RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/culture/catherinesalgado/2023/06/24/sound-of-freedom-go-see-the-movie-exposing-the-huge-child-trafficking-network-n1706026

Millions of innocent children are sex trafficked every single year, many as part of the Biden border crisis. But a movie about to come to theaters is seeking to expose the vast network of predation on kids and tell the stories of real-life heroes who work to rescue victims of child trafficking.

The movie Sound of Freedom exposes the network trafficking two million children every single year. Watch the theatrical trailer below:

The movie follows Operation Underground Railroad CEO Tim Ballard and his mission to save children. It has taken years to bring this important film to the public. Angel Studios President Jordan Harmon, whose company is now Sound of Freedom’s distributor, explained the frustrating process.

”This film has been through the ringer. It was originally done by — Fox was going to be the distributor back in the day,” Harmon said, according to Bounding into Comics. But then The Walt Disney Company and Fox had a merger — and Disney, the same Disney that has featured drag queens, homosexuals, and LGBTQ+ individuals and characters in their shows and movies, wasn’t interested. “Then Disney buys Fox and for whatever reason Disney shelves [the film],” Harmon said. It took a year to get the rights back, and now Angel Studios is the movie’s distributor. What does Hollywood not want you to know?

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/06/25/another-woke-reboot-dies-a-horrible-death-n1706111

We’ve long been critical of Hollywood’s lack of fresh, new ideas and its apparent fascination with rebooting past films or giving us a sequel decades later. Sadly, merely paying homage to the original material is insufficient. Instead, producers opt to incorporate “wokeness,” believing it will be more appealing to modern viewers, but in the process, they end up taking something beloved and turning it into garbage that the masses don’t want to see.

The latest example is Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies, the prequel series to the 1978 hit film Grease. I’m not sure who wanted this — it’s bad enough to hear any of the original songs and get them stuck in your head — but once again, the effort seemed less about telling a compelling story, and more about making it an anachronistically diverse, LGBTQ story, flaunting same-sex romances and obsession with racial identity.

Woke reboots, sequels, and prequels don’t have a stellar track record, and it’s hard to understand how Hollywood hasn’t gotten the hint. It’s bad enough that Hollywood doesn’t have enough new ideas it constantly has to borrow from past works, but it’s particularly bad when woke writers take period pieces and shamelessly insert LGBTQ ideology into them or diversify the cast in a way that makes them grossly inaccurate to the point where they’re arguably rewriting history. For example, Disney’s live-action reboot of Lady and The Tramp portrayed interracial relationships and race relations in a way that was grossly unrealistic for the era it took place in. The characters Jim Dear and Darling were made an interracial couple even though interracial marriage was illegal at the time and place the movie was set.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/06/sound_of_freedom_the_story_of_one_mans_war_on_child_trafficking.html

Last week, JPMorgan accused Cecile de Jongh, wife of the former governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI), of working for Jeffrey Epstein and facilitating his underage sex ring.

Meanwhile, JPMorgan itself reached a $290 million settlement with some of Epstein’s victims.

The two incidents do not just highlight Epstein’s vast network; they remind us of the horrific crime of child trafficking, believed to yield annual profits of $32 billion in the U.S. and $150 billion worldwide. It is the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world, in competition with drug running and the arms trade.

One man, Tim Ballard, has made it his life’s mission to fight this evil and rescue as many of its innocent victims as he can. A former undercover operative for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Ballard worked on its anti-child-trafficking teams but felt frustrated by the limitations of a government agency. In 2013, he and some colleagues quit to set up Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), which now has 150 employees, 80 contractors, and 70 trained dogs. Ballard and other staffers, who pose as customers to infiltrate child sex rings, have so far been involved in 7,000 direct rescues, resulting in 5,000 arrests. They also provide therapeutic aftercare to rescued children and train law enforcement agencies in five regions worldwide.

His valiant story is the subject of Mexican producer Eduardo Verastegui’s film Sound of Freedom, available for viewing nationwide beginning July 4.

