This was announced by the Conservative Political Action Conference, an influential MAGA madhouse that wants to brutalize conservative values ​​again

recently

that disgraced anti-human trafficking pseudo-hero Tim Ballard will speak at his annual meeting this month.

For those unfamiliar with Ballard, he made a name for himself among the Qanon conspiracy crowd as a supposed savior of sex-trafficked children, carrying out questionable missions to snatch children from the hands of abusers in far-flung lands. A group of women then accused him of sexual misconduct, which he denies.

Last summer, actor Jim Caviezel played Ballard in “The Sound of Freedom.” The not-so-reality-based film shocked the establishment by raking in $250 million at the box office.

It turns out that many people want to #savethechildren, or at least fantasize about it, regardless of reality.

While saving children from sex trafficking is something we all agree is right, few people want to do the difficult work of protecting girls and boys who are trafficked on America’s streets every day. It’s not glamorous, and it’s not what most of us think.

While anyone can be a victim of sex trafficking, regardless of race or gender, the reality is that most victims in the U.S. are black and brown children, who too often grew up in poverty and generational trauma.

While some may have been brought from other states or even countries, most come from our California cities and towns, and can be found for sale on Sepulveda Boulevard in Los Angeles, Capp Street in San Francisco, Stockton Boulevard in Sacramento, and hundreds Others. real world and internet back alleys.

Some are trafficked by strangers, but most know the person profiting from their bodies.

They can all use our help.

Ballard does not save these victims, whose misery is both visible and ignored. But Maggie Krell does.

Krell is an assistant attorney general from California who headed the state’s Special Crimes Unit (think “Special Victims” if this were a television show) and is now running for the state Assembly to represent a district in Sacramento to represent.

“Maggy is a prosecutor first, but she has a heart for survivors, and she leads with her heart,” Ashlie Bryant told me. Bryant is the founder of the 3 Strands Global Foundation, which fights human trafficking

educationeducation

children about how it really works, and helping survivors with assistance such as job placement.

The first time I wrote about a case involving Krell, she didn’t want me to use her name. Unlike Ballard, Krell does not seek publicity.

This was during the era

from President Trump

when children were separated from their parents at the border and essentially kidnapped without responsibility. Krell was Planned Parenthood’s chief attorney at the time, but she couldn’t stand what the government was doing. So she volunteered to help.

She finished at at

the

Port Isabel Detention Center near Brownsville, Texas, where she was assigned to assist a migrant I’ll call Patricia. Patricia was separated from her six-year-old son Alessandro and had no idea where he was or if she would ever see him again.

Krell discovered that the government had listed Alessandro as an unaccompanied minor

after arriving at the border

, without any connection to Patricia. The only way

Krell could do them

Locate

D

the child was

by searchingto searching

Through

Everything

the identification numbers issued to people apprehended by the border police

the day mother and son arrived, that day,

and track down the copies handed out just before and after Patricia got hers.

Krell got lucky with that bit of detective work and found Patricia’s son. She then fought to get asylum for both of them, then picked up Patricia and drove her to pick up her child.

I met Alessandro shortly afterwards

department

at the Fourth of July parade in my Sacramento neighborhood, where he rode a bicycle Krell bought him. Today, Patricia has a legal job and Alessandro is thriving.

The next time I wrote about Krell was when

she

represented Keiana Aldrich, a young woman who was a victim of sex trafficking from the age of 12, imprisoned for a crime related to her sex trafficking, and then sexually assaulted while in prison. During the pandemic, when prisons were on lockdown and mental health care was scarce, Aldrich tried to take her life.

Krell instead helped her get a pardon from the governor.

Like Patricia, Aldrich is now a hardworking mother of two who sees all that life has to offer for herself and her family.

“Maggy took everything that was good out of me because I thought I wasn’t going to make it,” Aldrich told me. “She helped me survive, to be honest, and to this day she still helps me survive. She’s bringing the future forward for women.”

I could tell you about more cases, some involving sex trafficking and some just plain

about

vulnerable women who needed help.

Krell is the attorney credited with shutting down Backpage.com, one of the largest marketplaces for the online sex trade. When Roe vs. Wade was destroyed, she devised a new legal strategy to help protect women’s online privacy. When an abusive father shot and killed his three daughters in Sacramento, she intervened to help the mother avoid deportation and allow her family to attend the funeral.

She is someone who actually saves children, and that is why I hope she is elected to the General Assembly. So she can help California better rescue the girls and boys trafficked on the streets, and all the vulnerable people who need help before they end up in such dire circumstances.

But it’s also important that we understand what saving children really means by recognizing Krell and others like her, since the idea has become so corrupted by politics.

After Qanon began to fade in popularity, those who wanted to keep its energy alive changed the idea of ​​saving trafficked children to protecting all children.

There was a conspiratorial turn from the far right to focus on LGBTQ+ people, especially transgender people, as dangerous predators who “groom” children for harmful purposes. The slogan Save Our Children (there is also a non-profit organization called Save Our Children that has been unfairly drawn into this madness) has now become Leave Our Kids Alone, a skillful political feint that puts fear over reality.

She has positioned herself as an organic parental rights movement, which she is not.

“American moms and dads should get a veto over anyone who teaches far-left gender ideologies to their children without parental consent.” Trump recently told this to a cheering crowd, which suggests that public schools should be shut down to stop “indoctrination,” whatever that means. Trump is the headliner at CPAC, the commander and leader of hate.

Meanwhile, children are still being trafficked on the streets, in cheap hotels, on the internet and in our own neighborhoods.

Like Trump, Tim Ballard will go to his MAGA convention in a few days and likely give a rousing, self-aggrandizing speech showing how much he cares about children. Men will cheer and women will cry over the fate of these unknown innocents drawn into sexuality

lie

slavery.

But if we really care about saving children from human trafficking, we need to ditch the propaganda and hate and support people, like Krell, who want progress, not praise. The people who want children to be safe, not politicized.

Because we really have to save the children, even when no one is looking.