con-sara-cy theories
Join your host, Sara Causey, at this after-hours spot to contemplate the things we're not supposed to know, not supposed to question. We'll probe the dark underbelly of the state, Corpo America, and all their various cronies, domestic and abroad. Are you ready?
Music by Oleg Kyrylkovv from Pixabay.
con-sara-cy theories
Episode 128: Code Name: Pale Horse & American Neo-Nazis
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
In tonight's episode, I will discuss Scott Payne's book Code Name: Pale Horse: How I Went Undercover to Expose America's Nazis. Now, it takes numerous chapters to even get to his infiltration of The Base and it involves a pretty bizarre goat sacrifice story.
03:35-20:32 - Has short-form social media content not only rotted the brain but pulled people into a massive trauma dump they never should have been part of? Is it responsible for mental health crises?
20:33-1:23:40 - Neo-Nazis, Christian nationalists, Christian "localists," Klansmen, accelerationism, etc.
➡️ No matter where we go these days, all roads lead to Peter Thiel.
➡️ Why are people building towns designed specifically for "Protestant Christians"?
➡️ Even an idiot can do harm.
➡️ You can thread a needle between these accelerationist ideas of "let it burn" and techno-capitalism/techno-libertarianism. As I say all the time: you can't swing a dead cat in the system without hitting a Nazi.
Links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUKilKprhUY&t=1134s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charleston_church_shooting
https://www.c-span.org/clip/white-house-event/user-clip-trumps-very-fine-people-quote/4811891
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism#Right-wing_accelerationism
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Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjöld was awarded Best Biography at the 2026 American Book Fest International Book Awards in Los Angeles!
Buy your copy on Amazon today: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT
My forthcoming project, Simply Dag, will be available in hardback, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats on July 29th!
Transcription by Otter.ai. Please forgive any typos!
Sara Causey discusses Scott Payne's book Code Name: Pale Horse, which details his undercover work infiltrating neo-Nazi groups like The Base. She critiques the book's structure, noting it takes too long to delve into neo-Nazism. Causey also explores the rise of white supremacist communities, such as Battle Ground, Washington, and Brewington Farms in Tennessee, which aim to create ethno-states. She highlights the dangers of accelerationism, a far-right ideology advocating for societal collapse to establish a white ethno-state. Causey emphasizes the need to address these threats seriously, noting the potential for violence and societal disruption. The discussion critiques Josh Abbotoy's exclusionary views, which emphasize that "leadership should come from Protestant Christians." It highlights the precarious state of the New Right in Washington, particularly the splintering of their electoral coalition and the intellectual coherence around Trump's governance. JD Vance is described as "a leading intellectual avatar," with key allies in Donald Trump Jr. and Peter Thiel. The conversation also touches on the radicalization process, the influence of techno-libertarianism, and the potential for Christian localist or nationalist ethno-states. The speaker urges awareness of these developments and their broader implications.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Scott Payne, Code Name Pale Horse, white supremacist groups, attention spans, social media, neo-Nazis, accelerationism, Charlottesville rally, Dylann Roof, Christian nationalism, Battleground Washington, Highland Rim project, New Right, conservative communities., New right, Republican party, white working-class Christians, JD Vance, Trump administration, Peter Thiel, techno libertarianism, surveillance, Christian localist, Christian nationalist, ethno states, radicalization, Operation Gladio, techno capitalism, cultural values.
Welcome to con-sary-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.
Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I will be talking about Scott Payne's book, Code Name Pale Horse: How I Went Undercover to Expose America's Nazis. I will also be talking about these white supremacist white separatist groups that are literally buying up towns and starting their own communities. I also want to just put a finger on the pulse of where we are as a country. There are a number of you who listen internationally, and I'm very glad that you're here, but I will say, on any given episode, the typical listening pool is about 70 to 80% American. So, I just want to ask, like, what is going on? Are people really as divided as we're being told? Is this propaganda, or have we really reached a pretty scary fracture. I was thinking about this just the other night, because I'm like, whatever happened to moderation? I saw a video, and I can't remember now if it was on Instagram or Facebook. I don't do that TikTok shit, you know? If you do, that's your choice, but the short form content and the rotting of people's attention span. I'm going to get to that too, before I ever even get to all this stuff about the neo-Nazis. There's another conspiracy theory I heard as it relates to people's attention spans and what's going on there, and I was like, "Oh, we need to talk about that. Anyway, I don't do that. I don't do the TikTok, but on one of those platforms I saw this guy talking about language that suggests someone is MAGA or suggests that somebody might be far right, but they don't want to come right out and say it, and one of it was being a moderate, calling yourself a moderate or a centrist, and I was like, I just stopped cold right there, I was like, What the fuck, what? calling yourself a moderate or a centrist is now supposed to be coded for secretly being far right or secretly being MAGA. I was just speechless and dumbfounded by that, but I do wonder, like, why is it that people have to fit into such polarized camps where we are supposed to either be far right or far left and very tribalistic. You're not allowed to have friends in that group, you don't talk to those people, you don't do that, you don't, you don't like, like the these people buying up their own towns. We just want to have our own communities where everybody looks alike and thinks alike, and we live in a vacuum. We live in an echo chamber. We're never challenged by anything that we disagree with. We don't even have to see somebody of a different skin color. What is happening? How did this happen? This is, this is going to be, it'll be an interesting ride, but I suspect an unpleasant one. Nevertheless, choose your frosty beverage of choice, and we'll saddle up.
Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjold was awarded Best Biography at the 2026 American Book Fest International Book Awards in Los Angeles. Sara's follow-up project, Simply Dag: The Private Man in a Public and Dangerous Office, will be available anywhere Amazon books are sold on July 29th. And now back to the show.
I stumbled on a video the other day on YouTube by this lady named Sammy Ingram. Full disclosure, I don't know her, I don't know anything about her channel or her philosophy. So it's like, how it is nowadays. You have to give a full disclaimer to talk about one freaking video, one comment. You have to give 1000 disclaimers of I don't know this person. It's not an endorsement. I don't know anything about them. She has a video called Social Media Could Be the reason you're struggling to stay in your desired reality, and what she talks about in that video is TikTok and short form content, and how it used to be that if you wanted to go to YouTube to watch a longer video, to watch a particular content creator, or even to watch a movie, it was like that's what you did, and you went on Facebook, and then later Instagram to look at what your friends and family were doing, to look at funny, silly videos, comedy videos, cute cats, cute dogs, puppies, and kittens, and fluffy bunnies, and things that just felt. Like entertainment, but now, particularly with TikTok, there's been this rise of short-form content, like how there's even YouTube Shorts now, and pressure to do, like, Facebook reels, and to make everything on Instagram a video. I've noticed that too. I only have an Instagram for business purposes, and I don't really even like it. I haven't ever gotten a lot of traction with it, even though sometimes I post my own nature photographs and things like that. I, it never really has gotten a lot of traction, but I have noticed that if I put up a picture, even if I just animate it slightly, it's like the algorithm rewards you for having some kind of little short form video, which I find really silly. It's like, why can't this just be a nice picture of a rose, because that's what it is. Why, why would somebody need, quote unquote, need to animate that? But Sammy starts talking about, like, people's attention spans suck, and they're just scrolling, there's just mindlessly scrolling. It's like, how it's called doom scrolling for a reason, and they're just absorbing all of these tidbits of other people's trauma, other people's sadness, other people's complaints, other people's rage. Now, there are conspiracy theories that say that we don't actually have 8 billion people on the planet right now, that those numbers have been grossly inflated, because modern eugenicists want people to think that we have this giant population, we're in an earth with finite resources, but yet we have this exploding and ever growing population, so at some point they're going to want to cull the herd and they're going to want mainstream population to be on board with them culling the herd, and an easy way to do that is to convince people that there are just way too many people on the planet. It reminds me of something that JFK said in an interview, because a reporter was asking him about things like birth control, family planning, eugenics, and he was like, the thing is, people tend to think that it's other people that are the problem, it's somebody else's family. The guy down the street that has a bunch of kids, he's the problem, not me. Me and my family, we're great, we're not the problem, and we should never have anybody show up at our doorstep, but those people are the ones that are the problem, and that is that is human nature. The eugenicists are like, well, us and our bloodline, we're pure and we're wonderful, and we should be having a crapload of kids. How many babies has Lord Elon had? He's at a boatload of kids. Nick Cannon is at a boatload of kids. You're just all the time hearing about some of these celebrities, they have been fruitful and they have multiplied. I mean, I guess they have the money to take care of the kids, but then you have to ask the question of, like, what kind of a relationship, parent to child, are you having? Like, are you really there when the training wheels come off the bicycle? Are you there when they have their first crush, when they have to get braces on their teeth? Like, what, what's actually going on, like, are you really there for that many kids?
