The Real-Life Hero

We watched a movie last weekend that probably many of you have seen by now. If not, put it on your calendar ASAP. It’s Sound of Freedom, with Jim Caviezel playing real-life child rescuer Tim Ballard. The subject matter is tough, but they make sure the movie doesn’t have anything in it that would satisfy a pervert. All that ugliness is implied off scene. 

Sound of Freedom movie poster, image from Angel Studios

The Real-Life Hero

It’s about the rescue operation—a real one, from 2014. It was reported on at the time by CBS News, so don’t let the MSM be telling you it’s made up or exaggerated. It’s very real. It was, by the way, after seeing this news story that movie director Alejandro Monteverde [or it might have been producer Eduardo Verastegui, not sure now who I was listening to], who had been working on a script for a similar fictional story, approached Tim Ballard about telling his real story.

Tim Ballard, CBA news story in 2014
screenshot from here

I’m sure some details were changed for making a movie. Characters get combined. Parts of the operation are left out of the story. But it is very much a real-life story.

I’ve known someone who went on a rescue mission with Tim Ballard. He was background only, not in any unsafe role; he had some security training, though not enough to be an actual agent, but he looked the part of a slightly exotic looking rich guy (which he was not; he was a Latter-day Saint returned missionary college student). Tony Robbins, one of the benefactors of Operation Underground Railroad, also went on one of these missions, which they talk about in an interview together.

Note the years: 2013, 2014, and beyond. Q, whatever that is, didn’t begin until October 2017, a year into the Trump presidency. (Anons are the followers; the term QAnon is a derogatory term invented by those who want anyone who even wonders if it might be true to be painted as conspiracy theorists.) While both Tim Ballard and Jim Caviezel have talked about the term adrenochrome, a substance derived from blood and tissues of children, which has been well documented for some time in its use by African witch doctors, and is thought to have youth-maintaining qualities. It is an issue attached to child trafficking—which includes organ harvesting and other atrocities. But Ballard has been clear that he’s not related to Q. His work certainly isn’t an outgrowth of a Q idea, since Ballard worked against child sex trafficking for a decade and a half before Q came on the scene.

It’s odd how MSM sources are suddenly trying to downplay or disparage Operation Underground Railroad. I think it’s because the administration’s lack of a southern border feeds child sex trafficking. Ballard testified to Congress to that effect in 2019. So did Sheena Rodriguez this year, who spoke at our Tea Party in April, telling us what she’d seen at the border, and then testified to Congress here. Things have gotten worse since the Biden administration changed their policy so that they do not vet those receiving unaccompanied minors after they cross the border; the administration will even fly or bus the children to their would-be traffickers. MSM can’t seem to diverge from this administration’s lies, no matter how unsavory.

I’ve been watching Tim Ballard, often along with Jim Caviezel, and sometimes with director Alejandro Monteverde, in dozens of interviews the past few weeks. As word-of-mouth campaigns go, this one has been stellar. I was surprised when Mr. Spherical Model told me he hadn’t ever seen Tim Ballard. This was in response to my surprise at how well they did at getting Jim Caviezel to kind of look like Tim Ballard. 

I’ve been watching and hearing from Tim Ballard for a good part of a decade. These photos, below, are from a news story about a sting operation related to the Super Bowl in 2017; I wrote about it here.  (The original news story is here.) In that post I reference an interview he did shortly before that with Glenn Beck, here. (The story is still at that link, but the video is no longer available there.)

Tim Ballard from 2017 news story
screenshot from here

from 2017 news story of sting operation
screenshot from here

Tim Ballard is far from the only group fighting against sex trafficking. I wrote about a couple of instances too close to home, here and here.  

Tim Ballard is an excellent storyteller, which is yet another special skill that seems to make him prepared by God to do this work. (I pray that he will always have the Holy Spirit to guide him in all he does—and those he works with; it is a dark and dangerous world.) He praises Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as the storyteller that helped the original Underground Railroad, and facilitated the eventual outlawing of slavery in the US. We can hope that this movie, Sound of Freedom, will be a similar catalyst in our day.

My first time hearing Tim Ballard’s story was at a Time Out for Women conference in Houston, a gathering of Latter-day Saint women. I think it was 2016 or 2017. Ballard told some of the story told in the film, but he also told the story of the adoption of his two children from Haiti (he and his wife had six children at the time and have had one more of their own since, for a total of nine).

There was a hint from Jim Caviezel in an interview that there will be a second movie about Tim Ballard and his work, picking up in Haiti, right after the end of this film. Already there are documentaries, available on the OUR website.  And there will be a documentary of the operation, called Triple Take, of the operation seen in Sound of Freedom, coming out in late summer/early fall.

Tim Ballard often credits his wife, Catherine (I don't know how she spells it) with the spiritual strength that led to his giving up his Homeland Security job and financial security and going off in the private sector with a nonprofit, and with the decision to adopt those two children.

It helps to understand that Tim Ballard is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The reason he is fluent in Spanish is because of his two-year proselyting mission to Chile. I am still in awe and wonder at a member of the Church being able to do the undercover work while maintaining his covenants. For example, he doesn’t drink alcohol.

My dad was in the OSS in WWII; he didn’t drink either. And in the testing phase, weeding people out, they had to maintain a character during a cocktail party. He passed the test, because his mind remained clear and he was able to stay in character. Of those weeded out, it was because the alcohol lowered their inhibitions, and they gave themselves away.

So I’m surmising that being the clear-headed person in a room of drinkers and drug users might be an advantage. But I don’t know how he abstains without their noticing.

Tim has an innocence about him that I think must be challenging to cover up, along with bright blue eyes. There’s nothing dark about him. And yet he can transform into this other, near-demonic being for the purposes of getting those children rescued. [Note: He doesn’t do undercover anymore; his face is too well known.]

The Story of His Children

He has talked about a change that took place near the time that he started Operation Underground Railroad and the adoption of the two children. Before that, he could always identify each child with a child of his own, because of their age range. But he worked to not get attached. He couldn’t sleep afterward if he was still thinking about any given child.

