The woke Left is championing the same “pedophile doctrines” that enable child sex slavery, warns Tim Ballard, a former Department of Homeland Security agent who has rescued hundreds of children from sex slavery.
He also warns that taxpayer dollars are in effect funding child sex slavery under President Joe Biden.
Ballard spoke with The Daily Signal last week, speaking alongside Jim Caviezel, the actor best known for playing Jesus in “The Passion of the Christ.” Caviezel portrays Ballard in the forthcoming film “Sound of Freedom.” The film tells the story of Ballard’s first mission to save children from sex slavery in Colombia.
Ballard spoke about the nexus of ideas between a pro-pedophile political party in the Netherlands and the Left’s transgender advocacy in the U.S., and he raised the alarm about Biden border policies that fund and enable the exploitation of children.
Ballard said he had studied the political platform of the Dutch Party for Neighborly Love, Freedom, and Diversity (which goes by PNVD, its acronym in Dutch).
In studying the PNVD’s literature, he discovered what he calls “the pedophile network doctrines.”
“They include things like: (1) separate children from parents, because parents are a bad influence, the state knows best; (2) sexualize kids, let them see pornography; (3) take God out of education because that just gets in the way; and (4) kids consent, consent, consent. Children can consent to anything,” Ballard said. “At 12 years old, they should be able to vote. They should be able to do anything.”
“Now, what am I seeing here? My stomach is getting sick as I’m reading this. I read this every day. It’s the woke Left agenda,” the child liberator said.
“I’m not saying that they’re colluding or talking,” Ballard said, referring to the Left and the PNVD. “It doesn’t matter. It’s the same dark source. But, pedophiles are sitting back right now, going, ‘We’ve been pushing this agenda for decades. and now we don’t have to push anymore, because the Left are taking care of it for us in America.’ In America!”
The former DHS agent also warned about “this whole trans [ideology] foisted on children.” He said he would fight for the right of adults to “do what you want,” but children are a different story. “What they’re saying is, children can consent to having their bodies filled with a chemical that will destroy their reproductive system. They can consent to ripping apart their genitalia.”
“This is insanity—in and of itself it’s horrible,” Ballard added. “But what it’s going to lead to is what the pedophiles have been asking for. If you can consent to that, guess what? What’s more fluid than gender? Age.”
Ballard also discussed “the economy of pedophilia,” noting that the U.S. is “the No. 1 consumer of child exploitation material. We are the demand.”
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, federal authorities encountered 152,057 unaccompanied minors at the border in fiscal year 2022 (ending Sept. 30 of that year), and 91,380 more this fiscal year to date (beginning on Oct. 1, 2022).
Ballard noted that “thousands of them … are under 5 years old.”
“Why is a three-year-old showing up at the border?” he asked. “Well, I can tell you why, because they show up with a name. The name of the sponsor that they’re given by the trafficker.”
The Department of Health and Human Services “gets the kids, and they by law have to call the number. ‘Hi, we have Jose Gonzalez, Mr. George Smith.’ ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s my kid. Whatever.’ ‘OK.’ They used to actually fly down to have to pick the kid up. Not anymore.”
“Our taxpayer dollars will then send the kid by plane or bus to this George, the sponsor, no background check, no DNA, nothing. And they deliver the kids,” Ballard noted.
“Our taxpayer dollars are literally, for the first time in American history, our taxpayer dollars are going to facilitate the last leg of a child-trafficking event,” he said.
Ballard also lamented that “the border’s wide open.”
He cited CBP’s estimate of how much money cartels made in February 2021, $411.5 million, for an average of $14.6 million per day.
“Fourteen million dollars a day are landing in the pocket of smugglers and traffickers, thanks to the Biden-Harris border policy,” Ballard said. “The only compassionate policy is border enforcement—barriers, walls. Why? And ‘The Sound of Freedom’ talks about this. Because the walls and the barriers lead the children who are being hurt into that funnel of rescue. Trained women and men in uniform are there. Those kids want to go through the port of entry.”
