Con Ink. (Part Eight)

Hi, everyone. It's me, Katie Couric. If you've been following me on social media, you know I love to cook, or at least try, especially alongside some of my favorite chefs and foodies like Benny Blanco, Jake Cohen, Lighty Hoik, Alison, Roman, and Ina Garten. So I started a free newsletter called Good Taste to share recipes, tips, and kitchen must-haves. Just sign up at katiecouric.com slash goodtaste.

I'm Jacob Goldstein. I used to host Planet Money. Now, I'm starting a new show. It's called What's Your Problem? Every week on What's Your Problem, entrepreneurs and engineers describe the future they're going to build.

Why aren't you a RedpilledAmerica.

believe in honesty and value the truth in storytelling, then join us. Become a RedpilledAmerica.

FAMBAM member by going to RedpilledAmerica.

Previously on Redpilled America. We were approached several years ago by a production company that wanted to do a feature film. We made a beautiful deal with Fox Latin America. Disney.

bought the studio that held the rights to the movie. I got an email from them saying that this movie is not for them. Studio after studio passed on the film. The Davis County.

Attorney's Office has opened a criminal investigation into Operation Underground Railroad. Angel.

Studios appeared and they told me, I think we are your only option, Eduardo. The sound of freedom did become part of the investigation. That investigation is reported to be over.

Vice News reported that Ballard had quietly exited Operation Underground Railroad. No major conservative media outlet touched the story.

the day's news. We're all about telling stories. Stories. Hollywood doesn't want you to hear. Stories.

can think of Redpilled America as audio documentaries, and we promise only one thing.

We're at the finale of our series of episodes entitled Con Inc. If you haven't heard the previous episodes, stop and go back and listen from the beginning. We're looking for the answer to the question, what's the purpose of conservative media? By chronicling our long search for a story about sex trafficking.

Railroad. Ballard even said as much. We're heading down to Bogota, Colombia, to begin filming what's currently called the Sound of Freedom, the story of Operation Underground Railroad.

Yet, at precisely the moment that the entire world would be introduced to the origin story behind OUR, instead of maximizing the PR and the fundraising windfall of the moment, OUR and Ballard quietly parted ways. It was the red flag of red flags.

If you Google it, you'll see all of these stations and news outlets did positive stories.

about Tim Ballard. Again, that's investigative journalist Lynn Packer. We've heard from.

him throughout the series. They helped make him into a hero. They helped raise the money. And then, when it come time to do fact checking and do their due diligence in terms of the reporting, there was nothing. There's only one mainstream news outlet in all of Utah that even reported there was a criminal investigation.

But now, with the sirens screaming, we thought surely conservative media, the very institution who claims to be the arbiter of truth, would at least cover Ballard's suspicious departure from the foundation he founded. But they went silent. And that's because they were given another opportunity to stick their heads in the sand. You see, Ballard is a master of media manipulation. In a way, he gave conservative media a free pass to ignore the bombshell news.

Something interesting happened at the end of the film. It used to say, and then they created Operation Underground Railroad. And again, I also became the CEO of the Nazarene Fund. I told Angel Studios, take the logo off of who you are. It's my baby.

Ballard was standing in front of a burning house and calmly saying, there's nothing to see here. But anyone with the pulse could recognize that there was something going on. It made no sense for him to launch a new child sex liberation project that basically did the same thing as OUR, just as the movie that told the origin story of OUR's launch was being released. I mean, the website for Ballard's new Spear Fund was purchased about three weeks before the launch of the film. It was obviously a quickly thrown together venture.

sounded farfetched. You tell these stories and so much of it sounds unreal. By the end of Ballard's.

appearance, Tim Pool and his audience raised a reported $50,000 for Ballard's new nonprofit. We reached out to Tim's camp for comment, but they didn't respond. Right-leaning media and continued to accept Ballard's stories uncritically. It was eye-opening. We watched as one day turned to two, then two turned to three, yet no conservative media outlet covered the story.

Joel invited us on his SiriusXM Sunday show to talk about what we'd found, and I made the argument that Tim Ballard was an extraordinary con artist. This is what I feel like. I feel like Tim Ballard is the Michael Jordan of Juicy Smollies. in regards to this story itself and the story that he pitches as his origin story. It is a fabrication made with a bunch of different half-truths and exaggerations and outright.

