The Neo-Nazi Hunter Next Door
Kris Goldsmith has seen too many veterans get tricked into equating patriotism with right-wing lunacy. He’s got a plan to turn ex-service members into neo-Nazi hunters
Courtesy of Kristofer Goldsmith
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Iraq War veteran Kris Goldsmith believes “patriot” and “anti-fascist” should be synonymous — and he’s turning that belief into action with the new Task Force Butler. The nonprofit’s tagline gets right to the point: “We are American veterans who hunt neo-Nazis.”
Goldsmith has seen first hand how fascist and militia groups subvert the trappings of patriotism to ensare veterans in right-wing extremism, and he stood up Task Force Butler as a competing force for good. The group draws its name and inspiration from a larger-than-life Marine, Maj. Gen Smedley Butler, who foiled an attempted fascist coup against the New Deal government of FDR in the 1930s.
Task Force Butler is the culmination, for Goldsmith, of a tumultuous life-path. Entering the Army as a teenager, he’d quickly risen to the rank of sergeant. But the horrors of the Iraq War left him with crippling, undiagnosed PTSD. A suicide attempt on the eve of being re-deployed in 2007 got Goldsmith booted from the service with a less-than-honorable discharge.
Stripped of his rank, community, and G.I. Bill benefits, Goldsmith entered a dark spiral, which included sinking down rabbit holes of online extremism. With his one remaining lifeline — healthcare through the V.A. — Goldsmith clawed his way back to the surface. He became a veterans advocate, earned a degree from Columbia, and (four appeals later) finally got an upgrade to an honorable discharge. Along the way, helped secure congressional reforms in 2017 that enable thousands of other vets get medical help and challenge their own “bad paper.”
During the Trump years, Goldsmith worked as chief investigator for Vietnam Veterans of America where he exposed a sophisticated Russian op that targeted U.S. veterans on Facebook to sow racial and political division. For Goldsmith, that open-source intelligence expertise soon gave him a leg up in exposing domestic threats, including fascist groups targeting American youth like Patriot Front.
In the aftermath of the insurrection of Jan. 6, Goldsmith saw a need give patriotic veterans a positive mission — uncovering extremists and insurrectionists in our midst. Task Force Butler’s work centers on exposing the inner workings and public wrongdoing of neo-fascist groups through deep-dive intelligence reports that can give prosecutors the evidence they need go after the hatemongers in court.
The work takes a toll. Goldsmith has been sued, and doxxed by white supremacists. On the day of his interview with Rolling Stone, he called to move our phone call up by several hours. “I have to fly to Asheville to deal with a little Nazi problem,” Goldsmith told me. A local fascist, having identified the home where Goldsmith grew up, has been dropping hate packages on his mother’s porch, including “gift bag” containing a printout of Mein Kampf.
Goldsmith insists he’s undeterred. “I can either sit back and know that these extremists are radicalizing other Americans — exchanging information on how to build a bomb, how to build a small unit and fight as a militia,” he says. “Or I can do something about it. And I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t do anything about it.”
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity:
For a country that won a World War against the Nazis, modern-day America has some very strange hangups about “anti-fascism” — as though being antifa were a bad thing. You don’t shy away from those labels. Tell me why.
We are named after Maj. Gen Smedley Butler, who foiled a fascist plot. There was a coup being planned within the United States — [The Business Plot] — that sought to use Butler as their “Secretary General,” to make the president a figurehead, and establish the fascist United States of America. So the O.G. anti-fascist is a grizzled old Marine who who served in the 19-aughts and ‘10s ‘20s.
My grandparent’s generation served in World War II. They were all anti-fascists. My grandmother’s brother, who died in France, he was an anti-fascist. And really, what the current “antifa panic” boils down to is a right-wing ecosystem that is trying to perpetuate fascism, and racism, and xenophobia and anti-semitism — who have an incentive to see these problems brew in the United States.
And you see veterans as a bulwark against that ecosystem?
