← The Preamble
The Preamble
The Hate Next Door with Matson and Tawni Browning
00:50:19
A look inside the world of white supremacist extremism, as an undercover agent and his wife expose how hate spreads and who it targets.
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- [00:01]
Sharon McMahon
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- [01:45]
Host
It just never stops. And then somehow you're supposed to eat.
- [01:50]
Sharon McMahon
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- [03:11]
Host
I am really excited to be chatting with Matt and Tani today. Thank you so much for being here. I read your book with great interest and I think people are going to be very excited to hear from you.
- [03:22]
Tawny Browning
We are so thrilled to be here. Thanks for having us.
- [03:26]
Host
Okay, so let's set the stage for your work. First of all, you know, of course people love to hear behind the scenes things. People love to understand what is going on in the background. And the concept behind your new book, the Hate Next Door Undercover within the New Face of White Supremacy. And Matt, I would love to hear more about how you got started doing undercover work in skinhead groups and groups like them.
- [04:01]
Matt Browning
It was kind of an easy transition. I was working in the gang unit in Mesa and I just got tired of sitting in the van. The guys on my squad were ethnic based Hispanics and so we would go to different Tejano bars or Hispanic bars around town and I would get stuck sitting in the van.
- [04:19]
Host
You know, you didn't blend in? You didn't blend back?
- [04:23]
Matt Browning
No, I couldn't blend in. And so one night, it was about 2, 3 in the morning, and I get a phone call from my boss and he's, you know, where are you at? Well, I'm sitting in the van in the parking lot. Where are you guys? Well, they had left and they're all gone home and they forgot that I was sitting in the van documenting. So it was that time that I thought, you know what? I think it's time to get involved in something that I can do. And then I was helping on a traffic stop with a motor officer and the skinhead tried to kill me. So you take the sitting in the van and you mix it with somebody trying to kill you, sticking a gun in your chest, and it's like, yeah, I think I need to learn about these guys.
- [05:00]
Tawny Browning
It became really personal.
- [05:02]
Matt Browning
It was really personal.
- [05:03]
Host
Were these sorts of groups always of interest to you? Was this always on your radar of like, you know, someday? Or was it truly the catalyst? Were those two events where this is the first time you thought to yourself, I need to do more with this.
- [05:18]
Matt Browning
I was born and raised in Phoenix, been here my whole life and never did I know that there was hate in Phoenix or in the Valley. And this was truly the two incidents that made me think, yeah, I need to do something.
- [05:31]
Host
I bet you were thrilled, Tawny. I bet you were thrilled when he came home.
- [05:36]
Tawny Browning
He's our protector. And I grew up in a home that was full of love, and I never knew that this existed. And that, quite frankly, we grew up in Arizona, where there's a very high Hispanic population. And I grew up with kids at least 30% or more of my grade school classes were Hispanic. So we just. I didn't know this existed. I know that's naive, but I really didn't know that there was such animosity towards people of color, because that's just not the way we were raised.
- [06:06]
Host
When he decided that he was going to start doing undercover work, was your initial reaction like, are you kidding me? No, you're going to get killed. You can't do that. What was it?
- [06:18]
Tawny Browning
I think that that really came when he told me he wanted to be a police officer, which was so far removed from anything that I thought my life was going to be about. And that's where I was like, you know, no narcs, no selling drugs, and no SWAT team. Undercover didn't seem that big of a deal. Little did I know. Right?
- [06:36]
Host
Yeah. Little did you know if we could all predict what was coming down the pike in our lives, we'd all just run in the opposite direction.
- [06:43]
Tawny Browning
Well, he was really good at being in law enforcement, and so I. I supported him in that. Even though that wasn't the trajectory or the way that I wanted my life to go.
- [06:54]
Matt Browning
The whole being a police officer conversation on our honeymoon wasn't really a good time to bring up the fact I wanted to be a cop.
- [07:02]
Host
No, no, that was a mistake on your part. I'm sorry.
- [07:05]
Matt Browning
Yeah, it was.
- [07:06]
Tawny Browning
But.
- [07:08]
Matt Browning
But the thing about Tawny is that Taney is extremely supportive, and we have the conversation, and it's like, okay, you know, okay, I can see that you want to do this. And so we gave it a shot.
- [07:21]
Tawny Browning
It took about six months. Right. I was like, hell, no. I mean, it's just. We're not doing this at all. But it was in his blood.
