Kris Goldsmith: The Anti-Fascist Agenda

Ken Harbaugh:

Hi everyone, it’s Ken. Before we start, I want to share some exciting news: We’ve paired with Meidas Touch, so you can now watch these interviews on YouTube. Just search for the Meidas Touch YouTube channel, or click the link in the show description. Thanks, and enjoy the episode.

Kris Goldsmith:

Anti-fascism is not just an idea. It's a way of life. These neo-Nazis are dedicated to spreading propaganda, to recruiting, to radicalizing people every day, to pushing the Overton window so that the Republican party starts to use their hateful rhetoric against minorities, against the LGBTQ plus community. We have to be anti-fascists, have to be just as dedicated.

Ken Harbaugh:

I'm Ken Harbaugh, and this is Burn the Boats, a podcast about big decisions.

My guest today is Kris Goldsmith, an Iraq combat vet who studies disinformation and far right movements. He's the founder of Task Force Butler, an organization of veterans who aim to disrupt online extremist activity and radicalization, and encourage those who have fallen victim to its disinformation to leave that path of destruction.

Kris, it's probably been a year plus since we've had you on. Welcome back to Burn the Boats.

Kris Goldsmith:

Thanks, man. It's great to be here.

Ken Harbaugh:

When we last talked, the idea of civil war being taken seriously was, I don't know that it was even part of our conversation, but it's part of every conversation now. Almost everywhere I look people are on our side, I guess, raising the warning flag. On the other side, they're salivating over the prospect. To what do you attribute this change in tone to?

Kris Goldsmith:

Well, just a few days ago, or it might have been yesterday as we're recording this, Senator Lindsey Graham basically said that MAGA is going to go out and riot if Trump is ever held to account for any of the laws that he may have broken. And while there's a bunch of discussion about, is Graham making a threat, is he irresponsible for talking this way, but frankly, he's accurate in what he's saying. MAGA maniacs will riot if and when the former president is held to account, whether it has to deal with stealing documents that belong to the United States government, regardless of their classification, or anything else that he's ever done.

The use of the term civil war evokes the idea of two sides going out with guns and shooting each other. It won't be that organized should there be some sort of mass violence. There is not going to be some split in the military where we've got a north-south type of situation. But what we will see is stochastic terrorism. We will see people like Trump, or other fascist-like politicians, like Ron DeSantis or J.D. Vance, who use their platforms to stir up their base, to inspire terrorist attacks like the attempted FBI shooter from a few weeks ago. He was responding to this stolen election lie. And we're likely to see more of that before things start to cool down.

Ken Harbaugh:

I think that's a really illuminating phrase, stochastic terrorism. In my prep for this, I looked it up and it describes exactly what's going on. You have these politicians you refer to, who create this environment, this condition, this permission structure for others to go out and perpetrate those acts of violence. We've had other guests talk about cell-style terrorism and the danger of lone wolves, but there is some real culpability at the top driving this narrative and this mood of resentment and anger that is infecting these groups that are actually pulling the triggers, right?

Kris Goldsmith:

Yeah. And this is not a new concept. It's not new to the MAGA movement. The MAGA bomber that people seem to have forgotten about was years ago, trying to mail pipe bombs to CNN. January 6th was not a spontaneous event. It wasn't just led by Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, the Proud Boys on the ground, it wasn't just led by the Steve Bannons in the war room and the General Flynns who were more or less providing the intelligence structure for this insurgency. This type of violence is fueled by, like you said, this permission structure where they're labeling their opposition as enemies, as enemies of freedom, people who are trying to take things away from you. That animates people to vote, yes, but there's a line of responsibility between saying they're coming after your healthcare versus they're coming after your freedom, they are socialists, being the Democrats, Joe Biden, AOC, whoever else is a target, saying that they're going to try and ruin your life in all sorts of fantastical ways. That is where things start to get dangerous.

Ken Harbaugh:

It is telling that Joe Biden and democratic leaders are encouraging Democrats and freedom-loving actual patriots to go out and vote while Lindsey Graham and others are inciting their followers to riot. I mean, I don't think there has been a clearer distinction between two major political parties and their belief in the fundamental value of democracy.

