DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. Many Americans appalled by the violence of the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol likely assumed that the rioters came from regions where Donald Trump had his deepest support. But researchers from the University of Chicago found that most came from places Joe Biden had won in the election, often counties where the white population was shrinking relative to nonwhites. One example is Orange County, California, south of Los Angeles. That's a region highlighted by our guest, veteran investigative journalist Eric Lichtblau, in his new book. He argues that America is seeing a nationwide surge in violent bigotry and white supremacy unlike anything since the bloodiest days of the Civil Rights Movement, often spurred on by incendiary racial rhetoric from Donald Trump.
Lichtblau writes about young men who follow neo-Nazi organizations and, in some cases, commit horrendous crimes, including the brutal murder of a young, gay Jewish man in Orange County, a central focus of his book. Eric Lichtblau is a Washington-based journalist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who spent years working for the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. He's written three previous books, including the bestseller "The Nazis Next Door." His latest book is "American Reich: A Murder In Orange County, Neo-Nazis, And A New Age Of Hate." Well, Eric Lichtblau, welcome back to FRESH AIR.
ERIC LICHTBLAU: Thanks very much for having me, Dave. It's great to be back.
DAVIES: You know, a lot of the troubling incidents of white supremist violence that you recount in this book were reported at the time. What made you decide there was a broader story here you wanted to tell?
LICHTBLAU: Well, we're really living in a decade of racial tyranny in terms of the epidemic of racial violence that we're seeing. And it began, not coincidentally, at the time of Trump's rise as a political candidate 10 years ago, in 2015, when he came down that golden escalator at Trump Tower, and here we are a decade later, still talking in incredibly racially inflammatory terms about minorities of all types, his second term in the White House. And we're seeing a doubling-down of not only the racial rhetoric, but of the violence by his supporters in terms of hate crimes and violence against minorities, which have reached record levels at or near the highest levels since the FBI recorded them, beginning in the early 1990s, with record numbers of assaults against virtually every type of minorities. So I wanted to try and document and better understand what the the source of this violence was, and the tip of the spear, really, is the growing power and influence of the white supremacy movement, which has really been emboldened by Trump himself.
DAVIES: Now, as I mentioned in the introduction, you know, a lot of people would assume that people in the January 6 assault on the Capitol would have come from Trump's bases of support, but that - there was this study that showed, actually, it was places often where Biden had won, where whites were shrinking in number - one of them Orange County, California. Tell us about it, what it was traditionally known for, how it's changed.
LICHTBLAU: Yeah. That's a really good point, and that was a really interesting study from the University of Chicago. Counterintuitive in a lot of ways that a lot of the January 6 rioters were not from the conventional Trump country, the deep red places. They were from places going under change, places that Biden had carried, places that we're seeing a lot of shift from red to blue. In Orange County, there was certainly a staunch base of support for Trump, including among white supremacists. It had been for generations known as the Orange Curtain because it was seen as the strongest of Republican bellwethers, the place that had given rise to Reagan and to Nixon, the place where Reagan liked to say, good Republicans go to die, some of the biggest extremists in terms of anti-Communist, the John Birch Society, where the Klan was headed, the local city councils in Anaheim and other places. The most far-right extremists in Congress served for years in the '50s and '60s and '70s, but it had undergone major, major changes in - just in the last eight to 10 years.
And I think what you've seen there is sort of a microcosm of what you've seen in the country was that with the changing demographics in the voting patterns, there was a real backlash from the far right in Orange County and in the country as a whole. That's not to say that this hadn't existed before. Orange County had been the home to the white power scene for many, many years and had a long history of gory hate crimes going back to the '60s and the '50s and before that, but it really seemed to rise up with this rebirth of stirring up white supremacy as the country - as the county, I should say - was getting bluer. This kind of stirred up this hornet's nest.
So I was interested in using Orange County as kind of a microcosm of what was going on, what we're seeing nationwide with, again, this really record-setting decade of violence in terms of hate crimes and white supremacy, looking at the country and at one sort of test case of what it was that was stirring that both nationally and locally.