I, I find that a little bizarre, but Kennedy's point is a valid one. It's typically like those people over there are the problem, and they should be subject to population control, but not me and mine. Anyway, back to Sammy's point, whether you believe that we have 8 billion people on the planet right now, or even if it's a smaller number, let's say it's half that, let's say it's 4 billion, let's say for argument's sake it's one, that's too many people to try to pay attention to, and we have this glut of information, I heard David Bayer the other day talking about how knowledge is no longer sufficient to start a business. It's not sufficient to be marketable, because you can get on AI and ask for basic knowledge like that in a finger snap, and it'll just give you page after page of data that a human being would take quite a long time to do research on. We were never meant to know this much stuff, we were never meant to try to cram all of this information into our brain in one lifetime, and then to see all of the trauma and the drama and the fussing and the fighting, and you have people getting on the social media platforms, and I think some of them, probably not all of them, but some of them, a good number of them, are lying. They're just lying in the same way that social media has carefully curated images. We all know the couple that posts pictures date night with this cutie. Look at our Hawaiian vacation. Look at how great we are together. Here's our fall photo shoot, and then two weeks later they're filing for divorce, and all they want to do is tell you that guy was the worst son of a bitch I ever met. That lady was the worst bitch. She was sleeping with half the town. She probably got pregnant by somebody other than me. I bet the kids aren't mine. And it's like, hmm, well, that's a far cry from the vacation photos and date night with this cutie. But in the same way that social media can be carefully curated to make you think that everybody else is doing better than you, they're smarter, they're faster, they have a more exciting life, they have more money, their kids are better behaved, and they're way ahead of you, they're heavier, or they're thinner, or they're more muscular, or they're whatever, it can also be used as rage bait to make you mad. It can be used as, as sadness bait too. I was in the store, and somebody said it was ugly. This Gen Z kid came up to me and said, "You need to run around the block because you're fat, and it's like, did that really happen? I mean, I thought Gen Z was supposed to be the generation of body positivity and acceptance, like back in the 80s. Yeah, some teenage brat absolutely would have come up to you and said, 'Hey, Porky, you need to run around the block, don't put those candy bars in your basket. But also, back in the day, you could be like, 'Listen, MF, I'm gonna cut a switch and whip your damn butt. You're not talking to me that way. It was just a different time all the way around, but my point is, really, did they are these things really going on? And then you just scroll and you just scroll and you just scroll, and it's like some attractive woman going, 'I just don't feel pretty anymore, and they want everybody to get in the comment section and validate them. Oh, you're still beautiful. Look at how pretty you are. You're gorgeous. You, there's no reason for you to cry. Or my husband said I was a fat cow, and I'm going to social media to get everybody to be on my side and say he's a bastard.
Sammy makes the point in her video of some things are meant to be kept to yourself, some things are supposed to be between you and your partner, or you and a therapist, not you and the damn internet, and it got me to thinking, because we've heard a lot about social media in general ruining people's attention span, and then we've also heard about the Rona being a turning point, the new normal, and people having terrible rates of mental health problems. You know, it was like, if Grandma's in the nursing home, you can go and stand outside the building and talk to her through the glass window, but you can't come in. If somebody dies, you can't have a funeral. If somebody's in the hospital, you can't go see them. You could try to Facetime each other, but that's it. You can't be there at the bedside to hold their hand while they pass. Yeah, of course, that's going to be emotionally devastating. Absolutely, but it got me to thinking, I wonder how much of it is that, and then also, in addition, not, not, besides, or not, instead of, but in addition to all of the trauma that we went through collectively during the Rona. I wonder, how much of it is this bullshit on social media, especially the short form content, like what Sammy is talking about, where you just scroll and you scroll and you scroll, and it's one video after another, after another, after another of other people's stuff, other people's trauma dumping. I have to believe that that is causing a lot of mental health problems, because, like she says in the video, you were never meant to know all of this stuff, you were never meant to be in the business of a million other people. Back in the day, you had your crew, you had your people, you had your close friends, you had the folks that you went to school with, you had your family, but you did neighbors too, of course. And then, if you were involved at a religious organization, a church, a temple, a mosque, whatever, you had the people that you went to service with, but you didn't have the world, it wasn't like I'm in the cut with a million other people. I'm worried about what's going on with Deborah in Des Moines, who I've never met, and I have no idea if she's even telling me the truth about this stuff that's going on. It just wasn't like that, and Sammy's like, "I don't think that that's healthy, and I don't think that it's helping people to get into a higher state of mind. I don't think it's helping anything either, and even though this may seem like a totally separate conspiracy theory from the main meat and potatoes of what I'll be talking about tonight, it isn't, because I also furthermore think that all of this content is driving people apart instead of bringing people together, like it's almost like it's bringing the wrong people together in some cases, which we'll get to when I start talking about the group that Scott Payne joins, whenever he's discussing his book, but it's like it's bringing people together that want to be in an echo chamber, where it's like I just want you to tell me things that I already believe, I want you to tell me things that I already agree with. I don't want to be intellectually challenged. I've seen this also happening with events and with books. At some point, I will record my episode about highly literal. Storytelling, and how I feel like people have rotted their brains, and so when you get into things like irony, satire, allegory, symbolism, you now have people that have no idea what the hell you're trying to do. It's like they don't have any point of reference, they don't have any experience with similes or metaphors or allegory. It's not literally this, it's suggesting something else. You give them something that's not highly literal, and they don't know what to do with it.
Speaking of social media, there's another guy, I can't remember his account, but he basically goes out to people in Gen Z and asks them to read messages from index cards, and they struggle, and then, so, then you think about the literacy rate in America, which I think, for quite some time, it's there's been a large segment of the adult population that cannot read to a sixth grade proficiency level, so you have all of these things kind of stewing around in a cauldron, you have the collective mindfuck that we all went through during the Rona. You have social media, and particularly the short form content, where you're just getting like bite-sized bits of other people's trauma, but you're getting it over and over and over and over again as you sit there and mindlessly scroll. You have highly literal storytelling, where if you're asking the reader or the movie watcher to meet you halfway, it's like they no longer know how to do that. It's like they're sitting there going, I've been lobotomized, and I want you to entertain me. Feed me my cotton candy, feed me my sweet marshmallows, and shut the fuck up. I don't want to think anymore. As I said, I've even noticed this with events. There was an organization. Obviously, I'm not going to call anybody out because I don't know the whole story. I'm drawing an educated inference. I'm drawing an educated, considered conclusion, but I don't know everything that went into this decision. Okay, full disclosure, full disclaimer. But there was an organization where I really wanted to go and give a lecture, and that's not something that I typically do. I don't typically like pitch myself, but I saw some real synergy there. I hate that word, because it's a corporate buzzword, but I saw it. I saw that there could be a good connection, there could be a good relationship between what I do and what I talk about, and what they do and what they talk about. And so I got in contact with the director and just said, hey, look, I would love to come and speak to your group, and here would be the topic, and they acted like we'll consider it, you know, got got some other things going on, but we'll get back to you, and then they just slow played me out the door, like they didn't really want me there, and when I started looking at the itinerary of people they do have coming in to give speeches, or to teach classes, or to make presentations, it was about as exciting as a bowl of cold gruel. It looked like if people are being so catty here, but it's like, what if everybody's sitting around at the asylum, most of them have been lobotomized, and they're drooling out of the side of their mouth, and they just need an activity for arts and crafts hour, you know. Let's, let's finger paint like toddlers, let's make a sculpture out of popsicle sticks, that kind of thing. And it just hit me like this all seems very safe. It feels very safe. It feels very predictable, and it's like, oh, yay, you learned a new little skill. Good for you. You learned how to finger paint, you learned how to make a god's eye, you learned how to make a house out of popsicle sticks. Good for you. Isn't that nice for you? And I'm sitting there going, I want to have like an actual intellectually stimulating presentation, but that's the thing. There are so many people now who don't want to be intellectually stimulated, and that scares the shit out of me. I am scared when it comes to that. I don't go around screaming the sky is falling like Chicken Little, but I will tell you on that point I am very frightened. I am frightened for this country, because it's like when you, when people have lost their ability to think critically, and it's not even only that they've lost it, it's that they've kind of willingly given it up, and they've just said, "fuck it, I want robots to think for me. I want to outsource any thought that I have in my mind to an AI chat bot, and I just want to sit in front of my streaming media and in front of my endless doom scroll on TikTok and be mindlessly entertained for hours.
