Donald Trump, Lindsey Graham, MAGA, Stochastic Terrorism

Top Extremism Expert REVEALS how to Combat MAGA Extremism | Burn The Boats

US Army veteran Kris Goldsmith uncovers and exposes right-wing extremist groups, including neo-Nazi networks, and offers insights into how Americans can join the fight.

0:00foreign [Applause] [Music]

0:13combat vet who studies disinformation and far-right movements he’s the founder of task force Butler an organization of

0:20veterans who aim to disrupt online extremist activity and radicalization and encourage those who have fallen

0:26victim to disinformation to leave that path of Destruction Chris it’s been over

0:32a year since we last had you on thanks for joining us again on burn the boats thanks man it’s great to be here when we

0:39last talked the idea of of Civil War being taken seriously was I don’t know

0:47that it was even part of our conversation but it’s part of every conversation now almost everywhere I

0:52look people are um on our side I guess raising the the

0:58warning flag on the other side they’re like salivating over the prospect what to what do you attribute this change in

1:05tone to well um just a few days ago or it might have

1:11been yesterday as we’re recording this Senator Lindsey Graham basically you know said that Maga is going to go out

1:18and Riot if uh Trump has ever held to account for any of the laws that he may

1:23have broken and you know while there’s a a bunch of discussion about oh you know is is

1:29Graham making a threat you know is he irresponsible for talking this way

1:35but frankly he’s he’s accurate in what he’s saying Maga

1:41Maniacs will Riot uh if and when

1:46the former president is is held to account for uh whether you know it has

1:51to deal with stealing documents that belong to the United States government regardless of

1:57their classification or anything else that he’s ever done um you know

2:04the use of the term Civil War evokes the idea of two sides going out with guns

2:09and shooting each other um it won’t be that organized should there

2:15be some sort of mass violence uh there are there is not going to be

2:21you know some split in the military where we’ve got a north-south uh type of

2:26situation but what we will see is stochastic

2:31terrorism we also see people like Trump uh or you know other fascist uh light

2:39politicians like uh Ron DeSantis or JD Vance who use their platforms to stir up

2:47their base um to inspire terrorist attacks like the the attempted FBI shooter from a few

2:53weeks ago he was responding to this stolen election lie and we’re likely to see more of that before things start to

3:00cool down I think that’s a a really Illuminating phrase stochastic terrorism

3:08and and my prep for this I I looked it up and it describes

3:13exactly what’s going on you have these politicians you referred to who create this this environment this condition uh

3:22this permission structure for others to go out and perpetrate those acts of

3:27violence uh we’ve had other guests talk about cell style terrorism and the danger of

3:33Lone wolves but there is some real culpability at the at the top driving

3:40this this narrative and this this mood of resentment and anger that is

3:46infecting these these groups that are actually pulling the triggers right

3:52yeah and you know this is this is not a New Concept it’s not new to the Maga

3:58movement you know the Maga bomber uh that people you know seem to have forgotten about was was years ago you

4:05know trying this to mail pipe bombs uh to CNN this is not a uh you know January

4:136th was not a spontaneous event it wasn’t just led by The Oath Keepers the

4:19three percenters the proud boys on the ground it wasn’t just led by the Steve bannons in the war room and the general

4:25Flynn’s uh you know who uh who were you

4:31know more or less providing the intelligence structure for uh

4:37for this Insurgency it is this type of violence uh

4:44is is fueled by like you said this permission structure where they’re

4:49labeling their their perceived you know their opposition as enemies as enemies

4:56of Freedom people are trying to take things away from you that animates people to vote Yes

5:02but there’s a line of responsibility between saying you know they’re coming after your health care uh versus they’re

5:10coming after your freedom they are socialists they you know being the Democrats Joe Biden AOC whoever else is

5:18a target saying that they’re going to try and like you know ruin your life um in all sorts of Fantastical ways that

5:26that is where things start to get dangerous it is telling that Joe Biden and

5:32Democratic leaders are encouraging Democrats and freedom-loving actual

5:38Patriots to go out and vote while Lindsey Graham and others are inciting

5:44um inciting their followers to to Riot I mean I don’t think there has been a clear distinction

