During times of universal deceit, wrote George Orwell, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

Our time can certainly be described as one of attempted universal deceit, as it seems the majority of the media is unceasingly and barefacedly trying to gaslight the public, propagandising for one political side. We can be thankful that in this age of torrential disinformation, the media are largely incompetent at being Pravda.

This ineptitude can be seen in their unwise choice of target.

A curious thing happened on July 4 in American cinemas… Normally, Hollywood studios organise to release their biggest titles around the American Independence Day holiday. This year, the long-awaited fifth Indiana Jones movie and a new Pixar animation were on offer at the ticket booths. However, a little-publicised independent movie about child sex-trafficking became a box-office hit, overtaking Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny to become the top-grossing July 4 movie despite opening in 2,000 fewer theatres. The film, made for a little more than $14 million, has now earned over $80 million since its opening.

You might imagine, if you were a working hack covering the film industry, that this is an interesting story. Your pen might quiver with some enthusiasm to tackle this event from several angles. One could write about the decay of formerly wildly popular franchises, drained of all respect for their own characters as well as their fans. Perhaps there could be some contemplation about why a movie about the darkest of possible subjects – child sex trafficking – would attract so many people in the height of summer, where one is naturally drawn to the lighter side of life. If one is an earnest kind of columnist, they could spend some hours digging deep into the remarkable true story of Tim Ballard, which the movie is loosely based on.

Ballard is a former HDS agent who founded Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), an anti-sex trafficking non-profit organisation. Despite its controversies, OUR claims to have rescued thousands of children and women from sex slavery across the world.

Oddly, left-wing media has taken a unified approach to the film, inexplicably determined to tie the movie to QAnon conspiracy, (a sprawling extreme right-wing conspiracy theory that includes accusations of paedophilia and child exploitation among the political and social elite).

The Guardian, despite wagging its literary eyebrows and fanning the conspiratorial air, concedes there is nothing actually in the film propagating QAnon nonsense. But, aha! ‘The first rule of QAnon: you don’t talk about QAnon where the normals can hear you,’ says the article.

Rolling Stone does its best to insult moviegoers with the title of its review – ‘Sound of Freedom is a superhero movie for dads with brainworms.’ The article appears convinced that the moviegoers’ emotional reactions in the theatre must be the dribblings of QAnon-transfixed luddites, instead of people being engrossed in a gripping movie.

CNN invited the author of several books about QAnon and conspiracy theories to discuss the movie. Unsurprisingly, they said the movie is ‘being marketed to either specific QAnon believers or to people who believe all of the same tenets as QAnon, but claim they don’t know what it is’.

It is almost as if child sex trafficking does not exist outside of the realm of QAnon conspiracy.

In truth, the sexual exploitation of children does not get close to the amount of attention that it deserves. According to the International Justice Mission, almost 1.7 million children are exploited in sex trafficking, a filthy ‘industry’ that generates 150 billion dollars each year.

This mind-numbing and stomach-churning statistic should shame the flippancy of the media at large who casually brush aside a movie that, by all accounts, does a great job in alerting people to this Chthonic phenomenon. In contrast, the movie has a 100 per cent audience score from over 10,000 ratings according to Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing, as well as a 72 per cent rating from professional reviewers. Since its opening, the movie has been picked up by a further 600 cinemas, and its weekly revenue has increased, against the normal trend.

We might also remind ourselves that some of these publications wrote warmly of Cuties, a French film that shows underage girls twerking in a sexualised manner which caused controversy for streaming service Netflix. Rolling Stone, which was critical of The Sound of Freedom’s connection to fact, held high praise for The Woman King, a movie so far removed from its supposed historic inspiration that it was verging on the laughable.

Even if there were small but tangible links to QAnon via those involved in the production, it would no more handcuff the movie to QAnon conspiracy than insisting Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible franchise is somehow Scientology-adjacent. After all, he is the producer as well as the star of many of his films.

It seems clear that this movie is being attacked for narrow ideological reasons. It boggles the mind that nitpicking films that raise awareness about those fighting against child sex trafficking is the hill so many want to die on.

Paedophilia is a scurge that has, in the past, been championed by left-wing luminaries. It is a dark stain on the cultural elite, whether they like it or not. The parallel call to sexualise children and saturate the education system with inappropriate content is equally depressing. Many parents despair at drag queen story hour for primary schoolers, especially with the introduction of sexual content to grade one children where they are exposed to cartoons that discuss erections and masturbation. Meanwhile, what many view as pornographic books are being made available in public school libraries.

I feel like there is very little I need to write about why protecting children from sexualised elements is necessary. Those who think otherwise will probably not read The Spectator Australia. But there is a great need to raise awareness about the increasing sexualisation of children, and to praise those who fight against this terrible industry, whether that be in real life or in film.