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Update to prior CW topic, in another round of America's favorite game Everyone Has a Sex Scandal Eventually: Vice reports that Tim Ballard’s Departure From Operation Underground Railroad Followed Sexual Misconduct Investigation
From Vice's reporting:
OUR states only that:
The Mormon church meanwhile chips in to scold Ballard as well:
Prior thread on Ballard's film here; My own prior comment here
My read on all this is that it is a human psychological tragedy, Ballard got lost in his own masculine heroic fantasy. Good men nearly all carry the fantasy of, as they say, wishin' a nigga would. We want a reason to give our World of Cardboard Speech. We have the urge to engage in violence and adventure, but we want justified violence, righteous adventure. We want to fight, but fight for the right. Ballard found it in child trafficking investigations. He got to play James Bond in real life!
And what does James Bond do? He sleeps with every woman he sees, "as part of the mission." One can see the logic, if these OUR operatives were in an undercover role pretending to be a couple, that making love would be important. Blowing their cover could cost their lives, could endanger the children they are there to rescue, so whether they want to is irrelevant, they have to! But that was also part of the fantasy for him: he wanted to have to, he wanted an environment where he just had to sleep with these women, which he would then enjoy. No doubt, in his mind, the women involved shared the same fantasy. After all, while else would they join OUR and put themselves in these operations?
Ballard never meant any harm to anyone, he never meant to take advantage, he just thought he had found a moral loophole, an opportunity to enter a morals-free zone for a good cause. Apparently the women involved, the rest of the organization, and the Mormon church disagreed.
We should be wary of our fantasies of righteousness, as men. Engage in self-criticism, when we want to have a reason to use righteous violence, sometimes we just want violence. Which itself isn't necessarily a fatal flaw, there is value in harnessing masculine urges in positive ways, that can be seen as the basis for all social function. But we can't let our fantasies obscure our real mission, or harm those around us.
So the charge is that he, an adult man, tried to convince adult women to engage in consensual sex with him?
I’m getting sick of this thing where every shot a guy takes which doesn’t land is somehow seen as a sexual assault. Do people realize that women have agency as well, and also engage in these sorts of fantasy? “Oh no I guess I have to sleep in this bed with this big strong man who is out here saving the children for the sake of the mission” is the plot of like 90% of female targeted erotica. “We had to shower together to convince the cartel that we were married” sounds like it was literally written by a female erotica writer.
Human adults have sex with each other. Sometimes there is a period of courtship. Sometimes, and in fact just due to pure statistical reality, most times that courtship fails.
That is not a scandal.
The scandal is that these people just cannot understand that the scandal is the fact that adults want to engage in sexual activity with CHILDREN.
Go to a drag show? No problem. You do you.
Go to a drag show, with children? Problem.
Engage in a gender fetish? No problem. You do you.
Engage in a gender fetish with children? Problem.
Make erotic literature? No problem. You do you.
Make erotic literature for children? Problem.
The scandal is that these maybe actual pedophiles don’t understand the demarcation between “sexual activity among consenting adults” and “sexual activity with children.”
He isn't taking criticism because he took run-of-the mill shots that didn't land. He's taking criticism because he came up with bullshit scenarios where he tried to convince women that they had some kind of professional responsibility to sleep with him, or engage in the kind of activity short of actual romantic involvement that most men would nonetheless like the opportunity to do with attractive women. And then to top it off he tried to lay a guilt trip on them if they expressed any reservations, making a claim that children would be harmed or even killed from a position as someone who would at least seem to be a credible authority on the subject. Maybe there's a legitimate explanation, but it all depends on the timeline. The kinds of things he asked the women to do are certainly unusual requests for employees or volunteers for a charitable organization. If you're going to make these kinds of requests from a position of authority, they'd better be necessary, and exactly what is required needs to be made explicit at the very beginning of the relationship, preferably with signed consent forms. If this seems extreme, keep in mind that these aren't women he met at a bar and invited to Ocean City for the weekend who were taken aback by his advances; they were women who never expressed any desire other than to help trafficked children. I haven't heard the whole story, and if he actually did all that it would be one thing. But my guess is that the "we have to share a bed and shower together" thing isn't something they found out about until they got to the hotel.
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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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This sorts of thing is some reversed 'republicans pounce' in action and it is every bit as pathetic. Of course this is a story. You don't need 'senseless purity spirals' to consider cheating on your wife and abusing your authority as a literal hero bad things.
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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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I have no idea what you're talking about with respect to this story.