5:52between two major political parties and their their belief in the the fundamental value of democracy

5:59yeah and you know I I think that it’s it’s something that we should note uh anytime that someone like Lindsey Graham

6:05comes up that that he served in uniform for decades this is a man who who

6:11understands um strategy understands the concepts of

6:17insurgencies and he understands what it takes to inspire violence he’s not a

6:22stupid man he was a lawyer he is a lawyer uh for him to be going out and

6:29and saying that there will be riots without condemning that this will happen without

6:36saying but there shouldn’t be because this is America and we solve our problems by voting by talking to one

6:43another by trying to change each other’s minds not trying to kill each other you know that that is

6:49um part of a disturbing Trend that we’ve

6:55seen in these former high-ranking officials who you know will stand on their former military rank

7:04to create this permission structure for civilians to use violence let’s

7:10drill down into into that for a minute because one of your main focus areas is

7:15on the radicalization of veterans obviously Lindsey Graham knows better you you mentioned JD Vance uh former

7:23Marine who knows better but you have also described the broader population of

7:28veterans in this country as economically efficient targets can you

7:35explain why there is such a focus by these disinformation

7:40purveyors on on Veterans and I’ll add another footnote to this that shooter

7:47the FBI shooter in Cincinnati who you brought up earlier on was himself a Navy vet unlike Graham or JD Vance uh

7:55probably a True Believer not a a cynical um

8:00not I mean you don’t become a trigger polar cynically he actually thought he was following

8:06his Commander’s orders yeah so

8:13I think that one of the um one of the biggest the reason why I got

8:20into what I’m doing which is essentially hunting Nazis online right and and that’s why I created my business

8:26barbarious and why I’m launching this non-profit task force Butler Institute to train other veterans to identify uh

8:35and intervene when they see disinformation and growing extremism now why are

8:42veterans targeted by extremists by those who spread disinformation like you said

8:47we’re economically efficient targets what does that mean um if

8:52if you can change the mind of a veteran if if I am trying to get a veteran to

8:59buy a product let’s say a Ford F-150 the electric one the the lightning

9:04if if I convince a veteran to buy that pickup truck they are more likely than

9:11if 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

9:18thing to to turn an idea into a movement the whether it’s the Russians that I

9:24used to study years ago targeting service members and vets with disinformation campaigns or the

9:29Republicans who have always been good about trying to recruit veterans to uh

9:34to vote their way or the far right they are going after Veterans for the same

9:40reason that Fortune 500 companies do those things are all different right but

9:45uh Fortune 500 companies go for veterans because we’re when we go to school we’re

9:51more likely to graduate than our peers we’re more likely to receive higher gpas we’re more likely to start small

9:58businesses we’re more likely to be Community leaders and that could be anything from running for office to

10:04being a football coach so when you uh when any uh propagandists

10:13source of disinformation wants to invest in a Target it it makes

10:19economic sense for them to Target veterans because they’re more likely to bring others these veterans that they’re

10:26targeting are more likely to bring others along for the ride I’d love you to tell us a little bit more about task force Butler I’ve I’ve

10:34known you for a while so I have your back story but um for your lead in can you uh can you

10:41give us a refresher on Chris Goldsmith how you got to where you are and what you’re doing now with this incredible

10:47initiative to engage veterans in in fighting back sure so so task force Butler Institute

10:55and this idea of of using open source intelligence techniques to uh discover

11:02and disrupt disinformation and extremism is actually built on years of my

11:08research at uh at a veterans organization I used to work for Vietnam veterans in America as one of the

11:14congressionally chartered uh veterans service organizations one of the most impactful and important in the country

11:21it’s part of what they call the big six up there with the American Legion Veterans of Foreign Wars Disabled

11:28American Veterans Etc while I was at Vietnam veterans America I was an organization by and for people

11:35in their 70s so naturally being the millennial in the office even though my job was policy and government Affairs I

11:43was also helping their communication staff manage their social media pages and one day I noticed that there was an