DAVIES: One of the interesting things that you write about is the white power music scene. Tell us about that and how it fed this movement.
LICHTBLAU: Yeah. So the white power music became huge in Orange County in the '70s and '80s, and sometimes with tragic and violent results. In 2014, one of the members of one of Orange County's biggest white power bands, Wade Page, went to Wisconsin to a Sikh temple with an AR-15 and killed seven members of the temple in what was really the first mass hate crime in what would be a whole series of them out of just pure hatred and then gunned down a police officer, who miraculously survived that assault. And he had been the bass player for one of these white power bands.
DAVIES: Wade was the bass player. Yeah. Yeah.
LICHTBLAU: Yeah. Wade Page was the bass player.
DAVIES: Not the police officer. You know, it was striking, as I read through the book, I began to keep a list of nationally known hate crimes which had an Orange County connection. You mentioned the attack at the Sikh temple outside of Milwaukee.
LICHTBLAU: Yes.
DAVIES: Another one was the horrific attack at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. I mean, the shooter was not from Orange County. That was Robert Bowers, but he was influenced by an Orange County group called the Rise Above Movement, right?
LICHTBLAU: Yeah. He was inspired by these guys who were sort of martial arts bros, I guess you would call them, who trained in martial arts and were white supremacists. They trained on the beaches of Orange County for years. And Robert Bowers, who was ultimately the shooter in the horrible Pittsburgh Tree of Life attack in 2018, which killed 11 Jews, the worst attack on Jews in American history on American soil, was a supporter, a sympathizer of the Rise Above Movement. He had posted a bunch of things supporting them, along with others. He posted things attacking Jews, attacking illegal immigrants, sympathizing with Trump.
DAVIES: They were pushing this so-called replacement theory, that whites were being replaced by others, right?
LICHTBLAU: Yes, yes. He posted things that were, you know, right-wing conspiracy theories and Trump's caravan of a lot of it, baseless, Trump-supported conspiracy theories that the Jews were illegally bringing in through HIAS, the organization that he ultimately tied to The Tree Of Life synagogue, which he ultimately attacked. They were behind this huge conspiracy to bring illegals in and overthrow the political system, and the Rise Above movement, these guys in Orange County who were training on the beaches and in playgrounds and other places in martial arts and other combat warfare were some of his heroes. And so they were inspiring him to his horrible mission before he went into The Tree Of Life.
DAVIES: We need to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with veteran investigative reporter Eric Lichtblau. His new book is "American Reich: A Murder In Orange County, Neo-Nazis, And A New Age Of Hate. We'll be back after this short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Eric Lichtblau. He's a veteran investigative reporter whose latest book is about the rise of neo-Nazi and white supremacist violence in the U.S. with a particular focus on Orange County, California, and the brutal murder of a gay Jewish college student. The book is "American Reich: A Murder In Orange County, Neo-Nazis, And A New Age Of Hate."
So I want to talk about Sam Woodward, who was the guy who murdered Blaze Bernstein, a gay Jewish college student, which is one of the stories at the heart of this. He became interested in extremist thinking as a teenager. What were his influences? What got him there?
LICHTBLAU: Yeah. He seems to have become enamored with this at a young age, even beginning as a preteen. I spoke with one of his few friends. He was, you know, your prototypical loner, and he seemed to become fascinated with kind of the dark side of gaming and into Germany's role in World War II, became interested in Hitler and Hitler's ideas about racial purity, and his father seems to have really pushed him towards this through a very anti-gay philosophy at home, and he was a convert to Catholicism. His mother was Catholic.
And Sam went to a school that was a magnet school for the arts in Orange County where, as you might imagine, there were a fair number of LGBT kids. And Sam, although he was a bit of a brooding loaner, did show some inclination for arts. He had done some theater stuff, but he really didn't fit in there, and he really resented his parents sending him there. And it was, by all accounts, a bad fit. And he resisted, especially the LGBT culture. And he had his father telling him at every chance he could that homosexuality was wrong and it was to be avoided at all costs. And then he began to loathe just about anyone who was not white Christian. He was in a very evangelical Christian home in a setting in school where there were lots of kids who were minorities. There were lots of kids who were LGBT. And after a while, he hated just about everyone who was not like him.
