The Brownshirts of Orange County

Blaze Bernstein loved to cook. So much so, he prepared two Thanksgiving meals on two coasts in 2018, a spaghetti turkey bolognese for classmates at the University of Pennsylvania, and a roasted bird with fixings for his family in Orange County, California. During the upcoming spring semester, Bernstein was scheduled to begin his new gig as managing editor of Penn Appétit, the student-run magazine for campus epicureans. 

Blaze Bernstein never returned to Philadelphia. He never scoured the city for the best undiscovered cheesesteaks, never got to argue late into the night about the best hoagie fillings. Tragically, the Thanksgiving feast in Orange County was his last meal, a final breaking of family bread before he was savagely murdered for being Jewish, gay and a former high school classmate of Sam Woodward. 

Woodward was a member of Atomwaffen Division, a shadowy white supremacist group. He lured Bernstein into a date and stabbed him 28 times, 14 in his neck alone. The prosecutor in the case theorized that the last thing Blaze saw may have been the blood-stained skull mask later found in Woodward’s car, one he had previously worn while sieg-heiling for a propaganda photo at an Atomwaffen “hate camp” held in the Texas wilderness.

Bernstein’s killing and Woodward’s 2024 conviction for murder and sentencing to life without parole are the backbone of “American Reich: A Murder in Orange County, Neo-Nazis, and a New Age of Hate” by Eric Lichtblau. It’s a maddening, disheartening, essential book about the surge of neo-Nazism over the last decade, which the Southern Poverty Law Center estimates has spawned at least 165 groups — or a 50% increase since 2023. Orange County is a longstanding extremist epicenter — the killer of six Sikhs in Milwaukee in 2012 was a product of the area’s white power music scene — but as Licthblau deftly lays out, the monstrous rage that drove Woodward has spread to every corner of the country. 

One of the most eye-opening aspects of “American Reich” is the sheer number of recent extremist murders that never reached national prominence. The 2018 massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue was a huge story, but how many people know about the copycat outside San Diego six months later? The shooter’s assault rifle jammed, so there was “only” one fatality and three injuries. The long online trail went back to the pre-digital days of “The Turner Diaries,” the 1978 novel by William Luther Pierce, founder and chairman of the National Alliance. Some 200 murders have been traced back to the book, including the 168 victims of the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh, who was carrying a copy in his car. 

“The Turner Diaries” portrays a racist landscape where so-called patriotic white men are called upon to commit genocide against minorities, take down the federal government and hang race-traitors in a mass execution on “The Day of the Rope.” It was a fundamental text for The Order, a 1980s neo-Nazi gang that terrorized the Pacific Northwest. Growing up in Billings, Montana, at the time, I followed the criminal exploits of The Order, especially after the assassination of cantankerous radio host Alan Berg in his Denver driveway. It boggled my teenage mind that there were Nazi sympathizers, not much older than me, in our midst. Nazis? The evil our grandfathers fought and died to defeat? The avowed enemy of the glorious American democracy we’ve been assured is the envy of the world? A desire of metaphorical, and maybe actual neighbors to align themselves with the perpetrators of the literal Holocaust? 

Over the years, it’s become clear how rampant and widespread white supremacist culture was out West. “Silent Brotherhood,” a book by Colorado investigative journalists Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt that grew out of Berg’s murder, exposed The Order and its plans to unite white supremacists in a Northwest ethnostate. “Silent Brotherhood” was so deeply researched and thorough that actual members of The Order were fans. It was also another of Timothy McVeigh’s book club selections. (The book was rereleased and renamed as source material for the film “The Order,” an underappreciated 2024 thriller from Australian director Justin Kurzel featuring a perfectly cast Marc Maron as Alan Berg). 

In 1988, in Portland Oregon, Ethiopian immigrant Mulugeta Seraw was brutally bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat by three skinheads. Local reporter Elinor Langer covered the murder, trial and conviction, but also took a wide lens to the violent roots and vicious tentacles in her book “A Hundred Little Hitlers: The Death of a Black Man, the Trial of a White Racist, and the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in America,” another fundamental link in the scholarly extremist chain. The second half of the book digs into a quixotic civil lawsuit brought by Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center against Tom Metzger. Metzger is a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, founder of the White Aryan Resistance, model for Stacy Keach’s character in “American History X,” and a guy I once interviewed about his hatred of fellow neo-Nazi forefather — and one-time associate — David Duke from his home base in Southern California. 

Around the first Barack Obama inauguration, I crossed paths with actual neo-Nazis over a satirical bit I wrote for Jewcy.com titled “The Connoisseur’s Guide to Internet Antisemitism.” The piece popped up on the Vanguard News Network — The New York Times for bigots — replete with physical and death threats, to which I responded with “In Which I Extended An Olive Branch to White Supremacists.” Today, I’m not sure I’d do that, even with my tongue planted in my cheek. Lichtblau’s book brutally details how the ground has shifted in stochastic domestic terrorism. 

What’s changed is white supremacists are not just building separatist rural compounds. Pathetic young men like Woodward might train for the race war in the backwoods, but they act upon their own murderous impulses by going to where minorities gather, killing indiscriminately for clout, dangerous idiots looking for online love. Given a gun, the San Diego synagogue shooter became dangerous. The second before he pulled the trigger, he was an incel-ish loser whose “manifesto” wanted his followers to ensure “my sacrifice was not in vain,” asking them to “make memes” and “shitpost.” Pepe the Frog emoji as dispirit animal. 

Incredibly, the pace of hate is so full-throttle today that “American Reich” is already a bit dated. It ostensibly ends with the last presidential inauguration, but in the months since: the demonized Haitians in Ohio became the demonized Somalis in Minnesota; the vice president proudly and publicly regurgitated white supremacist vomit; the Groypers gained a greater national normalized footprint; and, just a few weeks ago, neo-Nazis marched through the capital of Arkansas, right past Central High School, integrated with the National Guard in 1957 by the Little Rock Nine. The GOP, meanwhile, is increasingly infested with people who openly admire Hitler and the Third Reich. (That Jan 6. is the publication date for “American Reich” is clearly intended as a solemn wink on the part of Little, Brown and Co.)

A rare moment of grace in the book occurs when Bernstein’s parents start “Blaze It Forward,” an organization preserving their son’s memory through acts of kindness and service. It’s a nod to the power of solidarity and community I witnessed firsthand. In December 1993 — after a year of torment of Jews, Black people and Native Americans — the Billings Gazette printed full-page color menorahs for readers to hang in local windows as a citywide stand against hate. It gave rise to the Not In Our Town movement, still going strong all these years later. (Yes, a made-for-TV movie exists, “Not in This Town.” The menacing charismatic extremist is played by an L.L. Bean-clad Ed Begley Jr. You’ve been warned.) 

Eric Lichtblau’s “American Reich” makes it clear we need a full-scale national “Not In Our Town” effort to reverse course and that the fight will never end. I’d love to say things permanently changed in Billings for the better, but last month, days before Christmas, a rainbow banner proclaiming “God Is Still Speaking” was ripped down and stolen from the Mayflower Congregational Church. It was replaced with swastikas and anti-gay slurs. “American Reich” compiles the crimes, counts the bodies and connects the dots between the growing number of these acts and the people who support them. There can be no more blind eyes to turn.