11:50imposter Facebook account using our our logo our name photos of our CEO of

11:57Vietnam veterans America and uh and I also noticed that they had a quarter of

12:03a million followers in what was essentially a brand new Facebook page compare that to our 10 year old at the

12:10time Facebook page that had something like 75 80 000 followers right

12:15so when I first saw this I’m thinking oh man we got to reach out to this member and we’ve got to offer them a job

12:20because they’re doing a great uh doing a great job promoting our organization

12:27long story shirt long story short I um in studying this page came to realize

12:33it was actually a foreign intelligence operation and it wasn’t just a Facebook page it

12:38was entire digital ecosystem multiple websites Instagram Twitter Etc and it was connected back to we

12:47thank the internet research agency of Russia now two years later after that

12:53first discovery uh on behalf of Vietnam veterans America I published a nearly 200 Page report about the 10 different

12:59ways that foreign entities Target troops veterans and our families with everything from you know those Russian

13:05type disinformation campaigns to things like identity theft and the targeting of gold star families

13:11uh but the one common thread that came through almost all of those chapters to

13:17to build audiences to build engagement was the injection of like racist and

13:23xenophobic narratives into veteran Spaces by these foreign groups and and

13:29this could be you know the Russian intelligence research agency internet research agency or it could be

13:36um literally like those Nigerian scammers right targeting individuals for romance scams

13:42um and over time you know I published that in 2019 since then

13:48uh all of the all of the time the years that I spent looking outwards at the

13:54threats to the United States and to our community um

14:00those threats no longer seem nearly as relevant compared to the domestic

14:06threats leading up to January 6th um I was working for a private firm

14:11collecting intelligence uh infiltrating hate groups and unlawful militias and

14:17writing reports basically intelligence reports for a private company I don’t know where they went

14:23signed an NDA so I can’t really talk any about about any of the details but I can say that my intelligence reports

14:31um didn’t make it to the right people ahead of January 6th and uh on that day on

14:37January 6th my workstation here kind of looks like a like a space station I’ve got screens

14:43from here to here right I watched the Insurrection from the perspective of the insurrectionists seven different screens

14:49seven seven different live feeds all around the Capitol in the building I

14:56know the building I’ve worked in DC you know on and off for years

15:02um that’s when I decided I I need to go my own way launch my own company it’s called sparvarius Uh and I had every

15:10intent of of just you know being a consultant and working in security making sure that my reports make it to

15:16the right people to try and save lives and preserve democracy but every time I I talk about what I do

15:23I’ve had veterans reaching out to me on LinkedIn on Facebook on Twitter saying hey how can I get involved and it took

15:31me a couple years but I finally came up with the idea of task force Butler

15:36Institute which would train veterans not just to perform ocean open source intelligence investigations but to work

15:43as part of a team using a centralized database which would essentially become a

15:50um in extremism database where we are able to track the real world activities and

15:57online activities of everyone from like a general Flynn type figure who’s massively influential in Q Anon movement

16:04to individual veteran uh and Veterans who’ve um

16:10you know rated the capital uh as part of the insurrection you’re mostly it sounds like focused on

16:19veterans I would love to get your sense though of what kind of problems we face

16:25in terms of radicalization and extremist ideology within the active duty military

16:31because a lot of the talk of of Civil War I think confuses the two and it’s

16:38it’s an important distinction yeah so one of the

16:44one of the problems with studying um extremism in the military is uh there

16:51are a lot of powerful forces out there be it the Pentagon or politicians who

16:57don’t want to play along in making those studies effective right when we ask when

17:05a member of Congress asks the Pentagon and they genuinely want to know you know how many extremists have you kicked out

17:11of the military in the last five years is the rate increasing the Pentagon none of the branches have a good answer

17:19and that’s because they hadn’t been tracking that metric they hadn’t been

17:24tracking a metric of we gave this person an Article 15 because they’re a white supremacist we kicked them out we cord

17:30Marshal them because they’re a white supremacist right that that is just simply not a box that is being checked