As veterans we have sworn an oath to our Constitution — and actually understand it; not like the Oath Keepers, right? We’re the real keepers of that oath. At Task Force Butler, we have figured out a way to continue our service to our nation, in a way that is, for the most part, safe. Most of my guys are anonymous. I’m the only face of it, basically. So not everybody’s getting Nazis visiting their mom’s houses.
You’re quoting the same oath to defend against “all enemies foreign and domestic” that Stewart Rhodes, many other right-wing militias invoke all the time. Are you hesitant at all about using that rhetoric for this project?
No. We’re being very deliberate about it. We’re attempting to reclaim patriotism. Because the word “patriot” and the idea of patriotism has been so corrupted by these insurrectionists — these people who would literally kill their fellow Americans to install a fascist dictator. There’s a hell of a lot of vets out there who are not going to turn away from the American flag because of what these unlawful militias are out there doing. Instead, we’re gonna rally around those same symbols. The other guys wrap themselves in an American flag? They’re cheapening it. I’m not gonna let them steal that from me. We’re gonna take it back.
Tell me about the setup of Task Force Butler.
We’re slow growing. It’s only two dozen volunteers. It’s demanding job; it can be a stressful job: staring at the worst-of-the-worst on the Internet all day. But the veterans who have come to us gain a lot of satisfaction out of the mission. We share a bond — to counter fascism, which we all believe is the single greatest threat to Americans’ freedom, and lives, now in 2023.
How did this work get its start for you?
A buddy of mine I served with called me up out of the blue. He’s a fucking maniac. There’s no other way to explain it. He says: “Hey, I joined this neo Nazi organization, I want you to help me take ‘em down.” When that phone call happened, I was still at Vietnam Veterans of America. And I was about to publish my massive The Troll Report. But I was laid off during COVID in May of the following year. Once I was let go, I decided I’m not really concerned with what the Russians are doing on Facebook. If we’re still talking about Facebook and Twitter, we’re a few years behind the curve. I want to know what the actual white supremacists are doing. The ones who are training to radicalize their fellow Americans and inspire violence through stochastic rhetoric.
So I call my friend back up. And I said, “Tell me about your Nazis.” And we joined Patriot Front.
Patriot Front, for our readers who may not be acquainted, is a group founded in the aftermath of the Charlottesville white nationalist rally. It recruits young men using fascist symbols and anti-semitic U.S. history. But the fascism is cloaked in a veneer of patriotism. They operate in “flash mob” marches, and they often deface public monuments and murals celebrating Black Americans.
The founder, Thomas Rousseau, this kid, 24 years old, has very deliberately wrapped his organization in the aesthetics of red, white and blue — calling themselves Patriot Front. They want to convince Americans that that they represent the quote “real America.”
How did you and your buddy infiltrate?
He does like all of the in-person shit — he was in it from August until November of 2020. And I’m basically serving as remote intelligence gathering. They use Rocket Chat — basically an open source version of Slack. They modified it to make everything posted in their channels disappear after six hours. I’d log in every four hours to take screenshots of all of the evidence that I could — so I could start to predict their behavior, or understand how they could potentially be prosecuted for defacing an MLK mural or something like that.
What else did you suss out?
It seemed, from my guy and I being in there, that they wanted to do something the night of the 2020 election. We had a general understanding. They are super fucking secretive. They don’t let the members know what they’re doing until they find themselves in some strange city with their leader Rousseau saying, “We’re going to do X, Y, and Z this weekend.” He gets his foot soldiers to a city. That’s all they know. They do the thing, and then they get out of town.
So I started talking to a reporter — I’ve got this story for you. I’ll give you guys the exclusive. But the deal is, is you just you’ve got to publish before election day. BuzzFeed publishes story. When the piece first came out, Patriot Front members were all celebrating [on Rocket Chat]. “Oh, this is the best press we’ve ever gotten.” I started taking screenshots of that and posting it immediately to Twitter — making fun of them. Showing that it was an infiltrator. They they knocked me out of the server.
Do you feel like that spooked them? They weren’t a key group in election unrest.
I can’t prove a negative. But I can say that they didn’t pop their heads back up as an organization between the election and the insurrection. They were off the field.
Was this your official line of work at the time?