“Those kids pray for a wall. The wall will save their lives,” he added.
Yet the Biden administration took “it all down,” and opened “it all up.”
“Kids are being abused by the thousands, and our taxpayer dollars are actually funding it,” Ballard said.
He also opened up about very personal moments in the film, such as the moment when his wife told him to quit his job.
Caviezel spoke about the difficulty of playing a DHS agent who took on child sex slavery, and he also mentioned how difficult it was to make the film. He compared it with “The Passion of the Christ” and urged listeners to buy tickets and reach out to theaters to secure more screenings for the film ahead of its July 4 release date.
Audiences have purchased more than 524,000 tickets as of Tuesday. You can purchase tickets at Angel.com/Freedom, or you can purchase tickets to allow others to see the film at Angel.com/pay-it-forward. (You can watch a new trailer for the film at the bottom of this page.)
Listen to the podcast below or read the lightly edited transcript.
Tyler O’Neil: This is Tyler O’Neil, managing editor at The Daily Signal. I’m honored to be joined by a bona fide hero, Tim Ballard, and the guy who got to play him in the upcoming film “Sound of Freedom.” It is a masterpiece. You did an amazing job, just as you did in “The Passion of the Christ” film.
Tim Ballard: You saw it?
O’Neil: Yeah, I saw it last night. It was very moving. I got to say, I’m honored to have both of you here with me today.
Ballard: Thank you very much.
O’Neil: So, I want to get right into it. Tim, the story is fantastic, surprising. You were telling me they even didn’t want to include some of the details from the story because people wouldn’t believe that it’s true.
Ballard: Yeah.
O’Neil: But it is a true story. And would you just briefly introduce it and how you got involved in this important work?
Ballard: Well, I had spent 12 years as a special agent, undercover operator for the Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security Investigations, working child crimes, child trafficking. And it was kind of an evolution.
The first few years there was mostly just end user, collector cases of people who are possessing, distributing child exploitation material. And [I was] always wondering, “Where are the kids?” I see these videos, it breaks my heart. I got to describe them.
There’s a scene in the movie that breaks my heart where Jim is crying as he’s having to describe these horrific sex scenes of children. And when I say children, I mean averaging 7, 6, 5, OK?
Then in 2006, the laws changed. And for the first time, U.S. agents could actually go overseas and prosecute Americans for engaging in sex with children overseas and prosecute them as if they had committed the crime on U.S. soil. So that opened up my horizons and I started seeing, finding the kids.
That was a frustrating process, though, because the law didn’t stipulate how much time I would get or how much flexibility I would have or creativity I’d have. I’d be given a week or whatever to find it. I’d always find the kids. But if I couldn’t find the nexus, back to the United States, “Come home.” “But I’ve seen kids I can rescue.” “Doesn’t matter. Come home.”
So it all kind of came to a head for me in 2012 when I was working two different cases, actually, one in Haiti and one in Colombia. And I was told “Come home” on both of them.
They were both major cases. A significant hit against human traffickers would’ve taken place. And the film only focuses on the one in Colombia. And there I am, they’re asking me to come home once again, and I’m not going to do it. I’m going to stay. And that means I have to quit my job.
And I call my wife hoping, hoping she’ll say, “Get your butt home. Are you kidding me? We got six kids to feed.” And I wanted her to say it because I was being a coward, but I knew it was the right thing.
And she didn’t read my script and she said, “Of course you’re going to stay.” And I said, “Are you kidding?” And she ended that argument with—Mira Sorvino, the Academy Award-winning actress who plays Katherine in the film opposite Jim [Caviezel], and in the film you see her say to me on the phone, “You quit your job and rescue those kids.”
What she really said to me—because they didn’t want to make me look like the coward that I was, because I was saying, “I’m coming home. I’m not going to do this. I’m not going to be part of this.”
