A life spent undercover with terrorists trying to incite a race war

Guest: Michelle Shephard, former Toronto Star reporter and co-author of “Code Name: Pale Horse: How I Went Undercover to Expose America’s Nazis”

Scott Payne spent his career deep undercover in the drug trade, criminal networks and among racist terrorists — and despite some harrowing close calls that saw him stripped naked and almost exposed, he lived to tell the tale.

The woman he told it to — former Star reporter Michelle Shephard, who co-wrote a new book with Payne — sits down with This Matters to talk about what he went through and what he learned. This includes a time when he found himself in a field in the American south under a literal burning cross at a KKK rally, and how he learned that famous racist organization is now “your grandfather’s white supremacists” given the threat posed by The Base, a newer racist terrorist group bent on spurring a race war to bring about the collapse of society. Shephard discusses how Payne tried to stay safe while putting criminals in jail, and the toll it took on his mental health and family life.

PLUS: the time Payne had a hood pulled off his head and found himself being unexpectedly “knighted” into the Ku Klux Klan.

This episode was produced by Julia De Laurentiis Johnston, Ed Keenan and Paulo Marques.