Kris Goldsmith:

Yeah. I think that it's something that we should note anytime that someone like Lindsey Graham comes up, that he served in uniform for decades. This is a man who understands strategy, understands the concepts of insurgencies, and he understands what it takes to inspire violence. He's not a stupid man. He is a lawyer. For him to be going out and saying that there will be riots without condemning that this will happen, without saying, but there shouldn't be because this is America and we solve our problems by voting, by talking to one another, by trying to change each other's minds, not trying to kill each other, that is part of a disturbing trend that we've seen in these former high ranking officials who will stand on their former military rank to create this permission structure for civilians to use violence.

Ken Harbaugh:

Let's drill down into that for a minute because one of your main focus areas is on the radicalization of veterans. Obviously, Lindsey Graham knows better, you mentioned J.D. Vance, former Marine, who knows better, but you have also described the broader population of veterans in this country as economically efficient targets. Can you explain why there is such a focus by these disinformation purveyors on veterans?

And I'll add another footnote to this, the FBI shooter in Cincinnati, who you brought up earlier on, was himself a Navy vet. Unlike Graham or J.D. Vance, probably a true believer, I mean, you don't become a trigger-puller cynically. He actually thought he was following his commander's orders.

Kris Goldsmith:

Yeah. So the reason why I got into what I'm doing, which is essentially hunting Nazis online, and that's why I created my business Sparverius and why I'm launching this nonprofit, Task Force Butler Institute, to train other veterans to identify and intervene when they see disinformation and growing extremism.

Now, why are veterans targeted by extremists, by those who spread disinformation? Like you said, we're economically efficient targets. What does that mean? If you can change the mind of a veteran, if I am trying to get a veteran to buy a product, let's say a Ford F-150, the electric one, the Lightning. If I convince a veteran to buy that pickup truck, they are more likely than if I were to invest that time in changing someone else's mind, they're more likely to get their friends and their families on board with the same thing, to turn an idea into a movement.

Whether it's the Russians that I used to study years ago, targeting service members and vets with disinformation campaigns, or the Republicans who have always been good about trying to recruit veterans to vote their way, or the far right, they are going after veterans for the same reason that Fortune 500 companies do. Those things are all different, but Fortune 500 companies go for veterans because when we go to school we're more likely to graduate than our peers, we're more likely to receive higher GPAs, we're more likely to start small businesses, we're more likely to be community leaders, and that could be anything from running for office to being a football coach. So when any propagandists, source of disinformation, wants to invest in a target, it makes economic sense for them to target veterans because they're more likely to bring others. These veterans that they're targeting are more likely to bring others along for the ride.

Ken Harbaugh:

I'd love for you to tell us a little bit more about Task Force Butler. I've known you for a while so I have your backstory, but for your lead in, can you give us a refresher on Kris Goldsmith, how you got to where you are and what you're doing now with this incredible initiative to engage veterans in fighting back?

Kris Goldsmith:

Sure. So Task Force Butler Institute and this idea of using open source intelligence techniques to discover and disrupt disinformation and extremism is actually built on years of my research at a veteran's organization. I used to work for Vietnam Veterans in America. It's one of the congressionally chartered veteran service organizations, one of the most impactful and important in the country. It's part of what they call the big six up there with the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Disabled American Veterans, et cetera. While I was at Vietnam Veterans America, it was an organization by and for people in their 70s, so naturally being the Millennial in the office, even though my job was policy and government affairs, I was also helping their communication staff manage their social media pages. And one day I noticed that there was an imposter Facebook account using our logo, our name, photos of our CEO, of Vietnam Veterans America, and I also noticed that they had a quarter of a million followers in what was essentially a brand new Facebook page. Compare that to our 10-year-old, at the time, Facebook page that had something like 75, 80,000 followers. So when I first saw this, I'm thinking, "Oh man, we got to reach out to this member and we got to offer them a job because they're doing a great job promoting our organization." Long story short, I, in studying this page, came to realize it was actually a foreign intelligence operation. And it wasn't just a Facebook page, it was an entire digital ecosystem, multiple websites, Instagram, Twitter, et cetera. And it was connected back to, we think, the Internet Research Agency of Russia.