DAVIES: He switched high schools, eventually, left the art school. And...
LICHTBLAU: He did eventually switch high schools for a more traditional Orange County public school. He was still a loner who didn't quite fit in, but at least he didn't stick out quite so much. But by then, he had burrowed himself into these online extremist sites that were much easier to come by.
DAVIES: Right. You mentioned that, you know, he tried college and then quit and came home and began keeping a journal on his cellphone, which eventually was examined after his arrest. What kind of entries were there in this journal?
LICHTBLAU: Yeah. He kept what he called a journal of hate, in which he lashed out against virtually every minority group. He would tell stories about going online and posing as a gay person himself either on gay dating sites or just even non-gay dating sites, luring people into thinking he was gay, and then getting off on the thrill of scaring them and making them think up until the last minute that he was really gay, and then sort of coming out of the closet and then revealing he was not and scaring them, sometimes even meeting them in person, he said. And there was evidence in court that was produced with other people other than the eventual victim, where he did this. You know, he wrote in his journal, they think they're going to get hate crimed. And that was a real thrill for him.
DAVIES: Woodward meets a guy named Tristan Evans, who recruits him to come to Texas and join a group called the Atomwaffen Division. First of all, does that have a meaning in German?
LICHTBLAU: Yeah, it means atomic bomb.
DAVIES: OK. What is the Atomwaffen Division?
LICHTBLAU: So Atomwaffen was one of dozens and dozens of these new neo-Nazi groups that began sprouting up in the mid-2010s. Many of them an outgrowth of a network, an online network called Iron March that grew in record numbers that were sprouting white supremacy and neo-Nazism of young men, almost all of them in their late teens or early 20s that were preaching the replacement theory of white men having to take back America from this growing threat that was posed by minorities from the left, who posed an existential threat to the white man and reestablish white dominance in their society.
So Atomwaffen Division was started by a handful of guys in Florida. Key among them was a nuclear physics student named Brandon Russell in Florida, who was quite a gifted science student and quite adept in building bombs. And he stockpiled a whole cache of weapons in his garage and was building a budding organization of several dozen young men in Florida of neo-Nazi followers, and they were calling themselves Atomwaffen. And they wanted to build a more activist group that would actually do things, not just talk about white supremacy, as they said, and neo-Nazism, but do something.
And so they were stockpiling weapons. They were talking about attacks. They were talking about hate crimes. He had kids coming down from Massachusetts, from other places in New England. There were some in Texas. And Atomwaffen was already spreading. It had name branches in a number of states by then. It had relocated to Texas with a pair of brothers in Texas who were very willing to assume the mantle of Atomwaffen. They were doxing minorities all over the country at that point. They were taking what he had built and putting it into action. And Sam Woodward was attending a hate camp in Texas at that point.
DAVIES: So Sam Woodward, this guy from Orange County, goes to Texas with this group of Atomwaffen followers. How much did his parents know about where he was going? How did they react?
LICHTBLAU: They knew some of it. He had told them that he - of some of his beliefs, and they were worried, fair to say. That much came out at trial, at his murder trial. They thought about doing a few things to stop him but didn't actually take any measures. They thought about calling an old friend of his father's in Texas to maybe trail him. They thought about trying to cut off his money. They didn't end up doing any of that, as far as we know, or taking more aggressive steps. You know, were they were seen as sort of powerless to stop him. Oh, he's an adult at that point. He was about 21 years old.
DAVIES: He comes back. He's living with his family, and he has this interaction which leads to a murder here of this young man, Blaze Bernstein. These two guys knew each other. They were at the same high school for a while. They were never close, but they did know each other. What kinds of interactions did they have?
LICHTBLAU: Very limited. They were never friends. They were barely acquaintances. You know, Blaze was a very artsy kid, a poet and a writer. He, unlike Sam, was sort of a poster child at the Orange County art school where they both attend, very into writing and performing and theater. And at Penn, he was one of the leaders of the culinary magazine, where he wrote and prepared dishes for the magazine and was thinking of going to medical school but wasn't sure because he loved writing so much, had lots and lots of friends. He was the opposite of Sam in many ways, from their experiences at the art school. Blaze saw him as really a loner, someone, if anything, to be feared.