Get up, go to work at some job that's probably equally as unsatisfying and unstimulating as watching paint dry, and then get home with my beer and my potato chips, and eat a lot of ultra processed foods, and scroll on TikTok, and watch shit on Netflix, and that's my life. In my opinion, that's not alive, and it scares me to see how many people are going in that direction. I'm going to take us back now to the summer of 2017 It's hard to believe that that's been nine years ago. In my mind, when somebody says 2017 that seems like it's been three or four years ago, not almost a decade, which kind of makes me think of my question from last week's episode of Is Cern fucking up time. How is it possible that 2017 has been almost a decade? That's crazy, but let's go back to the Unite the Right rally, and I'm going to hop over to Wikipedia, just for ease of use, just so we have a handy dandy summary. The Unite the Right rally was a white supremacist rally that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, from August 11 to 12th, 2017 Marchers included members of the alt right, neo-Confederates, neo-fascists, white nationalists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and far-right militias. The organizers' stated goals included the unification of the American white nationalist movement and opposing the proposed removal of the statue of General Robert E. Lee from Charlottesville's former Lee Park, the event had hundreds of participants and sparked a national debate over Confederate iconography, racial violence, and white supremacy. The rally occurred amid the controversy, which was generated by the removal of Confederate monuments by local governments following the Charleston church pop pop in 2015 in which a white supremacist popped and killed nine at a black church. The rally turned violent after protesters clashed with counter protesters, resulting in more than 30 injured in the afternoon of august 12. Self-identified white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr. deliberately rammed his car into a crowd of counter protesters about a half mile away from the rally site, killing Heather Heyer and injuring 35 people. Fields fled the scene in his car, but was arrested soon after. In 2018 he was tried and convicted in Virginia State Court of first degree murder, malicious wounding, and other crimes. The following year, Fields pleaded guilty to 29 federal hate crimes in a plea agreement to avoid the death penalty in this trial. US President Orange Man remarked about the rally generated negative responses, which were criticized as implying a moral equivalence between the far right protesters and the counter protesters, the rally and resulting death and injuries resulted in a backlash against white supremacist groups in the United States. After Charlottesville refused to approve another march, Unite the Right held an anniversary rally on august 11 and 12th of 2018 called Unite the Right Two in Washington, DC. I'm going to scroll down a little bit, because this paragraph is important to what I want to say tonight. The rally sparked a national debate over Confederate iconography, racial violence, and white supremacy. US President Donald Trump, aka the Orange Man, aka mr. Cheeto, remarks about the rally generated negative responses. In his initial statement, following the rally, Trump condemned the display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides. The first statement, and his subsequent defenses of it, Trump referred to very fine people on both sides, while clarifying that he was not referring to the neo-Nazis and white nationalists. These statements were criticized as implying a moral equivalence between the far right protesters and the counter protesters. End quote. Now I'm going to also go to the tab about the Charleston church pop pop, because it will become relevant to what we're going to talk about in Scott Payne's book as well. On June 17, 2015 a racist mask pop pop and hate crime occurred in Charleston, South Carolina. Nine people were killed, and another injured during a Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest black church in the southern United States. All 10 victims were African Americans at the time. It was one of the deadliest mass pop pops at a place of worship in US history. Dylann Roof, a 21 year old white supremacist, had attended the Bible study before opening fire. He was found to have targeted members of this church because of its history and status.
In December 2016 Roof was convicted of 33 federal hate crime and murder charges. On january 10, 2017 he. Was sentenced to death for those crimes. Roof was separately charged with nine counts of murder in the South Carolina state courts in April 2017 Roof pleaded guilty to all nine state charges in order to avoid receiving a second death sentence, and as a result, he was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. He will receive automatic appeals of his death sentence, but he may eventually be executed by the federal justice system. Well, whenever we, whenever I start covering what Dave McGowan writes about in the book Program to Kill, whenever I can get myself emotionally prepared to go back through that book again to review it, yeah, I'd kind of wonder. Roof was one of the three inmates on federal death row whose sentence was not commuted by President Joe Biden, aka senile old man, prior to leaving office. Roof espoused racial hatred in both a website manifesto, which he published before the pop pop, and a journal, which he wrote from jail afterward. On his website, Roof posted photos of emblems, which are associated with white supremacy, including a photo of the Confederate battle flag. The pop pop triggered debates about the modern display of the flag and other commemorations of the Confederacy. Following these murders, the South Carolina General Assembly voted to remove the flag from the state capitol grounds, and and a wave of Confederate monument or memorials removals were followed shortly thereafter. End quote. When you go and look at Dylann Roof's mug shot, he looks possessed. I've said before that a movie like The Exorcist would not convince me of demonic possession, and it's actually really sad when you know that Linda Blair was a kid who had her pelvis broken because of all the, you know, the jumping up and down and the bending at the waist that happened in some of those scenes, she actually did break her pelvis, and that's horrible, and then all of the spewing profanity and the pea green vomit and all of that, it wouldn't convince me of demonic possession, whereas when I watch Jack Nicholson's performance as Jack Torrance in The Shining, he does look demonically possessed the way that he talks to Wendy and to Danny, his facial expressions, he is very scary to me. I only allow myself to watch that movie once a year, because that's all I can really tolerate of it. To me, there's a thing that I call the cloak of evil, where you can just see it on somebody, whatever that is that you believe in, whether you want to call that human evil or supernatural evil or Satan, or whatever. I saw it in the video, whenever Dick Folds from Lehman Brothers was talking about, I want to rip their heart out, I want to rip someone's heart out of their chest and eat it in front of them. The way that he looks in that video, I was like, he is wearing the cloak of evil that I just want to get away from it. I don't like that shit at all, and when, in looking at this kid, shit, man, something is something is bad wrong with him, something is bad wrong with him, and he has got on the cloak of evil. Now, is it possible that he was part of some program like MK Ultra? I mean, right now we've got Representative Luna doing these congressional hearings about the Charlie India Alpha and the MK Ultra mind control experiments. What will actually come of that? What will actually be revealed there? Of course, we don't know, but I'm just thinking like it's possible that this kid could have been brainwashed by some kind of program like that, people on the right side of the spectrum, whether you want to even say far right or not, will typically say, well, if he was brainwashed by MK Ultra, it was probably for a boom stick control agenda, they want to take our boom sticks, and so by having some kid get brainwashed to go in and do a pop pop at a church that's part of how they accomplish it. I'm not sure that the answer really is that simple.
