Task Force Butler

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.

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[T]he 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.

  Rolling Stone

And don't think that isn't used to discredit him by the right wing.

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.

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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.

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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.

From the interview...

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.