17:36in the massive um data set that that the military has on everyone who serves has served

17:44um and every time Advocates like myself and and

17:49um uh academics you know try to get uh

17:54the military to study this Republican politicians primarily step in

17:59and say oh you know this is all protected by the First Amendment we don’t want this

18:05um you know we we don’t want thought police uh investigating our military

18:10etc etc and you get caught in in this vicious cycle of

18:16we can’t study the problem because the Republicans won’t let us and then they say well there’s not actually a problem

18:22so we can’t justify the studies right so we are still stuck in that in that cycle

18:30and and the latest development on this is um the Senate armed services committee

18:36every Republican plus the independent Senator um uh Angus King who I have a lot of

18:42respect for and who has been right on issues like this more often than

18:48essentially said that any money that DOD spends on preventing extremism or

18:53researching extremism is wasted uh and it is offensive to to troops

19:00and that is profoundly disappointing and they they wrote this down in in this year’s Senate

19:07uh Armed Services ndaa report you know I I hope before the end of the

19:12year we can convince them that that is um that is unhelpful at best but it’s

19:19not looking good I don’t I don’t think that this year’s ndaa will

19:24um will mandate that the Pentagon get to the bottom of researching the problem of

19:29extremism on uh as a uh

19:34as it pertains to active duty troops how do you think about and address the

19:40the First Amendment concern because paid speech is still uh in most contexts

19:46protected speech how do you deal with the fact that you know we are one of the

19:53few modern democracies that holds that protection sacrosanct

19:59yeah so the first amendment protects people from the government coming in and

20:04saying you can’t say that or we’re going to punish you for saying this and everybody knows the the limits right you

20:12can’t scream fire in a crowded movie theater because those those words can Inspire panic and hurt people right so

20:18there are real realistic uh restrictions on that people can be held

20:23responsible for damages that they cause for that um for streaming fire in a theater right

20:31um there’s nothing about the first amendment that stops a private entity

20:37like task force Butler or me um from holding people accountable for the

20:45rhetoric that they use online for this you know for the speech that they use online

20:50and I think that’s a good thing you know we don’t necessarily want the FBI to be you

20:57know controlling everything that’s set on the internet to be you know spying on everyone right that there’s you can get

21:03dystopian with this kind of government um uh

21:09uh watching everything like a panopticon situation right we don’t want that but

21:16there’s no reason that if an extremist if a Neo-Nazi is trying to

21:23um use hateful rhetoric to create fear in a minority population that someone

21:28like myself or a member of task force Butler can’t highlight well this

21:33extremist Works uh for you know X company or they are planning to

21:41um you know protest a a gay bar uh and you know we know this person to have

21:48brought weapons to previous protests right so there’s there’s nothing to stop me as a private individual as an

21:55American using my First Amendment right to educate other people uh to educate

22:01other Americans about the threats about the people who are making the threats so that our communities can protect

22:07themselves in in ways that maybe we don’t want law enforcement to be involved

22:13I sometimes found myself uh in my days running a large veterans organization

22:20uh reminding staff and volunteers that while I might not have a constitutional

22:26right to tell them what they could and couldn’t say they didn’t have a constitutional right to a job at the

22:31organization I think that’s what you’re getting at right exactly yeah and you

22:36know no one a Neo-Nazi has and this is becoming a thing in Florida right people

22:42swastika bearing neo-nazis standing out and protesting every single weekend now

22:48they have a right to do that but me and my organization also have a right

22:54to identify that masked individual and let their communities know that the

23:00person you know uh in their Community is a Neo-Nazi and that those Neo-Nazi

23:05beliefs are potentially um life-threatening to their Community you know I it goes down to a specific

23:14example so I infiltrated the uh the Neo-Nazi group Patriot front and I’ve

23:19been doing it over and over for a couple years but in 2020 I infiltrated them found out where uh Thomas Rousseau

23:27the founder and leader of this organization found out where he lived well after he got arrested things like

23:34his address uh you know his biographical details were all uh became public

23:40information right so I took that public information and when an article came out explaining how Patriot front uh is a