I mean, we can certainly say that he falls into the category of an accelerationist, which I'll get further into that information when we start talking about Scott Payne, that he wants to bring about a race war. Okay, this also ties back into what the fuck was going on with Charles Manson. I will at some point get into the Manson murders and talking about in the same way that it's been said. When you look at Lee Harvey Oswald, you see the fingerprints of intelligence everywhere. I believe you see the same kind of thing when you look at what was going on with Charles Manson and his cult. It wasn't really that he was that extraordinary of a manipulator, and he was all over Laurel Canyon, and he seemed to have a lot of celebrity contacts. It's like things that make you say, so you look at this kid, and in my opinion, he looked. Fucking possessed, but we're supposed to believe that he had some kind of obsessive compulsive disorder. He was smoking pot, he started taking antidepressants, and so, because of the drug cocktail, and then maybe some kind of mental health issue like OCD, he starts going on the internet, and he gets radicalized totally by himself on the internet, and decides to perpetrate this crime. Could there be more to the story? I would say almost certainly there's more to this story, but Dylann Roof will come up again as we start talking about what Scott Payne encountered when he went undercover. Now, before I pivot away from the Unite the Right rally, if you go to the American Presidency Project, which is a legitimate website, you will find Trump campaign press release fact check after Charlottesville President Trump specifically and totally condemned neo-Nazis and white nationalists. This is dated from august 18, 2020 Democrats and many in the media love to repeat the false claim, and false claim is in bold type, that President Trump praised white supremacists in Charlottesville. Joe Biden even launched his campaign on this entirely fake news, entirely fake news being put in bold type, as CNN's Jake Tapper has said, President Trump did not call neo-Nazis or white supremacists very fine people. Jake Tapper, elsewhere in those remarks, the President did condemn Neo-Nazis and white supremacists, so he's not saying that the Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists are very fine people. President Trump, August 15, 2017 I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. Joe Biden loves to traffic in fear and division by lying about what Trump said or hasn't said, but Biden is the one who proudly befriended segregationists, touted an award from George Wallace, honored a former exalted cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan worried his kids would grow up in a racial jungle, marveled that Barack Obama was articulate and clean, bragged about being from a slave state, and repeatedly used the N word. Biden happily accepted the endorsement of Representative James Clyburn, a proud supporter and strong defender of racist anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, who said that Hitler was a very great man. Kamala Harris has also racked up endorsements from Farrakhan lovers, including Representative Alsi Hastings and Representative William Lacey Clay. End quote. Now, look to me, there's no reason to get partisan, because you're fucked either way. I've used the analogy with you, I don't even know how many times of the cartoon where the cow was standing outside the slaughterhouse. You can go in the left way or you can go in the right way. You can go in with a rainbow flag over the door or with an American flag over the door. You can go in donkey, you can go in elephant. You're going to get your throat cut, you're going to be hung upside down and exsanguinated either way, but you get to decide who jabs the knife into your jugular. Gee, thanks. But there is this attempt at revisionist history to say that the orange man did not make the comment about very fine people on both sides, but he did, and this, and they're not going to fucking Mandela affect me on this, motherfuckers. I remember, I remember seeing it, and what's more, I tracked the goddamn video down on C-SPAN.
I would highly recommend that you download this, keep it, keep a copy for yourself, because they're going to try to convince you that this never happened. Now, don't violate anybody's copyright. Don't publish or distribute where you don't have the permission to, because these companies will come after you. Don't do that, but make sure that you have a copy of it somehow, whether you write it, you transcribe it. You know, I can't tell you what to do here, but make sure that you have your own way of accessing this at a later date, in case it disappears, because it probably will at about the 24 second mark. He says, I have no doubt that there's blame on both sides, and you don't have any doubt about it either. What you want to do is get to the 32nd mark, because he clearly says very fine people on both sides, and in a way that's uncharacteristic for him, he actually stops and considers what's about to come out of his mouth. A reporter, I'm not sure who it was, I can't see the man's face, but it's the voice of a male reporter saying neo-Nazis showed up, and then Trump interrupts him and says, "Excuse me, they didn't put themselves down as neo-Nazis. He says, "You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were. And then he takes a pause, like he's actually going to take a beat and think about this very fine. Find people on both sides at about the minute and a half mark after he goes off on well, these people cared about a statue that was really important to them. And what are you going to do? Are you going to take down a statue of George Washington because he owned slaves? Are you going to take down a statue of Thomas Jefferson because he was a major slave owner? So he kind of throws a bit of a red herring into the argument, because people are talking about the violence that was perpetrated, and he's trying to go back to the root cause, which to me sounds like a bit of a defense, like, well, they were there for a good reason, were they, though, and even if we want to talk about people having the right to a peaceful protest, the the minute, then it becomes not peaceful, you know that law enforcement is going to get involved. So it's at the minute 30 mark, he finally says, I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. He claims that there were many other people besides neo-Nazis and white nationalists in the group, and these magical, mystical other people that weren't white nationalists or neo-Nazis have, according to him, been treated very unfairly by the press. So now I want to get into Scott Payne's book, but let's keep all of this in mind, because it will be relevant. What happened in Charlottesville, what happened in Charleston, Dylann Roof, Orange Man saying very fine people on both sides, and actually pausing, actually taking a beat to think about precisely what he wanted to say, and then only a minute later in the speech being like, well, I mean, not the neo-Nazis and white supremacists, but I mean also at the same time there's other people in that group that weren't like that, am I right? And everybody's like, no, not really. So the book is code-named Pale Horse, how I went undercover to expose America's Nazis. If we go to kind of like the back blurb slash Amazon sales copy. We read when Scott Payne was growing up, an 80s kid with a big attitude and a taste for sleeveless shirts, he could never have envisioned where he'd find himself on Halloween night 2019 Having transformed into Pale Horse and infiltrated the nation's most dangerous, fastest growing white supremacy group, the base, he was huddled with a cell of neo-Nazis in the backwoods of Georgia as they slaughtered a goat and drank its blood in a ritual sacrifice. A decorated agent, dubbed the Hillbilly Donnie Brasco Payne, takes readers along with him on some of the most terrifying and riskiest assignments in FBI history. He went deep undercover with the Lethal Outlaw Motorcycle Club in Massachusetts to the front lines of the opioid epidemic in Tennessee. He infiltrated the KKK in Alabama.
Through it all, he stayed married to the love of his life, raised two girls, and spent his Sundays at church sustained by family and faith. Timely and unputdownable, codename Pale Horse is a hard look at some of the most pressing threats facing America today, honest and inspiring. It's the story of a hero determined to take down a hateful army before the unthinkable could come to pass. End quote. I listen to this on Audible as an audiobook because I like to listen to audiobooks while I'm up cleaning the house and doing housework. It just makes those tedious tasks like loading the dishwasher and folding laundry, that much better if you can get interested in a good book while you're doing it. His voice reminded me of Jelly Roll, so it's a little bit like what if Jelly Roll was narrating a book about some of the sleaziest, nastiest people that you can imagine. It took me several listening sessions to get through it, and each time I just wanted to go and take a shower or a hot bath with a lot of bleach, as other people have noted in their reviews, the title is a bit deceptive because I was thinking, like, okay, there might be a chapter or two of introductory information, like telling you who this guy is, how he got started at the Bureau, what his career was like, etc. And then by maybe chapter two or three at the latest, you're going to get information about America's neo-Nazis, and I wanted to know, like, from his perspective, not saying that he's completely the most trustworthy source, right? Because it's like what I've said about people who claim to be ex-spies, ex-agency. Oh, I was part of the Charlie India Alpha, and they put all their brainwashing into me, but it's okay, because I've gone rogue. I'm not one of them anymore. To me, it's like, once a spy, always a spy, and I know that somebody like John Kiriakou, who's suddenly just kind of catapulted to success and is everywhere and is ubiquitous, says it's intellectually lazy to say that once a spy, always a spy. Sure, it is, pal, but you're the one that was a spy, not me. I'm just an. Normal average person out here to me, it's like, can we trust somebody from the Bureau in the same way? Like, I'm a former undercover agent, and I'm going to tell you how all this shit went down, and I promise Scouts honor everything I'm saying is true. He makes himself seem like the good guy and the angel in every situation, and I just have to wonder how much of that is actually true, which is not saying that I know anything about him as a person. I don't. His personality did not strike me as one that I would enjoy being around. There are times when he talks about, yeah, I'm bold and I'm ballsy and I'm brash, and I have a big loud personality, and when I walk in a room, I tend to be the center of attention, and sometimes that rubs people the wrong way. It sounds like a non-apology, you know? When somebody says something like, I'm sorry you got offended, I'm sorry you got your feelings hurt, I'm sorry you took it wrong, they're not really apologizing, they're just making a passive-aggressive fuck you statement, because when somebody is actually apologizing, they will say, I am so sorry for the way that I behaved, I'm so sorry for what I said, I regret it, and I have remorse, as opposed to I said what I said, but you know it's on you if you got offended, that's how it sounds to me when he's like, well, I just got a big ballsy personality, and I admit I'm not everybody's cup of tea, and I'm big, and I'm bold, and when I come in, everybody stops to look at me, that's just who I am. It's a little bit like I'm bragging, but I'm trying to not make it seem like I'm bragging on myself, and I knew guys like him, you know, coming up through high school and college, and thought they were tough shit, and they were loud, and they were aggressive, and I'm just like, you know, if I met this guy in person, I think I'd want to just walk the opposite direction pretty quickly.
