At the close of Donald Trump’s first year in office since being re-elected president, white supremacists and Lefties will likely agree on one point: 2025 was a pretty good year to be racist, anti-Semitic, transphobic, and homophobic in America. On his first day back, the president pardoned nearly all the 1,500 people charged with rioting at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. During his first hundred days in office, Trump dramatically transformed immigration policy to deport asylum seekers. More than 1.6 million immigrants lost their legal status to remain in the United States in 2025. Meanwhile, white South Africans were invited to seek asylum in the US as victims of “race-based persecution.” Dog whistle politics have fallen by the wayside as the Trump administration has removed “woke” protections for marginalized groups and erased events in some of its offices recognizing Black History Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and LGBTQ Pride Month. These facts and more are chronicled in American Reich: A Murder in Orange County, Neo-Nazis, and a New Age of Hate, by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Eric Lichtblau. In American Reich, Lichtblau explores the resurgence of white supremacist hate acts by focusing on extremism in Orange County, California.
The book, set to be published on the fifth anniversary of the January 6th Capitol riots, opens with the brutal murder of Blaze Bernstein at the hands of his former Orange County high school classmate, Sam Woodward. In 2018, neo-Nazi Woodward flirted with Bernstein on a dating app, then murdered the gay, Jewish Ivy League student. Bernstein, who was texting with friends during the flirtation, seems to have thought Woodward had changed his antisocial ways since high school and might even now be out of the closet. Lichtblau demonstrates this was not a one-off hate crime, but rather one of many incidents increasingly common since Donald Trump rode down a gold-colored escalator in 2015 to announce his candidacy for president. While California has a reputation for diversity and tolerance, Orange County, situated just south of Los Angeles, has long been a hot spot for fomenting hate groups. For more than a decade, it was host to the longest-running white power radio station, Radio White. While in high school, Woodward cultivated a right-wing persona fueled, perhaps in part, by his father’s virulent homophobia. Yet the budding neo-Nazi was not unambiguous. Lichtblau cites courtroom evidence that Woodward questioned his own sexuality while attending the same arts school as Bernstein. At the time, Woodward was a fan of the notoriously queer film Rebel Without a Cause. He once turned in an assignment for a digital design course revamping the film’s poster to include a Confederate flag in the background.
Though Blaze Bernstein’s family can never get the promising young man back, some justice was served when Woodward was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Nonetheless, the neo-Nazi remains a hero and martyr to white supremacists. Meanwhile, hate groups continue to multiply. According to a 2024 Southern Poverty Law Center report, there were 1,371 hate and extremist groups in the US, a 5% decline the Center attributes to the mainstreaming of racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic narratives. That is to say, the decline in the number of white nationalist groups is thought to be due less to a diminished influence and more to an increase. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, many who might have joined a hate group now see a normalization in government and mainstream media supporting racist and other hate speech.
Advance press for American Reich describes it as revealing growing racial hatred and intolerance in the US while presenting “hope for healing.” I was disturbed to read about horrific crimes receiving almost no national coverage over the past several years and saw little evidence of hope for healing in American Reich. The book closes with a quote from extremist Nick Fuentes, the young white nationalist who has been critical of Trump for a lack of extremism. Fuentes, who is of Mexican descent and may be self-loathing like Woodward, has sided with Palestinians against Israel since the Gaza war began in October 2023. Lest one think Fuentes is sincere, he made clear on the social media platform owned by Elon Musk that he is being strategic by aligning with the Palestinians: “We’re more anti-Semitic than we are racist!” It is difficult to see the hope for healing in such a grim closing to the book.
Apart from inaccurate PR and despite the gloomy picture Lichtblau paints, American Reich is an important, well-researched, and well-written read for anyone who imagines the current climate in the United States might not be so bad. The reader does not need to belong to any of the groups targeted for hatred to be concerned. In a recent Vanity Fair article, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles reveals that Trump went on a “score settling” rampage upon his return to office. Given the president’s propensity to make juvenile insults and to threaten to imprison his enemies, there seems to be no limit to his pettiness; a pettiness with potentially “bigly” consequences.
NONFICTION
American Reich: A Murder in Orange County, Neo-Nazis, and a New Age of Hate
By Eric Lichtblau
Little Brown and Company
Published January 6, 2026