23:48fascist racist organization who uh advocates for a white ethno State you

23:55know through genocide right I took that made it into an information packet a community and engaged in a

24:02community notification campaign I drew out a circle on a map and got 200

24:08addresses for everyone who lived within a quarter mile of Thomas Rousseau than in Grapevine Texas now in Haslet Texas

24:15and I spent my own money hundreds of dollars to print out hundreds of copies

24:20of of these uh of these reports stuff these envelopes buy the stamps and mail

24:26it to his whole Community the reason that I did that is because I know there are minorities who live in that

24:32community and if if I had a kid who lived down the block from a Neo-Nazi I

24:38would want them to know that if they see the red Camaro with you know the goofy kid with the cowboy hat driving down the

24:45street that they should get out of the street because this Neo-Nazi might just one day you know choose to kill a kid of

24:51color my sense and I’ve I’ve gotten to know you over the uh the past year and change

24:57is that you don’t do anything uh halfway uh and I’m and I’m wondering and I feel

25:04like I do know you well enough to ask this if if the look is intentional and

25:10for those who are just listening to the podcast uh Chris is like a character out of uh out of Sons of Anarchy does that

25:17help you get in yes

25:22um so I someone who looks like me and I have a bald head and a pretty uh pretty

25:28long beard people will say things to me if I go to a bar that they wouldn’t say to other

25:36white people like I with the tattoos and stuff like I look like I could be one of

25:43those Mega heads right I look like I could be in a militia you know right right now I’m wearing a collared shirt

25:49but if I take off my shirt people make assumptions right when I go to DC and I

25:55put on suit and tie you know you see the the bald head and the big beard everyone thinks I’m an undercover per cop

26:01including cops so I recognize you know I’ve got a different kind of white

26:08privilege I look like I could be law enforcement or I could be an undercover

26:13cop or I could be a Neo-Nazi and I use that as part of my work uh to gather

26:19intelligence in the field you’ve been doing this for a long time you also have an appreciation of of

26:27history and I’m wondering if if you think that the Nazism that is is so

26:34obvious today the white supremacy that that were being inundated by is on the

26:40rise or is it just bubbling to the surface and it’s always been there but has permission to expose itself now

26:48it is absolutely On The Rise um there is so again I mentioned Patriot

26:54front before this is a Neo-Nazi group that is primarily gen Z in some

26:59millennials uh what makes them different from a lot of other uh Neo-Nazi skinhead

27:05white supremacist organizations is they have an age range from 18 to 35 they are

27:12specifically targeting Young Folks so that they can not just

27:17um have an easier time I think uh pushing propaganda on them because these are

27:23folks who you know don’t have as much life experience and who might be angry

27:28and more likely to be economically insecure and therefore easier to

27:34manipulate um but when they’re pushing these white

27:39supremacist uh ideas they’re not just you know using racial slurs it’s not

27:45like the um the racism that people might have seen on the schoolyard when they were

27:50kids like the Casual racism they are reading uh stuff written by

27:57Mussolini and Hitler and uh a whole host of other actual fascists actual

28:04neo-nazis um you know they think of themselves as adopting a real philosophy

28:12they um they inundate themselves with with uh video propaganda that that

28:19rewrites the history of of Hitler and makes him look as like a great white

28:25savior right uh and as the as the United States is having been been manipulated

28:32um you know by some shadowy globalist cabal right so the

28:39between the online culture uh and our online Technologies the apps that we use

28:45to communicate and um and things like the pandemic

28:51uh white supremacist Neo-Nazi uh and

28:56extremist organizations have had a recruiting Bonanza in a way that just wasn’t possible a

29:03decade or two ago you know if the KKK two decades ago in order to recruit someone had to you know post flyers in

29:11their neighborhood or you know hand out flyers at a a pro-life event or

29:16something like that nowadays you know a group like uh the the Patriot front or

29:24uh the new Columbia movement these white supremacist organizations can get on

29:30Tick Tock or Twitter or Facebook and their propaganda can be seen by millions

