Eric Lichtblau

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

seem to rise up with this 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

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.

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.

Yeah, Wade Page was the bass player.

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 Bauer, who was ultimately the shooter in the horrible Pittsburgh Tree of Life attack in 2018, which killed 11 Jews, the

the worst attack on Jews in American history, in American soil, was a supporter or 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.

Yes, yes.

He posted things that were 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, that 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 politicians.

on the beaches and in playgrounds and in other places, in martial arts and other combat warfare, were some of his heroes.