Now, two years later, after that first discovery on behalf of Vietnam Veterans America, I published a nearly 200-page report about the 10 different ways that foreign entities target troops, veterans, and our families with everything from those Russian type disinformation campaigns to things like identity theft and the targeting of gold star families. But the one common thread that came through almost all of those chapters, to build audiences, to build engagement, was the injection of racist and xenophobic narratives into veteran spaces by these foreign groups. And this could be the Russian Intelligence Research Agency, Internet Research Agency, or it could be literally those Nigerian scammers targeting individuals for romance scams. And over time, I published that in 2019, since then, all of the time, the years that I spent looking outwards at the threats to the United States and to our community, those threats no longer seem nearly as relevant compared to the domestic threats.

Leading up to January 6th, I was working for a private firm, collecting intelligence, infiltrating hate groups and unlawful militias and writing reports, basically intelligence reports for a private company. I don't know where they went. I signed an NDA so I can't really talk about any of the details, but I can say that my intelligence reports didn't make it to the right people ahead of January 6th. And on that day, on January 6th... My workstation here looks like a space station, I've got screens from here to here, I watched the insurrection from the perspective of the insurrectionists, seven different screens, seven different live feeds all around the Capitol, in the building. I know the building, I've worked in DC on and off for years, that's when I decided I need to go my own way, launch my own company, it's called Sparverius, and I had every intent of just being a consultant and working in security, making sure that my reports make it to the right people to try and save lives and preserve democracy.

But every time I talk about what I do, I've had veterans reaching out to me on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Twitter saying, "Hey, how can I get involved?" And it took me a couple years, but I finally came up with the idea of Task Force Butler Institute, which would train veterans, not just to perform open source intelligence investigations, but to work as part of a team using a centralized database, which would essentially become an extremism database where we are able to track the real-world activities and online activities of everyone from a General Flynn-type-figure who's massively influential in the QAnon movement to individual veterans who've raided the Capitol as part of the insurrection.

Ken Harbaugh:

You're mostly, it sounds like, focused on veterans. I would love to get your sense though of what kind of problems we face in terms of radicalization and extremist ideology within the active duty military. Because a lot of the talk of civil war, I think, confuses the two, and it's an important distinction.

Kris Goldsmith:

Yeah. So one of the problems with studying extremism in the military is there are a lot of powerful forces out there, be it the Pentagon or politicians, who don't want to play along in making those studies effective. When a member of Congress asks the Pentagon, and they genuinely want to know, how many extremists have you kicked out of the military in the last five years, is the rate increasing? The Pentagon... None of the branches have a good answer, and that's because they hadn't been tracking that metric. They hadn't been tracking a metric of, "We gave this person an Article 15 because they're a white supremacist. We kicked them out. We court-martialed them because they're a white supremacist." That is just simply not a box that is being checked in the massive data set that the military has on everyone who serves, has served. And every time advocates like myself and academics try to get the military to study this, Republican politicians primarily step in and say, "Oh, this is all protected by the First Amendment. We don't want thought police investigating our military," etcetera, cetera. And you get caught in this vicious cycle of we can't study the problem because the Republicans won't let us and then they say, "Well, there's not actually a problem so we can't justify the studies." So we are still stuck in that cycle.

The latest development on this is the Senate Armed Services Committee, every Republican plus the independent Senator Angus King, who I have a lot of respect for and who has been right on issues like this, essentially said that any money that DOD spends on preventing extremism or researching extremism is wasted and it is offensive to troops, and that is profoundly disappointing. They wrote this down in this year's Senate Armed Services NDAA report. I hope before the end of the year, we can convince them that that is unhelpful at best, but it's not looking good. I don't think that this year's NDAA will mandate that the Pentagon get to the bottom of researching the problem of extremism as it pertains to active duty troops.

Ken Harbaugh:

How do you think about and address the First Amendment concern? Because hate speech is still in most contexts, protected speech. How do you deal with the fact that we are one of the few modern democracies that holds that protection sacrosanct?