I was doing it as a hobby. I was working as an intelligence analyst for a private company. But I’m also infiltrating groups like the Three Percenters and recording them talking about “storming” the Georgia State Capitol. And I’m giving all these recordings to the FBI.
When did you take this on full time?
After January 6, I quit [the private firm]. So that way I work out in the open. I’m not doing any sort of secret-squirrel shit. I end up working for nonprofits that put me on TV. And every time I go on TV, I have a ton of vets reaching out to me basically saying, like, ‘Hey, Put me in coach,” like, “I want to go after the bad guys, too.”
For the first year, I tell people like, “No, I’m not going to tell you how to join a neo-Nazi groups, take them down from the inside. Like that is objectively fucking crazy.” But a nonprofit that that I was working for did like the idea of motivating volunteers to get involved in research. We started a pilot program that was Task Force Butler for a few months, before they decided they didn’t actually want to do anything with it.
But I decided it was needed. My motivating factor is I want to make a difference. I want to stop the bad guys. Our volunteers are veterans, they really give a shit. And we felt like we could make this a nonprofit that actually pays us to get the work done. We haven’t figured out that last part yet. [Laughs]
So, busting Nazis — no so lucrative?
We’re very much in an existential moment. We need to find a couple of big-fish donors who want to see a bunch of vets going out and collecting digital Nazi scalps.
You’re speaking figuratively. What does that mean exactly?
Dragging Nazis into court. Our objective is to take these people off field, using the legal system. Civil, criminal, it doesn’t matter to us.
Was Task Force Butler involved in the Unicorn Riot leak of Patriot Front data?
No. But completely coincidentally, that was the date of our first in-person mission as a pilot program. We were on the ground watching Patriot Front in D.C. so that we could intercept their vehicle exchange point and gather intelligence on them in person. When we found out that Unicorn Riot was was dropping this massive data breach, we were very excited. And we’ve we’ve spent the last year going through that half-terabyte of data. We used it to write our Project Blacklisted report — which we created as an instruction manual for prosecutors and civil litigators to take down Patriot Front, rip it out at the roots. Because ultimately, they have been doing violence in the streets — as we saw in Boston and Philadelphia.
We are not going to allow this fascist organization to drop into a city, pop out of their UHaul trucks, terrorize a vulnerable population, and then think that they can get away with it. We will do everything that we can to identify every single member, whether that means looking at colors of boot laces, the velcro patches on their uniforms, their med kits that they’ve got on their belts. We’re looking to comb through the details and make sure that we hold each and every one of them responsible.
Cops are not doing the legwork to put together a 239-page intelligence report, I imagine
Law enforcement has put up their hands and said, ‘Oh, they wear masks, this is too hard.’ Well, we’re going to show them. We’re going to do all the work for you. And we’re going to give it to the public, give it to the press, give it to academics. And we are going to prove that this is enough evidence to charge them. All they have to do is just bring it before a judge.
Were you at all involved at all in the Coeur d’Alene arrests of Patriot Front members this past summer?
No that was that was a another beautiful surprise for us. We we got a bunch of new names not that we didn’t previously have on our list.
There are lots of white supremacy groups out there. Why has Patriot Front loomed large in your work?
I have come to understand them as a unique threat against the people of the United States. While they’re a small group — they may have 200, 220 members at any given time — the thing that makes them so dangerous is the cult like atmosphere. In order to be a part, it requires you to give up everything else in your life to be a neo-Nazi. It requires that you are constantly active — taking pictures of your activity, basically giving evidence of your criminal behavior over to Thomas Rousseau to prove that you are a valuable member.
They are finding people who are so willing to be dedicated to the cause of anti-semitism, racism, that even if a person only joins for a few months, they are so much further indoctrinated. They are then able to take those skills and start their own little neo-Nazi clique, locally. And that’s that’s what we’ve seen in the rise of NSC-131 — a New England-based group that now has upwards of 100 members; they’ve only existed for maybe two years.
They’re an offshoot?
It was started by Chris Hood; the founder is a former member of Patriot Front. They’ve taken the tactics, techniques that Patriot Front use for spreading propaganda, for publicity stunts, for small unit cohesion and he’s started a whole new group.
