Eric Lichtblau

Thanks very much for having me, Dave.

It's great to be back.

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 level since the FBI recorded them beginning in the early 1990s, with record numbers of assaults against virtually every type of minority.

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.

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 6th rioters were not from the conventional Trump country, the deep, deep red places.

They were from places going under change, places that Biden had carried, places that were seeing a lot of shift from red to blue places.

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-communists, 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 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.