In writing his new book on the 2018 murder of Blaze Bernstein—a gay Jewish college student killed in Orange County, Calif.—investigative journalist Eric Lichtblau set out to tell a true-crime story that also captures the rise of white supremacist violence in the United States.
Lichtblau told JNS that he wanted to “really localize” the phenomenon and “show how homegrown it was in its elements.”
He said he began working on his book, American Reich: A Murder in Orange County, Neo-Nazis and a New Age of Hate, published on Jan. 6, while grappling with a series of mass-casualty attacks linked to white supremacist ideology, including the 2018 shooting at Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha in Pittsburgh and the 2019 massacre at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.
“These record-setting, horrific attacks in the 21st century” were carried out “by white supremacists, by neo-Nazis, at a scale that we had never seen before in the U.S,” he said.
“Orange County was a place that was really sort of a petri dish for this in the Blaze Bernstein killing, because it was, first of all, surprising,” he added. “It wasn’t the traditional Deep South, which a lot of people think of obviously when you think of traditional racism and the Klan and white supremacy.”
On Nov. 15, 2024, Samuel Woodward, 27, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the first-degree murder of Bernstein, 19, with a hate crime enhancement. The Orange County District Attorney’s Office stated at the time that Woodward was affiliated with the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi group, and that Woodward’s diary contained anti-gay slurs.
Lichtblau said the crime forced renewed attention on Orange County’s long and often overlooked history of white supremacist activity.
“The county has had this tortured relationship with white supremacy going back to the early 1900s,” he said, specifically citing the white power music scene of the 1970s and 1980s and a more recent resurgence tied to extremist groups.
Among them was the Rise Above Movement, a white supremacist organization that is now “largely defunct” after several of its members were arrested in 2018, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
“It was a story within a story within a story,” Lichtblau told JNS. “Here you have the Blaze Bernstein tragedy of his killing at the hands of a classmate, and then you have Orange County writ large and its own history and the resurgence of hatred there, and then, of course, you had what was going on in the country as a whole.”
Taken together, he said, Orange County functioned as “almost a microcosm” of a broader national trend.
The county “was kind of a breeding ground for hatred in a lot of different ways that was interesting as a case study, so we decided to look at that in particular,” Lichtblau said.
Asked if there is still a large contingent of neo-Nazis and white supremacist groups in Orange County today, he replied, “Absolutely.”
“Huntington Beach is a magnet for white supremacists on the pier there,” he said. “Local politicians don’t like that. They’ve battled that reputation for a long time now, but it’s still certainly present and making a comeback.”
Lichtblau also said Orange County was “overrepresented” among those arrested for participating in the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
‘Cesspool of hate speech’
The “main driver of racism in a lot of these cases” is misinformation, according to Lichtblau.
He pointed to Robert Bowers, who was sentenced to death in August 2023 for murdering 11 congregants at the Tree of Life synagogue, as a prime example.
Bowers was “obsessed with HIAS and the caravan of illegal immigrants that Trump spoke of and HIAS’s untrue role in feeding that, and that’s what sent him to the Tree of Life in 2018,” Lichtblau told JNS.
Lichtblau also highlighted the spread of the so-called “great replacement theory,” which claims that Jews are bringing unauthorized immigrants of color into the country to vote illegally and replace white Christians at the ballot box.
“It’s one thing to say that the population is changing—which it is—it’s another thing to say that there is this illegal cabal which is actively promoting that from outside, through illegal means, in order to end white domination through illicit and secret means, which is what the great replacement theory is all about,” he said.
Lichtblau told JNS that the rapid spread of such misinformation has become “out of control” since social media companies have loosened their “guardrails” against hate speech on their respective platforms.
He singled out X, formerly Twitter, saying that since Elon Musk’s takeover, the platform has become “a cesspool of hate speech where almost anything goes.” He added that Meta has similarly weakened safeguards on Facebook and Instagram by dismantling fact-checking and enforcement mechanisms.
“We’ve taken about 10 steps backwards,” Lichtblau told JNS. “It’s really just a matter of getting back to ground zero.”