- [07:29]
Matt Browning
Yeah.
- [07:30]
Host
I would love to hear more about, first of all, the bigger, broader issue with the rise of these sort of, like, white nationalists or, know, neo Nazi skinhead type groups, because you talk in the book about how these groups are not a distant relic. They're not a thing of the past. They're not something that died in the 1950s or after World War II. That they are alive and well and in some places in the country are, in fact, growing in popularity. So can you talk a little bit more about this sort of rise of hate groups in just ordinary communities?
- [08:13]
Matt Browning
Hate has always been here in this world. And, and quite honestly, and sadly, it's never going to go away because it's a decision a person makes within themselves to hate or not hate. When we talk about your street level skinheads, your Nazis, your neo Nazis, those are core groups of disenfranchised, angry white boys out on the streets doing, doing hunting trips, jumping anybody for any reason, as long as they're not white. As things morph, then you become part of an organized group which is like the Aryan nations or the Klan or the National Alliance. These national groups bring in these younger guys to be their street soldiers, to be their enforcers, and they're just moldable, and they can mold them into doing whatever they want.
- [09:00]
Sharon McMahon
And.
- [09:00]
Matt Browning
And from there it just goes up and up and up, you know, from your organized group. The problem with today, and that's why the book Undercover within the New Face of White Supremacy, it's not boots and braces anymore, is khakis and camels. It's not getting kicked out of high school for fighting, is going to colleges and universities and protesting and fighting with protesters and everything that has to do with that. It's also going into your politicians, it's going into the laws. You know, you have lawyers and doctors and accountants that are part of these groups. And they're just not knuckle dragon thugs as Tani says, but they're actually educated people who are trying to convince and coerce other people to believe in the same way they do.
- [09:44]
Tawny Browning
And that's what makes it so scary. And I worry about our children and, you know, us all being sucked into something that we really don't know what we're getting into.
- [09:54]
Host
Yeah, it's so true. And I know this is true of all types of criminal behavior, all types of behavior, whether it's a gang or it's a hate group, or it's somebody who just decides to do something bad to their neighbor. Most often, people don't wake up in the morning one day and think to themselves, you know, I'm going to join a hate group. You know, that's my goal for today. It's like a series of small steps down the road and then you turn around and realize, like, how did I get here?
- [10:22]
Sharon McMahon
Here?
- [10:23]
Matt Browning
All the guys that I was undercover with, the majority of the guys I was undercover with, they come from great families. Their parents are attorneys or parents are doctors. Then you go into the split homes and the dad was a hater or whatever it might be. But the thing about it all is that it's still a conscious decision that we as parents make to teach our kids what's good in life. And, you know, I think that's where a lot of people, parents, educators, politicians, we miss the boat. These kids are following our lead. And that's one of the things that I would like the message to be in the book is politicians quit the arguing, quit calling each other names on tv, because kids are watching that. And they will repeat what they learn from you and they will go to a Democrat and say, oh, I heard that you guys are all this. Or they'll go to a Republican and say, oh, you voted for Trump, you're a hater. Well, no, those aren't true statements.
- [11:24]
Host
The vitriolic discourse that you see between different groups in the media teaches children that this is how we're supposed to interact with other people, that everyone is an enemy, either they're for us or against us. And if you're against us, we need to defeat you. And some people take that to the nth degree and it becomes, I'm going to put a gun in the chest of a police officer.
- [11:46]
Matt Browning
Yeah. And what you just did is you said, you know, it's the way that the life is going. I heard it, therefore it's true. And I'm going to do this. The rhetoric that is said by certain individuals promote the violence and promote the hate. Even the little words like nationalist or invasion or any of the other words that a lot of these organizations hear, and it's like, oh my gosh, I gotta do something. Well, you know, it's just not the way it should be.
- [12:15]
Tawny Browning
Words matter. Yeah, words matter. And the words that we're using, our politicians are using either knowingly or unknowingly. They have to be chosen carefully.
- [12:26]
Host
I totally agree with that. From your experience, Matt, working undercover, can you identify any commonalities between people who tend to join these groups? You mentioned that they're disenfranchised young white men, by and large, sort of acting as the foot soldiers. In what way are they disenfranchised? What are some of the common traits that they might have that make them vulnerable or susceptible to this type of thinking and wanting to join this type of group.