But after the operation in Haiti, he couldn’t stop thinking about this little girl and boy. And he couldn’t sleep. He called his wife, trying to work it out, process it, and get them gone from his mind. He tells the story now saying his wife tells him she wants to be their mother. But in the early telling of this story, he says she said to him, “You want to adopt those children,” realizing it from what he was talking about. And he was shocked. No! That thought hadn’t entered his mind. But after talking through it, he realized that was what he was thinking. She encouraged him to stay and do whatever paperwork it took and get those children.

There was quite a bit more to the story. Although they had been rescued from an orphanage that was intending to traffic them (so it was before they were actually trafficked; the two children had lost their parents in the Haitian earthquake), they got moved before he had them. It took a number of miracles—literal miracles of timing and meeting certain people—to be able to get them tracked down. In total, I think it was two years before they got them to their home in Utah.

Since that time he has found that it is actually useful to him to picture the children he’s rescuing as his own. He has to stay in character, and fulfill the mission, because otherwise he would be failing to save a child like one of his own.

A part of the Haitian story, the beginning of it, was a Latter-day Saint bishop in Haiti, Guesno (I don’t know how to spell it; they speak Haitian Creole on that part of the island, and Spanish over in the Dominican Republic on the other side), Guesno’s son, Gardi, was kidnapped—from the church building. I can hardly imagine the horror of that. This was shortly before the earthquake, which made tracking Gardi down even harder. But Tim Ballard was determined.

After the earthquake, so many children were orphaned that traffickers swooped in. It had been a corrupt country that trafficked children already. People would put up a sign that said “Orphanage,” and young children would be brought there by well-meaning people, thinking the children would now be cared for. It was at one of these orphanages where Tim Ballard and crew set up a sting operation. They posed as buyers—and in fact made the deal to purchase children. Once the deal was made, the officials came in and made arrests, and something like 29 children were rescued that day.

The hope had been that Guesno’s son, Gardi, would be among them, but he was not. Tim went back to Guesno with the news, in tears. They both were mourning, as I can only imagine. But when Guesno heard of all the other children who were rescued, he stopped crying. They would keep looking (I believe they are still looking for Gardi to this day), but Guesno said he understood the need to sacrifice his son for the lives of those children—an Abraham-like sacrifice, which is in similitude of our Father’s sacrifice of His Son Jesus Christ. Those children wouldn’t have been rescued if Tim Ballard hadn’t been looking for Gardi. Then Guesno said if homes couldn’t be found for any of those children, he and his wife would adopt them. They adopted eight of them.

Tim Ballard tells the stories a little differently to a Latter-day Saint audience, adding the faith and miracles. And there were many.

One thing that has affected me this week, as I face the challenges of my life, which are so mundane by comparison, is that I think, Tim Ballard was brave enough to go into the jungles of Colombia to rescue a girl from the cartel; I can certainly make a scary phonecall, or keep a challenging scheduling commitment.

He is a real life hero.

 

The Wheat and Tares Separation

The separation is happening—as in the wheat from the tares, mentioned in the New Testament, referencing our day: the Last Days. It’s happening. (I wrote about this metaphor here.) In case you need reminding of how that parable turns out, after the wheat is gathered separately from the tares, the tares are burned and disposed of.

Wheat, left, and tares (weeds that look like wheat in their
early stages); image found here

Last year’s Dobbs ruling, ending the legalization of abortion that happened with Roe v. Wade some 60 million abortions ago—you cannot be pro-abortion and be among the wheat. You mark yourself as a tare (weed) when you support the murder of unborn innocents. 

This movie about child sex trafficking is getting more notice than one could rightly expect. They had hoped to see revenue of about $20 million, as an estimate of their reach. As of today they’ve brought in $70 million—and this second weekend of its showing is barely underway. The film is independent and relatively low budget—although with very high-quality cinematography and acting. It was filmed three or four years ago and then sat on a shelf, passed from one distributor’s hands to another (including Disney at some point), but wasn’t scheduled for release. 

Finally, Angel Studios got hold of it. Amazon wouldn’t stream it for them. Netflix wouldn’t stream it. So they did their online marketing thing (think The Chosen) and presold enough tickets to get wide release in theaters.

And, really, it should be seen in theaters. You want to watch it without distractions, with everyone in the theater experiencing it at the same time. Because it is an experience that can change you.

If you can’t afford the tickets, Angel Studios has a pay-it-forward plan, where people can donate to buy tickets so others can see it. You can access those free tickets on their website (angelstudios.com). If you have the money but not the time, consider donating for someone else to see it.

In another month or so, it will be streamed for free, I believe on Twitter. The need is for as many people to see it as possible. Once you’re aware of the problem, you can’t help but take a side. Seeing it sorts you into the wheat or the tares. Actually, I expect most of those who see it to be wheat; those claiming, without seeing it, that it’s an exaggerated problem, or not real, or a conspiracy theory—those are the tares. The self-sorting is going on right in front of us.

These two issues, about harming innocent children of God, are maybe the most obvious. But there are probably a few other separators: anti-family ideas, for one. Among these are erasing the value of women and motherhood. We see that in the trans movement, and in feminism—which means valuing women who behave as bad men rather than as good women. And erasing masculinity—the desire to protect and provide for women and children, calling that toxic; that’s another.

We could add the separators related to the pandemic, the 2020 election (and other elections), what happened on January 6—and in an opposite way, what happened during the Black Lives Matter “mostly peaceful” riots of the summer of 2020. Some of those might not be as clear to everyone yet, because of censorship. In fact, almost anywhere you see censorship or coercion, you’re seeing the tares try to choke out the wheat. But the tares are beginning to fail. Truth is getting out.

We are coming to a time, pretty abruptly, that you can’t ignore great evils among us. You either take a stand on the side of God, or you by default place yourself on the side of Satan. It is a choice. And if you’re “awake to a sense of your awful situation, because of this secret combination which shall be among you,” [Ether 8:24, Book of Mormon] then you will choose to act so that “evil may be done away” [verse 26]. 

Real Evil

This is an uncomfortable post to write. It will be even more difficult to illustrate. But some things are simply evil, and we need to be clear about that.

