When the traveling carnival of election, COVID-19, and QAnon conspiracy theorists gathered for a ReAwaken America event in Dallas, Texas, in December, John Guandolo was among the speakers. Guandolo is a disgraced former FBI agent, radical right-wing conspiracy theorist, and anti-Islam activist who now runs an organization called Understanding The Threat, through which he trains law enforcement agencies around the country to identify seemingly anyone with dark skin and a beard as an Islamic terrorist.
Following his presentation at the ReAwaken America event, Guandolo sat down backstage for an interview with David Scarlett and self-declared “prophet” Amanda Grace of the program “His Glory,” where he revealed that he has recently begun offering training sessions for average citizens on how to take over their towns by driving out all the insufficiently right-wing officials and arresting their mayors.
Guandolo said that when he first founded Understanding The Threat, the organization focused on training national leaders but he soon “realized that was a waste of time” and began to focus on state-level leaders. After realizing that “none of them were willing to do what needed to be done,” Guandolo and his organization turned their attention to the local level and “started developing a program for citizens.”
“We started teaching it about four years ago and actually training them on how to identify these folks in the community and then showing them how to take actions to rip these people out of the community and punt them out of their county or state,” Guandolo said. “Do it lawfully but very aggressively. These people have to be flushed. These are bad people.”
“Flush the bad guys, reestablish an actual republican form of government, then you reestablish the county,” Guandolo said. “When counties do that and then you get adjacent counties to join you, now you have a pretty incredible stronghold in a state to start going after the cowards and the traitors at the state level.”
Guandolo said that the “the enemies” who must be pushed out of office are not just Democrats or progressive leaders, but also anyone like Sens. Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, and Mitt Romney who, he said, are just “as big an enemy as the Communist Party is.”
“Take back your city council,” Guandolo said. “Throw your mayor in jail if you’re capable. Take back your schools, your chamber of commerce, your local community. … What we do is we put people through this training, and then we help them organize their team, show them how to do this stuff at the local level, show them how to research the organizations and individuals that are in the community and then show them very creative, devious, fun ways to flush these people ]out] and to screw with them and to make them incapable of continuing what they’re doing in the local community.”