But we don't get into information about the base until chapter 12, so it's like you're sitting there going through all of these other chapters thinking, when are we going to get to the information about the actual neo-Nazis? That's why I picked up this book, or in my case, why I downloaded the audio book to read it. I wanted to know, how do these people get radicalized? How do they find one another? And what, what's the psychology behind it? What is going on inside somebody's brain that they want to give themselves over to hatred, because I don't get that, but there has to be something that snaps, there has to be something that breaks. It makes me think of Eichmann, and how he said, like, after he was caught and was put on trial, he said, like, he would have murdered his own father if Hitler told him to. He was so committed to the ideology, so committed to Hitler, so committed to the Nazi party, that if Hitler had said, "Go kill your own father, because it's what I want you to do, he would have done it. That will also come up as we talk about this book, but it's like, why, how, like, what, what happens that the light inside of you gets snuffed out, and it's just replaced by something dark and scary and creepy, and, and I would use the e word, evil, what, what happens to somebody, and I really wished that he had gotten into that kind of information. Nevertheless, even though I feel like he took us down some weird twists and turns, and I feel like the book should have just been marketed as, hey, I'm a former undercover agent, I was known as the Hillbilly Donnie Brasco, here's my life. If it was positioned more as a memoir, I could understand all of these other roads that we walk down, but if you're specifically going to lure people in to say, "Hey, here's how I infiltrated and exposed neo-Nazis, and then you don't get to the neo-Nazis until like chapter 12, it kind of pisses the reader off, and I'm not the only reviewer who has said that. He starts talking about a whole bunch of stuff when you're sitting there, like, what? So he starts taking us through high school, you know, being a rough and tumble dude, drinking and smoking some marijuana, getting into satanism, and saying that he has this like weird experience where he hears something demonic and he decides that he's been fooling around with powers that he didn't really understand and that he shouldn't have been messing with, and that's when he decides that he's better off aligning himself with Jesus and going to church, as opposed to aligning himself with the powers of evil, he's a cop, and then somebody that he's working with on the force says, "Hey, if I were young and single like you, and I could do whatever I wanted, I'd go apply to work at the bureau. So he gets started at the bureau, and according to him, because he has the kind of personality where he can talk to him. Anybody about anything, and pretty quickly fit in with them and gain their trust. It makes sense for him to go undercover, because that's a big part of the job, is making an identity, and then being able to convincingly stick with the identity and ingratiate yourself with whatever group you're trying to be a part of. We go down the rabbit hole with him about some biker gangs on the East Coast, and it just made my skin crawl, not because all bikers are bad, and then he makes that point in the book that the vast majority of people that are riding around on a motorcycle are not bad people, they're normal law-abiding citizens that just enjoy going out on a motorcycle on the weekend, but you have this smaller cadre of people who are messing around with a life of crime, you know, and he tells all of these gross stories about people dealing and using dope and women getting passed around, like, well, if she gets married and she becomes somebody's old lady, then we can't pass her around like a party favor, but until then she's basically just a biker groupie, and we can all take turns having sex with her and using her like she's nothing.
You have guys that are making money by fencing stolen goods and committing robberies and fighting pit bulls, and it's like, I just. I understand that people exist like that in the world, but I don't want to sit around thinking about that. I just, it made me want to go take a hot shower with bleach. Then he starts getting into backwoods people that he was dealing with down in the Deep South, where it was like people who were making and selling coke and meth, and some woman, not even getting out of the realm of men doing nasty things. Some woman who told him, I like to torture people, I like to take coat hangers and ram them down the urethra of men, and then jerk it out and cause them terrible pain, and you're like, what the hell, what, what on earth is happening here? I don't want to know about any of that. And then he starts talking about people practice, men and women practicing bestiality, and it's like, I just, I just want to get out of here. I just, I don't, I don't want to sit and listen to this. And then he's like, oh, some guy wanted me to prove that I wasn't a fed by telling me to snort a line of coke, and I tried to talk my way out of it, but finally he let me get away with just tasting it, you know. But he has the tendency to do this throughout the book. It's like there will be these situations, and it's like, instead of just saying, yeah, I had to take the drugs to keep from being outed, I talked my way out of it, like he is like he always is wanting to make sure that you know that he was the upstanding police officer in the situation, which I find far fetched. He could be telling the truth, I don't know, I'm just telling you from my perspective as a reader it seems far fetched. Then at the same time he's talking about PTSD and his anxiety and wanting to be home with his wife and his kids, and a time when he and the wife got into a big marital argument, and he said that he kicked an ottoman across the room, and she freaked out and called the cops, and so, of course, they were law enforcement was going to get involved, and I'm like, you just start to wonder how much more to these stories was there, like I don't know, I just.. I got a vibe from it that I was like, I.. he doesn't seem like the kind of person that I would enjoy hanging out with, and I don't completely trust everything that he's saying, which is not.. I want to be very clear, which is not to say that the villains in the story are not actual villains, I'm sure they are. I just am a little skeptical that he was always this, you know, angel with a halo over his head. But finally, you know, we start getting into him infiltrating the KKK, and then infiltrating the base. One area where he gets kind of close to talking about the psychology of, like, what's going on with these people. It's not quite psychology so much as it is a tactic, an important tactic that we need to be aware of, and that is accelerationism. So, in this case, we're talking about far right slash militant accelerationism. So, there's a belief that liberal democratic society is irredeemable, and that these neo-Nazi groups and white supremacists should advocate for the T word, for violence, for chaos. They want to create acts of sabotage and murder to spark off to intentionally spark off what they believe will be a race war and or a societal collapse with the ultimate goal of then establishing a white ethno state, basically like in their vision all of these other races will kill each other, the white race will be superior and will be able. To just go off in its own sort of enclave and have an all white ethno state. Now it's also worth mentioning when we go over to Wikipedia and we look under the tab right wing accelerationism, we see the name Curtis Yarvin.
