Chet Hanks Promotes ‘Sound of Freedom’ Despite QAnon Constantly Calling His Dad a Pedophile

Chet Hanks, the perennially awful son of Tom Hanks, promoted the QAnon-pilled Christian thriller Sound of Freedom in his Instagram story Sunday night, suggesting everyone flock to see the controversial film about an anti-trafficking activist. “Everyone should go see Sound of Freedom,” he wrote. “It blows my mind that it took an independent film for the facts of what’s going on in the world to be revealed. Cuz you definitely won’t see it in any of our media.”

The show of support would be fairly eyebrow-raising from any public figure given the film’s reliance on unabashed right-wing propaganda—but it’s especially disorienting coming from Chet Hanks. For the last couple years since his dad, Tom, became one of the very first celebrities to announce he had covid in March 2020, the actor has been relentlessly targeted by unhinged far-right QAnon conspiracy theories. Hanks’ broad popularity and indelible place in pop culture have only rendered him a more perfect QAnon boogeyman.

Some QAnon followers don’t even believe the elder Hanks is alive, since a viral article from a fake news site posited that he was killed by the U.S. military for (imagined) child sex crimes. The actor’s 2020 video announcing he had covid, some Q followers argue, was simply a front for his military execution by lethal injection. Others point to the baseless claims made by minor Vanderpump Rules star-turned-vocal-Q-follower Isaac Kappy, who called Hanks a pedophile without any evidence and then died shortly after from what was determined to be a suicide. Kappy’s death only further inflamed fringe conspiracy theorists, as you might imagine.

Sound of Freedom, for those blessed with the gift of blissful ignorance, tells the story of a former Department of Homeland Security agent who quits his job because the U.S. government isn’t taking enough action to stop pervasive child trafficking. The agent is based on the real-life man of the same name, Tim Ballard, who founded the Our Underground Railroad (OUR) organization to stop child trafficking. Ballard has very publicly embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory that the world is governed by a Satan-worshiping, cannibalistic cabal of pedophiles that consists mostly of Hollywood elites and Democratic politicians who run a child sex trafficking ring and drink children’s blood to stay young. The star of Sound of Freedom, Jim Caviezel, has also publicly pushed QAnon theories.

Chet Hanks’ support for Sound of Freedom comes as right-wingers celebrate the movie as revolutionary and push yet another conspiracy theory that it’s being suppressed by theaters and the media. They point to its status as an independent film and rejection from multiple major studios, and Chet’s Instagram story echoes this narrative: “you definitely won’t see it in any of our media,” he wrote, surely imagining himself as a brave, free-thinking hero.

Of course, as multiple journalists have pointed out, Ballard’s OUR has a complicated history of distortion, fabrication, and, as Vice put it in 2020, “outright falsehoods” to brandish its image and spread hysteria. While QAnon is a relatively new far-right internet fad, the right has long been pushing hysterical, inaccurate narratives about child sex trafficking to bolster support for conservative ideology and traditional gender roles that supposedly keep children safe—while studies have shown QAnon fantasies actually put trafficking victims in greater peril.

In any case, the least surprising aspect of all of this is that Chet Hanks would buy into the hype surrounding a movie rooted in a far-right conspiracy theory, even if it means all but siding with the hordes of online freaks who spend their days harassing his own father. Of course he would! This is the founder of “white boy summer” who attempts to speak in patois, rails against “cancel culture,” fetishizes Black women, and is accused of alarming acts of domestic violence. At this point, I’m just waiting for his pro-QAnon rap music video to drop.