29:35of people all over the country all over the world um

29:41and you know the pandemic gave a lot of folks a lot more time online to

29:47self-radicalize and to end up in these recruiting Pipelines I want to pivot to what we do about it

29:56obviously there are private efforts underway like task force Butler but at the policy level

30:02is there is there a solution

30:10so um you know it’s it’s hard for me as a

30:15former Advocate I used to work on things like the GI Bill and Healthcare and every time there’s a problem as an

30:22advocate it was my job to literally like go to Congressional staff and be like here’s the problem here’s the evidence

30:27of this problem here’s the solution I don’t have a policy solution for this stuff what I what I do have is

30:35um is the idea of imposing costs social and economic costs on fascists uh as as a

30:45way of life you know anti-fascism is is not just an idea it’s it’s a way of life

30:51These neo-nazis are dedicated to spreading propaganda to recruiting to

30:56radicalizing people every day to pushing me Overton window uh so that the

31:01Republican party starts to use their um hateful rhetoric you know against

31:07minorities against the lgbtq plus Community um we have to be anti-fascists have to

31:14be just as dedicated so you know there’s one of the most important lessons I

31:20think that I ever learned in Community College you know after coming home from the military was was uh in economics 101

31:27about negative externalities the negative externalities say there’s a coal plant next door they’re pumping out

31:33coal unregulated that smoke comes into my house every day everything’s black now my whole life is just covered in

31:40soot uh you know I could get cancer from it well government solves these problems by taxing and regulating that coal plant

31:48not just to you know prevent and danger from happening to me the neighbor and

31:53the future but to compensate me they tax them so that I am better off

31:59um to than I had been after being damaged by my neighbor right so these

32:04neo-nazis have been able to operate virtually unopposed for years recruiting

32:10radicalizing targeting minority populations to instill fear

32:15what we have to do is take that negative externality and turn it back on them if

32:21they want us if they want minority communities to be scared uh we have to

32:27figure out a way to expose them expose these individual neo-nazis and impose

32:34social and economic costs so sometimes that’s the justice system if they’ve

32:39created uh if there’s evidence of a hate crime you know we can give that to investigators to State uh local or

32:47federal law enforcement maybe they’ll um the criminal justice system will take care of them more often than not I hate

32:54hate crimes aren’t prosecuted so it’s up to us to notify you know uh their

33:00employer their their wife their girlfriend um their families let them know that

33:08they’ve got a Neo-Nazi in their life so that they can keep themselves and their

33:14Community safe I mean bottom line is most employers around the country are

33:20um are not willing to employ a known Neo-Nazi so if we can identify someone

33:26who’s trying to instill fear on in minority communities to their employer that’s an economic cost that is a tax on

33:34neo-nazianism so that’s that’s what task force Butler is basically founded on it’s the idea

33:39of impro imposing these prices I I think that’s great and I I applaud the the

33:46work that you’re doing but I have to imagine that one of the the challenges of

33:52um of imagining a policy solution is that one of our major political parties is

33:59developing this weird symbiosis with the far right I mean the leader of that

34:04political party told the proud boys to stand by in the

34:10event that he he lost an election correct me if I’m wrong but is it the proud boys that are designated a an

34:16extremist organization by Canada yeah they’re they’re

34:21um Canada has recognized the proud boys as uh terrorist organization terrorist

34:26organization yeah and that is that is not a label that comes lightly um you know I think it’s also notable

34:32that um the proud boys were started by a Canadian uh Gavin McGinnis he’s also the

34:39founder of Vice uh Vice news but he has not been associated with them for years right

34:45um but Gavin McInnis is was born in the UK he’s Canadian citizen has been living

34:51in the U.S uh on a green card I have he has made the claim that he recently got his American citizenship I’ve seen no

34:58proof um as we’re recording this just last week Gavin McGinnis was doing a show and

35:05it was apparently interrupted by what sounded like they were off camera sounded like law enforcement and he

35:11hasn’t posted in a few days so you know if uh if his home country if if

35:18he still is a Canadian citizen has designated the organization that he started as a terrorist organization I I