Tim Ballard, who inspired Sound of Freedom, out. at both organizations he led.

The story wasn't hard-hitting by any means, but it did raise questions as to why Ballard quietly departed the organization he founded. Well, almost immediately, Daily Wire's readers began attacking the writer and the website in its comments section. One commenter wrote,

While Tim Ballard did leave OUR and the Nazarene Fund, your source, Motherboard, leaves a lot to be desired. Motherboard is a part of Vice News. I expected better reporting.

from Daily Wire News. Comment after comment slammed the article. Now, sometimes, even if you get a story right, it angers your audience. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, if the outlet has any integrity, it's supposed to brush it off and carry on. Well, in this critical moment, The Daily Wire decided to abandon its integrity.

rejoiced. Wow, the title, wording and the tone of this entire article have turned completely.

around in the last two hours, wrote one commenter. Another added, Huh, backtrack much? It was one of the most embarrassing displays of journalistic cowardice that we'd ever seen. But the embarrassment parade was just getting started.

My name is Michael Wolff, and I'm the host of Fire and Fury, the podcast. Not too long ago, I saw Donald Trump, and he shouted, hey, Michael, I made you rich. And the truth is, my three books about Trump, they have sold a lot of copies. It all started eight years ago. I found myself in Donald Trump's Beverly Hills home, sharing Häagen-Dazs ice cream with him.

I'm Ben Adefhafry, host of the history podcast, The Last Archive, and I want to tell you about a new series running in our feed. It's called The Deadline, and it features six essays written and read by Jill Lepore, the New Yorker writer, American historian, and founding host of our show. These are incredible essays on everything from the history of cryogenics to the Silicon Valley gospel of disruption, and at the end of each essay, I interviewed Jill about her craft as a writer and how she's thinking about the themes of these essays. now. We talk Frankenstein.

Doctor Who. This is a crazy origin story. I don't think I've ever told this before.

I really loved having these conversations with Jill, and it was a rare chance to talk to her about how she goes about reading, writing, and the work of history. You can listen to The Deadline on The Last Archive feed, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome back to Red Pilled America.

You're calling in as a representative of someone who you have your own show and you're coming on.

like a guest? I'm not coming on as a guest. I'm coming on to question someone that came on your.

show. Ask questions and tell my audience what they should know. You need to be a subject matter expert. You promote your podcast to my producer, send him a press release, we'll book you. But you're not just going to jump on here and basically delegitimize the guest.

I was on Sirius on Sunday about this topic, this very topic.

that many Americans think are bad. We don't tell many stories, to be honest. It's an interesting point you make, and you're right. I wish there were stories equivalent to what we're doing.

Prager U would eventually take that idea and enter the storytelling game, and Tim Ballard was using that new platform to build on the myth of his origin story. Now, we were in the thick of investigating his claims, so we had to publish a story on the new contradictions the Prager U documentary revealed, which meant we had to reach out to Prager U for a comment. So we sent an email to Prager U CEO, Marissa Strait, who'd also appeared on our show. We pointed out that Ballard's statement made in their documentary directly contradicted assertions made under penalty of perjury in a federal court case. We closed by asking for a comment.

Your question makes me wonder, who are the people that sit around trying to poke at minutiae details of a timely and important docuseries exposing the horrors of pedophilia and human trafficking? Who are they really trying to protect? That might be a more worthwhile investigation.

We couldn't believe her response. This was from the CEO of an organization we respected enough to produce a documentary on. They'd liked it so much that they requested a copy of it, stripped of advertising for use in their fundraising efforts, which we happily supplied. Now she was effectively claiming we were attempting to protect pedophiles. And, worse, we had to publish her comment.

In the weeks that followed, only Dr. Sebastian Guerga covered our story.

Now I'm a little bit trepidatious of my next big question, because it will open a can of worms, the likes of which, well, truth is the truth, so let's talk about it.

Dr. G. Joel Pollack, an Instapundit, made up the very short list of conservatives in media brave enough to cover it.

of Information Act request. Vice News reports. witnesses who spoke to federal and local investigators say Tim Ballard claimed OUR and his personal business ventures were backed by Elder Ballard as part of a larger mission to bring Americans to the LDS faith.