I try not to put images in my mind that are too ugly for replay. I didn’t watch Passion of the Christ, because I anticipated that the violence would be too much for me. In that case, I was glad the movie was made, for other people to visualize the suffering of our Lord and Savior; but, for me, seeing it depicted was more than I wanted to watch happen, even knowing it was just a portrayal.

I generally avoid violent movies. I manage the blockbusters, the Avengers and so forth, but it’s stylized and pretend and therefore not too upsetting. But I really prefer something quieter, with more storytelling. It’s a taste thing.

But the thing with violence is, no one is really killed or stabbed in the making of the movie. Real bullets don’t hit the actors. Real knives don’t stab real people. It’s all a simulation. It’s by counting on that safety for all involved that allows us to watch it at all.

Some studies show it’s nevertheless harmful—particularly to young people—because our subconscious doesn’t actually separate out simulation from real when we view it. And getting used to the simulation can inure you to the real thing. You can start thinking gunplay is normal. That’s a risk you take when you watch it.

Still, it’s not real; no one is being harmed, and we know that.

In the sheltered world I grew up in, I thought the same safe assumption should apply to nudity; if something was shown that implied nudity, I had the expectation that the person really was covered during the filming, and it was a trick of camera angles or something that implied nudity. And then, once I saw a showing of the movie The Bible, and the backsides of Adam and Eve were shown, and I was stunned. How could that be? That was real. Right in front of us children.

It wasn’t, I recognize now with my adult mind, a depiction intended for prurient purposes. Nevertheless, to a little girl who was taught the importance of modesty, it was incomprehensible.

The thing about nudity in media is—it’s real. A real person uncovered their body and allowed a camera to photograph them, usually for money.

Purpose and intent may make some difference. Private photos of childbirth, for example. But that does tell us something about the times when uncovering our body is appropriate: in intimate, personal, private circumstances.

Uncovering our body for the world to see is not empowering; it is degrading. We call it sin in my religion.

So, let that be a prelude to our discussion today.

There’s a French movie, being shown on Netflix (for the time being) that is about the sexualization of 11-year-olds. Just the “poster” advertising it caused such a stir that Netflix had to change it. But reports are, that was one of the least offensive images of the movie. (Here’s one of the reports, passed along from a family therapist, on Facebook.)

I’m purposely not mentioning the title. It’s not something a civilized person should seek out. But we can discuss what we know of it and apply principles.

Legally, if it is declared to be child porn, the laws against producing it don’t apply here in the US; it was made in France. But distribution laws would apply. And that would mean Netflix would be found guilty of distributing child porn. Everyone who watched it would be guilty as a consumer, but probably not prosecuted. However, those who passed along images on social media, or those who downloaded the movie to their computer would be prosecutable.

I listened to the Sunday livestream of the law guys Viva and Barnes. They discussed the law aspects. Neither was willing to watch the film. The images available in stories about it were disturbing enough. Reading descriptions, they are of the opinion that, probably if it were filmed in the US, and certainly in Canada, where Viva (David Frei) is located, it would be child porn and prosecutable as such. Child exploitation laws would also apply. But because it was made in France, and because it was already on Netflix, labeling it now as child porn is probably not going to happen. Barnes speculates that Netflix got clearance before putting it on their service. Still, pressure could very well cause them to take it down within a week, just to avoid a total boycott by a large portion of their customers.

The film skates close to a rather fuzzy line. There is nudity, but, according to descriptions, actual nudity is adult only, not of the children. But near nudity is certainly there. Sexting of a crotch is portrayed. Self-stimulation is portrayed. That qualifies as porn even if it is portrayal only, without the actual act being performed.

Ben Shapiro braved through it, to be able to comment, last Friday, based on what is actually in the film, rather than what is known about it. It was disgusting, as everyone says. However, he notes, as do a few others, that the portrayal isn’t in favor of sexualizing children; it shows it as horrifying and bad.

Does that redeem the film? Not in the least. As I’ve heard passed along from multiple commentaries, it’s like showing how bad animal cruelty is by actually beating animals on film for an hour and a half. Do people see that animal cruelty is bad? Yes, but you harmed actual animals to make the message—which means saying a message is more important to you than actually preventing cruelty to animals.

The Babylon Bee (parody news) illustrated for us in a story earlier today (and provides me a relatively safe illustration for this post):

from this Babylon Bee story

And in this case, actually hypersexualizing young girls is being done—there are, indeed, actual young girls in the film being hypersexualized. Are we supposed to be convinced that saying the message is worth sacrificing real lives?

Meanwhile, in California, the legislature just passed a law decriminalizing sex with children. Not entirely, yet. What they claim to be addressing is the problem you have when high school kids, with a possible upper limit of 19 and a lower limit around 14, date each other. And, of course, it’s not the dating that’s at issue, but the sexual act, but they’re making the assumption that it’s a “wholesome” love relationship between young people within a certain age range. However, they made it a ten-year age difference. That means they’re OK with a 25-year-old and a 15-year-old, or a 23-year-old with a 14-year-old. That’s the very type of relationship that can entrap a young person. The older person has adulthood credit, and seems to offer status—but at a cost of innocence, because adults are allowed to expect sex in a relationship that a child, by law up until now, has not been able to legally consent to.

The Babylon Bee had another accidentally true headline:

 

from this Babylon Bee story

California has been leading the nation in sexualizing children. Why? Not for the good of the children. Rather, it’s to accommodate the LGBT agenda. If you looked at what they’re doing in so-called comprehensive sex education and what predators do to groom children, you might not see any difference. Maybe that’s because the culture they’re supporting is grooming children, sexualizing them early, getting them used to things that would otherwise be repugnant to them.

Reread what Rebecca Friedrichs has revealed about sex ed in California (and other US) schools.

And reread what Kelly Litvak tells us, from experience with her daughter, about how the groomers patiently work to entrap.

In a brief moment of good news, last week we watched as the Texas State Board of Education met to discuss new health education standards. We were worried—because there had been heavy lobbying—that the board might weaken and give in to demands to sexualize our young school children. I’m happy to say they held strong, mostly on votes of 9-6. I’m uncertain how that affects local schools, such as in Austin, where they have already adopted those standards, however. Parents need to be ever vigilant.