- [12:58]
Matt Browning
Great question. Again, I think they're bullied. These groups look for kids who have been bullied who are kind of standalone standoff by themselves. A kid that goes online and starts googling, spending all this time on the computer, looking at the different chat rooms and educating himself and the ideologies of hate. That's the way it's Done a lot now is everything is online. And so when I was doing my undercover work, I would go and actually meet face to face with these guys and have conversations and hear it directly from them.
- [13:28]
Sharon McMahon
And.
- [13:29]
Matt Browning
And then I would formulate a backstory and a story that would fit the narrative of what this particular group is. But now, I mean, kids just go online. The big thing, if you've been picked on by a gang member, a minority, or just pick a topic and they will target you as being one of their own because they want that rage and that anger that you feel now to explode out on a minority.
- [13:56]
Tawny Browning
The thing that I see so much is that if a child doesn't feel or a kid or a young man or woman doesn't feel that they have a place where they belong, where they're included. It's that whole very human basic need of being included. If we're not providing that in our schools and our communities, and quite frankly in our homes, children are going to find that somewhere else. That sense of family, I hear that.
- [14:20]
Host
That it is such a basic human need, and if you're not getting it in a healthy, constructive way, it makes you very vulner vulnerable to seeking it out in a destructive way.
- [14:31]
Tawny Browning
These groups are preying on our children and they see the vulnerabilities and the weaknesses, and that's how they get involved in something that is shocking to us as parents and as a community is and to them, quite frankly. How did I get here?
- [14:44]
Host
I can imagine that it really takes a toll on you to do this kind of undercover work and to be surrounded with these kinds of messaging and people and the amount of vitriol that has to be present when you are essentially pretending to be one of them. Because if you blow your cover, that's very dangerous for you and your family. And you talk about how even in the book, this sort of like low level fear that your family continually experienced when you were doing this kind of work. I would love to hear from you more about what it is like mentally to have to pretend to be a member of a hate group.
- [15:30]
Matt Browning
Oh, wow, now I have to go back into the garbage and into the hate and into the ideologies. It's studies have shown that when you surround yourself with hate or bigotry, it chemically changes your brain. And so the more you're enthralled in it, the more you're involved in it, the more your brain changes to accept what you're hearing and seeing. To be true and factual. For me, man, I would just come home Sit in the driveway for 20, 30 minutes in my undercover car, just trying to get my head straight of what just happened and trying to come back to reality, because I'm in the driveway, but in the house, I got five kids and a wife that need me. But here's the great thing about it. I was blessed and lucky because Tawny would come outside and she would help me go through what I needed to talk about. The realities of life I'm dealing with, with the images of what's going on, hate with hate in the world, from the meetings of how bad the immigrants are coming across the border, how we need to go down and. And shut down the borders, by shooting and by killing. And then I come home and sit at my house, and all of a sudden, out of the driveway, out of the garage, comes Tawny, who is the essence of love. I mean, if you know Tawny. Tawny really is the true definition of what a loving person is. And she would come out of the house and she'd stand by my door and we'd talk, and then she'd go back in the house and come out with one of the kids. And it wasn't like jumping, hey, we gotta do this, we gotta do this. It's more of a, okay, I'm going to gradually get you out of the hate cycle, back into the love cycle. And I, I tell everybody this. When you go into the psychology and ideology of hate, it will kill you. It can consume you, and if it gets to that point, it will kill you. And I was at the point in my life and my career that it was to that point. And if it wasn't for Tiny, the kids, I wouldn't be sitting here today.
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Host
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- [20:00]
Host
Tani what was it like when you were talking to him in the driveway? What was he like when he would come home at the end of the day?
- [20:06]
Tawny Browning
Sometimes he was losing himself and if he was out there longer than 15 minutes, I tried to give him space, trying to find that balance. Then I would go out there just as he said. And if we weren't getting to where we needed to go, I'd go check on the baby, bring the baby out and that usually would bring him back. We just needed to bring him back. But I knew that he needed to do this work because if not him, who? And I knew that we were equipped to. I felt naively perhaps that we were equipped to handle this and to be our own foot soldiers against hate.