If you're saying that the women who accused him, employees of Operation Underground Railroad who dedicated their lives to stopping child sex trafficking and pedophilia, the board of OUR that conducted the investigation and removed him, or the Mormons are all just blind wokies... That's astonishingly uncharitable.
I am commenting on the Vice article, as well as the more general culture war climate where failed attempts at courting women are treated as some form of sexual impropriety.
Also you and the other person that commented something similar: you are both apparently falling into "wait, which side of the culture ware is firmamenti on here? Who is he accusing of being a wokie?" - this is bad form. I would highly encourage you to try to get yourself out of that framing.
n = 2, but I read your comment the same way.
What do children have to do with this guy’s creepy hotel fantasies? It sounded like you were looking for an excuse to take shots at people who “can’t understand” that pedophilia is bad. I think everyone involved in this anti-child-trafficking organization understands that. I assume the rest of the Mormons are fully aware, too. So who are you complaining about, if not some straw progressives?
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Did you read the article at all? He wasn't cancelled for being 'anti-woke' he was cancelled for being a Mormon man (ie. a sexually conservative culture in which premarital sex is banned) and trying to get young single women to sleep with him.
Your boss / employer telling you to get into bed with him is different than a man hitting on you in a 'UwU...unless' way. Why are you so deliberately trying to reframe the allegations?
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Seriously -- if sex-positivity is a thing that needs to be discussed/encouraged with 9 year olds by their teachers, then I think grown women are going to need to learn to handle a dude asking them "how 'bout it?" from time to time.
They have learned to handle it, by reporting when their boss does it to them repeatedly under coercive circumstances.
The next step is for men to learn how to handle that.
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Do you think the Mormon church is sex positive or has liberal views on promiscuity? He's being cancelled for being a hypocrite.
Do you think that 'Vice Magazine' is likely to reflect the interests of the CJCLDS in any way?
Liberals calling out conservatives for their hypocrisy about promiscuity, homosexuality and so on is as old as time, what's your point?
"Look at this self-identified Mormon conservative trying to sleep with his interns against the core tenets of his church" is a story, sure.
Well, actually...
It could be argued that any righteous Mormon man (and what could be more righteous than rescuing children from sex slavery) has the right, nay, the obligation, to share his righteousness with as many celestial wives and spirit children as possible.
Take that page with a heap of salt. Much of it is outright falsehood, and much of the remainder more misleading than not.
For example, there's a whole section about how women can't be exalted except through men, and are thus otherwise denied salvation. This is false on two levels:
Salvation is different from exaltation. People are saved with no regard to marital status, making the second half of the claim an outright lie.
Men also cannot be exalted without women, making the first half misleading enough that it is essentially a lie. The implication is that righteousness flows forth from men to women, when the reality is just that marriage to a member of the opposite gender is a commandment for everyone. It would be just as accurate to claim the exact reverse, that righteousness flows from women to men.
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A quick google suggests that is not the case any more:
These sorts of public-facing nonbinding documents are often missing important context which committed members understand. Everybody knows that the banning of polygamy was a reaction to political circumstances (Utah wanted to become a state, and congress was reluctant to condone polygamy), not a reaction to divine revelation about the nature of the eternal law. If a man's celestial wife dies, and he remarries in the temple, he now has two celestial wives for eternity. I couldn't find anything definitive, but it seems like there are certain circumstances where a man may be sealed to multiple living women at the same time, even if they aren't civilly "married".
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Was he proposing marriage before sex?
For all we know he may have been. Others in this thread have noted the lack of any actual touching. Maybe he did just want to share a bed together in the temporal realm. It's not any weirder than soaking.
EDIT: To be clear, I still think the default hypothesis is that he was trying to get his dick wet, but I don't want to completely discount bizarre-sounding Mormon explainations.
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This. See that Biden scandal is not about "look at this degenerate druggie pervert", but "look how so called servants of the people abuse their position for personal enrichment".
A servant of the people abusing his position is bad in a non-partisan way independent of any hypocrisy. To make that analogy work, you'd need a weird situation where Democrats care about political corruption, Republicans do not, and the Republicans are criticizing Biden only for the hypocrisy in being corrupt, not for being corrupt per se.
Being a hypocrite about adultery also doesn't seem serious enough that you should try to prevent someone from making money from a movie. Notice that the headline calls it "sexual misconduct", not "hypocrisy", because on some level Vice understands this. "They're just after him for being a hypocrite" is the motte to their bailey.
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"No enemies to the left" is more succinct.
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