Code Name: Pale Horse

This was not an easy book to listen to. The author was the narrator, too, and he was great, but the story was pretty scary.

Payne tells about his job as an undercover agent for the FBI for 30 years. He also explains how he became an undercover agent, his parents, high school years, his wife and kids, his church, his university years in psychology and criminal justice, his mental and physical challenges, the KKK, biker gangs, his FBI teaching job, and his first job as a cop. The final and big story is about his infiltration of a neo-nazi/white supremacist group. In fact, he explains that these people don’t call themselves « supremacists » but « accelerationists, » because they  promote chaos as a way to accelerate the fall of society, which will then allow them to establish a white ethno-state and build a new government on these beliefs. (Sadly, the US government currently seems to be pretty good at promoting chaos, too, right now.)

Wow, what an incredible story! It took me only three days to listen to it because it was so interesting, funny, scary, suspenseful, crazy, unbelievable, sad, encouraging, and did I say fascinating? Payne explains that hate groups have always existed, but that the white supremacist/accelerationist movements in the US and, sadly, many other countries, grew bigger and stronger after the events of August 2017, when the University of Virginia decided to remove a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee from its campus. White supremacists showed up en masse in a rally they called « Unite the Right, » and one of them ran his car into the crowd, killing and injuring several people.

One thing that made it difficult to follow these stories was that these « bad » people often had names and nicknames and pseudonyms, so sometimes it was hard to keep track of who was whom!

There’s even the story of a murdered goat in there, which, in my opinion, was the saddest part of the book. People are idiots, I don’t care if we all kill each other, but goats are innocent, for Pete’s sake!