At this time, Ballard’s reputation as a heroic anti-trafficking expert was at a peak. His rhetoric around trafficking—that it’s the world’s largest criminal enterprise, carried out with impunity due to the negligence and incompetence of the federal government generally and Democrats specifically—had become incredibly popular. QAnon believers took a particular interest, especially after Ballard appeared to support a false conspiracy theory that furniture company Wayfair sold children online by saying that “with or without Wayfair,” the selling of children online was “common.” (Jim Caviezel, who played Ballard in Sound of Freedom, has lent overt support to QAnon beliefs; Ballard, he claimed, taught him that traffickers extract a substance from children’s bodies that “elites” then inject to preserve their own youth. An OUR spokesperson denied at the time that Ballard had explained this to Caviezel.) As this was playing out, the QAnon-tinged Save the Children movement became a driving force in Republican politics, and Ballard himself began to eye a run for the US Senate.