It is a text as sordid as it is chilling. And invented from scratch. A blog post, which appeared at the beginning of April among the most shared links on Facebook in France, evokes the discovery of one hundred thousand children and corpses in a tunnel connecting the port of New York to the Clinton Foundation.
The text was taken up on several blogs and also translated into English. A mixture of several recurring motifs in conspiratorial literature (conspiracy of the democratic elites, pedophilia, Satanism), it is not supported by any proven fact.
What the text says
This long text, published on April 5, has the title: “Nearly 100,000 children and corpses were found in a tunnel arriving at the Clinton Foundation in New York! "
Among the main elements:
an underground pedophile slave network has reportedly been dismantled by a special Pentagon division. These malnourished and traumatized children are said to be treated in a special Covid-19 hospital;
the children were allegedly discovered, starved for certain victims of sexual abuse, in a tunnel leading to the Clinton Foundation;
the blood of these children was used to produce an anti-aging substance, adrenochrome, intended for the world elite, which would be satanist.
Why this information is not based on any fact
The text, confused, approximate, spooky and devoid of any serious source, is not based on any proven fact.
There are at least three weaknesses in the story:
- the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), in charge in the United States of the cases of pedocrime, never announced such a discovery;
- pedophile rumors targeting Democrats are a classic marker of far-right conspiracy;
- Adrenochrome does exist, but has nothing to do with the description given here.
Page Contents
1. There has been no pedophile dismantling of this magnitude
In most countries there is a unit responsible for investigating child trafficking. First error: it is managed in the United States by the FBI and not the Pentagon.
Called Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Forces (CEHTTFs, for “intervention forces against the exploitation of children and trafficking in human beings”), it effectively participates in the dismantling of networks, but none has taken place in the New York tunnels.
In 2019, 337 individuals linked to a child pornography site were arrested in 38 countries, including France, following an extensive international investigation. The same year, the FBI allowed the arrest of a Frenchman in possession of 80,000 illegal images. The FBI has also identified and in some cases rescued more than 100 child victims of sexual slavery in the United States after infiltrating a network of online classified ads for escort girls.
The one mentioned here does not appear anywhere. In all, the FBI claimed in the summer of 2019 to have identified or saved more than 6,600 minors since the creation of the CEHTTFs in 2003. The identification of 100,000 children or corpses would have been, by far, the largest dismantling in its history .
2. The Clinton Foundation, a recurring target of false rumors
One of the two offices of the Clinton Foundation, an American NGO created in 1997 for, according to its official website, is in New York, more precisely in Manhattan. "Create economic opportunities, improve public health and generate civic engagement and service" in the United States and around the world.
In addition, a field hospital has been established in Central Park, in the heart of Manhattan, to deal with the Covid-19 epidemic, of which New York was the epicenter in North America. But the rest is just fanciful speculation and assertion: in fact, no human trafficking has been discovered at the Clinton Foundation.
The Clinton Foundation is the recurring object of conspiracy theories. She was, for example, accused in February – at the turn of a simple unsourced Facebook post – of having hatched the death of actor Paul Walker, who would have been on the verge of revealing that the NGO was exploiting children in Haiti.
In recent conspiracy theories, Democrats are regularly accused of human trafficking, such as the “Pizzagate” (a rumor, launched by the far right, accusing Bill Clinton and his family of taking part in parties pedophiles in a New York pizzeria). "There has been a crystallization lately, linked to the fact that these rumors have been particularly taken up and put forward by far-right websites. In these conspiracy theories, we always target our enemies ”, says Julien Giry, doctor and associate researcher in political science at Rennes-I University, specialist in American conspiracy.
In October, a comparable rumor on Before It’s News, a site that specializes in false and fake news, reported that 21,000 children were found in cages discovered in underground tunnels, this time under a Californian military base. Their rescue was once again attributed to the so-called Pentagon Pedophile Task Force, a unit whose existence has never been proven, and which was created, according to American right-wing conspiratorial rhetoric, by Donald Trump.
3. Adrenochrome is not a satanist drug
This adrenaline-derived substance is obtained in the laboratory, not by sacrificing children. Its main effects are to accelerate the heart rate, as AFP Factuel recalls, and not to allow rejuvenation. Its use as a psychotropic drug is extremely marginal.
It owes its reputation mainly to the novel by Hunter S. Thomson, Las Vegas Parano, in which the hero, Raoul, supplied by a satanist dealer, consumes it as a hallucinogen.
Asked where it came from, his supplier explained that it can only be taken from the adrenal glands of a living person, not a corpse. The fictional explanation seems to have been taken in the first degree in conspiratorial literature.