- [20:40]
Matt Browning
Let me put it just like this. And to add what Tony was saying, anybody in law enforcement, I don't care if you're a patrol, your swat, your narc, your whatever position you are in law enforcement, before you go and you start your day, you mentally have to prepare yourself for what you're going to go and do. So when I was going to these meetings, I would have to change my mind from tawny and a loving, caring world is great. Bubble esque, Disney esque, family at home And I would have to start listening to Screwdriver, Bound for Glory, Aggravated Assault, different hate bands, hate music. To get my mind in a place where I can go and talk to these other haters and not slip back into that. Oh yeah, I got, you know, Tawny told me this, or you know, I was playing with the kids and this happened. That life didn't exist when I was undercover. And so you, you mentally prepare yourself, putting hate into you. And at some point in time the hate has to leave. Otherwise you're no different from any other hater when you go to bed hating and you wake up in the morning hating and you spend your day hating. And I don't want it to be like that.
- [21:50]
Tawny Browning
And having a Disney esque home is, you know, it's exhausting and it's, it's not sustainable. So, so, you know, there was definitely things in there. I don't want it to sound like it was this great big bubble all the time. You can't, you can't sustain something like that. But we tried and we knew. And that's one of the messages of the hate next door is that love is the antidote to hate. It really is.
- [22:14]
Host
It has to be really mentally exhausting and it has to take a toll on your mental health to continually compartmentalize like that. To say, I have one part of me that loves my wife and kids and is not abusive to them and treats them well and loves them and is present and engaged. And then to force yourself into a mentality, as you're saying, where you, you have to do all of these things to psych yourself up into even being able to tolerate being around those people, to even like get into the mental space where you can pretend to be one of them. And then you have to pressure, release all of that out of you in the driveway at the end of the day, that has to be mentally taxing and exhausting.
- [23:04]
Matt Browning
Matt, I'm still tired. But you know what it was, it was a job and it was a career and it was successful. I like to think that we were successful. And you go in the house and you put your gun away and you hang out with the family, go to bed and you wake up the morning you do it all over again.
- [23:26]
Host
Just speaking as an officer, what is it like for the mental health of people who work in law enforcement? What kind of supports do people who do this work need?
- [23:40]
Matt Browning
I'm glad you asked that and thank you for asking that. Because law enforcement people think that cops are robots. I mean, we're not, we're guys who, who actually want to make a difference in this world. We families, we have our hobbies, we have things that we like to do. Being a cop is a job, and we go out and we do our job and we go home. The problem is, is that everything that we do involves trauma. It involves threats, it involves when we make a traffic stop, we have no idea if the guy is going to shoot us or run from us, cry because we gave him a ticket. We don't know how their day is going. And before you know it, I mean, somebody's world could come to an end in a blink of an eye. And that's what we do on a day in and day out basis. We need to take care of our police officers. We need to understand that this is traumatic for them, and we need to take the time and actually police agencies need to take care of their people, provide the mental health that they need, provide times for the decompression to release the steam. There's too many police officers committing suicide in this country every year. I believe we're up to 46 now here in the United States this year alone. And it just needs to stop.
- [24:57]
Tawny Browning
We need to realize that our brains are not wired to go from one traumatic event to another and that we, you know, we've got to have compassion and know that, as Matt said, cops aren't robots. And if we take care of them, they take care of us.
- [25:11]
Host
I think it's so, you know, there's a tendency amongst people who work in law enforcement or the military to be like, you have to have mental toughness, mental toughness, really important, because you cannot just happen upon a terrible crime scene or enter a war zone and just collapse into a heap. You have to be able to move forward, do your job, do what you gotta do, and then worry about that later. And I understand that that is needed in that moment. You don't need officers crying on the side of the road. You need officers who are going to get the job done in that moment. But I think often that mental toughness viewpoint never gives people any space to not be mentally tough, never gives people any space, to your point earlier, to decompress, to get counseling, to see a professional. It's, if you're not mentally tough 24, 7, well, then you're weak, and that's suspicious. And then you're not doing your job right. But if we want people to be mentally tough in the moment, but then not commit suicide or become a member of a hate group, we have to provide them with those Kinds of supports.