And she said to me, very sternly, and she’s usually pretty sweet, but this is righteous indignation at its finest—and this is a quote because it was that powerful and it pierced my heart when she said it. She said, I quote, “I will not let you jeopardize my salvation by not doing this.”
It breaks my heart because not only is she losing our income, but she, possibly, very good chance, maybe 50/50, she’s going to lose me. She’s willing to risk becoming a widow … .
And Glenn Beck, bless his heart, who raised the money for us so that we can even do the operation because I had no money to do it. In the end, it was unbelievable. We rescued over 120 women and children.
The film only gets into a piece of it. There’s 54 rescued on that island, but the op was bigger than that. And the movie didn’t have time to get into it. And that is the basis of the film. And there’s so much more attached to that whole story. But that’s the basis of the film.
And when we did that big hit on Oct. 11 of 2014, it made national news in the United States. Scott Pelley reported, CBS News. And Eduardo Verástegui, the producer, saw the clip. He had been working on a script with Alejandro Monteverde about human trafficking that was fiction. And they saw this story and they said, “Well, maybe there’s a true story here.” And that began the process of “Sound of Freedom.”
O’Neil: Jim, what was it like for you seeing these scenes? It rips your heart out—
Jim Caviezel: Yeah.
O’Neil: They never actually show exploitation of children in the film.
Ballard: I demanded they didn’t. Don’t make pedophilia material here.
O’Neil: Right. But you had to do the incredible job of acting the part of watching this exploitation, trying to describe it, typing it out. And we could see your eyes. I mean, just watching your eyes in that scene—
Caviezel: Yeah.
O’Neil: … spoke volumes. What was it like to do a scene like that?
Caviezel: I don’t know how he does it. It took everything I had. And I thought of my own children. I adopted three of my children from China and I saw the things that I felt were nefarious even with adoption and all that stuff. And there are dangers within, in the adoption world with children and globally.
So that was very easy for me to transfer. Like, what if this was your own kid, you know? And that started the conversation in my heart. And then I wouldn’t even hesitate. I wouldn’t even hesitate if someone was going to hurt my family, especially my children and my wife. It would just hit—there’s some things where it’s like, I can’t live without them, and that’s what love is. And I’d take a bullet for them.
So to put myself in Tim’s situation—and then … I was so grateful that he came to me. And I remember at one point he came down and I remember telling Tim, “I think we’ve got lightning in a bottle.” And he said, “That’s good, right?” And then I said, “Yeah, but it’s going to be hard.” “Why?” “Well, because when it’s this good, darkness gets very, very upset because it’s not a little light, it’s a mega light and it’s going to draw a lot of attention.”
We struggled making it. We struggled getting the money together. We lost our money. We lost our studios that were supporting us. And yet we were just getting by a little bit at a time. Faith bonded us together.
Eduardo, once we got it done, Eduardo Verástegui had to bear the burden to try to get this film in studio. The studio is like, “Nobody will want it,” even though they’re moved, even though they get up and they, you know, you could clearly see that it had the power to change a direction.
But we had the same issue with “The Passion of the Christ.” And that thing ended up becoming a juggernaut.
And this one is showing people are buying tickets right now, and the problem we have, the major problem we have is that we don’t have enough theaters. So that’s why we’ve been telling people, “You got to get out and buy tickets like you did on ‘The Passion’ because you created a way for us.”
So imagine if you’re in a hydroplane speedboat and you see a wall coming, we need people to tear that thing down or we’re going to go right into it.
O’Neil: When you talk about the evil here involved in human trafficking and the sex slavery of children, it’s the kind of thing that beggars the imagination, you know, you can barely understand how people would do something like this.
Caviezel: No, I understand it. I had to understand what they were thinking. I had to understand. I started from both ends. Corruption, power seduced people do pretty much anything for big, major power at one end, whether it be honey-potted or what.
On the other end, you got people, starting with—so I worked with Tim, but Tim’s very busy going on, but I had guys that helped me to understand the psychology, or you’re starting older with pornography and you just keep going younger and younger and younger.