As Betsy DeVos said, on Glenn Beck on August 28, 

[Parents] are paying property taxes. Grandparents are paying property taxes. Businesses are paying property taxes. And they should be able to say, “We want something different. We want something better for our kids.”

The odds appear to be against us parents and grandparents and taxpayers.

There’s this headline about what’s new at the UN, from September 4, 2020: 

Advocate for legalized teen prostitution takes influential UN post

'The idea of purchasing intimacy and paying for the services can be affirming for many people,' insisted Tlaleng Mofokeng, formerly an abortionist and now a U.N. special rapporteur.

 

Add this one, from August 25, 2020, with a paragraph from the story: 

Sexualized toys created for children: A disturbing trend, not a coincidence

Not mentioned on the packaging is a second button or sensor in the female doll’s genital area that, when pressed, causes the doll to gasp and make sounds like “Whee!” and “Oh!”

 

Hasbro has since pulled the doll from store shelves, but the placement of the button is disturbingly similar to grooming tactics used by child predators to normalize and desensitize kids to inappropriate touching.

 

The results of these cultural trends show up in stories of harm to children, some rescued, some not.

This is from The Blaze, September 1, 2020: 

Registered repeat sex offender allegedly chases down naked teen boy, executes him in the street

'He was pleading for his life'

 

Think about the grooming that victim probably went through before finding himself in the predicament that ended in his death. And we may not ever know what went into the luring of this girl who ended up in a tractor-trailer being shipped out of the country, rescued August 31, 2020: 

Border Patrol agents find missing Texas girl inside tractor-trailer at checkpoint

Sometimes a child is taken in a snatch-and-grab kidnapping, but more often it’s after grooming, frequently through social media like Tik-Tok. It’s shocking how often we see stories like this next one from August 27, 2020, and hard to stomach that the rescues are the rare ones: 

U.S. Marshalls recover 39 missing children in Georgia operation

If there were no market for sexualized children, there would be no slavery of them. That may be what shocks me the most. My life is sheltered enough that I have a difficult time imagining the depravity required for a person to choose to purchase sex, let alone with a child.And yet even I am subjected to images in media that are so sinful that I can hardly comprehend.

We can’t afford to tolerate these things. They do not represent open-mindedness, or tolerance of different viewpoints. They do not represent empowerment, or freedom. They represent, as they always have, depraved debauchery.

And enslavement. Every pornographic image represents a person enslaved in a way that coerces them to uncover their body and allow a camera to photograph them, sometimes doing things that should never be viewed by others, usually for money, possibly for drugs to feed an addiction, possibly just to be allowed to live another day—in a world where life is used up, literally, in about 5 to 7 years.

Porn is not innocent. It is not consented to as a real free person could consent. It is not harmless—not for the viewer, and certainly not for the victim in the portrayal.

If we are in a world where this evil is normalized for children—may God quickly come to our rescue!

No Means No When Parents Speak

Last spring I wrote a couple of posts (here and here) about what we learned from Kelly Litvak about human sex trafficking—and how one of the steps of recruitment was desensitization. That is, introducing things that are gross, ugly, taboo, socially unacceptable, to condition a dulled response, and finally acceptance of the aberrant behavior as normal. 

Courtney and Kelly Litvak
image from Epoch Times

There’s a follow-up story about Litvak’s work and experience from a couple of weeks ago, here. 

But I’m looking at another story, out of Austin, Texas, where the school district voted unanimously—over the outcry of parents—to instigate a sex-ed curriculum for children in grades 3-8 that looks designed to do what Litvak says sex traffickers do to normalize the unacceptable.

The Texas legislature, earlier this year, passed legislation intended to prevent this type of sex ed. SB 22 made it so that schools could not contract with abortion providers. This thwarted Austin Independent School District’s plans to adopt a Planned Parenthood-provided pro-LGBT sex ed curriculum called Get Real. Not to be deterred, they assigned internal staff to write their own. They did this in a hurry, without expertise in the subject matter. Mostly, it appears they borrowed large portions from a Canadian program.

The writers failed to alter details where laws are different. For example, the Austin ISD program tells 6^th graders (who are 11-12 years old) that the age of consent is 16; in Texas, however, it is 17.

The program labels disagreement with the homosexual agenda as simply homophobia, and is categorized “along with other forms of discrimination,” and says such views “should be challenged.” In other words, if you’re a Bible believing religious person who saves sex for within traditional marriage, you are simply a homophobic bigot, and your beliefs should receive public scorn.

The program does spend a large portion, however, on not accepting bullying—toward LGBT-believing people.

But Christians are used to the schools dealing unfairly with us. And we have been able to mostly counter the attacks with good teachings at home. So, can this new sex ed be as radical as all that? Is this just alarmist? You judge.

You can find more commentary on the Austin ISD program here, which includes links to the actual 6^th-8^th grade curriculum. But I’ll share a few of my impressions.

There’s a graphic aimed at the younger students. You’ll note that there is nothing scientifically accurate about it. It doesn’t clarify; it confuses. According to the program, there are four aspects of sex:

·        Your sexual identity, your woman-ness or man-ness, which is what your brain tells you that you are, which can be male, female, or whatever else.

·        Your attraction, which is what your heart tells you to be attracted to, which can be to women and/or feminine and/or female people; or to men and/or masculine and/or male people.

·        Your anatomical sex, which isn’t necessarily related to your attraction, but can be to women and/or feminine and/or female people; or to men and/or masculine and/or male people.

·        Your expression, which is your femininity or masculinity as you choose to appear to others, regardless of your biology, the gender you identify as, or whatever type(s) you are attracted to.

They say that identity ≠ expression ≠ sex; gender ≠ sexual orientation. And that sex is assigned you at birth based on the appearance of your genitals—which they’ve just told you is not related to your gender, identity, expression, or whatever.

graphic from Austin ISD's sex ed curriculum
image found here

They fail to note that every cell of your body has contained the DNA determining you to be either a male or a female since you were an embryo. They fail to note that 99.98% of humans recognize themselves and others based on these inborn characteristics—so to say there is no correlation is not only confusing; it is a lie.