35:25wonder if the fed’s uh would be willing to hand him over to face Justice

35:32I want to finish with a little more on task force Butler because the historical

35:37reference is not only fascinating it is

35:42um it’s opened my eyes obviously well not obviously but General Butler is a

35:48Legendary Marine but you uh talk about

35:54on your website his involvement in the uh the the bonus marcher uh Scandal and

36:03I had always read about that as an event that Drew a bunch of hungry desperate

36:11veterans clamoring for justice but there’s a there’s a back story there to

36:17these tens of thousands of veterans gathered on the National Mall they were being

36:23towards the end provoked and instigated by industrialists who wanted to

36:28overthrow the government do I have that right that’s correct yeah so there’s uh there’s a book that I keep in mind on my

36:35desk uh gangsters of capitalism by Jonathan M Katz that is a book about

36:41Smedley Butler um major generals medley Butler was a man

36:46of a lot of contradictions he was referred to as the Fighting Quaker the man was an incredibly effective Marine

36:53of of the uh like World War One era now

36:58when he came home from um and retired and into civilian life the

37:06man was one of the most well-known uh Marines ever he was incredibly well uh

37:14respected kind of like a general mattises for for Our Generation and uh he was approached by a group of

37:23wealthy industrialists who tried to recruit him into a coup against the

37:29United States and he basically went along with the plot to gather information started

37:35working with the journalists so the journalist was there to vet the information that uh that he was getting

37:40to vet the story and um they called it the you know the Wall

37:47Street coup they intended to have Smedley Butler lead the Bonus Army who were literally

37:54camping out on the National Mall to storm the United States Congress to storm the White House and to take over

38:00the United States government and the Bonus Army for context they they were

38:06demanding um things and and for the most part that

38:12were rightfully theirs but they were also being manipulated uh by people who

38:17were not on the front lines and I’m I’m characterizing it that way because

38:22in some ways the parallels to January 6th are are striking yeah so the the

38:27Bonus Army where the Doughboys right the World War One vets had been promised while they were overseas that they would

38:33get a bonus for every day that they were overseas fighting the war in a combat zone when they came home we were on the

38:39gold standard the treasury only had so much money they couldn’t print it um they couldn’t just print more money

38:46right um and that was one of these the biggest tensions right now uh at this point with

38:52these industrialists getting off the gold standard paying uh printing money

38:58you know going into debt that that kind of thing right so there was there was a lot going on behind the scenes now the

39:06Bonus Army went down and went to DC because the Great Depression happened and they were destined their families

39:13were destitute and the parallel to uh to what happened in

39:192020 and 2021 with with Trump’s Insurrection

39:24um you know is is similar in that those folks who went down to storm the

39:31capital on January 20 uh on January 6 2021 they thought that they were

39:38entitled to something they truly believed that the election had been stolen that their democracy was at risk

39:45now you know that doesn’t make them not responsible they should be held legally responsible spend some time in prison uh

39:53especially the ones who actually committed violence that day but the manipulation of not just Americans but

40:00American veterans uh on and around you know the time leading up to January 6th

40:07goes to show um how how much of economically efficient

40:14targets we were you know there there were um there have been several hundred

40:19people who’ve been charged we’ve seen veterans we’re at the core of the planning and execution of the violence

40:25that day and we’ve seen that those veterans their presence

40:30um their experience helped them to lead the mob on that day so this is you know

40:38a multi-generational thing that we’ve seen people trying to manipulate veterans into destroying our own

40:45democracy well Chris this has been an extraordinary conversation thanks so

40:50much for joining us where can people go to learn more about task force Butler

40:56taskforcebutler.org you can read a little bit more about the history of of General Smedley Butler you can sign up

41:03and if people want to support us by donating you know we absolutely appreciate every dollar that you can

41:10send us because we’re using it to train veterans to engage in this type of uh investigation and to hold fascists

41:18accountable for um for what they’re trying to do to destroy our democracy from within we’ll

41:24keep it up Chris it’s been great having you on thanks a lot brother thank you so much for watching this episode of burn

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