- [26:24]
Matt Browning
Yeah. And I'm glad you said that. Not to become part of a hate group, that's a very important thing you just said. Because a person's traumas and what happens to a person on a daily basis is one of those things that can guide them into belonging and being a part of a hate group. You know, there's been people who've taken their plans to the city's office to do an add on to their house, and after being redlined 14 times, they just lose it and they think the government's out to get them. And those are the people we have to come in contact with as police officers. We don't know what's going on in their life, but they explode on us and we have to deal with that. And I think luckily for me, and I know there's a lot of other police officers that can say the same thing, luckily for me, that I have a wife and a family who got it. And then Tani would always say, matt, if you don't let it out now, it's going to come out sideways in two weeks, three weeks, whatever it is. And we don't want that. And so that's why my time in the driveway was so important. My time to decompress, take the screwdriver and Bound for Glory out of the CD player and listen to Tawny and the kids playing. And that was what I needed for that decompression.
- [27:34]
Host
It makes complete sense that to your point, it has to come out somehow. And we can either create constructive ways for it to come out or it will find its own way.
- [27:45]
Tawny Browning
Yeah.
- [27:45]
Matt Browning
And that's why we wrote the book the Hate Next Door. Tani said, matt, you gotta write this stuff out to get rid of all those traumas that are in your head.
- [27:53]
Tawny Browning
I think when it came down to it, it was very difficult to talk about some of the more deep family times and things that were very personal. That was hard to write about. But when it came right down to it, I didn't want any family to think that they were alone. I didn't want officers to think they were alone. And I didn't want parents that had children in hate groups or that were involved in some of these extremist organizations to think that there wasn't a way out. Because there is. There's hope, there's. And if there's awareness, you know, that's where it starts. And we knew and, you know, that's kind of when you know more, you gotta do more. And we found ourselves in this position and that's why we wrote the book.
- [28:34]
Host
I would love to hear a little bit more about what kinds of activities are hate groups involved in today. Because as you mentioned, Tani, you grew kind of naive about the fact that these people, like, they. What are you talking about? You know, like what hate groups? You know what I mean? Like, especially if you grow up in a nice family, loving family, you grow up in a place where you just don't see this kind of activity, it's easy to feel like that's not real, that's not happening. And obviously Matt can attest, both of you could attest that they are, but what kinds of activities are they out there doing? Are they having, like, I'm the president, take the minute, you know, like, fill us in.
- [29:17]
Matt Browning
All right. What kind of activities that these guys are involved in? Allentown, Texas shooting killed eight people. Colorado Springs Q Club. They killed people. The Buffalo City supermarket killing. El Paso, Texas Walmart shooting. That's the type of thing that these guys are involved in. And that's not the groups, but the guys who get radicalized and, and they get their ideology from other shooters. Dylann Roof shooting in Charleston, South Carolina. So many people have read his manifesto that they get the same idea, the New Zealand shooter, all kinds of different shootings. That's what these guys are getting involved in. Now when we talk about the groups they're getting involved in, I mean, if you talk about proud boys, they're going anywhere they can possibly go to fight. That's all they want to do. And they'll find a reason to go to a left leaning organization and fight and try to make a stand for themselves. You still have your street level thugs that just want to go out and beat people up because they're not white. That's the type of stuff. But then if you want to go to your other groups that are trying to get people into politics, into law enforcement, and now we're in a totally different breed of people.
- [30:29]
Host
Professionals.
- [30:30]
Matt Browning
Yeah, it's. It's sad. It's sick and wrong.
- [30:33]
Tawny Browning
And what was so shocking to me is that some of these groups were planning international war.
- [30:39]
Matt Browning
Yeah, we talk about in the book. I got a call down to the border because a bunch of guys from a local skin crew that associated with the national alliance were headed to the border to shoot at the Mexican military. And what other way to shut the border down but to cause an international incident, you know, and luckily we're able to stop that. But that's the type things these guys are doing. Whatever they can do to Keep America white and to push everything else out.
- [31:06]
Tawny Browning
And what was scary to me is that I would watched it evolved until it was more and more and more mainstream. And I think that's another reason that we wrote the hate next door is hey folks, this is right, this is next door and we need to be able to see it. It's at our local Walmart. We talk about it at Denny's. And for us, you know, it came.
- [31:26]
Matt Browning
Into our home and hate is mainstream because we allow it to be mainstream.