Kris Goldsmith:

Yeah. So the First Amendment protects people from the government coming in and saying, you can't say that or we're going to punish you for saying this. And everybody knows the limits, you can't scream fire in a crowded movie theater because those words can inspire panic and hurt people, so there are realistic restrictions on that. People can be held responsible for damages that they cause for screaming fire in a theater. There's nothing about the First Amendment that stops a private entity like Task Force Butler or me, from holding people accountable for the rhetoric that they use online, for the speech that they use online, and I think that's a good thing. We don't necessarily want the FBI to be controlling everything that's said on the internet, to be spying on everyone. You can get dystopian with this kind of government watching everything like a panopticon situation. We don't want that. But there's no reason that if an extremist, if a neo-Nazi is trying to use hateful rhetoric to create fear in a minority population that someone like myself or a member of Task Force Butler can highlight, "Well, this extremist works for X company," or, "They are planning to protest a gay bar. And we know this person to have brought weapons to previous protests." So there's nothing to stop me as a private individual, as an American using my First Amendment right to educate other people, to educate other Americans about the threats, about the people who are making the threats so that our communities can protect themselves in ways that maybe we don't want law enforcement to be involved.

Ken Harbaugh:

I sometimes found myself, in my days, running a large veteran's organization, reminding staff and volunteers that while I might not have a constitutional right to tell them what they could and couldn't say, they didn't have a constitutional right to a job at the organization. I think that's what you're getting at, right?

Kris Goldsmith:

Exactly. Yeah. And a neo-Nazi has, and this is becoming a thing in Florida, swastika-bearing neo-Nazis standing out and protesting every single weekend. Now, they have a right to do that. But me and my organization also have a right to identify that masked individual and let their communities know that the person in their community is a neo-Nazi, and that those neo-Nazi beliefs are potentially life-threatening to their community.

It goes down to a specific example. So I infiltrated the neo-Nazi group Patriot Front, and I've been doing it over and over for a couple years, but in 2020, I infiltrated them, found out where Thomas Russo, the founder and leader of this organization, found out where he lived. Well, after he got arrested, things like his address, his biographical details became public information. So I took that public information and when an article came out explaining how Patriot Front is a fascist racist organization who advocates for a white ethno state through genocide, I took that, made it into an information packet and engaged in a community notification campaign.

I drew out a circle on a map and got 200 addresses for everyone who lived within a quarter mile of Thomas Russo, then in Grapevine, Texas now in Haslet, Texas. And I spent my own money, hundreds of dollars, to print out hundreds of copies of these reports, stuff these envelopes, buy the stamps and mail it to his whole community. And the reason that I did that is because I know there are minorities who live in that community, and if I had a kid who lived down the block from a neo-Nazi I would want them to know that if they see the red Camaro with the goofy kid with the cowboy hat driving down the street, that they should get out of the street, because this neo-Nazi might just one day choose to kill a kid of color.

Ken Harbaugh:

My sense, and I've gotten to know you over the past year and change, is that you don't do anything halfway, and I'm wondering, and I feel like I do know you well enough to ask this, if the look is intentional. For those who are just listening to the podcast, Kris is like a character out of Sons of Anarchy. Does that help you get in?

Kris Goldsmith:

Yes. So someone who looks like me, and I have a bald head and a pretty long beard, people will say things to me if I go to a bar that they wouldn't say to other white people with the tattoos and stuff. I look like I could be one of those MAGA heads. I look like I could be in a militia. Right now, I'm wearing a collared shirt, but if I take off my shirt, people make assumptions. When I go to DC and I put on a suit and tie, and you see the bald head and the big beard, everyone thinks I'm an undercover cop, including cops. So I recognize I've got a different kind of white privilege, I look like I could be law enforcement, or I could be an undercover cop, or I could be a neo-Nazi, and I use that as part of my work to gather intelligence in the field.

Ken Harbaugh:

You've been doing this for a long time, you also have an appreciation of history, and I'm wondering if you think that the Nazism that is so obvious today, the white supremacy that we're being inundated by is on the rise or is it just bubbling to the surface and it's always been there but has permission to expose itself now?

Kris Goldsmith:

It is absolutely on the rise. So again, I mentioned Patriot Front before, this is a neo-Nazi group that is primarily Gen Z and some Millennials. What makes them different from a lot of other neo-Nazi, skinhead, white supremacist organizations is they have an age range from 18 to 35. They are specifically targeting young folks so that they can not just have an easier time, I think, pushing propaganda on them because these are folks who don't have as much life experience and who might be angry and more likely to be economically insecure and therefore easier to manipulate. But when they're pushing these white supremacist ideas, they're not just using racial slurs. It's not like the racism that people might have seen on the schoolyard when they were kids, like the casual racism, they are reading stuff written by Mussolini and Hitler and a whole host of other actual fascists, actual neo-Nazis. They think of themselves as adopting a real philosophy. They inundate themselves with video propaganda that rewrites the history of Hitler and makes him look as a great white savior and as the United States as having been manipulated by some shadowy globalist cabal.