Indeed, there’s an Epstein connection: Jim Caviezel, who plays Ballard, says the film features an Epstein island allegory, and wonders how the “three-letter agencies” could not be aware of the extent of the child-trafficking problem. He hopes the film will motivate more witnesses and whistle-blowers into speaking up.

Award-winning director Tobias Elvhage, whose most recent awards include Best Short Film at the 2023 LA Documentary Film Festival and Winner of the 2023 European Cinematography Awards, joins experts interviewed in the Epoch Original docudrama Gender Transformation: The Untold Realities, in the panel discussion moderated by Facts Matter Host Roman Balmakov after the theatrical premiere of the film.

Don’t miss this exclusive event!

Date : Friday, June 16, 2023
Location: Cinema Village in New York City

7:00 PM – 8:30 PM Film Premiere
8:30 PM – 9:30 PM Panel discussion with directors and cast

https://leavingcamovie.com/

“Leaving California: The Untold Story” is a feature-length documentary that portrays California’s growing challenges, causing an unprecedented mass exodus. Siyamak Khorrami, television host of California Insider and editor of The Epoch Times Southern California, takes viewers on an intimate journey of love, loss, tragedy, and hope as California residents face the prospect of leaving their beloved state. About 700,000 people moved out of the state within the last two years.

https://pjmedia.com/culture/robert-spencer/2023/06/07/the-wokeification-of-movies-begins-as-the-french-connection-goes-under-the-knife-n1701374

Leftist publishers have recently taken it upon themselves to rewrite the works of Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, and Agatha Christie to bring them into line with contemporary woke sensibilities, and now movies are starting to get the same treatment. The first to go under the knife has been William Friedkin’s gritty 1971 flick The French Connection, in which Gene Hackman plays Popeye Doyle, a tough, cynical cop of a kind that wouldn’t last five minutes on any big-city police force today. At one point in the movie (exactly ten minutes and five seconds in, if you want to check), Doyle dares to utter the forbidden word of all forbidden words, the racial epithet that can end careers and destroy lives in the blink of an eye. We see early on in the film that Popeye is not exactly cuddly, or even fully likeable. But if you get a new copy of the movie, you won’t see that at all. The Most Offensive of All Words has been removed without a trace.

Jeff Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere wrote Sunday, “The absence of this sequence can be confirmed by anyone who streams the Criterion Channel’s version of the Oscar-winning feature. The messed-with sequence begins at the 9:42 mark, during the film’s first act. Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle enters the brightly-lighted main lobby of the police station. He drops off paperwork, puts on his overcoat, walks over to the main door and flexes his hand. Roy Scheider’s Cloudy follows but at exactly 10:05 a passage that used to be part of the film is no longer there.”

The missing piece is “a bit between Doyle and Cloudy, who’s nursing a wounded arm after being stabbed by a drug dealer. Doyle: ‘You dumb guinea.’ Cloudy: ‘How the hell did I know he had a knife?’ Doyle: ‘Never trust a [ethnic slur].’ Cloudy: ‘He coulda been white.’ Doyle: ‘Never trust anyone.’” To avoid wounding the fragile sensibilities of contemporary wokesters, who are much more likely to be watching some new movie about transgender superheroes defeating MAGA-hat-wearing bigots, this small section doesn’t appear in new copies of the film. Wells notes, “It is presumed that the sequence was removed by Disney, which bought the film’s original owner, 20th Century Fox, on 3.20.19, and not The Criterion Channel.”

The woke censors are evil, but they’re not stupid. They know that few people are going to be upset by the removal of the magic life-destroying word from a fifty-year-old movie. Most people won’t notice at all, except for a handful of movie geeks who love to memorize scenes and repeat lines from them in every conceivable situation. Most who do notice will not dare to say anything about the edit. They don’t want to appear to be or be portrayed as someone who would go around saying That Word or approve of its use.