I said, “Well, why would a man be interested in an ‘unformed woman’?” He says, “It’s the innocence, it’s a demonic thing, this innocent child, and it becomes more attractive to them.”
O’Neil: When last night you brought—you briefly mentioned this idea of pedophile laws, I think you called them.
Caviezel: Yes. We’re making it easier for the trafficker and the pedophiles.
O’Neil: How is the American society doing that? …
Ballard: Yeah. So, last year we did a big operation. There’s a four-part docuseries coming out produced by Tony Robbins. Mel Gibson was also involved in consulting on this. He was part of the story.
When Ukraine was attacked, Mel Gibson called me within hours. And I know Mel through Jim. And he said, “Hey, I got all these Ukrainian orphans that I help, that I support, and I’m worried about them.” What a crazy ask: “Can you go to Ukraine while bombs are dropping and go find these kids?” And he didn’t know that a few hours earlier my wife came to me in tears and said the same thing.
We were working on adopting about seven children out of Ukraine at the time, through our foundation Children Need Families. And so she says the same thing. I’m like, “Oh my gosh. Mel Gibson and my wife are both telling me to go to Ukraine while bombs are dropping.” And I always was raised with the idea—
Caviezel: I could just see him.
Ballard: He was in Budapest filming. And I thought to myself, I was raised with the thought that if Mel Gibson and your wife ever tell you to do something within hours of each other, you should probably do it, right? Who wouldn’t?
So I had to go to Ukraine and I partnered with an amazing group and I sit on the board of Aerial Recovery. And we went in and started rescuing these children. Six thousand in the end we got out of the war zone. But we were looking—
Caviezel: Six thousand.
Ballard: Yeah. We were looking for human traffickers because we know that they prey upon vulnerability—wars, hurricanes, whatever it is. And sure enough, we lock into this pedophile ring.
Now, it’s a frightening ring because it’s a political party that was out of Holland called the PNVD, lots of media on them. They were trying to legalize sex with children. They thought a 3-year-old could consent to sex. Well, even the Dutch arrested them in 2020, which, it’s very hard to get arrested in Holland. You’ve got to be really bad.
O’Neil: Red-light district.
Ballard: You got to be really bad to get arrested in Holland. They were arrested in 2020. Fugitives. They ran. And they were hiding, no one knew who they were. Well, they rear their ugly heads.
The leader, this guy named Nelson Maatman—I’m literally in Poland at the time, at our staging operation for Ukraine. And I get this information that this guy in Mexico is trying to traffic kids out of Ukraine.
And so I go undercover, the Dutch asset who’d given me that information infiltrated me and I’m undercover talking to this guy. In fact, just yesterday, two of the guys were convicted in Ecuador because it led us to Ecuador, a child sex hotel these pedophiles from Holland had set up. But we’ll get into that another time.
But the point I’m making is, I had to study their literature. This was a political platform. This was a political party.
What I started recognizing is—I named them “The Pedophile Network Doctines.” They include things like, “Separate children from parents because parents are a bad influence, the state knows best. Sexualize kids, let them see pornography, two. Three, take God out of education because that just gets in the way. And four, kids consent, consent, consent. Children can consent to anything. At 12 years old, they should be able to vote, they should be able to do anything.”
Now, what am I seeing here? My stomach is getting sick as I’m reading this. I read this every day. It’s the woke Left agenda. I’m not saying that they’re colluding or talking, it doesn’t matter, it’s the same dark source.
But pedophiles are sitting back right now going, “We’ve been pushing this agenda for decades and now we don’t have to push anymore because the Left is taking care of it for us in America.” In America! And this whole trans foist on children.
Again, I’m libertarian, adults do what you want, I’ll fight for your right to do whatever you want in terms of adults. I’m talking about children. And what they’re saying is, “Children can consent to having their bodies filled with a chemical that will destroy their reproductive system. They can consent to ripping apart their genitalia.”
