Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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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?
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Chapter 2: 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
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
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Chapter 3: What historical context does Eric Lichtblau provide about white supremacy?
I began to keep a list of nationally known hate crimes which had an Orange County connection. You mentioned the attack at the Sikh temple outside of Milwaukee. Yes. Another one was the horrific attack at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. I mean the shooter was not from Orange County. That was Robert Bowers.
But he was influenced by an Orange County group called the Rise Above Movement, right?
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.
They were pushing the so-called replacement theory that whites were being replaced by others, right?
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. And so they were inspiring him to his horrible mission before he went into the tree life.
So I want to talk about Sam Woodward who was the guy who murdered Blaise Bernstein, a gay Jewish college student, which is one of the stories at the heart of this. He became interested in extremist thinking as a teenager. What were his influences? What got him there?
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Chapter 4: What are the alarming trends in hate crimes and violence against minorities?
He was the opposite of Sam in many ways from their experiences at the art school. Blaise saw him as really a loner, someone, if anything, to be feared.
We will get to how this led to a murder in a few moments. First, we need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Eric Lisblau. His new book is American Reich, a murder in Orange County, neo-Nazis, and a new age of hate. He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
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So it's January 2nd, 2018, and Blaze had been to the University of Pennsylvania where he'd gotten very involved and was back home for break. And he gets this online outreach from Sam Woodward. What happens?
Yeah, he had actually heard from Sam about six months earlier with this same sort of dalliance. And there had been this friendly back and forth, almost flirtatious, you know, is he flirting with me? Can't quite figure it out. This does not seem like the same Sam Woodward sort of bully, homophobic guy that I knew back in high school. And then the first go-round, it just sort of stopped.
And in fact, Sam was the one who more or less pulled away at that point and said, well, I'm not really interested. And then it started up all over again that December break. When Blaze was, again, home from school from Penn. And this time it went a step further. And there were a bunch of back and forth online exchanges.
And this time it went a step further with Sam saying, hey, why don't we get together? just want to catch up and see how things are going. And Blaze had been hesitant to do that the first time around. And this time he sent him his address, said, okay, fine, let's, you know, go meet up. And so Sam came by and
and picked up Blaze at his house, and they went off to a park together near Blaze's home, and they just walked around for a little bit, and that was the last anyone saw of Blaze alive, unfortunately.
Right. Now, Blaze hadn't told anyone that he was going to meet Sam.
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