Scott Payne says he sucked clotted goat blood during an FBI undercover operation inside The Base

The grossest sentence in podcasting this week belongs to Scott Payne, who says he stuck his fingers into clotted goat blood and sucked them clean while undercover with The Base. That is the part that sounds like a rejected True Detective monologue. Payne’s point is that it wasn’t theater.

On This Past Weekend, Payne tells Theo Von that the Halloween 2019 ritual happened during his FBI infiltration of The Base, the neo-Nazi accelerationist group he writes about in Code Name Pale Horse. The story arrives with all the classic Theo Von upholstery, Bojangles biscuits, bad beer, goat confusion, a side discussion about whether Eisen is a Jewish-sounding name. But underneath the absurdity is a harder claim: Payne says this wasn’t just a bunch of internet-poisoned young men doing woods-weirdo cosplay. He says they were training, recruiting, using operational security, and inching toward real murder plots.

You got to see this. You’re not going to believe it.

That is how Payne says he was woken up at the camp, after nodding off in his truck while charging his phone. Members told him they had stolen a goat, or maybe a ram, from someone nearby. The distinction matters to farmers and possibly Odin. To everyone else, the important part is that a bunch of armed neo-Nazis in German-pattern camouflage and balaclavas had allegedly wandered onto someone’s property and taken an animal for a ritual.

The goat was the bait. The ideology was the hook.

Payne is careful to separate actual pagan faith from what he says The Base was doing. He describes true Asatru and pagan communities as people whose religious symbols have been hijacked by white supremacists, a useful clarification in an episode that otherwise contains enough nightmare Home Depot energy to make Norse mythology file a restraining order.

This goat, we’re showing this goat love. We’re going to sacrifice it to start the wild hunt, and it’s going to Val. It’s going to be with Odin tonight.

The phrase Payne uses, the wild hunt, is doing a lot here. In his telling, the group’s version meant cleansing the world of enemies. Not spiritual vibes. Not Dungeons and Dragons with worse hygiene. He says members talked about fascism, anti-fascists, Jewish targets, journalists, and a future collapse they wanted to accelerate through violence. The goat blood is disgusting. The planning is the part that should keep you awake.

Now they slice the throat of the goat, fill up a cup full of blood.

Payne says members chased the blood with tabs of LSD. He declined the acid with a line that sounds too perfect until you remember he was surrounded by armed extremists and probably needed perfect: if someone slipped him a dose and he went on a bad trip, everyone was coming with him. When the cup reached him, he says the blood had thickened.

I just stuck two fingers deep into the blood, pulled out my fingers, and sucked the blood off my fingers.

Believe the gross story, but don’t stop there

Payne’s incentives are obvious. He has a book. He is a gifted storyteller. A retired undercover agent has every reason to make his past sound like a prestige limited series starring Matt Damon, which Theo helpfully points out he kind of resembles. Still, the claim fits the larger shape of what Payne describes, and what is publicly known about The Base: online recruitment, cell structures, paramilitary training, and arrests in early 2020 before planned violence could unfold.

The episode gets stronger when Payne moves from horror prop to operational detail. He says a Georgia cell identified people it believed were Atlanta Antifa, planned to attack a family, burn a house, and use the killing as practice before targeting journalists. He also says another cell discussed firing into a Virginia gun-rights rally, hoping armed factions and police would start shooting each other.

Essentially, we’re going to whack some people.

That line is the hinge. Before it, the story is lurid. After it, the story is about domestic terrorism, and about the rotten little bridge from message boards to woods training to real targets. Payne says the hardest question in a case like this is when to stop watching and start arresting. Too early, and you have speech, ugliness, fantasy. Too late, and someone is dead.

Theo, to his credit, doesn’t treat Payne like a guy merely swapping war stories at a cigar bar. He keeps asking the normal-person questions. Why didn’t they bust them then? Did Payne ever believe the role? What did his wife think? Did he feel dirty afterward? Payne says after that Halloween weekend, after burning American flags and Bibles and participating in the blood ritual, he called his pastor because his spirit felt wrong.

The blood is what people will Google. The lesson is meaner. If Payne’s account is right, the line between online radical fantasy and a real-world body count doesn’t announce itself with a siren. Sometimes it shows up as a stolen goat, a cup in the woods, and a guy deciding whether two fingers of blood are the price of staying close enough to stop the next thing.