AMERICAN REICH

A study in the workings of white supremacist hatred as it surges across the land.

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Lichtblau focuses on Orange County, California, “a petri dish for young white supremacists anxious to take back their culture from minorities they see as an existential threat.” There, one young man—disaffected, taught by his conservative father to despise gay people, obsessed with Nazi ideology—targeted a classmate, gay and Jewish, and murdered him. Sam Woodward, now imprisoned for life, wasn’t the first neo-Nazi killer on the block. Indeed, Southern California abounds in white nationalist gangs, for, as neo-Nazi/KKK leader Tom Metzger declared, “This may not be the Mecca of white separatism…but it is the breeding ground.” The neo-Nazi drama plays out, in Lichtblau’s fast-paced account, against a backdrop of national politics and demographics: Enrollment in white supremacist organizations accelerated dramatically with Barack Obama’s election, and violent action spiked with Trump’s. “While Trump always denied any suggestion that his ugly, racist rhetoric was fueling violence,” writes the author, “dozens of his supporters made that connection explicit in unprovoked hate crimes that invoked his name and mimicked his language.” Emboldened, supremacist groups are spilling out of Southern California and the Deep South and growing nationally. Perhaps ironically, Lichtblau notes, those very places are becoming less white and more ethnically mixed, giving rise to the “Great Replacement Theory” and the fervent support for Trump that led to the January 6, 2021, insurrection, most of whose participants “hailed from counties where the proportion of the white population was shrinking rapidly compared to that of non‑whites.” The author’s thorough reporting makes it plain that things are likely to become still worse, for, with Trump’s second term, supremacists’ numbers and actions are rising, while violent hatred has become “the sad state of normalcy in modern‑day America.”

A deep investigation into the plague of white nationalism.