Elder Ballard is a high-ranking official within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He shares a last name with Tim Ballard, but the two are not related. The LDS Church issued a statement to Vice News from Elder Ballard stating in part that Tim Ballard.

betrayed their friendship through the unauthorized use of President Ballard's name for Tim Ballard's personal advantage, an activity regarded as morally unacceptable.

Some believed the church had effectively excommunicated Tim Ballard. The development was a massive blow to his standing within the Mormon community, and the bad news was just getting started. Lim Packer also got a copy of the Davis County investigation documents, and he found assertions within them that stated that Ballard was forced out of OUR because of claims of sexual misconduct. Tim Ballard says the allegations against.

him are quote baseless inventions. Ballard's statement saying during my time at OUR, I designed strict guidelines for myself and our operators in the field. Sexual contact was prohibited and I led by example. Any suggestion of inappropriate sexual contact.

is categorically false.

Months later, by nothing short of a miracle, an informant came forward and said they had information on where we might find Garty.

Well, the Davis County investigation documents claimed that Tim Ballard acquired the intel for that Haiti operation from a psychic that helped him communicate with the Mormon prophet Nephi, who'd apparently been dead for thousands of years. Several women making the sexual misconduct claims contacted Glenn Beck, wanting to tell him their side of the story.

If, if it's true, I can't believe how many of us were duped, but that's if it's true.

And, as we've mentioned earlier in the series, Glenn handed the story off to a Blaze Media investigative reporter. The network eventually published a long-form investigation into the sexual misconduct allegations against Tim Ballard, and it included one shocking claim after another. Former OUR operators told Blaze Media that Ballard allegedly requested all women to have a Brazilian wax, which would remove all pubic hair from their private areas before they went on an operation. A few days later, a lawsuit dropped. Our top story.

both Ballard and Operation Underground Railroad and others are now being sued in a Utah court. The women suing Tim Ballard and OUR contend those trips they took with him overseas were not what they appeared to be.

According to the accusations in the lawsuit, Ballard's child rescue operations were allegedly more like degeneracy-filled luxury vacations. The five women say they are Utah residents who.

worked with or for OUR. The rescue operations typically involve first-class travel for OUR personnel, the lawsuit says. And in strip clubs and massage parlors, Ballard sometimes drank alcohol until he passed out. The suit described the couple's ruse, where Ballard and a woman he selected would go undercover. The women say the ruse became a means for sexual grooming, that Ballard would share a bed or shower with them.

telling was that, in the wake of all of these allegations, when Tim Ballard was under fire like never before, not one of the 7,000 women and children Ballard claimed he'd saved had come forward to defend him. Not one. By mid-September, the Tim Ballard scandal had completely pierced through the national and conservative media silence. It was a turning point moment, and revealed the trouble now facing conservative media.

I'm Ben Nadefhafri, host of the history podcast The Last Archive, and I want to tell you about a new series running in our feed. It's called The Deadline, and it features six essays written and read by Jill Lepore, the New Yorker writer, American historian, and founding host of our show. These are incredible essays on everything from the history of cryogenics to the Silicon Valley gospel of disruption, and at the end of each essay, I interview Jill about her craft as a writer and how she's thinking about the themes of these essays. now. We talk Frankenstein, we talk writing leads, we talk Barbie, we talk Doctor Who.

Hi, everyone. It's me, Katie Couric. If you follow me on social media, you know I love to cook, or at least try, especially alongside some of my favorite chefs and foodies like Benny Blanco, Jake Cohen, Lighty Hoyt, Alison Roman, and, of course, Ina Garten and Martha Stewart. So I started a free newsletter called Good Taste that comes out every Thursday, and it's serving up recipes that will make your mouth water. Think a candied bacon, Bloody Mary, tacos with cabbage slaw, curry, cauliflower with almonds and mint, and cherry slab pie with vanilla ice cream.

Welcome back to Red Pilled America. So by mid-September, the Tim Ballard scandal went mainstream. It was a revealing moment. Because, you see, it wasn't the big national media that broke the story, and it wasn't conservative media that brought it to the surface either. It was just a small handful of journalists looking to expose a man that has a problem with the truth.

