#2817: Thomas Ertl

Veterans Today (VT) is an infamous conspiracy website focusing (primarily) on various anti-semitic conspiracies about, well, virtually any event taking place anywhere in the world, including, in particular, Holocaust denialism; VT did, for instance, famously publish (VT editor) Jim Fetzer’s Sandy Hook truther conspiracy theories (‘Did Mossad death squads slaughter American children at Sandy Hook?’).

 

Most of all, however, VT is a Russian propaganda outlet consistently pushing the Kremlin party line, and it is formally partnered with several Russian institutions – like New Eastern Outlook – as well as with with the Iranian state media outlet Press TV. Thomas Ertl is among the writers for VT who toe the Kremlin party line: His February 2022 piece ‘The Ukraine Crisis: Facts Versus Lies — An American Christian Perspective’, for instance, is an attempted justification of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in which Ertl also claims e.g. that it is a lie that Ukraine is a sovereign country.

 

We assume that VT’s Ertl is the same Ertl as the Florida homebuilder and former member of the Council for National Policy who in 2016, for the dominionist Oak Initiative, published a gloriously insane rant about the Access Hollywood video, the release of which Ertl blamed on “the establishment”. The Establishment, you see, is “desperate” to “destroy” Trump because Trump is a threat to “their plans for their New World Order and surrender of U.S. sovereignty”, including “the big banks, and multi-national corporations” [he seems somewhat unclear on Trump’s background]. But more importantly, Trump challenges the satanic underpinnings of The Establishment: “Who of us can know the will of God and plan He has for our great country? But can you not see He is up to something big in the candidacy of Donald Trump?” asks Ertl, asserting (he may be among the first to do so) that Trump may be “a modern-day Cyrus and as President a great defender of the Christian religion.” The Establishment is also working with mainstream media (“deep state papers”) to “keep the pedophilia and assorted sexual perversions of their political associates under wraps.”

 

Diagnosis: For all intents and purposes a Russian bot, and a fine example of how toeing the Kremlin party line, anti-semitism, QAnon and religious fundamentalism blends together to in the dark, rotten stew of hatred in which the US is currently mired and which rather seriously threatens to topple the whole civilization project.