DAVIES: We will get to how this led to a murder in a few moments. First, we need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Eric Lichtblau. His new book is "American Reich: A Murder In Orange County, Neo-Nazis, And A New Age Of Hate." He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. We're listening to the interview I recorded with veteran investigative journalist Eric Lichtblau. He's written a new book about what he says is a nationwide surge in violent bigotry and white supremacy, encouraged in part by incendiary racial rhetoric from Donald Trump. He profiles many young men drawn to neo-Nazi groups, some of whom commit horrific hate crimes. His new book is "American Reich: A Murder In Orange County, Neo-Nazis, And A New Age Of Hate." In it, he pays particular attention to the murder of college student Blaze Bernstein by Sam Woodward, a young man from Orange County, California, who had become involved with the white supremacist organization, the Atomwaffen Division.
So it's January 2, 2018, and Blaze had been to the University of Pennsylvania where he'd gotten very involved and was back home for break. And he gets this online outreach from Sam Woodward. What happens?
LICHTBLAU: Yeah. He had actually heard from Sam about six months earlier with this same sort of dalliance, and there had been this friendly back-and-forth, almost flirtatious, you know, is he flirting with me? Can't quite figure it out. This does not seem like the same Sam Woodward sort of bully, homophobic guy that I knew back in high school. And then the first go round, it just sort of stopped. And, in fact, Sam was the one who more or less pulled away at that point and said, well, I'm not really interested.
And then it started up all over again that December break when Blaze was, again, home from school from Penn. And this time, it went a step further, and there were a bunch of back-and-forth online exchanges. And this time it went a step further with Sam saying, hey, why don't we get together? I just want to catch up and see how things are going. And Blaze had been hesitant to do that the first time around. And this time, he sent him his address, said, OK, fine. Let's, you know, go meet up. And so Sam came by and picked up Blaze at his house, and they went off to a park together near Blaze's home, and they just walked around for a little bit. And that was the last anyone saw of Blaze alive, unfortunately.
DAVIES: Right. Now, Blaze hadn't told anyone that he was going to meet Sam.
LICHTBLAU: He did not.
DAVIES: His parents discover he's missing, and pretty - seems pretty clear that there's - this was unusual. They couldn't find anything missing. Then Blaze's sister discovers from Blaze's snapchat he had met with Sam Woodward. So the parents reach him, talk to him, and the police talk to him. What did Sam Woodward say to them?
LICHTBLAU: Yeah. There was immediately this search. Blaze was supposed to be at the dentist the next day, and he was going to meet his mom for lunch, and doesn't show up. So there's immediately this search effort. And, in fact, it pretty quickly became a full-scale Southern California search effort with Kobe Bryant tweeting stuff out because there was a crossover in their church to Kobe Bryant. And so it became, you know, very quickly, an all-hands-on-deck search kind of thing. Friends in their living room, you know, looking for every lead they can.
And then his younger sister manages to crack into his phone and discover this name of someone who had been in touch that night, whose name they didn't know, which was Sam Woodward. And that puts a different spin on things. And they did reach him, and Sam gives this cover story, really, of having seen him that night but then left him in the park and Blaze having gone off to meet a third friend and not having seen him again that night and supposedly having then gone back hours later to see if he could find him. But then that story begins to fall apart for various reasons, and the police weren't originally focusing on Sam, but within a few days, they do begin to see him as a suspect.
DAVIES: Right. And his story falls apart pretty quickly. I mean, he's been changing details. He has...
LICHTBLAU: He's been changing details. He concocts a girlfriend whose name he can't really remember. He has cuts and bruises on his hands.
DAVIES: Right. And so he's clearly not telling the truth about what happened that night. Then some rainfall comes, and that uncovers a shallow grave in the area where they said they'd walked, and it's clearly Blaze Bernstein's body, right?