- [31:30]
Host
You know, in the past, hate groups like the kkk, looking back, they've had several iterations over the centuries. But in the past, one of the big drivers of groups like the KKK and other hate groups, a big driver has been economic instability and economic insecurity of these immigrants are taking our jobs. That's a very common theme from the past. For a while, like during the nineteen teens, nineteen twenties, it was immigrants coming from Southern Europe and Eastern Europe. And they dress differently, they don't speak languages we're familiar with, you know, they don't speak Swedish, they're speaking Polish, they have different foods than we do, and they're by and large Jewish and Catholic. And that's where you saw the KKK sort of morph from being just an anti black hate group to also being anti Catholic, anti Jewish, anti immigrant. In part because of those economic pressures where they felt like, you're taking our jobs, you're changing who we are, you're changing our way of life and we are going to essentially take back the country for white Anglo Saxon Protestants. To what extent is that still true? Is that still an ideology espoused by hate groups today?
- [32:48]
Matt Browning
That's a very interesting thing and I'm glad you brought it up because history does nothing but repeat itself. If you listen to a lot of different politicians or lawmakers, the rally cry right now is we're being invaded, the borders are being overrun, we're letting gang members and rapists and murders into this country. They're taking our jobs, they're causing our insurance to go up. They're doing all these things and, and we need to do something to stop it. And so what that ideology does, what those triggering speaking words do, is they spark all these different groups. So you got your haters who are going to go down to the border because now they have a reason to hate the immigrants, they hate the Mexicans and hate the Guatemalans. Coming up now you have your oath keepers who are military police officers and people who've taken an oath of office to protect the country, think now that they need to go down and protect the country because we're being invaded. You have your 3 percenters that are doing the same thing. I was asked just about a year and a half ago to be part of a militia that would go to protect the border, and they asked me to be on the sniper team and to actually shoot at immigrants as they come across the border. And that is what's happening with this rhetoric and with this speak and with his ideology. That's just like you said. It comes back from the 20s and teens and it's the same thing now. It's just progressively it's, I believe it's getting worse and worse.
- [34:21]
Sharon McMahon
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- [38:27]
Host
What are the two of you doing to make sure that your children are not wrapped up in these kinds of groups? What are you doing to inoculate yourselves and your family and your loved ones from this kind of rhetoric?
- [38:42]
Tawny Browning
I'm not sure that we did. I think we spoke, we talked a lot about it. We had everyone, all races and nationalities at this house. It was never an issue. It's just inclusion. I think it sounds so trite and simple, but it's about inclusion and love. And you know, Brownings don't exclude based on anything that character.
- [39:06]
Matt Browning
If you would like, come to one of our kids birthday parties, know, hey, dad, I'm going to have a birthday party. Okay. How many people are going to be there? I don't know, maybe 10. Okay, well, the first hundred people show up and then you have 200 people show up at the house. And the. The great thing is, is that every nationality, every race, every religion, every part of society is at the house. Tawny was able to teach our kids, we love everybody. We don't love anybody. And we understand what everybody believes. And you know what? We can have a conversation and talk about it, give each other a hug and say, we'll see you tomorrow at school. That's the way that Tawny was able to raise our kids and to make our house this house of safety where kids could come to if they needed to get out of the whatever situation they're in and what's really cool. And I'll tell you this, we have kids that are football players. And one of our sons played football last year in high school and his team took state. They won the state open division. And at the beginning of the season, he was on a team that his freshman year, they won one game out of 10. They were horrible. And they stayed together and their coach brought them together their senior year and had them sit in a room and understand each other. So every race, every nationality, every religion was sitting in this room together. Bunch of teenage boys, understanding, talking, not judging, not casting hate towards anybody, but understanding enough to love each other, that when they step foot on that football field, they were a family and they won. And that's what we need to do in our homes and in our societies, in our politics. We need to come together and understand. And I think that's one of the main reasons that we wrote the Hate Next Door. Read the book, and if you have questions about it, hey, let's talk, let's understand each other.
- [41:02]
Tawny Browning
It's about being good people, I think, you know, raising good people so that we can be good Americans. And I think that's where it's at. And I felt like if a football team could do it on a high school level, why can't we do it in our homes, in a community? And really as a nation, I don't really think that's all that idealistic. It's about leaving our agendas at the door and coming together. We're smart people. You know, you're not in those leadership positions unless you've done something very smart. There's no reason that we can't do this and give our kids a better America just like generations before have done. We don't need hate. I don't know where that's helping any of us.
- [41:43]
Host
In your experience, Matt, is everyone who is in a white nationalist group of whatever iteration, is everyone white? Because you. This has been a topic of conversation nationally that some of the leaders of some of these militia groups, you know, like the national leaders, are not Caucasian.