Lying would be bad enough. But among the evils that they do in this effort to sexualize young people is to expose them to the details of perverted sex, without ever countering with an example of a married couple—as though normal was whatever LGBT people do, but what the students’ parents do would be so abnormal as to not get a mention.

What the overwhelming majority of us actual normal people want our children to know is the basics about how their bodies will change during puberty, and why—so that they can have children when they are grown and ready for that step in their adulthood. They don’t need to be confused. They don’t need to be exposed to what qualifies as pornography in any other setting.

In our Texas Republican Party 2018 platform, we had a plank that would remove the pornography exemption for schools. That means, if it would be ruled as porn in any other setting, it is not exempt in a school setting. This would disallow many of the visuals and demonstrations included in the curriculum—and other versions like it. But that didn’t come out of this legislative session; there were a great many other SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity) issues to deal with.

In the Austin ISD 6^th grade sex ed, drawings of male genitalia are beyond diagrams to very realistic. 

In the section for this younger age group about abstinence, it goes into what behaviors qualify as abstinent and what doesn’t—including descriptions of vaginal sex, oral sex, and anal sex—because, I guess, they think a pre-adolescent can’t get through the 6^th grade sexually abstinent without knowing what those various things mean. Descriptions of which body parts fit where for each were included. But at least I didn’t see them diagrammed.

There’s a section of the Austin ISD 8^th grade sex ed that focuses on why women are paid less than men. Not whether they are, but only why. However, the fact is, when you compare apples to apples, women and men are paid virtually equally for equal work. And women at this time are more likely to have college education opportunities for higher paid work. So—why this section?

There’s a section for 8^th graders (age 13-14) to help them figure out who/what they are. Because, they tell your child, you might not be what your biology tells you, or what you’ve always thought you were. And you might not be attracted to whichever types you thought, because now you're being introduced to this new array of types.

Can I just say, this is not information that would lead my child to a healthy, happy marriage relationship in which they can bring children into the world. So, no, I would not want it inculcated into my children.

And, by the way, there’s a pretty strong assumption that pregnancy is just one of those bad risks, like STDs. And while abstinence works 100% of the time (the only time I saw this is mentioned in the 8^th grade curriculum), there are many many options for contraception to suit you and your teenage lifestyle, because we know you’ll be choosing to have sex (wink, wink).

There’s a section on being able to tell flirting, which is legal in schools, from harassment, which is illegal. It comes down to whether it is two-way. In other words, if a person flirts—which in most generations has meant putting oneself out there in a playful way to encourage a similarly playful reaction—and the person doesn’t respond, then it’s harassment. But you won’t know that until you’ve done it. Not helpful information.

The program spends a large portion telling the students of the various combinations of gender, identity, expression, and orientation—with an emphasis on “and they’re all OK.” Nevermind that there’s only one combination that leads to procreation, and only one place—within marriage—that it creates a family. The youth are told these various forms are all equally acceptable. Marriage isn’t mentioned.

There’s a small portion of one lesson that talks about values and where they come from, including from family and church. This is followed by an exercise in which the students label various beliefs with Agree, Disagree, or Pass—in front of their peers. So that there is peer pressure to agree with the lessons and beliefs of peers, even after being told pressuring for agreement is unacceptable. That’s not realistic. The school authority tells them what to believe even though it may differ from what the family or church has taught them, and then challenges them to share publicly whether they dare to disagree with what the school authority has told them.

I thought the California version, Teen Talk, was more explicit than what I’m seeing (outside the videos, because I didn’t view them all) in the AISD program. But it’s still definitely not what I would want my children to be taught.

Parents resist in Downey, California
image from here

Everywhere these things are incorporated in schools, the implementers count on parents not being informed. Because informed parents always object. What an inconvenience for these people who claim to know more than you do about what your child should be taught!

Think about this: Whose values on sex do you want to be inculcated in your child? Yours, or LGBT activists? It’s an either/or question. Do you want your child to understand the way abstinence before marriage followed by complete fidelity within marriage is the path to a healthy and happy love life—which has been known for millennia and which social data confirms? Or do you want a radical pro-sex-without-consequences of all types and in all situations.

By the way, the original instigation of sex ed in schools was ostensibly to lower rates of out-of-wedlock births. Those rates were at that time on a downward trajectory. But rates went up from that point on, while abortions rose as well, until plateauing in recent years. When schools say, “Think how bad things would be if we hadn’t acted,” think again.

You need to be willing to remove a child from school to avoid their exposure to the normalization of perverted sex. When parents do that, schools cave to the pressure. But you have to actually stand strong. Be informed. And take action to protect your child.

Besides those I’ve linked above, here are additional places I’ve written about explicit sex ed in schools, as well as a couple of the news stories I mentioned above.

·        “Growing tide of outraged parents move to demolish perverted California sex ed program,” LifeSite News 

·        “Planned Parenthood Sex-Ed Not Radical Enough, AISD proposes Canadian Curriculum to Indoctrinate Children,” Texas Values 

·         “Worth Standing Up” 

·        “Teachers’ Unions Harm Education” 

·        "Too Much Savagery" 

·        “Worse than We Imagined” 

·        “Worse than We Imagined, Part II”         

·         “Surprise at Old News” 

It's Called Grooming

A few weeks ago I shared some information for parents to protect their children. The issue was human sex trafficking. We were made aware of warning signs that a child is being groomed, to be led into the hands of the traffickers. There are steps in recruitment, what we could call grooming:

1.       Befriend—to get the target to see the groomer as someone to trust.

2.       Intoxicate—to cause inability to think clearly combined with causing friction at home.

3.       Alienate—to drive a wedge between target and family and their core values.

4.       Isolate—to separate the target from old friends who held their original core values.

5.       Desensitize—to confuse the target’s moral compass, making the previously unthinkable seem common or even normal.

6.       Capitalize—to take the target into control by the groomer, and subject to sex slavery.

Image from here
link from this story

As a follow-up, here’s a piece warning parents of the apps the predators are using. 

