The Legend of the Bear Jew

How a military MMA instructor teaches Nazis to lose fights

"We wanna fucking take our pound of flesh. We wanna make it expensive to be a Nazi,” says Iraq combat veteran Kris Goldsmith.

Goldsmith is the founder of Task Force Butler, an elite unit of veterans who use their military expertise to take down Nazi terrorists on American soil.

I profiled Goldsmith and his team for

The Free Press

and you can read that profile by following the link below.

He Hunted al-Qaeda. Now He Hunts Neo-Nazis

In the essay, I describe how Goldsmith got into the Nazi-hunting game when his old military buddy Donny called him out of the blue one day to say, “Hey, Goldie. I just joined a neo-Nazi organization. I want you to help me take them down.”

Donny is not his real name. That’s a pseudonym I gave him to protect his identity. I took it from Sgt. Donny “the Bear Jew” Donowitz, the character in Inglourious Basterds played by Eli Roth. The one with the baseball bat.

The reason I decided to name him after that particular character will make sense once you’ve heard his story and his unique method of fighting Nazi terrorists. So without further ado, I give you the story of the Bear Jew.

Goldsmith describes Donny as a “fucking maniac” and a “human weapon.” Those are not exaggerations. In the military, Donny was a combatives instructor, which means he trained soldiers in hand-to-hand combat. He is also a competitive MMA fighter. In Iraq, Donny was part of the sniper platoon where, Goldsmith says, he experienced “the realest kind of combat, the see-it-only-in-the-movies kind.”

Donny had seen his old friend Goldie on television at the Clinton-Trump forum years earlier, and noticed him shaking hands with John McCain. He imagined Goldsmith knew powerful people and could get things done. Goldsmith explained that this wasn’t the case and wished Donny well, but after further consideration, he called Donny back and said, “tell me about your Nazis.”

The rest, as they say, is history. You can read Goldsmith’s story in

The Free Press

.

Goldsmith and Donny don’t collaborate on infiltrating Nazi terrorist cells, but they do frequently share information they’ve gathered. It was Donny who gave Goldsmith online access to Patriot Front’s files for documentation and public exposure. But whereas Goldsmith focuses on gathering intelligence to help secure arrests, Donny’s methods are a bit more, shall we say, hands-on.

“He’s a fucking maniac,” says Goldsmith. “He joined the Army like a year or a year-and-a-half after I did, though we’re the same age. So he joined one combat deployment after me. I came home from Iraq, he’s a new soldier in the Army, and I immediately recognized him for what he was. I’m a forward observer, so I’m not infantry. I do everything infantry, but I’ve just got a higher test score and I use the radio. And I immediately recognized my buddy as a fucking star. The dude is supremely fucking motivated. And he’s built like a pit bull. He’s very intelligent, becomes a sniper, gets invited to join the sniper platoon almost immediately, which is not usual. He was a fast-tracker.”

Goldsmith and Donny became immediate friends. Donny deployed in 2007. That was his first deployment. They threw him into the heart of the beast and put him face-to-face with the rawest realities of war. There’s no avoiding the impact such carnage has on the human soul, Goldsmith explained. “It affects you in ways that are … hard to explain. Who your sense of self is. Your anger. Your motivation in life. You can feel empty or you can be feeling a thousand percent, but your body is deteriorating because you’re running on stress hormones.”

When Donny came home, he found his motivation in hunting Nazis. He has now infiltrated Patriot Front three times. Each time, he has entered a different cell to avoid being recognized. When he does it, he’s honest about his background too, about being a MMA fighter and former military hand-to-hand combat instructor. As a result, he’s often recruited by such groups in the hope that he will teach them to fight like soldiers. Think Fight Club, but for racists.

Donny says the only way he’s able to tolerate being around such people is because he gets to regularly knock their heads in. The best part is, they ask him to do it because he tells them the only way to learn to fight is to actually fight. So one by one, they step into the ring with this pit bull, and one by one, he gives them the physical punishment they so richly deserve.

But while these little Nazis line up to get their faces busted, believing Donny is teaching them to become hardened warriors, in reality he’s teaching them counterproductive fighting skills. You can react faster if you lower your guard. It hurts less if you lean into the punch. He teaches them how not to fight, all the while telling them this is some kind of secret sauce.

It’s had generational effects, says Goldsmith, because the bad lessons have been passed on to newer members, and spread far and wide, poisoning the organization’s fighting ability. One tactic Donny taught was to make a phalanx-type formation with shields, then have front members run to the back of the formation to replenish the front with fresh members.

It may seem like a good idea to replace your front end with new guys so you don’t tire out, but for one thing, it’s unlikely Patriot Front is ever going to be rushed by a mob, and if they are, shields alone won’t help. Besides, the absolute worst thing you can do when facing a mob is turn your back on it, and that’s precisely what Donny taught them to do. When the front line runs to the back, the first thing they do is turn completely around. They don’t back up while facing forward. They turn around and run to the rear, their backs exposed.

“They’re still running around like idiots trying to do, I don’t know, magical-looking shield maneuvers,” says Goldsmith.

On one occasion, Donny was recognized while trying to infiltrate a Nazi cell. He had passed one of the initial rounds of vetting and was asked to meet in a Starbucks. The group showed up with half a dozen members, which would have been an effective intimidation technique if the person on the other end of the table was anyone but Donny. His reputation was already legendary at this point and everyone at the table knew that people didn’t fight Donny so much as endure abuse at his hands.

As he sat at the table and they went round with their questions, suddenly one of them realized who he was and what he was up to—they’d heard the legend of the Bear Jew who infiltrates Nazi cells and spends weeks or even months physically punishing them, beating them and beating them until they had something like war PTSD but without any of the fight skills you’d get from actually being in the military.

The member who realized what was going on blurted it out and suddenly they were all sat there, silently staring at each other, half a dozen of them and one Bear Jew at a table. The silence lingered. No one moved. Donny gently smiled and reached for his coffee. Everyone else flinched. The chairs clattered on the floor as they jumped up and ran. Most of the group bolted out the front door and disappeared.

Donny wasn’t bothered. He already had their information. He could take his time getting to them later. For now, he simply raised his coffee and calmly took a sip. One of the members had run to the bathroom, Donny noticed. Taking a deep breath, Donny finished his coffee and slowly got up. He had to use the bathroom now anyway.