Hey folks! Today, I’m honored to be writing over at “Where Peter Is” for the very first time. I know that a lot of my work at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a paywall, but Where Peter Is is free. I am writing about an absolutely bonkers conspiracy theory website which seems to be in the process of taking over my old tabloid nemesis “Church Militant,” but possibly not. And in the process, I have discovered a truly awful documentary film that had my hair standing on end:
“In addition to Fog, Truth Army highlights a 28-minute documentary called The Tunnels, made by conspiracy theorist Dom Lucre. Lucre, whose real name is Dominick McGee, is an internet personality who was briefly banned from X, allegedly for posting “child exploitation photos,” though Lucre claims it was because he criticized Democrats. The Tunnels is an amateurish documentary perpetuating an antisemitic conspiracy theory that claims (without evidence) that underground tunnels in Brooklyn were being used by an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn for child trafficking and sexual assault. One viewer summarized this portion of the film as Lucre “wandering through some random tunnels in NYC which are full of random junk.”
The film also features a handful of conversations between Lucre and random people on the street discussing child trafficking and praising the trafficking-themed film Sound of Freedom. Sound of Freedom stars Jim Caviezel playing Tim Ballard, the controversial former CEO of Operation Underground Railroad (OUR) who faces criminal and civil charges for sexual assault and harassment and whose claims of rescuing children from traffickers have been challenged by journalists and trafficking experts. As a result of these scandals, Ballard departed OUR and was allegedly excommunicated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons).
Roughly a third of the video consists of an interview with a Jewish child sexual assault survivor, Manny Waks, who comes from and was abused in Australia and not Brooklyn. Waks has denounced the film on his own website; he provides a transcript of the correspondence by which he was tricked into the interview and taken out of context…”
You can read the whole thing yourself right here.
Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In