American reich A murder in Orange County neo-Nazis, and the new age of hate

Investigative reporter and Pultizer Prize--winner Lichtblau (The Nazis Next Door, 2014) offers an alarming book about the surging influence of the neo-Nazi movement in the U.S. It centers around a hate crime committed in 2018 in Orange County, California, an epicenter of white supremacist activity. Sam Woodward, a member of a neo-Nazi cell, lured his former high-school classmate Blaze Bernstein, who was gay and Jewish, into a secluded area and killed him. Both men were 20 years old. Lichtblau creates in-depth profiles of extremists like Woodward, tracing how young white males become radicalized and indoctrinated into ever-expanding virtual and real-world communities of hate. He examines multiple examples where online rhetoric turned into devastating action, decoding various manifestos embraced by individuals, subgroups, and splinter groups. The author also unflinchingly identifies Donald Trump as a rallying source of inspiration whose support of hate rhetoric instigates and normalizes the actions of these groups, and he condemns civic authorities, especially those in Orange County, for blatant mishandling of hate crimes. Lichtblau's elegant writing somehow makes the horrors he relates even more upsetting.

In this kaleidoscopic account, Pulitzer-winning journalist Lichtblau (The Nazis Next Door) delves into the 2018 murder of University of Pennsylvania student Blaze Bernstein by neo-Nazi Sam Woodward. The story centers on Orange County, Calif., where both Bernstein and Woodward grew up and were briefly acquainted during high school. Born into a Jewish family, Bernstein, "a friendly vivacious kid" who was gay and wrote poetry, fit in at school. Woodward, meanwhile, was a brooding misfit with few friends and a virulently homophobic father. Lichtblau traces Woodward's increasing radicalization--he went from drawing swastikas in school notebooks to joining the Atomwaffen Division and attending a far-right militia training camp--and juxtaposes it with Bernstein's trajectory studying creative writing at Penn. Their paths cross again when Woodward, well-known even by Bernstein for his odd practice of "scamming" gay men by pretending to be interested in them on dating sites, matched with Bernstein while the latter was visiting home. Despite Bernstein's misgivings, the two met up; the encounter ended with Bernstein's murder. Lichtblau untangles Woodward's motivations--he was convicted of a hate crime in 2024--while unpacking the role that Orange County, the birthplace of the John Birch Society, plays in the resurgent far right under Donald Trump, including via parallel narratives spotlighting local extremist leaders who helped organize the January 6 attack and other Atomwaffen Division members arrested for hate crimes. It's a troubling window into the rage that animates America's shadowy far-right networks. (Jan.)

A study in the workings of white supremacist hatred as it surges across the land. Pulitzer Prize--winning journalist Lichtblau focuses on Orange County, California, "a petri dish for young white supremacists anxious to take back their culture from minorities they see as an existential threat." There, one young man--disaffected, taught by his conservative father to despise gay people, obsessed with Nazi ideology--targeted a classmate, gay and Jewish, and murdered him. Sam Woodward, now imprisoned for life, wasn't the first neo-Nazi killer on the block. Indeed, Southern California abounds in white nationalist gangs, for, as neo-Nazi/KKK leader Tom Metzger declared, "This may not be the Mecca of white separatism…but it is the breeding ground." The neo-Nazi drama plays out, in Lichtblau's fast-paced account, against a backdrop of national politics and demographics: Enrollment in white supremacist organizations accelerated dramatically with Barack Obama's election, and violent action spiked with Trump's. "While Trump always denied any suggestion that his ugly, racist rhetoric was fueling violence," writes the author, "dozens of his supporters made that connection explicit in unprovoked hate crimes that invoked his name and mimicked his language." Emboldened, supremacist groups are spilling out of Southern California and the Deep South and growing nationally. Perhaps ironically, Lichtblau notes, those very places are becoming less white and more ethnically mixed, giving rise to the "Great Replacement Theory" and the fervent support for Trump that led to the January 6, 2021, insurrection, most of whose participants "hailed from counties where the proportion of the white population was shrinking rapidly compared to that of non‑whites." The author's thorough reporting makes it plain that things are likely to become still worse, for, with Trump's second term, supremacists' numbers and actions are rising, while violent hatred has become "the sad state of normalcy in modern‑day America." A deep investigation into the plague of white nationalism. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.