I found something new to be thankful for today...
This guy is sticking his neck out for us...
Washington Post
In the years after his discharge from the Army, Iraq War veteran Kristofer Goldsmith experienced homelessness, unemployment, alcohol addiction and social isolation. He attempted suicide. Such darkness, Goldsmith later realized, can leave veterans vulnerable to radicalization from anti-government groups promising fraternity around a shared embrace of extremist beliefs.
While managing the social media accounts for Vietnam Veterans of America, an advocacy group, Goldsmith discovered a copycat page on Facebook. Before long, he had unearthed multiple sites targeting veterans specifically with divisive and what he saw as dangerous propaganda. He wanted to fight back.
Last year, amid a fractious and polarizing presidential contest, Goldsmith and a friend set out to infiltrate a leading white-nationalist group online. They publicly exposed its members’ hateful rhetoric and outed their leader to his neighbors, disrupting the group’s activities just before the 2020 election and forcing the extremists to go underground for a time.
He’s forcing them to go underground...
Raw Story
"So, after the election, I was doing things that some other veterans were doing and joining these extremist organizations," said Goldsmith. "Now I was joining them because I wanted to know what they were planning. And I joined the Three Percenters. During the screening, using basically my real profile as an Iraq veteran as background, they're asking me questions about my weapon system, my secondary, meaning my handgun, how I was prepared to use it. What I would do in different tactical scenarios. They specifically asked, and I made recordings because these people are idiots, they were explicitly asking would you kill someone from Antifa or Black Lives Matter. This wasn't an anomaly."
(snip)
He recalled another session that he recorded where they asked Goldsmith what his "threat intelligence reports look like in November and ahead of Jan. 6." He said that he's seen that people like Alex Jones have been called into Congress, but he hasn't seen people like Nick Fuentes and the America First PAC, "who were literally riding in an armored fake Humvee all around the country and practicing these insurrections at state capitals trying to intimidate members of those local legislators and governors to overturn the election."
(snip)
"They have been basically made afraid," Goldsmith said of the law enforcement. "And especially with the Trump administration and Bill Barr's Department of Justice. Law enforcement was afraid to watch these folks like I did. I'm not a law enforcement official. I can go and buddy up to these people online. Make a fake profile, a fake gab account. and just copy and paste their rhetoric. So, they think I'm one of them then you know, a few days go by of silence and the next thing you know, there are conversations that I recorded."
I’ll be honest… I don’t think I’d have the guts.
MSNBC
We saw in the Capitol 6 rally organization of some of the people who were doing some of this most severe fighting. For everyone veteran who was a policeman or ex-soldier special forces, you would get 10 Kyle Rittenhouse type people who see them as, you know, sort of the Centurion in the little Legion that they were forming there. And they would rally around that person.
We had special forces, people doing training programs, tactically with guns and movement. For many of these militia organizations. They see themselves as either the individuals who are going to be the key motivators to this extremism. And many people defer to them, just because they`re veterans, we need to take that away from them. And I said this in a Washington Post Op- Ed on January 17, you have to shame these people. And the Oath Keepers was a group which was supposedly about not violating your oath to attack American citizens. That group has turned into an armed militia, to attack American citizens and the U.S. government and democracy itself. We have to sort of dis -- you know, disentangle their honor, and restore it and get these people away from extremism. I don`t know whether that`s going to ever be possible, but we have to make the effort.
Like many of us, Goldsmith saw this all coming.
CNY Central
"We knew this was coming and unfortunately the warnings that my colleagues were sending out were not listened to the way that they should have been," explained Goldsmith, an Army veteran who started Sparverius, LLC a few weeks after the insurrection. It's an intelligence organization working to find what Goldsmith calls threats to our democracy: disinformation campaigns and domestic terrorism.
"January 6th was a wake-up call for the intelligence community, for the law enforcement community and frankly, for congress," said Goldsmith.
(snip)
CNY Central asked Goldsmith why extremist groups seem to have a strong grip on New Yorkers. "Upstate New York has unfortunately for decades been relatively disregarded compared to the rest of the state. And that has caused a fertile breeding ground for radicalization and extremism," explained Goldsmith, who knows these groups better than most people. "I infiltrate these organizations and pretend to be a member. Being a bald guy covered in tattoos with a beard, I kind of blend in, even if it's in a digital environment. Having been in military myself I can speak the language."
Thankfully, he’s decided to do something about it.