LICHTBLAU: Yes. So then they have the forensics examination that confirms, tragically, that it is him. But what they're still lacking then is really a motive. And most of what cracked open the motive, a lot of that was done from outside journalists digging into it, especially from ProPublica, which did a lot of great reporting on white supremacy in general, including this case, to their credit, by showing that there were all sorts of internal chat logs where they were basically celebrating the murder of a dead, gay Jew, as they put it. And this was literally something to be celebrated as horrible as that sounds, at Atomwaffen.
DAVIES: Right. So until that information came up, neither the victim's family nor the police really knew how involved Sam Woodward was in these extremist groups, right? So that was journalism making a difference.
LICHTBLAU: Not at all. Yes, that was journalism making a difference. Now, the police, after that, were able to get into his phone, and that revealed a lot of further evidence of just how deeply embedded he was with the neo-Nazi movement. Now, and there was tons more evidence that then was produced at trial of reams and reams of stuff that he had on his phone. They had to - there was so much, they had to limit how much was introduced to trial. So that was just a traunch of racist, vile, antisemitic stuff on his phone. So that really confirmed what ProPublica had already kind of turned on the spigot to find.
DAVIES: So, in the end, the jury renders a quick verdict of guilty, and he is sentenced eventually to life in prison without possibility of parole.
LICHTBLAU: Without the possibility of parole. Yeah. And it's worth noting that there have been more than a dozen other Atomwaffen guys who have also been put away on a variety of other hate crime and terrorism and doxing charges. So there was guys out there to this day who are being arrested from Atomwaffen.
DAVIES: And did you talk to the Bernstein family? The parents of the...
LICHTBLAU: I did, yeah. In the course of my research, yeah. And obviously, they were, as anyone would be, devastated by this and have tried to recover from that by starting a foundation, a charity called Blaze It Forward to sort of give back and partially through pro-LGBT causes. Their son had never totally been out with them, at least. And so they've tried to create a more openly, friendly LGBT environment, and his mother has a podcast that she does for anti-hate crime and pro-LGBT causes. So she's devoted herself to a lot of that now, working with local politicians - Democratic politicians in Orange County.
DAVIES: We need to take another break here. We are speaking with veteran investigative reporter Eric Lichtblau. His new book is "American Reich: A Murder In Orange County, Neo-Nazis, And A New Age Of Hate." We'll be back after this short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and our guest is Eric Lichtblau. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter whose latest book is about the rise of neo-Nazi and white supremacist violence in the United States, with a particular focus on Orange County, California. His book is "American Reich: A Murder In Orange County, Neo-Nazis, And A New Age Of Hate."
Your book is really about this dramatic rise in hate crimes and hate groups and their activities. The FBI, over time, and other federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security did become more focused on hate groups. What was the effect of those efforts? I guess this would have been during the Biden administration and during the First Trump administration, too, I think.
LICHTBLAU: Right. Well, there was a period of a few years in 2017, 2018, 2019, after the Tree Of Life attack, after the El Paso attack, when, really, out of necessity, they had to do something. I mean, there was a series of high-profile hate crimes when it was too hard to ignore. You know, we had been through this period of really almost 20 years when the FBI's focus and DHS focus had been on Islamic-inspired terrorism at the expense of domestic terrorism. And I think you really saw that when you had these homegrown terrorists in South Carolina, in El Paso, in Pittsburgh, then in Buffalo. And that was becoming too hard to ignore.
But then what happened, certainly under Trump, was that it has moved away. And certainly in the second Trump term, with the focus on ICE and immigration, the mission of the FBI has been almost totally recast into an arm of immigration. And the traditional law enforcement agency is secondary to the immigration role. And I think whatever momentum there was in terms of identifying violent subversive elements like Atomwaffen and The Base and Boogaloo Boys and go on and on - the Proud Boys. That has been, I think, once again, minimalized. And that's also been minimized by Trump and his own priorities. He's not going to go after the Proud Boys if that was his agenda. He has done just the opposite. He has given those groups a platform.
DAVIES: The pardons of the January 6 rioters...
LICHTBLAU: Sure.
DAVIES: ...It was a pretty powerful statement, wasn't it?