If you listened to my episode about why is Peter Thiel obsessed with the antichrist, then you may remember that Yarvin has had a great influence on Peter Thiel. So, I've told you before, you can't get in the system. It's like you can't swing a dead cat in the system without hitting Nazis and fascists. So, Scott talks about how the bureau had been tracking this group called the base, and they had been putting propaganda online on apps like Telegram and Gab, and the posts would say things like, there's no need to wait for the conditions of a revolution, guerrilla insurrection can create the right conditions, insurgency begins as a T-word campaign. If you want a society with traditional values, electoral politics could still achieve that, theoretically, but if you want a white society, electoral politics cannot achieve that unless the current system of government is replaced, and that current system cannot be replaced peacefully. End quote. He talks about meeting these people, like the militant Buddhist and pestilence, just, you know, they have their online handles, some of which are just ridiculous. He talks about how he's six foot four, 262 pounds, and he was larger than any of the guys that he showed up from the base to meet, but at the same time he was more than double their age, and one of the things that I want to say is that at points in time in this book it's almost like these people don't know their asshole from their elbow, they seem like the keystone cops of neo-Nazis, and we want to be careful with that, because it's easy to say, well, these people are just buffoons, they're larping, they're playing games, they're being stupid, and there's nothing to worry about. Even an idiot can be dangerous. I have a former coworker who learned that the hard way. He was working for a man who he had apprised to be an idiot, he was like, this guy is just a complete goof, I can get away with doing anything on the job because this guy's a moron. Well, as it turned out, the moron was just a little bit smarter than what my former coworker realized, and it wound up getting him fired and fired with cause. It makes me think of this lyric from the Huey Lewis and the new song "Perfect World" - nobody's perfect, not even the perfect fool, meaning sometimes even an idiot can be dangerous, sometimes an idiot can be a little bit smarter than we think and can cause you some real harm. So we want to be careful about reading a book like this, and hearing, like, okay, a bunch of skinny, scrawny white dudes who are pasty pale, it's like they haven't seen sunlight in a decade show up, and they're, and they're just like city teenagers, even people who seem young and stupid can be dangerous. He talks about at the beginning of the book, what acceleration, what accelerationism is as a concept, and I'll read just a brief selection here. Groups like the one I infiltrated, the base present a new ideology within the far right movement, and I think it is the most dangerous and overlooked threat facing us today. They call themselves accelerationists, although accelerationism as a concept has been around since the late 1980s I'm going to butt in and say maybe under that nomenclature, but if we think back to Manson and what he was doing back in the 1960s we could certainly call that all the shit about helter-skelter. We could certainly call that accelerationism, so we're told anyway. Manson's goal was to set off a race war, so that there would be chaos, and then people of other races would kill each other off, and white society could band together, and then go off and have their own enclave, or take charge and create a white ethno state in another episode. Later on down the line, I will go into all of that, as well as what the Charlie India Alpha knew. How involved were they with Manson and the Manson murders? Like this guy who's a shrimping nobody, sure makes a scene, you know.
He sure seems to get a lot of inroads in Hollywood, and to make friends in high places, and he wanted to be a musician, and it's one of those things that's like, hmm, just let's put a pin in that and contemplate it later, but it does make you wonder, so even though I would argue that accelerationism is certainly not something that was born in the late 1980s maybe we can say that. When the nomenclature came about, it has never had such a widespread following in the white supremacist community. Those who adhere to it don't believe there's a political solution to solving anything, because Western governments are irrevocably corrupt. What they do believe is that society will eventually collapse, either on its own or from a man-made event, and their goal is to speed that up by sowing chaos and political tensions to accelerate it. After they help spark a race war, they will move in and create a white ethno state. Accelerationists don't support the political establishment, but they do use it to further their goals. They'll vote for extreme candidates, right or left. I know accelerationists who are about as far right as you can get, but who voted for Hillary Clinton. Yep, Hillary Clinton. This is their thinking. Democrats don't support law enforcement and the military, so they believe a Democrat in charge means crime rates will skyrocket, the US will be flooded by immigrants, society will decline, and the country will burn. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but they are also racists who support the Black Lives Matter movement, believing that these protests always turn violent. Accelerationists think, "Bring it on, let them destroy the cities. Accelerationists are not just angry white guys in their basements, they're actively recruiting and radicalizing online. When they meet in person, they hone their skills at outdoor training camps, planning and plotting to target racial minorities and Jews, end quote. And that's another reason why we just have to be careful with the idea of they're just numb nuts, they're just sitting around with their dicks in their hands, larping and playing games, and they, they couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag. He talks about these guys absolutely idolizing Dylann Roof and wanting to get haircuts like Dylann Roof, and looking at him as being like, oh yeah, he stood up, he did something, he didn't just sit in the basement and talk, he actually stood up and did something to help spark off the race war. It's intriguing too, because when he's talking about the Klan, by and large, he's talking about Christian nationalists and people who have this severely alternative view of scriptures, and it's like they picture Jesus as having been a white guy, like he has alabaster skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes, Nordic Jesus. Now, where in the hell they're getting that idea from. Who cooked that shit up? I don't know. I mean, he does. He does get into some details mildly about that in the book, but it's like, okay, on the one hand, you have these Klansmen, Christian nationalists who feel like God is on their side and white-skinned, blond-haired Jesus is on their side, but then he gets into the base, and they have some very bizarre kind of Teutonic or Nordic pagan ideas, like we're going to get rid of the shackles of Christianity and do unto others as you would have them do unto you, get rid of all that, so that we can have people going back to worshiping Odin and the old gods from the old days, and I think one way to look at that is this transcends religion, because if it can be slotted in in some perverted version of Christianity, or it can be slotted in in some let's go back to the olden times, I mean, the olden times, and start doing human sacrifices and worshiping Odin. Then it goes above any one particular spiritual or religious training, any one particular denomination or religion, and that's scary. After he gets the guys in the base to trust him, even though he is older than most, if not all of them, they have this Halloween in the woods, which is creepy and bizarre, but also very keystone coppish, like supposedly they have people in their ranks that have have been in the military, and I want to get into that.
I'm hoping to have Matt Kennard come on the show to talk about his book, Irregular Army, because it's like there are these military vets that are in alignment with the base, giving them information about weapons and tactics and warfare, and so forth, and that's another reason why we just have to be careful not to assume that these are all 20 year old white dudes sitting in grandma's basement, pulling on their pecker all day, like people like that in cells and creepy dudes hanging out in grandma's basement, can still be dangerous, but they go out for this Halloween bash, they steal somebody's goat and do a pretty botched up, bizarre ritual sacrifice of the poor goat, and drink its blood, which is described as being like thick, gross, and chunky, and take drugs, and try to like hallucinate, and have a spiritual journey, and then I think. In the wind up, some of them weren't even charged as seriously as they should have been for all the shit they were planning to do, like as it, as it relates to T word attacks. If you do kind of an after the fact Google search, you will find in 2019 the bureau initiated a sweeping crackdown on the neo-Nazi white supremacist group, the base, resulting in multiple arrests for hate crimes, conspiracy, and weapons violations. September 2019 US Army veteran Jarrett Smith was arrested for expressing interest in carrying out attacks on left-wing groups and a major news network. September 2019 Youssef Barasna was arrested for allegedly conspiring to vandalize a synagogue in Racine, Wisconsin, in an operation the group dubbed Operation Kristallnacht, late 2019 Patrick Jordan Matthews, a Canadian Armed Forces reservist, and Brian Mark Limbly Jr. were monitored and subsequently arrested in Maryland ahead of a planned 2020 rally, where they were found to be stockpiling weapons and ammunition to incite violence. October of 2019 the Bureau infiltrated a paramilitary-style training camp in Georgia, operated by the group, leading to the identification and later arrest of members plotting to murder an unspecified couple. End quote. And he talks about in the book that that's one of the things they wanted to do was get some like left-wing Antifa people, and it was like, well, if they have kids and we get there, and the kids are home, you know. This debate about would we have to kill the kids, or would we be able to leave the kids alone. And there, there were guys saying, like, if I had to kill my own family member, when, when it all goes down, if I had to kill a father, a mother, a brother, and or sister, I think I could do it, which made me think of Eichmann and his whole thing under oath, that if Hitler had told me to kill my own father, I would have done it, because I was that obedient, and I was that into Nazi ideology. Are these dudes just larping? Are they trying to play hard? They're trying to play tough, when really they would piss themselves. If there really was what they're calling the boogaloo, which is supposed to be like a race war or a second US Civil War, some kind of shit hits the fan, it all blows apart incident, apocalyptic type shit. Would they actually do all the crap that they claim that they're going to do, or would they pee and poop their pants? Well, yeah, probably a lot of them would pee and poop in their pants, but you'd have others that are more in that real agent of chaos, evil for its own sake, destruction for its own sake, that would be wild. I mean, that would, that would absolutely go apeshitting nuts and try to destroy everything. I'm thinking now of this, the scripture about steal, kill, and destroy. They would, before I get on to these people that are starting their own towns and trying to already get their own little miniature ethno states going, in terms of the book itself. If you are interested in hearing this guy's biography, if you want something that's more of a memoir and less of a look at, here's a comprehensive view of American neo-Nazi groups, and here's a look at the psychology behind it. Here's how people get radicalized. Here's what happens.