So between the online culture or online technology, is the apps that we use to communicate, and things like the pandemic, white supremacist neo-Nazi and extremist organizations have had a recruiting bonanza in a way that just wasn't possible a decade or two ago. The KKK, two decades ago, in order to recruit someone, had to post flyers in their neighborhood or hand out flyers at a pro-life event or something like that. Nowadays, a group like the Patriot Front or the New Columbia Movement, these white supremacist organizations can get on TikTok or Twitter or Facebook, and their propaganda can be seen by millions of people all over the country, all over the world. And the pandemic gave a lot of folks a lot more time online to self-radicalize and to end up in these recruiting pipelines.

Ken Harbaugh:

I want to pivot to what we do about it. Obviously there are private efforts underway like Task Force Butler, but at the policy level, is there a solution?

Kris Goldsmith:

So it's hard for me, as a former advocate. I used to work on things like the GI Bill and healthcare, and every time there's a problem as an advocate it was my job to literally go to congressional staff and be like, "Here's the problem. Here's the evidence of this problem. Here's the solution." I don't have a policy solution for this stuff. What I do have is the idea of imposing costs, social and economic costs on fascists, as a way of life. Anti-fascism is not just an idea. It's a way of life. These neo-Nazis are dedicated to spreading propaganda, to recruiting, to radicalizing people every day, to pushing the Overton window so that the Republican party starts to use their hateful rhetoric against minorities, against the LGBTQ plus community. We have to be anti-fascists, have to be just as dedicated.

One of the most important lessons I think that I ever learned in community college after coming home from the military was in economics 101 about negative externalities. A negative externality is say there's a coal plant next door, they're pumping out coal, unregulated, that smoke comes into my house every day. Everything's black. Now my whole life is just covered in soot. I could get cancer from it. Well, government solves these problems by taxing and regulating that coal plant, not just to prevent danger from happening to me, the neighbor in the future, but to compensate me. They tax them so that I am better off than I had been after being damaged by my neighbor. So these neo-Nazis have been able to operate virtually unopposed for years, recruiting, radicalizing, targeting minority populations to instill fear. What we have to do is take that negative externality and turn it back on them. If they want minority communities to be scared, we have to figure out a way to expose them, expose these individual neo-Nazis and impose social and economic costs. So sometimes that's the justice system. If there's evidence of a hate crime, we can give that to investigators, to state, local or federal law enforcement and maybe the criminal justice system will take care of. More often than not, hate crimes aren't prosecuted, so it's up to us to notify their employer, their wife, their girlfriend, their families, let them know that they've got a neo-Nazi in their life so that they can keep themselves and their community safe. I mean, bottom line is most employers around the country are not willing to employ a known neo-Nazi. So if we can identify someone who's trying to instill fear in minority communities to their employer, that's an economic cost. That is a tax on neo-Nazism. So that's what Task Force Butler is basically founded on, it's the idea of imposing these prices.

Ken Harbaugh:

I think that's great and I applaud the work that you're doing, but I have to imagine that one of the challenges of imagining a policy solution is that one of our major political parties is developing this weird symbiosis with the far right. I mean, the leader of that political party told the Proud Boys to stand by in the event that he lost an election. Correct me if I'm wrong, but is it the Proud Boys that are designated an extremist organization by Canada?

Kris Goldsmith:

Yeah, Canada has recognized the Proud boys as a terrorist organization. And that is not a label that comes lightly. I think it's also notable that the Proud Boys were started by a Canadian, Gavin McInnes. He's also the founder of Vice News, but he has not been associated with them for years. But Gavin McInnes was born in the UK, he's a Canadian citizen, he's been living in the U.S. on a green card. He has made the claim that he recently got his American citizenship, I've seen no proof. As we're reporting this, just last week, Gavin McInnes was doing a show and it was apparently interrupted by what sounded like, they were off-camera, sounded like law enforcement, and he hasn't posted in a few days. So if his home country, if he still is a Canadian citizen, has designated the organization that he started as a terrorist organization, I wonder if the Feds would be willing to hand him over to face justice.

