Late Wednesday night, I saw a post on X (formerly Twitter) that had me scratching my head.
I happened to see a tweet from the account of the infamous media outlet Church Militant, which announced it would be ending its operations in April after losing a defamation lawsuit to a New Hampshire priest (which is a good thing, as they’re famous for tabloid gossip and have hurt more than one person I care deeply about). The post was of a seven-minute YouTube video of a young man named Joseph Gallagher, apparently a former employee of Church Militant, standing in front of a blue screen with a display of an ominous-looking logo of a black eagle. And what he had to say was extremely bizarre.
The video was made private soon thereafter and can no longer be viewed, but its contents were summarized in an AP article about Church Militant and its parent company, St. Michael’s Media:
Church Militant’s YouTube channel included a video posted Wednesday featuring a former Church Militant staff member, Joe Gallagher, representing a new organization called Truth Army. He said the group is now managing the assets of St. Michael’s, including the Church Militant site, and is soliciting funds to run the site with a focus more on Catholic spiritual topics than current events.
I also watched the video before it was taken down. This is my synopsis of the video (I put it together from memory, so it may not be totally exact):
Mr. Gallagher began by mentioning that he had worked for Church Militant, but left in 2022, and then worked for “many great and some not-so-great Catholic media companies” in the next 14 months. He then said a prayer for Michael Voris’s soul, saying he hoped to see him in Heaven (after Voris leads a silent life of penance). Gallagher then announced that he was now the CEO of something called “Truth Army.”
Gallagher gingerly admitted that Truth Army was “cultural” rather than “Catholic,” but that it was run by a large Catholic family. He did not mention the family’s name, but he explained that they were behind the very successful documentary Fog. He then said that this family had bought the domain for Church Militant, was managing its assets, and had hired as many Church Militant employees as wanted to be taken on for the new venture, offering them good pay and health benefits.
Gallagher also promised that Truth Army was going to avoid spreading gossip, but would have lots and lots of positive content about how wonderful Catholicism is and how we can deepen our faith. He shared a GiveSendGo fundraiser for Truth Army as well. Then he offered to let people schedule 30-minute personal phone calls with him, for some reason.
To the best of my recollection, those were all the main points covered by the video.
I’d never heard of the “very successful” documentary, Fog, nor the Catholic family behind it. I tried to find a review of Fog on IMDB, but it wasn’t there.
I tried googling “Truth Army” and immediately wished I hadn’t, because I ended up on one of the sketchiest websites I’d ever seen. At first, I wanted to believe that it couldn’t be the right site — that it was another website with the same name. But then I noticed the eagle logo, and Gallagher himself appears in the videos on the website.
The site has only three (possibly AI-generated) articles published so far. Their authors are not named. One article claims in a total absence of evidence that Taylor Swift is a government psy-op and another is about a supposed influx of communist Chinese immigrants at the California border; the third article speculates about President Joe Biden’s mental acuity and the potential consequences.
The website also appears to feature the “very successful” Fog documentary that Gallagher spoke of. However, Fog isn’t really a documentary but a series of four interviews conducted by Gallagher — apparently out of a planned eight — which are only available if you create an account on the site. There is also a video interview with a man named Mario Fratto, a self-described “far-right” Republican candidate for a congressional seat in New York who has supported an initiative to pull COVID vaccines off the market.
All the interviews discuss the COVID-19 pandemic, celebrating the people who denied the safety rules and decrying “tyranny” and “government overreach.” This “documentary” didn’t seem to have any credits either, so the “Catholic family” funding it remains a mystery.
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.
I don’t know why I’m surprised that the organization that says it’s taking over Church Militant seems to be proudly spreading old-fashioned blood libel, but I am.
When I woke up the morning after watching the video, I discovered that the post on X was gone. The link to the YouTube video on my laptop came up as an error message, saying that the video had been set to “Private.” I half-hoped that the whole thing had been some kind of fever dream. But there was a link to the now private announcement video on Gallagher’s own social media. There were the few posts replying in consternation to the deleted post.
Whatever’s going on at Church Militant, I don’t think we’ve heard the last of them.
And whatever’s going on at Truth Army, I suggest you don’t give them any money.
Images: Screenshots from X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, Truth Army.
About the Author: Mary E. Pezzulo is the creator of the Steel Magnificat blog on the Patheos Catholic channel, where she writes about everything from current events to movies to poverty in the Ohio Valley to the kindness of strangers.
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