But flash forward to September 2023, and that movement has stumbled. Witnessing this whole affair led us to a conclusion. Conservative media was becoming the very thing that it purported to be fighting against. It was evolving into a profit-seeking, agenda-driven, confirmation-biased machine. Conservative media organizations are now making money—real money—and that development seems to have played a major part in changing the movement.

I've never had somebody in my personal network get kidnapped and go overseas and have to be rescued. It feels so outside of the normal context of where we live.

That's Brittany Dunn, the COO and co-founder of Safe House Project. The Safe House Project was founded in 2018 by three military families who saw the devastating impact of child sex trafficking here in America and wanted to do something about it. They strived to increase the identification of trafficking victims, as well as work to get victims emergency support throughout the United States. Since launching the Safe House Program, in Brittany's estimation, the scenario offered in Sound of Freedom is misleading. In the film, strangers shoved child sex slaves into a container and shipped them to a far-off land where pedophiles purchased them in seedy black markets.

we've helped over 480 survivors exit a trafficking situation. And maybe a handful have been kidnapping situations. And I believe only one of those has ever gone outside of the United States. And if still we're talking about that, one even still had ties back to the family unit, it was just that the family, you know, extended family removed that individual and took them.

abroad. So out of the nearly 500 sex trafficking victims they've serviced, not one was kidnapped by a stranger and sold abroad for sex. Not one. A lot of times when people think of trafficking,

it's just not how it's portrayed. even in the Sound of Freedom. That's a former Operation.

Underground Railroad field operative, Jimmy Rex, in a September 2023 podcast. He began going on missions with the organization around 2015.. I didn't love parts of that movie because I had.

to tell a bunch of people that asked me about it. I'm like, no, that's not really how it works. It does work that way sometimes, but it's very rare. The Sound of Freedom pitched a scenario.

that effectively never happens. Yet, conservative media refused to critically analyze the problem the movie was presenting. However, when other media did, conservative media played cover for the filmmakers. When Sound of Freedom was released, mainstream media outlets criticized the film for tapping into the fever dreams of the QAnon conspiracy theory crowd. NPR, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and others all largely came down on the child sex slavery scenario portrayed in the film.

Brittany Dunn. And so what we see more oftentimes is that these are, you know, vulnerable individuals who, traffickers, are preying on and trying to identify a moment of vulnerability. They are using mental coercion to help convince them that this is their idea, that they want to enter this life, that they want to do something for their future. And they're building a trust bond and they are isolating them from their safe people or their safe networks. And then, over time, they will start to traffic them.

cases. Tim Ballard, Operation Underground Railroad, and organizations like them are diverting funds to corrupt foreign lands where it's impossible to clearly audit their work and in countries where prostitution is a legal industry. If their tactics were effective, why, when we look at the crown jewel of their operations, the Cartagena sting, all of those alleged child traffickers were set free. Those American funds could and should be tackling the problem right here at home. Again,

Lynn Packer. The fact is, is that when you do the stranger danger thing, you're actually putting children at greater risk of being sexually abused. Because then the focus is on this person in the van, the shadowy guy with a trench coat and a hat behind a tree with a bag of candy, like the FBI poster showed it in the late 50s. And they're not on the lookout for their scout leader, for a schoolteacher, for a perverted older brother, for a father, for a neighbor, for a church leader, for a pastor, for a Mormon bishop. You're not on the lookout for that.

financial scam ever pulled on conservatives. And there are other broad questions about child sex trafficking that conservative media fails to investigate.

And we're not alone. A lot of the stats that come out about how many kids are being trafficked around the world, they say like 2 million, then I heard it was 8 million. now. I don't believe those.

numbers. Again, that's former Operation Underground Railroad. field operative Jimmy Rex. I don't believe.

those numbers, if I'm being honest. I think it's much less. And the reason I believe that is because we went to multiple cities and never found anybody trafficking kids. We went to Mexico City multiple times, went to several places around Latin America, South America, and couldn't find.

trafficking. We just left. The filmmakers like to throw around big numbers for child sex trafficking,

like Jim Caviezel. National Football League, people are talking about it. Now that's a big league, 13 billion dollars made last year. Imagine that the NFL is not even a JV team compared to sexual trafficking. Imagine being on the freshman team, because sex trafficking makes three times more money.

like Jim Caviezel won't tell you, or perhaps he doesn't even know, is that most of these statistics come from the globalist United Nations, the same entity that brought us global warming. The U.N. claims that human trafficking is a 150 billion dollar annual business. How they get to those numbers is they conflate child sex trafficking with countries that allow forced labor and forced marriage.

world. Again, Lynn Packer. He's saying the same thing today that he did 10 years ago. It's the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world. Well, hell, in 10 years it would have passed up everything.