We’re just beginning a research project on NSC-131. We’re going to use Project Blacklisted as our outline for how we’ll do that report. NSC-131 very helpfully put out the list of actions that they claim credit for — which includes things like vandalism and property destruction. That’s very helpful. We’re going to cross-reference those claims of responsibility for criminal behavior, with the evidence. And hopefully establish, if not criminal liability, find victims who are done harm, who may be able to file a civil suit.
I saw on the Task Force Butler site an NBC clip of you talking about taking drone footage of a neo-Nazi meeting in Texas. Is that a third group?
That was the Aryan Freedom Network. AFN. They’re the ones who just doxxed me and my family last week. Yeah, they’re pretty mad about the drone, they ended up filing suit. I did that on a Saturday in late October. By Monday, they were filing suit at their local courthouse.
In that interview, you said weren’t in the business of doxxing anyone. Help me understand the difference between doxxing and the kind of work you in your intelligence reports.
I don’t give out the private information about anyone. With Project Blacklisted — our lengthy report on how to take down on Patriot Front, we we didn’t include phone numbers or addresses. And we also didn’t distribute it widely to the public. We gave it to law enforcement, researchers and journalists. We get accused of doxxing all the time. But what we do is collect evidence of criminal behavior and put it into a report. And we submit it to the relevant authorities.That is pretty fucking far away from doxxing.
So this is this goes to strategy. The idea behind the research that Task Force Butler does is to demonstrate patterns and techniques and culpability, that can be used by prosecutors, or perhaps form the basis of a civil suit. And that’s how these people get best taken off the playing field from your perspective?
Also when we do something like infiltrate one of their Telegram chats or their organization, that imposes a cost as well. That makes it so that they are suspicious of one another. They think that there’s a plant inside — or a fed. Since we used the drone over the AFN, we’ve got the AFN’s lawyer in Texas talking about how he’s going to build a Gatling gun to take out drones out of the sky, because now he’s thinks Antifa has got like an Air Force or something. So eroding the sense of invulnerability that allows them to hurt people, that’s not just done through the courts, that’s also done psychological.
Your quip about the Antifa Air Force resonates with my own reporting — about how many extremists are also sunk in a morass of conspiracy theories, more generally. You have talked about falling into some of that yourself during your darker days.
With disinformation comes extremist narratives, conspiracy theories, anti-semitism, racism, etc. These things are all intimately connected. What made me so so vulnerable to conspiracy theories, and the anger and hate is that I got kicked out of the Army. After coming home with PTSD and attempting suicide, the Army interpreted that as misconduct. It made me not just unemployable, but I couldn’t even collect unemployment. So at that point in my life, I went from having the identity of Sergeant Goldsmith, being well respected and well liked. I really didn’t like the Army that much, but had, on paper, great career. And it all went crashing down all at once. With that economic anxiety, undiagnosed PTSD, social anxieties about would I ever have self respect again?
I had the VA to help me put my life back together. It took years. It took healthcare. It took an opportunity to get an education that made me learn how to think critically. And that skill — that critical thinking is the biggest asset that someone can have to make them resistant to conspiracy theories, and other things that bring you down that rabbit hole of hate.
Thinking about Jan. 6: Stewart Rhodes attended Yale Law School. If I were fresh out of the Army, feeling vulnerable as fuck, feeling like my country betrayed me by sending me to a bullshit war that no American really cared about, I could look at a guy like Stewart Rhodes and be like, this guy went to one of the best law schools on the fucking planet. When he tells me what the Constitution means or sells me on this misinterpretation of the Second Amendment, why shouldn’t I believe him? So really, it was healthcare and an education that that got me out of it.
Given the efforts to dox you and now harass your extended family, obviously this line of work is exposing you to more trauma. Is that just something that you’re willing to accept?
My wife is a Jewish journalist who works in New York Times. And a lot of our friends are also journalists. When the MAGAbomber from Florida was mailing pipe bombs to CNN, it’s my friends who are getting pipe bombs in the mail. The way I look at it I have two choices: I can either wait until a mail bomb kills her or one of her friends. Or I can fight back first.
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