Ken Harbaugh:

I want to finish with a little more on Task Force Butler because the historical reference is not only fascinating, it's opened my eyes. Obviously, well, not obviously, but General Butler is a legendary Marine, but you talk about on your website his involvement in the Bonus Marcher scandal. I had always read about that as an event that drew a bunch of hungry, desperate veterans clamoring for justice, but there's a backstory there to these tens of thousands of veterans gathered on the National Mall. They were being, towards the end, provoked and instigated by industrialists who wanted to overthrow the government. Do I have that right?

Kris Goldsmith:

That's correct. Yeah. So there's a book that I keep on my desk, Gangsters of Capitalism: by Jonathan M. Katz. That is a book about Smedley Butler. Major General Smedley Butler was a man of a lot of contradictions. He was referred to as The Fighting Quaker. The man was an incredibly effective Marine of the World War I era. Now, when he came home and retired into civilian life, the man was one of the most well known Marines ever. He was incredibly well respected, kind of like General Mattis for our generation. He was approached by a group of wealthy industrialists who tried to recruit him into a coup against the United States, and he basically went along with the plot to gather information. Started working with a journalist, so the journalist was there to vet the information that he was getting to vet the story and they called it the Wall Street Coup. They intended to have Smedley Butler lead the Bonus army, who were literally camping out on the National Mall, to storm the United States, Congress, to storm the white house and to take over the United States government.

Ken Harbaugh:

For context, they were demanding things, and for the most part, that were rightfully theirs, but they were also being manipulated by people who were not on the front lines. I'm characterizing it that way because in some ways the parallels to January 6th are striking.

Kris Goldsmith:

Yes. So the Bonus army were the doughboys, the World War I vets had been promised while they were overseas that they would get a bonus for every day that they were overseas fighting the war in a combat zone. When they came home, we were on the gold standard, the treasury only had so much money. They couldn't print it. They couldn't just print more money. And that was one the biggest tensions right now, at this point with these industrialists, getting off the gold standard, printing money, going into debt, that kind of thing. So there was a lot going on behind the scenes.

Now, the Bonus army went down and went to DC because the Great Depression happened and they were destitute. Their families were destitute. And the parallel to what happened in 2020 and 2021 with Trump's insurrection is similar in that those folks who went down to storm the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, they thought that they were entitled to something. They truly believed that the election had been stolen, that their democracy was at risk.

Now, that doesn't make them not responsible, they should be held legally responsible, spend some time in prison, especially the ones who actually committed violence that day. But the manipulation of not just Americans, but American veterans on and around the time leading up to January 6th, goes to show how much of economically efficient targets we were. There have been several hundred people who've been charged. We've seen veterans who were at the core of the planning and execution of the violence that day. And we've seen that those veterans, their presence, their experience helped them to lead the mob on that day. So this is a multi-generational thing that we've seen, people trying to manipulate veterans into destroying our own democracy.

Ken Harbaugh:

Well, Kris, this has been an extraordinary conversation. Thanks so much for joining us. Where can people go to learn more about Task Force Butler?

Kris Goldsmith:

Taskforcebutler.org. You can read a little bit more about the history of General Smedley Butler, you can sign up. And if people want to support us by donating, we absolutely appreciate every dollar that you can send us because we're using it to train veterans to engage in this type of investigation and to hold fascists accountable for what they're trying to do to destroy our democracy from within.

Ken Harbaugh:

Well, keep it up, Kris. It's been great having you on.

Kris Goldsmith:

Thanks a lot, brother.

Ken Harbaugh:

Thanks again to Kris for joining me. You can learn more about his organization at Taskforcebutler.org. You can also find Kris on Twitter and Instagram @KrisGoldsmith85.

Thanks for listening to Burn the Boats. If you have any feedback, please email the team at [email protected]. We're always looking to improve the show.

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Burn the Boats is a production of Evergreen Podcasts. Our producer is Declan Rohrs, and Sean Rule-Hoffman is our audio engineer. Special thanks to evergreen executive producers, Joan Andrews, Michael DeAloia, and David Moss. I'm Ken Harbaugh, and this is Burn the Boats, a podcast about big decisions.