Conservative media has failed to expose all of the muck in the child sex trafficking arena because they've found their very own global warming issue that excites readers and generates revenue.

Ballard would make you think that there's hardly anybody else out there working on this particular problem. The world is spending millions and millions of dollars to try and protect children from sex crimes. It's at every level. The FBI is working on it. Homeland Security is working on it.

Sending your money to foreign lands so that jump teams can work with corrupt foreign governments to try and arrest traffickers in countries where prostitution is legal and the age of consent is sometimes 12 years old is not a way to address the issue here in the USA.

There's so many incredible organizations throughout the United States that are responding, that are serving survivors right here.

If conservative media were really concerned with addressing the problem of child sex trafficking, it would ask Tim Ballard, if the problem is the biggest here in the United States, why are almost all of your operations done in foreign lands? They don't ask these kinds of questions because, again, conservative media has become a profit-seeking, agenda-driven, confirmation bias machine. And perhaps nothing shows this more than conservative media's reaction to yet another sex trafficking story. My name is Michael Wolff, and I'm the host of Fire & Fury, the podcast. Not too long ago, I saw Donald Trump, and he shouted,

Hey, Michael, I made you rich.

And the truth is, my three books about Trump, they have sold a lot of copies. It all started eight years ago. I found myself in Donald Trump's Beverly Hills home, sharing Häagen-Dazs ice cream with him. I asked him, why was he running for president? And he answered, without missing a beat, Because I want to be the most famous man in the world.

I'm Ben Adafafri, host of the history podcast The Last Archive, and I want to tell you about a new series running in our feed. It's called The Deadline, and it features six essays written and read by Jill Lepore, the New Yorker writer, American historian, and founding host of our show. These are incredible essays on everything from the history of cryogenics to the Silicon Valley gospel of disruption. And at the end of each essay, I interviewed Jill about her craft as a writer and how she's thinking about the themes of these essays. now.

This is a crazy origin story. I don't think I've ever told this before.

I really loved having these conversations with Jill, and it was a rare chance to talk to her about how she goes about reading, writing, and the work of history. You can listen to The Deadline on The Last Archive feed, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome back to Red Pilled America. As Sound of Freedom was becoming a right-wing phenomenon, Andrew Tate was becoming a conservative media darling. For those of you unfamiliar with him, Andrew Tate is an American-British media personality, an ex-kickboxer who has become sort of an anti-feminist, toxic masculinity icon.

If I were to get on a plane, and that plane was to fly into the eye of a hurricane, there was a 50% chance of it crashing, I'd want a male pilot, because I think that males are better under stress and under pressure. I think they're less likely to get emotional in a life or death situation. That's why they make better soldiers. That doesn't make me misogynist. That doesn't make me sexist.

Over the course of about two years, Tate had a meteoric rise among young males who were frustrated about the feminization of men, and had racked up over 10 million followers on the X platform, formerly known as Twitter. By July 2023, he'd become a regular on big conservative media shows.

We think Tate's views about men very much deserve a hearing. So we flew to Romania to talk to him.

Tucker, Carlson, Candace Owens, Patrick McDavid, and others were giving their enormous platforms to Andrew Tate.

Andrew Tate. Long time. I know, it's been a very long time.

Now, it wasn't troubling that they were interviewing the man. The problem was, just as the entire conservative media complex was making the issue of sex trafficking the hot new cause du jour with Sound of Freedom, many within conservative media were also promoting Andrew Tate, who was literally on house arrest in Romania, awaiting trial for credible sex trafficking allegations. Many social media users complained that when Tucker interviewed Tate, he let him lie about the charges against him, and there were plenty of reasons to be upset with Tucker. On camera, Andrew Tate openly claimed to have built a pornography empire by deceiving young women into becoming one of his webcam girls.