- [42:01]
Matt Browning
They're not. They're born and raised in the US and so they're American citizens and they want to stop the invasion. See, it's kind of a hypocritical way of thinking, but the ideology within it I understand because you can be a white nationalist, but you can be from Spain. And so when I first heard that, I was thinking, well, they're. How. How can a Spanish person be a white nationalist? Well, it's because they're part of the pure European bloodline and the pure European bloodline is a white bloodline that these guys preach about. So now there's there, I think these groups have all different races and, and things in them. As long as you're American and as long as you have the same views and philosophies as everybody else, then you can be part of it. Now, if you're talking your street level skinheads now, you're not. There's not going to be a black person or an Asian or, or anything else within those organizations that's straight up white and white hate.
- [43:01]
Tawny Browning
It's all about ideology. I mean, that's what you always say.
- [43:05]
Matt Browning
You got to understand the ideology. If we're going to talk about hate and racism, then you have to understand the ideology within the organizations.
- [43:13]
Host
You've talked multiple times about how inclusion means working to understand each other, even if it doesn't mean at the end of the day you agree and you arrive at the exact same conclusion that feeling accepted and understood for who you are, even if you have a difference of opinion, really is the difference maker. In your home, at the birthday parties, people who are trying to join a skinhead organization. And I also think on a broader community, national scale, that seeking to understand where somebody else is coming from, just actually caring enough to understand where they're coming from, that in and of itself is a difference maker. It's not now we agree. It's that you care enough about me to try to understand where I'm coming from, how I came to believe that, you know, how my parents got here or if I'm an immigrant or what my goals and aspirations are why I might have voted for Bob instead of Susan. Just actually feeling like somebody cares enough to ask and listen and take whatever answers that person gives you and welcome them into your home anyway.
- [44:29]
Matt Browning
Yeah, that's. You know, it's crazy thing about working so many years undercover in these organizations. I was able to go to a lot of different concerts and a lot of punk shows and different things. And one. There's one band that the singer. One of his songs said, don't ask me how I'm feeling unless you have 30 minutes to stop and listen to.
- [44:47]
Tawny Browning
An hour or two.
- [44:48]
Matt Browning
An hour or two. And I think that's what we need to do. If I ask you, hey, how you doing today? Let me hear how you're doing today, or if I come and ask you, can you tell me what you learn in your synagogue? And then I need to at least have an open mind to understand what you learned in your synagogue. And I understand you have this holiday month for your race or your culture. Can we talk about it? Can we understand? So I don't have to just feel like I'm being forced by A and E or not A and E, but History channel or whoever else to watch this stuff. But let's have a conversation. And that's where we as adults are dropping the ball. We. We are teaching our kids that it's okay to argue, that it's okay to fight, that it's okay to yell and throw things at the TV when somebody says something that we don't agree with. We need to be more adult, like in everything that we do because our kids are watching. And it goes back to what you said. How do we raise our kids? If I came home blaring screwdriver and bound for glory every minute of the day when I was home, yeah, I know. I would have been teaching my kids to hate.
- [45:57]
Tawny Browning
Matt always says we're not born to hate. It's learned. So we gotta be really careful what we're teaching our children. You know, overtly or even subtly, what.
- [46:08]
Host
Are the objectives of an undercover officer like you were, Matt, when you are infiltrating these groups, what is your objective? Is it to just learn about potential criminal behavior? What is it?
- [46:24]
Matt Browning
Well, you have different styles of undercover work. You have the guys that go buy drugs, so they buy. Make 320 Rock Buys, and they'll hit the house with the warrant after the third buy. Or. My objective was intelligence based. My job was to go to the meetings, gather the intelligence on who was there and when a crime occurred. Because you can say whatever you want and you can do that. It's not against the law to hate. But when you go past the line and you actually have an overt act based upon the hate. So if you shoot somebody or if you beat somebody, whatever it might be, my job was to know who the people are and where I could find them. And that's what I did. And I think I go back to, I wish I was more successful. I wish I was able to do more. But you know, we locked up 18 guys in Arizona alone for murder and attempted murder from organizations that I was a part of. So that was my objective. I didn't want to learn about hate. I don't like hate. I wanted to stop the hate.
- [47:27]
Host
It makes sense that you didn't have to. You know, you already had a potential list of like, who could potentially be involved in this when something occurred. Because you have. Because of your undercover work.
