Book Review: American Reich: A Murder in Orange County, Neo-Nazis, and a New Age of Hate by Eric Lichtblau

It seems to be a sad part of the human condition that there will always be those among us who harbor baseless hatred for entire groups of people. Maybe because they have a different skin color, a different gender, or a different religion. Maybe because of their sexual orientation or national origin. Sometimes it’s over something even dumber than that, like political affiliation or favorite football team. Whatever the cause, there are some people who are primed for hate and they will happily accept any excuse to target someone with it.

In 2018, college sophomore Blaze Bernstein was visiting his parents in Orange County, California, when he was lured out of the house by an ex-high-school classmate and brutally murdered. That young man, Sam Woodward, had a long history of antisocial, racist, and homophobic behavior, of which Blaze was well aware, but the text messages indicating that Sam had long harbored a secret crush on him made him wonder whether the hostility had been a mask for something more complicated. Perhaps it was. Either way, after having played similar “pranks” on other gay men in the past, this time, Sam escalated his sadistic pattern, stabbing Blaze repeatedly.

In American Reich, author Eric Lichtblau traces the lives of both men and the various points when their paths crossed. Sam was taught to hate at an early age by his father and older brother, and kept to himself in school, only occasionally attracting attention by espousing racist vitriol. Blaze, by contrast, was creative, outgoing, Jewish, and gay—traits that placed him squarely in Sam’s sights. After high school, their trajectories diverged sharply: Blaze thrived, while Sam descended deeper into militant extremism, eventually aligning himself with violent white‑supremacist networks.

In alternating chapters, Lichtblau also traces the recent rise of domestic terrorism in America, most of it spurred on by hatred of people deemed “other”, and often only a few degrees of separation away from Sam and the people in his immediate orbit. Orange County has long been a hotbed of the worst kinds of far-right rhetoric with a history of hosting neo-Nazi organizations, and the author posits that all played a part in this terrible tragedy. It’s downright chilling to read about the various groups working to spread their vicious ideology throughout the United States. Some of their members would very likely stand out in a crowd, but in many cases they could be among your neighbors, moving unseen, and plotting violence of varying severity.

I’m not entirely convinced that it’s all satisfactorily tied together, but the result is still gripping and deeply unsettling. The murder at the book’s core is especially affecting, as Lichtblau makes sure to properly humanize both the victim and the perpetrator, especially taking care to honor the legacy of the former. As hate is pushed more and more into the mainstream of American life, packaged as content, amplified by algorithms, and fed back into public life, it’s increasingly important to be reminded of stories like these. Hopefully in doing so, we will be better prepared to stamp it out when we see it and prevent more senseless deaths from occurring. ★★★★