This is a scary scenario, and pretty horrifying for a parent. I think we do need to be vigilant. But I think the danger is larger than recruitment into human trafficking, which, while unbelievably too common, is still comparatively rare.

I don’t mean to diminish the meaning. But I believe the methodology—grooming—is being used in a broader attempt to recruit a generation into an alternate reality, with an alternate morality and behaviors.

These things are so serious, it helps to be able to keep a sense of humor. So let’s start with yesterday’s Andrew Klavan Show intro. He begins each episode with a monologue in the form of a news report parody, like this:

Leftist scientists working around the clock have developed powerful new tools for altering reality. In a speech to the Society for the Promulgation of Irrational Hysteria, left-wing physicist Dr. Geraldo Von Zippity-Noodle told the gathering of empty chairs he can now confirm that writing a statement five times over in all capital letters and posting it on Twitter transforms that statement, no matter how absurd, into the truth.

In an experiment that has been reduplicated in multiple peer-reviewed imaginations, scientists posted the words “TRANS-WOMEN ARE WOMEN” five times in all caps on their Twitter feeds, and discovered from that time forth men who wore dresses not only became real women, but were actually able to conceive and bear children, if no one looked too closely.

In a transcript of the speech, released through UCLA’s office of Collecting Undeserved Paychecks by Repeatedly Using the Word Diversity, Dr. Von Zippety-Noodle said, “The key to changing reality through repetitive Twitter capitalization, or RTC, is to ensure that no one damages the results by demanding proof or using such phrases as ‘nonsense’ or ‘applesauce’ or uttering ‘complete horse manure of the purest ray serene.’[i] If people using such words can be banned from Twitter, or silenced through intimidation, then the proper reality change can take place undisturbed. Or, if not, who is there to say?”

Andrew Klavan,
screenshot from episode 710

That's somewhere around step 5, desensitizing. Disorienting. Claiming an alternate truth so often and so firmly that sensible people begin to question their long-held grasp on reality.

This disorienting comes easier if there’s already been some unmooring from the family and the core beliefs inculcated within (step 3, alienating), and from friends who went along with those core values (step 4, isolating).

This step has been underway for quite a while. Things that seemed unthinkable in 1950 or 1960 were mainstreamed—in media, academia, and then in politics, which is downstream from culture.

Consider a few recent stories.

In this one, a British priest/teacher at a school in Essex was castigated for considering the feelings of any child but the boy/girl with gender dysphoria: “Priest Resigned Post Over Children Being ‘Sacrificed on the Altar of Trans-Ideology’”  

The school in Essex, which has not been named in reports to protect the privacy of the children and families, had a pupil who, at just eight years old, was looking to transition from a boy to a girl, British newspaper the Mail on Sunday reported. Reverend Parker said he supported the child’s transition but wanted to inform parents of other pupils in order to ensure the safety of everyone at the school and to address any concerns about the child using the girls’ toilets.

It was not enough that he supported the transitioning child; he had to also dismiss any concerns surrounding the situation. The school’s governor and church leaders told him to shut up. So he left.

In Brazil—as attempted in the US with the recent Equality Act, which passed in the House—disagreeing with the LGBT agenda is being made a crime: “Brazil's supreme court votes to make homophobia and transphobia crimes.”  

Racism was made a crime in Brazil in 1989 with prison sentences of up to five years. The court's judges ruled that homophobia should be framed within the racism law until the country's congress approves legislation specifically covering LGBT discrimination.

Brazil's Senate is dealing with a bill to criminalize discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender with sentences of up to five years.

Meanwhile, as women and girls express their fears—not necessarily of transgenders, but of predators using the opportunity to victimize—actual cases continue appearing: “Man who says he’s ‘female’ enters women’s bathroom, sexually assaults 10-year-old girl.” The story offers this commentary:

Decades after feminism swept the West, transgender rights have now formally replaced women’s rights as the emerging ideology of gender fluidity wipes out any formal conception of what a “woman” is to begin with.

Women and girls who feel unsafe when biological males enter spaces once reserved for females only are being essentially told that they are transphobic and that they should shut up.

And this:

Any discomfort expressed by women themselves is condemned as bigotry. And this system is impervious to questioning: It is not only transphobic to ask whether some spaces should be limited to biological females for the purposes of safety, it is also transphobic to ask any follow-up questions about this. The transgender community, apparently, is a uniformly perfect group, utterly without sin and lacking any nefarious members whatsoever. I suppose if you can believe a woman has a penis, you can believe anything.

If you’re recruiting, why not start young? It’s hard to know whether this next story is about a really, really stupid teacher or a purposeful groomer: “'He Feels Confused': Parents Sue After Teacher Repeatedly Asks 8-Year-Old if He's Trans.” In this case, an 8-year-old had digestive problems, which were accommodated by allowing him to use a different restroom (I think I read in a related story was the teachers’). His teacher, instead of asking why this arrangement had been made, surmised that he had gender dysphoria, and singled him out multiple times to ask him if he thought he was really a girl, and gave him books to read that would lead to that conclusion. The books in his backpack were how the parents found out. The boy was very confused, and required some to deal with the trauma the teacher caused him. The family sued, rightfully.

Note here that the boy wasn’t confused before the teacher repeatedly and somewhat forcefully implanted the idea of gender dysphoria. In other words, the pressure to put this information in early grades, supposedly to get kids used to the existence of people with gender dysphoria so that there will be greater understanding and acceptance, is really recruiting, or grooming: separating the child from the parents’ core values, making shocking abnormalities seem normal, claiming a lie loudly and boldly enough that sane people begin to question reality. It’s a horrible thing to do to vulnerable children.

There was a story a few months ago, from here in Houston, about drag queens reading to small children in Houston city libraries. Here's additional commentary on that story: “DragQueen Who Read to Kids at Houston Library Is Convicted Pedophile.” Eventually, a second sexual predator was found reading to kids. The library said, “Sorry,” but not really sorry. After all, it was for the greater good of indoctrinating kids to be more tolerant and accepting. Chris Sevier, of MassResistance, the parent group that did their own research, leading to the discoveries, when the city refused to, said, 

“It’s not about acceptance, love and tolerance. It’s really about indoctrinating children to the ideals of secular humanism.”

