‘American Reich’ explores rising hate crimes and the Blaze Bernstein murder

As Eric Lichtblau began research for a non-fiction book on the rise of hate crimes in the United States, he found that there was a seemingly unending array of horrific examples.

In 2022, a White supremacist shot and killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket. That same year, a Colorado Springs man, inspired by other hate-inspired mass shootings, killed five patrons at an LGBTQ nightclub.

A few years earlier, 23 Hispanic people were shot and killed at an El Paso Walmart by a man who posted a hate-filled manifesto online before opening fire. Before that, 11 Jewish people died when a similarly motivated gunman started shooting inside a Pittsburgh synagogue.

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In the end, though, Lichtblau turned his focus to Orange County, where in January 2018, Blaze Bernstein of Irvine was stabbed to death by Samuel Woodward of Newport Beach in a murder that a jury decided was a hate crime against Bernstein, who was gay, by a former high school classmate who’d joined a Neo-Nazi group.

“When I started working on this, there had been this whole series of national hate crime disasters on a massive scale,” Lichtblau said in a recent phone interview. “And so I was looking for a way of grounding that at kind of a local level: How do you tell the story at a more intimate [level], putting sort of a human face on it?

“And Orange County was one place that came to mind,” he said, referring to “the tragedy and horror” of the Blaze Bernstein case. “Sam Woodward’s radicalization spoke to the growing neo-Nazi movement. It really hit a lot of the really jarring elements.”

In the just-published book, “American Reich: A Murder in Orange County, Neo-Nazis, and a New Age of Hate,” Lichtblau, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for his work at the New York Times, examines the story of Bernstein’s death and the influences that shaped Woodward’s actions, as well as a bigger story about hate in America and its explosive growth since 2015.

In addition to the murder of its title, “American Reich” also looks at Orange County, where Lichtblau once worked as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times, as a microcosm of the bigger, national picture of hatred and violence.

In an interview edited for clarity and length, Lichtblau talked about the historical precedents for hate and White supremacy in Orange County and the nation, how his reporting took him into the closest circles of Bernstein’s family and friends, the impact of our modern-day politics and social media on hate, and more.

Q: As well as the Blaze Bernstein case, you trace things back a hundred years or so to the Klan control of the Anaheim City Council. Talk about the historical context in Orange County.

A: Well, Orange County certainly had this reputation for so long as the conservative bastion, going back to not only the Klan days and then the John Birch Society after that. When I was a young reporter there, you had just one Republican after another in the ’70s and ’80s through the ’90s and 2000s – you couldn’t be conservative enough in Orange County.

And as I say in the book, saying and doing offensive things towards minority groups couldn’t hurt you.

You had the White power music scene that went back to the ‘80s, especially in Huntington Beach. And along with that, a couple of really sensational crimes that drew a lot of attention, hate crimes, in the ’80s and ’90s.

Q: And in more recent years?

A: I’m not the first one to make the case, but in 2018, when Orange County elected all Democrats to Congress, that was something few, if any, people saw [coming]. That was such a political sea change. Orange County goes all blue. And then you had almost this backlash among the far right.

You had at times a resistance, a violent pushback, and then a whole surge of hate crimes that spouted up after that. Defiant messages over the 405 talking about the new Muslim mayor in Irvine. Like, “You’re not getting rid of us yet. They may have just elected all these Democrats, but we’re not going away.”

And then back to January 6, we had an awful lot of Orange County people, as I reflect in the book, represented there. A dozen or more; I think it was close to 17 or 18 who traveled 3,000 miles just be there.

This is the constant pendulum swing. They sort of faded away there for a little while and then came roaring back with this racial extremism.

Q: Let’s talk about the Donald Trump factor and how that has fueled some of this.

A: ‘Fueled’ is the right word. He’s certainly done nothing to dissipate it, unlike past national leaders. Hatred needs a fuel to burn it. You need these people who are on the edge in the first place, who need that oxygen to set them off. And he has unfortunately provided that.

