“I was emotionally upset”: McCarthy moved by “Sound of Freedom” and encourages Biden to watch

During a brief from Capitol Hill to address the status of a grab bag of ongoing legal issues involving Donald Trump and his own stance on the matter of impeaching President Biden, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. wedged in an impassioned review of the QAnon-leaning film, “Sound of Freedom,” which he screened for members of Congress on Tuesday.

“It was difficult. There were moments I was emotionally upset,” McCarthy said with hand to chest, visibly moved by the subject matter. “When you watch and get to the end and you think today, as a policy maker, I would love to sit down and watch this with the president. What is transpiring to these young children? Human trafficking that is going on, let’s not put politics around it. Let’s put these children first.”

As Salon pointed out in last week’s review of the film, “there’s a general lack of clarity concerning most of the plot’s legitimacy,” but that hasn’t stopped the massive hold it’s taken on Republican viewers. “If there’s any beneficiary to this phenomenon perhaps it is Tim Ballard, the former Homeland Security agent and Operation Underground Railroad founder, played by [Jim] Caviezel,” writes Melanie McFarland. “Even that’s debatable since according to multiple reports, Ballard quietly left O.U.R. a week ago, around the time the movie began breaking box office records and reporters started digging into the substance of the allegedly true story on which the movie is based.”