A week ago, Jordan Peterson, on his weekly podcast, interviewed provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. I didn’t know much about Yiannopoulos before. I remember a couple of years ago he was invited to speak at C-PAC. But I don’t give a lot of heed to people who say something anti-leftist and are suddenly given a platform as a conservative. Let time settle any questions.

Milo Yiannopoulos,
screenshot from Jordan Peterson podcast

It was an interesting interview. He’s unpleasantly in-your-face accusatory at times, and overly certain of his own brilliance and talent. OK. Anyway, I knew so little about him that I didn’t know he was gay or that he had suffered a media downfall because of a comment he made about younger gay males being brought in by older gay males; that had happened to him, but he said it was consensual, which he said he believed it often is. What he realizes now, slightly older, is that for him at his age to do the same to a young teen male would be predatory and wrong. It happens; everyone in the gay community knows it and recognizes it. But he only now, with a little more maturity, sees that he had been preyed upon. He was punished for saying what he said, but I think a sensible onlooker would have looked at the scenario and thought, “Oh, he doesn’t yet realize what happened to him.”

Another piece I came upon makes the pedophile/homosexuality connection: "Pedophilia and homosexuality–an undeniable connection." This is an opinion piece, originally written in Croatian, I believe, so there are syntax issues. But I’ve done the math before and gotten similar results. The author (I can’t find an author or date on the piece) posits that many gay men prey upon boys who were the age of their own first encounter.

The LGBT agenda isn’t the whole story. But it’s a good example of grooming. Review this piece on the Yogyakarta Principles: “Ten Years of International Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Laws: Lessons Learned,” by Daniel Moody.

You can add abortion to the list of disorienting realities being called good. We need to end with something a little light-hearted, to give us strength. Thanks again to The Babylon Bee, for their “news” story: “DisneyCEO: 'To Avoid Filming Among Depraved, Immoral People, We Are Moving All OurGeorgia Operations Back To Hollywood.'” Because Georgia passed anti-abortion laws:

"To avoid filming among depraved, immoral people, we are moving all our Georgia operations back to Hollywood," [Disney CEO Bob Iger] said in a press conference, wagging his finger sternly. "The people of Georgia can't pass immoral, unjust laws like this and expect us righteous elites in Hollywood to stand by and let it happen. Morality is very important to us in the film industry. That's why we film a lot of our stuff here in Hollywood, where we can rest easy knowing that the money from our production is going to support moral, upright people."

"It's the right thing to do," he added.

Iger also pointed out that California's lax abortion laws come in handy in Hollywood quite often.

Questions I have at this point are, who is doing the grooming, and what is their goal?

In a religious context, the simplest answer is that Satan is grooming as many people as possible—and concentrating on the young—to accept as “real” and “good” things that are false and evil, so that he can ruin as many lives as he can. Science and natural law are on the side of real and good. That’s why the “groomers” make sure the real and good are shouted down—in all caps. With claims of being “for tolerance and against bigotry,” while being intolerant and bigoted—adding force of law whenever possible.

Keep your children close. Don’t trust them to schools, entertainments, academia, or anyone who has already fallen prey to the false and evil; those people are patiently doing their work as groomers.

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[i] I looked this up so you don’t have to. It’s from stanza 14 of Thomas Gray’s poem “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”

Savagery Too Close to Home

The world is worse than we thought.

This past Saturday, a speaker at our Cypress Texas Tea Party meeting talked to us about child sex trafficking. This is an issue that has horrified me before. I’ve followed Tim Ballard’s Operation Underground Railroad efforts to free children in various countries. But, while heart rending, that work was mostly foreign, far away. Any connection to the US seemed to be through illegal immigration—closer, but still kind of far away.

A few years ago, I wrote of a sting operation in Waco, Texas, which seemed very close to home. But Kelly Litvak told us it is even closer. Very close.

Kelly Litvak
founder of ChildProofAmerica.org
image from March newsletter

Litvak is the founder and executive director of ChildProofAmerica.org, an effort to inform parents and others to learn how to recognize signs of danger and work to prevent what they went through.

The Litvaks suffered through this horror with their own daughter. She was a good student, an excellent athlete, involved in their church, in the Cinco Ranch area of Katy, Texas. And Kelly Litvak ran a prison ministry for juvenile offenders, so they had talked about a great many things. Yet their daughter got trapped in this evil.

Cinco Ranch is a very nice suburb, west of Houston, with a highly rated school district. Not what you'd expect of a seedy underbelly.

Here are some shocking statistics she told us:

·         One in 20 US men have purchased sex online. (That is, they set up the encounter using the internet).

·         In Houston, that number is 1 in 5 men.

I can’t even!

I have lived a fairly sheltered life. To my knowledge I have never interacted with a man who would ever go to a prostitute. It is so uncivilized that my life doesn’t intersect. I talked with Kelly Litvak’s husband about this afterward. He agreed it’s shocking. He said, you won’t find them in this room (the conference room of the restaurant where we were meeting with civic-minded patriots), “But out there in the restaurant, I guarantee there’s someone.”

Kelly told us there’s a group called the Elijah Project that helps inform on this issue. They took her on a tour to identify the brothels in the area. For local people who know this area, there are 14 brothels on Mason and Fry Roads alone. You have probably passed by them. They’re in strip malls. Places like massage centers or maybe reflexology therapy centers, with dark tinted windows, open long hours, like 7:00 AM to 10:00 PM.

There are more brothels in Houston than Starbucks.

I was at a chiropractor in Cypress once, several years ago—again, in a nice neighborhood, within half a block of the high school—when a nearby massage parlor was raided, and we assumed it must have been a brothel. But even then, I didn’t think about underage, trafficked children. And yet that was probably true there.

It’s not only a local problem, of course. There’s this story from Cleveland, OH, where three pastors were indicted.  According to an eye-opening piece from The Rutherford Institute, the Baltimore—Washington DC area is a hub for sex trade. 

An estimated 14,500 to 17,500 victims are trafficked into the US each year, mainly through illegal immigration. But some 300,000 US teens are also trafficked each year. That’s nearly a third of a million. The target age is 12-14 years; the average age is 13—which means there are younger girls trafficked as well. Half of all victims are minors; 80% are female. The internet is the most likely interaction point for pimps.