LICHTBLAU: It was a very powerful statement. I mean, he has given the white supremacist an influence that they have never had before over the course of the last decade. You can trace it through the debate with Biden where he told the Proud Boys to stand by and stand down. You can trace it through January 6 where he spoke with such equivocation and even support about the rioters who were standing there with Confederate flags and antisemitic symbols and screeds and racist paraphernalia. You can look at the pardons, of course, probably more than any other single act of those white nationalists who were there that day. You can look at the myth of the cat-eating and dog-eating Haitians in Ohio, which was a myth that was first started by a neo-Nazi group in Ohio. You could look at the trying to bring in the white Afrikaners, which was another myth that was started by a neo-Nazi group in South Africa, you know, and on and on, these are all points of pride for neo-Nazi groups that look to Trump as an icon.
DAVIES: It's interesting that a good part of your career, or at least two of the books that you've previously written, have dealt with the original Nazis in Germany. Your book "The Nazis Next Door," was about how the United States government had eased the way for so many Nazis to come in and live lives in the United States, including people who'd been involved in various aspects of the Holocaust and other deprivation of rights. And then another book was about a Holocaust survivor who became an American GI and did some amazing stuff undercover in Germany. I'm wondering, as you've done this research, if you've reflected on the similarities and differences between the neo-Nazis of the United States and the Nazis that took power in Germany?
LICHTBLAU: Yeah, I have. I mean, that's one of the reasons that I started down this road was that I had written about the World War II-era Nazis, and I wanted to understand after that kind of horrible, ugly fascism, how is it that, 70 years later, we have this whole new generation that has opened its arms up to those horrible people and wants to do it all over again? How did we get to this place?
DAVIES: Well, let me offer one counterpoint that - something that would be a little bit encouraging. And this comes from your book. I mean, you tell the story of Haijun Si - I hope I'm pronouncing this correctly - a Chinese-born businessman who settles in a community in Orange County in Ladera Ranch. He's a new arrival for Asians in that community, and he has kids banging on his doors of - all hours of the day or night, dumping trash, yelling at them. Everything's - horrible stuff. And then a neighbor, Layla Parks, hears about this, is mortified. She organizes patrols which so many people want to sign up that they can't even - they have too many to fill the shifts, and this kind of put a stop to it. Again, you know, not to minimize it, but I think these horrible views really are still way, way in the minority of most Americans, I'd like to think.
LICHTBLAU: Yeah, the response was sort of a feel-good moment where you had these kids - and they were teenagers - who really put them through hell for several months there, where they were leaving all sorts of racist and sexual material. And they had two very young kids who literally couldn't sleep at night, and they were just terrorized day and night and asking, like, why do they hate us? And what did we do wrong? And why don't they want us to live here? And they went to the police. They put in - who wouldn't do anything. They put in a new fence and Ring doorbells and all sorts of other things, got videos, went to the town council and nothing.
Then these neighbors set up this patrol, and gradually it stopped. And, you know, sometimes it just goes to show that, you know, public shaming can do something where even the police and other public action can't. And you realize, you know, there are some good people out there, and there are a lot of bad people out there, at least enough that can make people's lives miserable. It only takes one or two to make their lives miserable.
DAVIES: Are you aware of any organizations or strategies out there to combat the spread of online hate that might help, you know, the next Sam Woodward from being radicalized?
LICHTBLAU: There are a number of very effective hate speech monitors, especially in Europe and the EU, but the Trump administration has tried to silence them and last month took steps against five prominent Europeans to keep them out of the United States altogether, accusing them of supposedly censoring free speech and accusing them of overly burdensome regulations, which a lot of hate speech advocates saw as just another another pretext for opening the door to more hate speech.
DAVIES: Well, Eric Lichtblau, thank you so much for speaking with us.
LICHTBLAU: My pleasure. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
DAVIES: Eric Lichtblau's book is "American Reich: A Murder In Orange County, Neo-Nazis, And A New Age Of Hate."
Coming up, Justin Chang reviews the new film "Marty Supreme," starring Timothée Chalamet. This is FRESH AIR.
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