:45

extremely high rates.

1:32:47

But there is a difference between people

1:32:49

being clubbed, knocked out

1:32:51

in Cambodia, and they wake up in Detroit.

1:32:54

That doesn't happen. Again, I think this distinction

1:32:57

is important because it's based on our unwillingness

1:32:59

to confront the deepest

1:33:01

culprit in all this, which again is economic

1:33:04

insecurity domestically. And

1:33:06

also, I mean, when you think about it economically,

1:33:08

if I'm running a massage

1:33:09

parlor where I'm exploiting young

1:33:12

women and sort of in these terrible

1:33:14

conditions and they're working long hours and I'm not paying them

1:33:16

very much, why the fuck would I

1:33:18

recruit people from other countries? There's so many

1:33:21

desperate people in America. Right.

1:33:23

It's just on the idea that there's a shortage

1:33:26

of people in America who would

1:33:28

do anything for a decent

1:33:31

paycheck, which like, what a weird

1:33:33

thing to believe. Right. It

1:33:35

just doesn't make any sense when it's like,

1:33:37

you can just put an ad in a newspaper

1:33:39

and people will apply for jobs. When terrible

1:33:42

farms, terrible

1:33:43

food processing plants, when they have job openings,

1:33:46

they put ads on Craigslist and people apply.

1:33:48

I mean, look at the, what was it? A

1:33:51

poultry processing plant in Mississippi that

1:33:53

was just raided by ICE and that

1:33:55

was a raid carried out, I think, because the

1:33:57

boss didn't want to pay his workers and it was cheaper

1:33:59

to get paid.

1:33:59

just have them all scooped up

1:34:02

by law enforcement. I mean, those weren't people

1:34:04

who had

1:34:05

been kidnapped and brought to the United

1:34:06

States in order to work

1:34:08

for insufficient wages. They were people

1:34:11

who had taken those jobs voluntarily because

1:34:13

there was nothing else for them and then had their lives

1:34:15

destroyed because of it. And no one had to

1:34:17

take anyone across international

1:34:20

borders to achieve that. Right. And if I'm like an

1:34:22

asshole poultry plant director guy,

1:34:25

why would I spend money on plane tickets

1:34:27

and like reaching tentacles into Guatemala

1:34:30

to like find workers for my low

1:34:32

wage, low skilled jobs? You can

1:34:35

really tell a fake conspiracy

1:34:37

by the fact that it's just economically impossible.

1:34:40

Exactly. Why would you exploit people

1:34:42

in a different country when there are plenty of people you can

1:34:44

exploit in your own county? So I think that

1:34:47

distinction is extremely important. Whenever

1:34:49

we talk about trafficking, we need to be really

1:34:51

clear that there is a huge

1:34:54

difference

1:34:54

between people coming here and people who

1:34:56

are being taken here. And

1:34:58

the reason why it's dangerous

1:35:00

to come here is because there are no laws

1:35:03

that allow people to come here legally. Right. Like

1:35:06

why is there an economy of people

1:35:08

that will take you across the U.S. border for ten thousand dollars

1:35:10

because there's really terrible immigration policy.

1:35:13

Again, we're saying we'll solve this problem if we

1:35:15

strengthen our border or if we make it harder

1:35:18

or more punitive for undocumented

1:35:20

people to come to the United States.

1:35:23

And it's like, no, like that's going to make it

1:35:25

worse because that means that you will owe more

1:35:27

money to someone who's smiling. Exactly. And

1:35:30

they will have even more

1:35:30

justification to work you to death.

1:35:33

One of the other factual claims that the sheriff makes

1:35:35

is that they're working seven days a week

1:35:37

having unprotected sex with one thousand men a year.

1:35:40

It doesn't appear that there was any sex going on.

1:35:43

Like intercourse. Okay. All

1:35:45

right. These cops spent six months

1:35:48

surveilling this massage parlor, which is a huge

1:35:50

waste of their time, by the way. Yeah.

1:35:54

They had all kinds of weird hidden camera shit going on. And

1:35:56

in six months of surveillance, they only found 20

1:35:58

people who got any sex acts, the

1:36:01

vast majority of them were hand jobs, and a little

1:36:03

bit of it was oral sex. There were a couple instances

1:36:05

of oral sex, but there was no sexual

1:36:07

intercourse. There's also, the women

1:36:09

were not living on the premises. Only