- [47:38]
Matt Browning
Yeah. And actually I went into my undercover work after the guy stuck a gun in my chest. I knew no names, no places, no people, no anything. And then from that one incident, fast forward 13 years. Yeah, I knew who the people were. I could tell you what church they went to because they went to church with our brother in law, my brother in law, her brother. They, they showed up the house, they showed up at different places.
- [48:03]
Tawny Browning
When you started to know what to look for, it really was all around us. And we have to have our eyes open to it. And they need to know that we know, you know, the haters need to know that we know what we're looking at and what we're looking for to keep it out of our homes and our communities.
- [48:18]
Host
Yeah, they know that you're onto them of like, we're not playing that game. It becomes a lot harder for them to recruit from when you're, when you're like, I, I'm watching you now.
- [48:29]
Matt Browning
Change that to I'm watching you. And next, you know, you get a death threat, you know, now they're going to come after you. We need to say, and that's what happened to us, is that we just had to stand up and keep fighting the fight.
- [48:44]
Tawny Browning
You know, and they, because they do, once you expose them, they, they fight back with hate. We're already seeing it with, with this book right now. You know, we're getting very hateful articles and comments and you know, we're, it's expected, we're ready and it's really just, you know, part of what we're doing.
- [49:02]
Matt Browning
But call me if, I mean, if you got a problem let's talk about it.
- [49:07]
Tawny Browning
One of my favorite comments is, you know, it's all right to be white, bro. And I'm like, you really didn't read the book because it is all right to be white. It's all right to be you. And that's what the message of the book is, is bring your best, and let's be our best and do better.
- [49:24]
Host
What do you hope, somebody who reads the Hate Next Door, which really is a fascinating peek behind the scenes of America's hate groups, what do you hope the reader takes away? I'll start with you, Tawny. What do you hope the reader, when they have closed the book, what do you hope some of their takeaways are?
- [49:41]
Tawny Browning
Well, when it was hard to write some of the pieces that we wrote in the book, I didn't want anybody to feel alone. I didn't want a mother whose son or daughter was involved in these groups to feel like there wasn't a way out. And I didn't want families of law enforcement to think that what they were experiencing was unique to them. I wanted them to know that they weren't alone and that there's hope and that there's something we can all do to fight hate.
- [50:08]
Host
How about you, Matt?
- [50:09]
Matt Browning
Law enforcement to take care of their people. I want professionals to be able to understand what law enforcement goes through on a daily basis. As you read the book, I. I want people to be grateful for the things they have, their families, and to take advantage of their families by spending time with them and. And appreciating them for everything they have. And I think, most importantly, I. I don't think Tanya and I put our story out there just to be read and put the book on the shelf. I hope people share it and talk about it and start that line of communication. I hope that these are all big hopes. I know that. But I hope college professors in psychology and criminology read the book and say, okay, what can we do to make a difference in these hate groups? Because as we just talked about, when you expose hate, they try to go underground, but when you shine the light on them, they have to scatter. The only way to get rid of the hate is to expose it, to talk about it, and then we can get rid of it. So, I mean, what's my goal on the book? Get rid of hate.
- [51:13]
Tawny Browning
I hope that it, you know, starts communication within our homes, within our society, and let's have those conversations, whether we like where it goes or not. You know, let's have those conversations.
- [51:26]
Host
Thank you so much. To both of you for being here today. I really enjoyed reading the Hate Next Door and I really enjoyed getting to chat with you and hear more about your story. I appreciate you.
- [51:36]
Matt Browning
Thank you.
- [51:36]
Tawny Browning
Thank you, Sharon.
- [51:39]
Host
You can find Matt and Tawny Browning's book the Hate Next Door wherever you buy your books, and you can also Visit their website matandtani.com for more information about all of their upcoming projects.
- [51:53]
Sharon McMahon
Thank you so much for listening to here's where it gets interesting. If you enjoyed today's episode, would you consider sharing or subscribing to this show that helps podcasters out so much? I'm your host and executive producer, Sharon McMahon. Our supervising producer is Melanie Buck Parks and our audio Producer producer is Craig Thompson.
- [52:12]
Host
We'll see you soon.
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Craig Thompson
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- [52:37]
Craig Thompson
That's dedication. Find out more@fatherhood.gov brought to you by the U.S. department of Health and Human Services and the Ad Council.