During a hearing held last week by the House Homeland Security Committee ahead of a possible Republican effort to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas or another Biden official, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) brought up the recently airing feature film Sound of Freedom, which purports to spotlight the worldwide issue of sex trafficking.
The movie has garnered concerns for seemingly using the real-world issue of human trafficking to push ulterior ideologies. Actor Jim Caviezel, who stars in the movie, has promoted conspiracy theories related to QAnon, the far-right worldview that claims the existence of variably defined cabals of Satan-worshiping cannibals who traffic children via systems that often do not, in their description, reasonably relate to physical reality — like in talk of massive tunnel systems spreading under Australia, for instance.
Greene expressed support for the movie and attempted to notch a political win that didn’t relate to what her opponents were actually saying. She asked one of the witnesses whether child sex trafficking is a conspiracy theory, though no prominent voice is claiming as much.
“Is our border a serious issue — the fact that our border is open and the amount of people coming across our border — is that contributing to child sex trafficking?” Greene subsequently asked. The southern border is not “open” according to any reasonable understanding of the phrase, though witness Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies, which generally supports right-wing perspectives on immigration, was broadly in agreement with Greene’s suggestions. Vaughan claimed in general terms there to be a direct connection between the Biden administration’s handling of immigration and the rate of sex trafficking, though she didn’t provide specific evidence in her answers to Greene.
Greene subsequently accused the Biden administration of direct complicity in Americans’ deaths from fentanyl. “It’s not negligence,” she contended. “It’s not that they don’t know it’s happening. They know it’s happening. It’s hard to deny 300 Americans dying every single day from fentanyl. But would you agree that the Biden administration’s policies is helping the Mexican cartels traffic this Chinese poison fentanyl into the United States of America?” The witness Greene was questioning, a former DEA official, was eager to agree.
Check out the hearing below:
