The Growing Power & Influence Of White Supremacy In America
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. Many Americans appalled by the violence of the January 6th 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 non-whites. One example is Orange County, California, south of Los Angeles. That's a region highlighted by our guest, veteran investigative journalist Eric Listblau, 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.
Lischblau 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 Lischblau 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 Lischblau, welcome back to Fresh Air.
Thanks very much for having me, Dave. It's great to be back.
You know, a lot of the troubling incidents of white supremacist 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?
How has President Trump's rhetoric influenced white supremacy in America?
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.
Now, as I mentioned in the introduction, you know, a lot of people would assume that people in the January 6th assault on the Capitol would have come from Trump's bases of support. But there was the 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.
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
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:04
2
How has President Trump's rhetoric influenced white supremacy in America?
2:04–7:28
3
What historical context does Eric Lichtblau provide about white supremacy?
7:28–19:42
4
What are the alarming trends in hate crimes and violence against minorities?
19:42–44:50
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from Fresh Air
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