Look at [Pres. George W.] Bush after 9/11. You can criticize Bush on Iraq and any number of things that he may have done in foreign policy. But to his credit, he did say just days after 9/11, after there’s been a whole slew of attacks on Muslims, he went to a mosque, even though we’d just been attacked by 19 Muslim hijackers, and he said, “This is not a war on Islam. This has to stop.”

It’s tough to imagine Trump doing something analogous to that in that situation, and that was credited with having an enormous psychological, emotional and, of course, political impact.

It’s no coincidence, as I say in the book, that the hate crime numbers started to surge a decade ago, which is at the same time as he declared his candidacy. The rhetoric in this country just took a nose dive in 2015, with things that we never thought we would hear on the national stage suddenly becoming acceptable.

Q: You point to social media’s role in the rise of hate in America, too.

A: The other factor you need to cite in terms of the national stage is the effect of the social media platforms, where they’ve really bowed to Trump in dropping their guardrails in the name of free speech. And the guard rails were pretty flimsy to begin with.

They weren’t much of a safety rail, but now with [Facebook founder Mark] Zuckerberg and [Elon] Musk at Twitter, or X, it’s basically the wild west. It’s anything goes.

Q: Let’s shift to the sources in Orange County and elsewhere who were important for you to have in the book.

A: I spoke with the Bernstein parents, both Gideon and Jeanne Pepper, and also a lot of Blaze’s friends in the lead-up to the trial. [Samuel Woodward’s family declined to be interviewed for the book.]

I also talked to a bunch – I have to say, unfortunately – but a fair number of neo-Nazis. James Mason, I spent a number of hours talking to him once I was able to track him down in Colorado. He was this figurehead leader of the neo-Nazi movement who Sam Woodward had gone out to pay pilgrimage to just before the killing.

I spent hours in person and then on the phone talking to him, trying to understand just what the draw is. What is the attraction of something like that – he’s in his mid-70s now – to this younger generation? He had basically been exiled for years and years, and now there’s this whole new crew of kids in their 20s who deified him and this horrible racist screed called “Siege” that he wrote back in the ’80s.

So I talked to him and others. Rob Rundo from Orange County, who’s been prosecuted since then, and a number of other American Nazi Party guys, to try to understand. Their one universal theme is how much oxygen Trump has given them.

Q: I was less familiar with the parts of the book you wrote about the hate experienced by a Chinese American family and a Black family in Orange County’s Ladera Ranch. These weren’t physical attacks, but the racism was extreme.

A: They experienced psychological torture. Sort of small arms warfare, where they were harassed for months in one of these sad situations where the cops wouldn’t intervene. It came up to the neighbors to really – to their credit – do something. They literally stood vigil for, I think, over a month.

I saw that as an example of where local law enforcement doesn’t know what to do with cases like this. They throw up their hands. Either they don’t want to do anything or they don’t know what to do, and there are too many cases like that where they’re afraid to intervene.

Q: That example offered a small ray of hope in the book, thanks to the majority of the neighborhood standing up to racist bullies.

A: Yeah, what the neighbors did there was quite inspiring. One in particular, I spent an hour with her, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman I believe was from Georgia originally. She said she was ready to leave. Like, if this is still going on, I would take my kids and move out. It was quite a position to take.

Q: So, in your opinion, what can turn the direction the country has taken away from hate?

A: I wish I had an easy answer for you. Just since I started this, it seems to have gotten worse, not better. I did not envision Trump’s re-election. We’ve had a whole other round with the anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim stuff growing out of Gaza.

Different in some ways, somewhat the same, because that’s not exclusively far-right stuff. You’ve got some of that coming from the left in terms of the anti-Semitic stuff.

Q: You focus on Orange County here, but it’s not the only place in the country that’s experiencing more hate.

A: I think it’s an extreme version. If you look at the number of hate groups in the county, collected by the Southern Poverty Law Center and other groups, it has more than its share of hate crimes. It has more than its share of hate groups. So it’s sort of overrepresented, both historically and currently.

That’s not to say it’s the worst of the worst, but it’s an extreme case that kind of reflects what’s going on at the moment with this surge, this real epidemic that we’re seeing. I think you’re seeing the extreme in Orange County of what you’re seeing around the country.