I was all about trying to get paid. I used sex as a tool to make women love me, so they'd obey me and live in my house and make me money. That's what I wanted. So I was a pimp in that sense. And over time, I just build up this big little empire of webcam girls.

He'd even produced a tutorial on how to pimp women online.

So yeah, on CorporateTate.

This girl's like, okay, well, I'll try it.

Put both girls on camera together the first day, so the new girl can sit there and just sit with the other girl and get drunk.

And that's how I got rich.

So that teaches everything I know from start to finish about not only getting girls, not only obtaining them, but retaining them. Because that's a completely different game as well.

He even recorded himself beating a woman.

So what are you charged with? That's a really good question. I'm charged with being the head of an organized criminal group, which is in charge of recruiting girls to make TikTok videos to steal the money from the TikTok views.

Social media users complained about Tucker's interview. The complaints may have been waived off as just social media trolling. But then an Australian forklift driver entered the scene.

I don't think of myself as a journalist. I think of myself as a filmmaker.

That's Nathan Livingston. Nathan goes by the handle, TheMilkBarTV on the X platform. Nathan watched Tucker's interview of Tate and couldn't believe that the media veteran hadn't called out the accused sex trafficker for the obvious lies he was telling.

It just blew my mind that Tucker appeared hadn't done even just five minutes worth of research. You can find the charges, they're publicly available. You know, I could tell he was lying about what he'd actually been charged with in his upcoming criminal trial. You know, this guy's lying about his charges. You know, people lie about their innocence, but who kind of lies about what they're being charged with?

So Nathan decided to take Andrew Tate's claims in his interview with Tucker and juxtapose those claims with court documents and Tate's previous video confessions.

I'm a forklifter by day, and I do these videos in the spare time that I can kind of pull together. And it really was that first video that I did that went kind of crazy viral.

The video garnered over 11 million views. It went so viral that Candace Owens, who had developed a friendship with Andrew Tate, felt the need to come out in his defense.

So I did see a mashup clip that we're not going to show because I thought it was unfair, I will say that, only because there was no context provided to the clips.

This was the same person that was one of the early conservative personalities that promoted Tim Ballard.

I'm here to discuss this with me is the founder of Operation Underground Railroad, Tim Ballard. He has done way too much. His resume is extensive. We're going to get in that a little bit. But first and foremost, Tim Ballard, welcome to the Candace Owens Show.

Thanks for having me.

And now she was defending a man who'd claimed he was a pimp. On the topic of Andrew Tate, we couldn't rely on the big budgeted, high production value reporting of Candace Owens. We had to turn to a foreigner who produced videos as a hobby.

So I kind of find it funny that me, like an Aussie forklift driver, who's got a wife and a baby, in my spare time, I've kind of just dug deep enough to kind of find these moments of him kind of exposing himself and somehow got that in the world.

Watching how conservative media handled covering the sex trafficking issue became a bit of a crisis moment for us. If people can't turn to conservative media for the truth, where can they turn? We put that question to Nathan.

Oh, I don't know. That's a tough one. That's a tough one.

But when he collected his thoughts, he actually turned back to something Candace Owens had said in the past.

She said for her, she was motivated by what was true and not what was right. And I think that's an intelligent observation in the idea of what's right will kind of change on where the culture's at. And it's kind of aligned with what's popular at the time. But what's true is consistent. And a dedication to the truth may make you unpopular at times.

Which leads us back to the question, what's the purpose of conservative media?

Truth is all we have.

I think actually truth pays.

Red Pilled America is an iHeartRadio original podcast. It's owned and produced by Patrick Karelchi and me, Adriana Cortez, of Informed Ventures. Now you can get ad-free access to our entire archive of episodes by becoming a Backstage Subscriber. To subscribe, visit redpilledamerica.com and click join in the top menu. Thanks for listening.

I'm Jacob Goldstein. I used to host Planet Money. Now I'm starting a new show. It's called What's Your Problem? Every week on What's Your Problem, entrepreneurs and engineers describe the future they're going to build.