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Keep in mind also that Tim Ballard was married. I'm sure his wife didn't exactly consent to him trying to sexually proposition the women who went with him on these trips.
Unfortunately, as Quantumfreakonomics notes, she has not spoken on the issue, and she is most certainly a victim.
And that makes him, if the allegations are true, an adulterer. That’s an issue for his family. I don’t see the need to make this a national story.
The thing that makes this a national story is that Mr. Ballard, through the fictionalized version of his life that is "Sound of Freedom," one of the major cultural figures held up as virtuous and good by Team Red. Thus, it is imperative in the kulturkampf that Team Blue knock him off his pedestal or prove him to be bad in some way, lest Team Red be able to convince people that Reds can be virtuous, or that it is virtuous to be Red. That's what's driving amplification of this story in higher-profile news networks/through non-Red social media networks. Obviously Reds, Mormons, and Utahns have their own reasons to care about this - their idol has feet of clay / adultery is something they care about, etc.
Yeah, that was what struck me about the reaction to the movie: it was excoriated, and I couldn't figure out why. All the QAnon accusations, about some movie that had been held up by studio internal politics, and was a mid-tier action movie about saving victims of child sex trafficking.
Nobody was having conniptions about the latest Jack Reacher or Bourne movies, which are all about heroic white guy going out and kicking ass in action hero style. Why this particular movie? What was provoking such reactions?
And I honestly had to think it was the religious angle: Caviezel is Catholic (and not the Biden/Pelosi "Imma Catholic who's cool with abortion" type) and probably forever tainted by being in the Mel Gibson movie about Christ, this guy Ballard is a Mormon (again, remember when Mitt Romney was the Dangerous Mormon Theocrat before being rehabbed as The Only Good Republican?). Not the proper type of religious, the bad conservative traditional anti-all things good, right and progressive type.
Caviezel is into QAnon and believes the elite cabal are extracting adrenochrome from children through torture. So the connection is not spurious.
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I'm reminded of that classic smuggie. What even is the thinking here?
"Oh no the guy who made that one movie that vindicates the elite pedophiles cult narrative is an adulterer? Allow me to purity spiral senselessly and immediately reject the entire memeplex associated with it"
Smuggies all have a grain of truth to them, but they're also the ultimate example of motte-and-bailey arguments in practice.
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Sound of Freedom beat the final Indiana Jones movie at the box office, albeit through a ticket multipurchase scheme, and the idea that Hollywood might lose its power is unthinkable to them. The "need" is to regain control of a public narrative of mainstream moral superiority over Christians, and nothing hurts Christians in the news like the "hypocrisy" of a single Christian falling like Samson to a woman's wiles.
That's the Culture Total War mentality: destroy all monuments and great works the other side might conceivably claim as theirs, and salt the earth, from football and beer all the way down to knitting forums.
One of the guys from Angel Studios is on this podcast: https://www.thebulwark.com/podcast-episode/how-2023s-oddest-box-office-hit-paid-it-forward/
He claims that under the "Pay it Forward" ticket scheme, the tickets aren't counted as "box office" until a ticket is claimed and used to attend a screening. That is, the theaters do not see the purchase of the ticket until it is actually used. If true, I don't see how that is any less legit than the buy-it-yourself ticket model. Attendance is attendance.
It might say something interesting about the distribution of interest in the movie: some people were sufficiently interested to buy multiple tickets and contribute more towards the movie's success than they had to, and some people may not been sufficiently motivated to see it without a free ticket (although i don't know a lot about how you get a free ticket and it's possible ticket recipients would have seen the movie anyway)
I'm not sure that's negative towards the movie, though: having some people be super excited about your movie isn't uncommon, and it's kind of interesting that we don't see more of this.
Imagine a campaign where feminists and allies subsidize a movie that they think portays women well, to try and get more moviegoers to explore along those lines. Kind of terrifying in what it'll do to movie creator incentives in a Toxoplasma of Rage way, but i don't think people are making a strategic decision not to do it on those grounds.
We will definitely see a lot more of it now that there's been such an effective proof of concept.
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