It’s a huge business. It’s the second largest criminal industry. According to Litvak, a pimp can make $150,000 to $300,000 a year per victim. As horrifying as it is, if you do the math, at a price of $25 per rape—and rape is what we’re talking about—that’s possibly 12,000 a year. About 33 a day. Some days more than that.

We’re all in agreement that the Elizabeth Smart case was horrific. A young, innocent girl, taken from her home, held hostage for most of a year, raped repeatedly every day. She has remarkable resilience, using her story to help others. She repeats something her mother told her, that the best thing she could do to disempower the perpetrators is to move on and live a happy life. The Litvaks have that kind of attitude as well. And their daughter, now rescued, and in her 20s, is doing well and considering being an advocate as her life’s work.

What I’d like to point out is that, as rare as Smart’s case was, it isn’t very different from the daily experience of children, or young adults, trapped in the sex trade as slaves. This is just too much evil.

There are several problems to solve: Rescue and rehabilitation. Prosecution of traffickers/pimps and buyers. Prevention and protection of children. Getting rid of demand.

Today’s post is mostly to raise awareness. I’d like to share the information for parents and grandparents that Litvak gave us.

She talked about the grooming process to watch out for, in six steps.

·         Step 1: Befriend. This can begin when a young person is seen as vulnerable, such as after a traumatic event, such as the death or divorce of a parent, a friend’s suicide, or something as relatively small as a boyfriend breakup. Traffickers look for clues online to spot vulnerability and then seek out the teen to build a relationship.

·         Step 2: Intoxicate. The new “friend” invites using drugs and/or alcohol to numb the pain. This has the additional “benefit” of causing friction in the family.

·         Step 3: Alienate. The teen is led to believe her family is against her. This may be the first notice the parents have of something off, but they may not recognize it as different from simply teen separation from parents that is a natural part of growing up. But this is already a severe danger point for the child, hard to step back from without intervention.

·         Step 4: Isolate. Not only is the child disconnected from family, but now the “new friend” cuts them off from longtime friends, anyone who shares their previous core values.

·         Step 5: Desensitize. The child is exposed to a great many formerly shocking scenes and images, and is told these are all normal. Soon nothing that used to shock seems shocking.

·         Step 6: Capitalize. At this point, the child is separated from family and friend, disconnected from their moral compass, and ripe for taking.

graphic from Kelly Litvak's presentation May 11, 2019

The perpetrators can be patient. This process could take as long as two years. They could time it to get the teen to walk out the door of their home and into the arms of the cartel at age 18, when it’s harder to prove the crime, because force, fraud, or coercion must now be shown—which are not necessary for minor victims.

What is a parent or grandparent supposed to do? One thing is to be very vigilant about the online world the child is allowed to connect with. Limit their phone use. Look at their phones; check the apps they use. Among the dangerous apps to look for are Kik, Whisper, Periscope, and Partyline—all used by pimps to build relationships.  Periscope and Partyline include GPS tracking. There are also YouNow live video and Snapchat, which has a hidden backdoor app for hiding photos. Tinder is used for sexual encounters. Keepsafe is used to hide photos in an app disguised as a calculator.

Apps and symbols to beware of.
graphic from Kelly Litvak's presentation May 11, 2019

If you see these apps on your child’s phone, you’ve got a problem already. If you take a phone away, be aware that some pimps provide alternate phones you won’t know about. If there’s child porn or evidence of trafficking on your child’s phone, you can give the police permission to search the phone. Note that there is risk that your child will be caught up in prosecution; one of the things teens are encouraged to do in the desensitizing process is send nude selfies, which qualify as child porn. However, with a minor it’s not necessarily going to be seen as their fault, especially if they cooperate and help identify the person luring them. Regardless, whatever punishment they go through is still better than being caught up in sex trafficking, with a life expectancy of about seven years.

What can you do besides watch your child’s behavior and worry? There are some apps to help parents. All of them approach things differently, some clandestinely, some with the knowledge of the child. These include Highster Mobile, Net Nanny, Qustodio, and mSpy.

Keep dialed in to what your kids are doing. Check up on them. Talk with them—about this danger specifically. Make sure they’re equipped to protect themselves before you put a phone in their hands. Monitor social media. Set your house alarm to know if anyone leaves during the night, and use security cameras. Be on high alert if your child has experienced a traumatic event; get them professional trauma counselling, if needed.

If the worst happens, as it did for the Litvaks, their program, ChildproofAmerica.org, can immediately send a family guide to walk you through the process of getting legitimate help, and avoiding the scammers. On top of all their pain, the Litvaks were also victims of fraud. Someone called these desperate parents, said they were former Seals specializing in finding children. All they had to do was put up $6,000 and they’d get their daughter back. Of course, what really happened was these scammers disappeared with the money. (ChildproofAmerica is a nonprofit that does not accept any donations from families in crisis.)

It’s a wicked world we’re in.

I don’t really have time today to fully cover another big concern—demand. Why is there a market for sex with children? How can we be so savage a society that people who function among us think that is acceptable behavior?

Desensitization is part of it. Porn desensitizes, and it creates an addictive desire for something more intense. Every pornographic photo involves a ruined life. It’s not a victimless crime. But it’s so pervasive, I think we also need to look at porn addicts and help them find a way out of the savagery and back into civilization. Before they become so savage that they would seek out a prostitute, or worse, a child prostitute.

Desensitization, unfortunately, is also a goal of sex education. As Rebecca Friedrichs describes in her book Standing Up to Goliath, the curriculum has nothing to do with teaching a young person safe sexual practices. It instead teaches risky behavior, including perverted behavior, and normalizes it. Healthy sexual relations between married mother and father are never examples. And in some places the very concept of abstinence is prohibited. Look at step 5 again. Such curricula follow an agenda that serves anyone but children or parents. We would be much better off today if all sex education had been left to parents with the support of their churches.

I am sickened to see this savage world functioning alongside our civil society, hidden practically in plain sight. Evil is real. And we’re at war.