Here's what's psychologically going on inside someone's mind that would cause them to be drawn to this kind of fucked up, hate-filled ideology in the first place. If you're not looking for that kind of content, you just want to hear some guy who calls himself the hillbilly Donnie Brasco, who seems like kind of a rough and tumble jelly roll type of dude. Then, hey, knock yourself out, spend a few bucks on it. There are a couple of interesting reviews on Amazon that are in the two-star category, some reviewing guy writes predictable and bland. The rare book that I started and couldn't finish. I read a lot of true crime, and these undercover books follow the same blueprint. So, if you've read one, you've pretty much read all of them. Also, a theme in these books, if you pay close attention, you will see that most of the crime he stops was crime he initiated. I found that interesting, because, as I said, you know, from his perspective, he's always the angel in every story. I didn't want to do it, I was worried about it. I tried to see if any of the agents would come and rescue me. It's always like, I mean, did you, though? Like, there's all this drinking, and there's all this, all this partying, and I know you were on the job, so to speak, but, like, you know, pardon me if I'm a little bit skeptical that you were a perfect angel the whole time. Another reviewer writes, "Save your money, watch the Joe Rogan episode, just listen to the Joe Rogan podcast episode with Scott Payne. There is nothing in this book or more details than what is in that podcast. Save your money and just listen to the episode. Now, if we go over to Goodreads under the one star category, there's a lot more to unpack. Someone named John Devlin writes, so a lot to say here. This book is a classic bait and switch. It's only 225 pages, and perhaps 50 is about combating supposed white supremacist organizations. Uh, that's a pretty accurate ratio. It takes a long time to actually get to where he's talking about the base and the neo-Nazis. So, if you want to hear about the creepy biker gangs and the pill poppers and the drug runners of Appalachia, and you want to hear about the Klan, if you're like, 'Hey, I just want to hear all this guy's stories, he seems like he'd be really, really interesting. Knock yourself out if you want to know specifically about the base or about neo-Nazis in general. Probably not the book for you. Hannah Pate writes, the title is misleading. 12 of the 17 chapters do not pertain to what you think you'll be reading exactly. Lindsay writes, I'm sorry, sorry, but immediately no, not this man saying he saw a scary devil while taking in a demon, talking in a demon voice, not him complaining that no one was hiring white male police officers. I think we may have white supremacy a little too close to the sun. My guy did not finish after two and a half chapters. I had actually forgotten that part. Yeah, he did have a part where he was talking about trying to find a job, but nobody was hiring white male police officers, and I did laugh out loud. I'm going to switch gears slightly now to talk about these towns and communities that are being taken over. I guess they felt like the Boogaloo or the next Civil War, or whatever the fuck is not happening fast enough to suit them, so some developers are just saying, 'fuck it, we're going to go ahead and make our own little communes. I'm going now to the Oregon Public Broadcasting Network's website, OPB. I'll drop a link, of course, in the comments. A Christian Vision for Battleground: How One Business Man Is Transforming the Heart of a Southwest Washington Town, and this is written by Eric Newman. The face of a growing town 30 miles north of Portland is undergoing a transformation. A blue brick convenience store was recently remade into a rustic chic bakery called Al and Ernie's. Around the corner, a former dairy building was recast as an indoor farmers market with a fresh coat of white paint with black trim.
A nondescript three-bedroom house from the 1930s was renovated to become Spurgeons Pipe and Cigar Shop. The pattern continues along Main Street, and where orange plastic construction fencing stretches around a grassy lot the size of a football field. Soon this community will host a new convention center, and beside it a new stone chapel with tall narrow windows for the First Presbyterian Church. Welcome to Battleground Washington, a rapidly growing community of roughly 23,000 people, that's being reshaped by a group of business leaders and a pastor engaged in the Christian localism movement. I guess by using the term Christian localism, that sounds a bit less scary to people, perhaps, than Christian nationalism. The driving force behind these changes is Camden Spiller, co-owner and CEO of Maddox Industrial Transformer, far and away Battlegrounds' fastest-growing company. Spiller and his colleagues at Maddox have spoken openly about purchasing properties and developing land in Battleground during a presentation to the city council last year. Amatics executive said the company had invested in at least 30 properties in town using state and county property records. OPB confirmed that number, identifying more than a dozen corporations controlled by Spiller that have purchased over 30 properties in Battleground in the past six years. Spillers' purchases have raised hopes for some residents. He's revitalizing parts of the city's downtown, but the changes have also raised questions about whether there is a religious vision for Battleground. The church pastor, for whom Spiller is building a new chapel, has spoken about the importance of governing unbelievers that Pastor CR Wiley has ties to a prominent, self-described Christian nationalist in Moscow, Idaho, who wants his faith to shape how that town is run, and who has endorsed turning the 10 Commandments into civic law. Spiller is also listed as a director of American Reformer, an evangelical Christian nonprofit with a mission to promote a vigorous Christian approach to the cultural challenges of our day. Wiley is on its advisory board. American Reformer has published authors who argue in favor of Christian nationalism. The organization also hosts a fellowship for young professionals who are interested in politics, which it says is designed to recapture existing institutions to bring them under the lordship of Christ. On social media and on city streets, people are wondering about Spillers' intentions as he and his corporation grow their influence over local businesses, politics, and religious life, and the transformation has made a persistent national debate about the degree of separation between religion and civic life, an urgent question in a community, in a community that remains split about Spillers activities. Really, what is at stake is what defines America for me, says University of North Georgia Professor Matthew Bodie, who has written about Christian. Nationalism, and has followed its growing influence in Moscow, Idaho. Is it religious liberty? Is it economic liberty? Is it this idea that we could, as a democracy, work out our issues together? OPB contacted Spiller and Wiley for interviews via phone and email. Spiller declined an interview. Wiley did not respond, despite their ties to people and institution who have embraced the idea of Christian nationalism. Neither Spiller nor Wiley has spoken publicly about their view of it. In a March 2026 essay published in the local newspaper The Battleground Reflector, Spiller said his investments in battleground are rooted in Christianity. He said he hopes to strengthen the community, whether or not you share our faith. In the editorial, he cited a favorite Bible verse that says, "Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you. I'm going to scroll down a little, where he further quotes this wily person as saying, "What we, as Presbyterians and people who belong to the Reformed tradition, bring to the larger church are the resources of a public theology that helps us to govern unbelievers, Wiley said during the talk. End quote. I'm going to go now to an article that was published last month in Politico. The new right has a blueprint for building a Christian America inside the conservative plan to chart a new political future one town at a time. This one was written by Ian Ward on june 14, 2026 On a Tuesday morning earlier this spring, Josh Abatoy steered his pickup truck through a grassy meadow in central Tennessee.