This is insanity. In and of itself is horrible. But what it’s going to lead to is what the pedophiles have been asking for. If you can consent to that, guess what? What’s more fluid than gender? Age.
I adopted two children in Haiti that we rescued back in 2014.
O’Neil: Well, really quick. We don’t have much time.
Ballard: OK.
O’Neil: I want to hear you talk a little bit about the border because you spent a decade down there.
Ballard: I can’t believe you stopped me right there, man. You got to have me back.
O’Neil: I got to.
Ballard:This is too important.
O’Neil: I wanted, just briefly, how is the Biden administration enabling this?
Ballard: Well, look, the economy of pedophilia—the United States is the No. 1 consumer of child exploitation material. We are the demand. So, that means that traffickers want to get children into that dark market. There’s a lot of money to be made here.
The United States also, according to the State Department, is in the top three countries for destination countries for human trafficking. So there’s every incentive to get children into America, into the black markets here of pedophilia.
And so when I find out that, in the last couple of years, at least 85,000—I think it’s much higher than that—but that at least 85,000 unaccompanied minors, thousands of them, I’ve seen the [Customs and Border Protection] reports, are under 5 years old. Why is a 3-year-old showing up at the border? Well, I can tell you why, because they show up with a name. The name of the sponsor that they’re given by the trafficker.
[The Department of Health and Human Services] gets the kids and they, by law, have to call the number. “Hi, we have Jose Gonzalez, Mr. George Smith.” “Yeah, yeah, that’s my kid. Whatever.” “OK.” They used to actually fly down to have to pick the kid up. Not anymore.
Our taxpayer dollars will then send the kid by plane or bus to this George, the sponsor, no background check, no DNA, nothing. And they deliver the kids. Our taxpayer dollars are literally, for the first time in American history, our taxpayer dollars are going to facilitate the last leg of a child trafficking event.
O’Neil: And the border is open.
Ballard: The border’s wide open. Fourteen million dollars a day are landing in the pocket of smugglers and traffickers, thanks to the Biden-Harris border policy.
The only compassionate policy is border enforcement—barriers, walls. Why? And “Sound of Freedom” talks about this. Because the walls and the barriers lead the children who are being hurt into that funnel of rescue. Trained women and men in uniform are there, those kids want to go through the port of entry.
Those kids pray for a wall. The wall will save their lives. But, “Let’s take it all down. Let’s open it all up.” Kids are being abused by the thousands and our taxpayer dollars are actually funding it.
O’Neil: Do you have anything to say briefly on these?
Caviezel: I’m asking people, you have soldiers that fight for you and you say, “We love you, thank you for doing that,” but we all have to be soldiers in this fight. And when you say, “Well, it’s really too hard,” I said, “Look, a parent has to have strength and fortitude to defend their own children. My God.”
And this film is something where when you watch it, you learn how routinely it occurs, you also learn the warning signs. That’s good for the public. It weaponizes that individual, the parent, or whoever watches this film. But when you know the chips are down, when God asks you, in this film you see it, “Can we love our children more than we fear evil?” When God tells you to do something, you don’t hesitate. God’s children are no longer for sale.
O’Neil: Amen. Well, thank you both so much for joining me and sharing this important work. And I’d encourage, you know, you would encourage people to contact their theaters, get seats available, where should they go for this?
Ballard: Angel.com/sof.
Caviezel: Angel.com/jim as well.
Ballard: I don’t know if that gets you maybe a special something. But, buy tickets. We want 2 million people in theaters week of July Fourth representing the 2 million children currently forced into commercial sex.
Whatever it is, go to angel.com. It’s all over the place. Buy tickets, guys. Be there. Support us so we can rescue more kids. That’s it.
Caviezel: That’s it.
O’Neil: Oh, yeah. Well, thank you so much again. Tyler O’Neil with Daily Signal. I had Tim Ballard and Jim Caviezel and sharing such an important story, such an important movie, “Sound of Freedom.”
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