Indeed, excising the dreaded word to end all words from The French Connection is as canny a move as tearing down Confederate statues. Few will enunciate the slightest dissent; everyone knows that those who object will be targeted and destroyed as racists. That’s a neat way to co-opt opposition, but the issues in play here are much larger than just Popeye Doyle’s use of a bad word. The worst aspect of this whole thing is that the Criterion Channel’s presentation of The French Connection gives no hint that it has been edited and that viewers aren’t seeing the actual film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1972. The door has thus been opened to any and all films being edited to suit the sensibilities of today’s cultural arbiters, without any notice that it is being done at all.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fbi-true-series-but-whats-the-other-half-of-it/

A new series on Roku’s Paramount + Channel titled FBI True caught my attention and aroused my curiosity. It was put together by a retired FBI Agent, Anne Beagan who has founded her own production company, in concert with one Craig Turk. It features real agents talking about real cases, and is hosted by one of two retired agents, either Cindy Coppola or Kristy Kottis. The film footage is real, not reenacted

Two episodes in the Paramount TV series specifically caught my attention, one being the episode titled “Boston Marathon Manhunt;” the other being the “San Bernadino Mass Shooting.”

The location of these interviews is the Arts & Crafts Beer Parlor in downtown Manhattan. The opening introduction for each series goes something like this, in part, “In the FBI we make a lot of headlines. We understand why people want to tell stories about us. But they don’t know the half of it.”

I have watched several episodes and overall, in my opinion, it is a pretty good series. I enjoyed watching some of my retired colleagues talking about cases they worked on.

I would agree with the above quoted introduction narrative that my prior employer is certainly making a lot of headlines these days, of course not to the Bureau’s credit. Many of my active duty colleagues are apparently violating their oaths of office by aiding and abetting the Communist enemy within, having become the enforcement arm of an anti-American political party, here and here. But I digress.

Now, let us explore the real other “half of it” regarding these two TV episodes, probably unknown by many concerning the Marxist/Muslim Brotherhood enemy within.

I attribute my knowledge of Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood to one Phil Haney,  deceased, (and others), a patriot and a founding member of the U. S. Department of Homeland Security,  author of “See Something Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the  Government’s Submission to Jihad,” here.

I interviewed Phil for two days in 2019, prior to his 2020 demise. One can watch and listen to Haney here, and here, as he expounds on the Boston Marathon Jihad attack as well as the Jihadi attack in San Bernadino.

Predictably neither the words Islam or Jihad are mentioned in the respective TV episodes. The closest one comes is when retired Los Angeles Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Stephen Woolery comments that the San Bernadino shooters were “devout.” Devout what?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/emnefariousem__the_most_interestingly_subversive_antiwoke_movie_you_havent_seen_or_heard_about_.html

As a fan of horror films whose wife doesn’t share my affection for them, I’m encouraged to watch movies when I travel on business if I ever get a free evening.  Tuesday night was just such a night, and there were options.

First, there was a 7:40 showing of Evil Dead Rise.  I enjoy most things of the Evil Dead franchise, so I figured this would be the option.  But I also noticed there was another intriguing movie playing at this particular Southern California movie theater that I’d never heard about, called Nefarious, at 7:20. 

I checked out the trailer. 

Sean Patrick Flanery (of whom I’m a fan and grew up watching, of Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Suicide Kings, and Boondock Saints fame) plays a death row inmate, found guilty of multiple murders, and who prison officials assume is acting so erratically and manipulatively that he must be seeking a stay of execution by means of insanity.  Specifically, he claims to be a demon possessing the body of the convict.  A psychiatrist, who harbors demons of his own, is tasked with determining the convict’s level of sanity or insanity, putting his life or death squarely in the psychiatrist’s hands.

It looked interesting enough, so I did this silly thing that I often like to do while weighing which movie I should go see and looked at Rotten Tomatoes. 

Evil Dead Rise is at a solid 84% critic rating.  Promising. 

Then I looked at Nefarious on Rotten Tomatoes.  A dismal 33% critic rating…but it somehow maintained a 97% audience rating. 

That piqued my interest.  What could possibly be going on with this movie that almost every non-critic who decided to weigh in on it says it’s great, but two thirds of critics hate it?

In my dotage  I confess that I often binge on crime series and movies on the tube. To my great amusement, I just noted that streaming movies come with trigger warnings:

The content may have, we are informed- ‘foul language, violence, sexual content, and smoking.”

Yikes! Explicit smoking????!!!!!