The field was empty, save for a few patches of yellow wildflowers, but from behind the wheel, Abatoy, a soft-spoken 30-eight year old with a boyish face and a stubbly beard described a town that was visible only to him. A cluster of English cottages and craftsman style farmhouses, their front porches opening into a communal town green, a farm to table restaurant tucked alongside a repurposed barn housing an organic farm store. On the ridge overlooking the field, a pasture dotted with grazing cattle and other livestock, and at the center of it all, Abatoy said, gesturing toward the middle distance, a church spire rising into the pale blue Tennessee sky. For now, the town exists only in his imagination, but if everything goes according to plan, the field will soon become Brewington Farms, one of the neighborhoods that Abatoye's real estate company, Ridge Runner, is developing in rural Tennessee. End quote. I'm going to read a little bit more on paper. Brewington Farms will be a neighborhood like any other. In practice, it's anything but. The development stands as the cornerstone of the Highland Rim project, an audacious effort to build conservative Christian charter communities throughout Appalachia, backed by the venture capital firm New Founding, a Dallas-based fund with extensive ties to the ecosystem of conservative intellectuals and activists known as the New Right. The plan embodies the movement's core conviction that conservatives need to use the levers of public and private power to remake American life in their own image, as Abatoy readily acknowledges, the project is as much an ideological experiment as an entrepreneurial one. What would it look like to build a microcosm of the new rights ideal society in the middle of central Tennessee? End quote. As Ian points out, in accordance with anti-discrimination laws, the communities are theoretically open to anyone, but in practice, Abatoy, who is a practicing Southern Baptist, expects them to be populated primarily by right-leaning Christians. He has described his customers as good-based people who want to build something inspiring and authentic to the region's history, and has said that he expects most of the leadership for the project to come from Protestant Christians. End quote. I've been doing some reading about the early days of the Kennedy family in America, and the prejudice that they faced when they came here, and like ads that were very clear, we really just only want our own kind. We don't want blacks, we don't want Jews, and we don't want Irish or Catholics. We just want other Brahmins, we want other Bostonians who are white and Protestant, and multiple authors have written about Joe Kennedy Sr. having this mentality of, like, I want to get socially acceptable enough that I could be part of the country club. It was like he loathed these institutions, but there was still some part of him that wanted their approval or wanted their acceptance as well. And even when he got to the point where he could have bought the fucking country club, they were still like, we're going to exercise the one thing that we can do, which is to tell you no, we can ostracize you, we can say that you're not good enough, even though you were born in America, the fact that you're of Irish Catholic descent is enough. For us to say we don't want you here, you're not one of us, you're not a Brahmin, your people didn't come over on the Mayflower, and you're not a Protestant, so fuck off. This guy is outright saying to Politico that he expects most of the leadership for the project to come from Protestant Christians, and I'm sure we can probably extrapolate that by most of the leadership, what he actually means is all of the leadership. Now, in this article, Ian further goes into the idea of a retreatist mindset, and how Rod Dreher, in his 2017 bestseller, The Benedict Option talked about conservative Christians taking refuge in quasi-monastic communities dedicated to cultivating transcendent virtues, and then Ian also mentioned that Dreyer apparently thought that there was more hope for that happening in Hungary because he moved there in 2022 to join a think tank that was involved with Viktor Orban. Now I want to thread this needle a little bit tighter. I'm going to scroll down a little bit. I really want you to go back to Politico after this episode and read the whole article for yourself.
It's all good, every word of it. Ridge Runners move into the political fray comes at a uniquely precarious moment for the new right in Washington. The movement's goal of reorienting the Republican party around the cultural values and material interests of white working-class Christians is running up against the chaos and tumult of the second Trump administration. The electoral coalition that the new right hoped would buttress its power in the coming decades has splintered over the war in Iran and the persistently high cost of living, and the movement's allies in the Trump administration, including its leading intellectual avatar, Vice President JD Vance, are struggling to preserve the patina of intellectual coherence that they have erected around Trump's haphazard style of governance. End quote. The leading intellectual avatar, which anyone calling JD Vance an intellectual, is so laughable to me, almost can't even stand it. But let's think about that. The leading intellectual avatar is Vice President JD Vance. In an article that they link to, that's also on Politico, is there something more radical than MAGA? JD Vance is dreaming it. The byline reads, in a candid series of conversations, Vance revealed an ominous philosophy behind his first year in office. I'm going to scroll down a little bit under the tab, we need to fuck something else up. Vance's dual identities in Washington, the MAGA mudslinger and the new right leader are reflected in his two key political allies, both of whom dwell far beyond the Beltway. The first can be found 1000 miles to the south of Capitol Hill, amid the sunny confines of Mar-a-Lago. Vance remains in regular contact with Trump, but his closest ally in that world is the former president's eldest son, Don Jr. Now, let's scroll down a little bit more to something that's even more disturbing. Vance's other critical political connection and his primary political patron. Let's read this again. Vance's other critical political connection and his primary political patron can be found 3000 miles to the west of Washington and Los Angeles in recent years, Peter Thiel, whose venture capital firm Vance worked for before running for Senate, has become the chief financier of the new right ecosystem, and Teal's idiosyncratic brand of techno libertarianism, which combines an abiding skepticism of liberal democracy with a belief in national restoration through utopian modes of technological innovation has become a touchstone of intellectual discussions on the new right, end quote. Now this article was released in March of 2024 so he's even farther away now that he's gone to Argentina. Imagine that. Don't just love that scene in first class where Magneto gets down there and finds the Nazis. So look, you have Scott Payne talking about everybody from sleazy bikers running pit bull fights and having anal intercourse with prostitutes to earn their brown wings, and pill poppers in Appalachia having sex with animals, etc. etc. etc. a lot of grotesque sexual content in the book, and then getting to the base with a bunch of guys who sound like complete fuck wads, but this is almost like God, I'm trying to think of the exact right analogy that I want to use. It's almost like dangling a shiny toy in front of a child, so they don't see something that's even bigger and scarier in the background. Yes, we should be aware that these people exist, and I think it's, it's important for us to know what they're doing. What are they up to? And how does somebody get radicalized in the first place? What happens? It's another reason why I'm hoping that Matt Canard can come on to talk about. The regular army, because in that case of having criminals and gang members and neo-Nazis infiltrating the armed forces, or being flat out recruited to come in, you know that has echoes of Operation Gladio to me. Why the fuck were we paying people like Klaus Barbie and the Black Prince 1000s of dollars, people who should have gone to not only to jail, but to a fucking firing squad for war crimes. We're getting 1000s upon 1000s of dollars and a cushy life from the West. It's just disgusting, absolutely disgusting. I think we have to look at the bigger picture, because we have something like the base that's the..
I mean, I hesitate to even call it the tip of the iceberg, a bunch of dudes in a basement that think they're going to kick off the Boogaloo or Helter Skelter, or whatever the fuck, but then you have the real power brokers, I mean, the real for real power brokers who can fuck shit up on the turn of a dime, my God, that's scary to think about the technology that exists, the surveillance, social credit scores, central bank digital currency, going to a cashless society, agenda 2030 and so forth. That's where it really becomes frightening to me, the power, the surveillance, the technology, techno capitalism, or techno libertarianism, and then you put that in addition with people saying, like, we just want to already, we're not going to wait for the Boogaloo or the Apocalypse, we're just going to come out separate, because we don't want to be around the riff-raff anymore, we don't want to be part of this country, we want to have our own fake ass English village in Appalachia, which is not lost on me, that you have Scott Payne talking about pill poppers and people doing bestiality, but then you have this guy down the road that's trying to make an English cottage community centered around a church where everybody's supposed to be a Protestant Christian. What the talk about a tale of two cities, aren't we so far gone? Are we really that fractured in this country that it's coming down to that, or is that what we're supposed to believe? And then even beyond that, who's pulling the strings here? You know, I would definitely start to look askance at somebody like Peter Thiel, who has that kind of money and that kind of power and that kind of infrastructure and technology, and then putting up a puppet like JD Vance. Just some food for thought, you know. As I mentioned, Scott Payne's book, if you want to read a memoir by somebody like that, hey, here on the hill, Billy Donnie Brasco, and here's how I infiltrated these organizations. Knock yourself out. It's not a terrible book. It's not the worst thing I've ever read, but it is pretty grotesque. I will say that it's far and away not as bad as Programmed to Kill by Dave McGowan. God damn, that book still gives me nightmares. Worth your time, definitely. I would keep your eye on this little situation, though, of these people coming up with their own Christian localist or Christian nationalist ethno states. What's going on there? Are we really going to be separated from each other? Where you have to identify by your race or religion to live in a community, is that what we want? Is that who we are? Just give it some thought. Just give it some thought. Take very good care of yourself. Stay a little bit crazy, and I'll see you in the next episode.
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