On the night of January 2, 2018, 19-year-old Blaze Bernstein was home in Foothill Ranch, California, during winter break from his sophomore year at the University of Pennsylvania, when he received a message on Tinder from a former classmate, Sam Woodward. Bernstein, known for his boundless creativity as a poet, his sharp-witted humor, and his sincerity, had flourished at the Orange County School of the Arts, a selective charter high school. Woodward, meanwhile, had left the school after their sophomore year with a reputation as an edgelord loner who drew swastikas in his notebook and harassed his gay classmates.
Bernstein, who was gay and Jewish, was skeptical of Woodward’s Tinder come-ons. Still, he sent him his address on Snapchat and slipped into Woodward’s car without attracting his family’s notice. Just over a week later, Bernstein’s body was found in a shallow grave in Borrego Park, a wooded enclave near his house. He had been stabbed 28 times. Orange County Sheriff’s Department investigators soon arrested Woodward on suspicion of Bernstein’s murder.
In late January, as the sheriff’s department and Orange County prosecutors were still piecing together Woodward’s motive, ProPublica published an investigation revealing that he was a member of Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi group notorious for its militance. After prosecutors gained access to Woodward’s phone, unlocking a trove of evidence connecting Woodward to Atomwaffen and laying bare his hatred of gays, Jews, and other minorities, they added a hate-crime enhancement to the murder charge he was already facing.
In American Reich: A Murder in Orange County, Neo-Nazis, and a New Age of Hate, Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist Eric Lichtblau situates Woodward’s hate-fueled murder of Bernstein within a decade-long rash of white supremacist violence. Lichtblau, also the author of The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men, knows all too well that “the story of violent bigotry in America is a story older than the nation itself.” But he argues that young white men like Woodward are part of a new wave of hate, influenced by online forums that appeal to white grievances, by the rise of Donald Trump, and by the backlash to a diversifying country. Atomwaffen Division, which was founded online in 2015 by a white teenager who developed an obsession with Hitler via far-right websites, epitomizes this era of white supremacy.
Lichtblau also asserts that Woodward’s upbringing in a conservative, homophobic family in Orange County is not coincidental. He compellingly chronicles how Orange County gained a reputation as “the Skinhead capital of the world”—it is a place where Ku Klux Klan members openly served on city councils in the 1920s, where members of the ultraconservative John Birch Society proliferated in the 1950s, and where a “white power” music scene has flourished since the 1980s. The county’s white supremacist history, combined with its recent demographic shift to a majority-minority area, has made it “a case study in the coloring of America—and the violent reaction from far-right extremists,” Lichtblau writes. At Orange County School of the Arts, which reflected the county’s new diversity, Woodward told a friend that he was bothered by the mixing of the races and thought it must be stopped.
I was especially attuned to how American Reich metes out its narrative of Bernstein’s murder because I have been following the case since he was first reported missing. One of my closest friends was Bernstein’s academic adviser at Penn; in the book, Lichtblau cites a eulogy she delivered at his memorial service. Through her and other connections, I met Bernstein’s parents in fall 2018 at an event for a memorial fund that supports young writers.
I was heartened that Lichtblau, who cites interviews with Bernstein’s parents, grandfather, and friends in his endnotes, portrays Bernstein as more than just a murder victim in American Reich, highlighting his vivacity, intellectual curiosity, and passion for cooking. But the omniscient narration style Lichtblau employs—he is not a character in this book and does not even make clear in the text itself that he interviewed subjects—also gives cover to some uncomfortable moments of projection. For instance, Lichtblau enters Bernstein’s head as he exchanged Tinder messages with Woodward on the night of his death. Yet Bernstein’s thoughts on that night died with him.
American Reich reaches widely beyond Orange County as it explores why and how hate crimes have recently surged in the United States. Lichtblau attempts to use the story of Bernstein’s murder and Woodward’s radicalization as connective tissue, but the book meanders for long stretches without connecting back to its central case. At times, it reads like a disturbingly detailed catalog of every major white supremacist attack or threat that has taken place since 2015. In this, it is comprehensive to a fault.
“Life without my son will never be the same,” Bernstein’s father told the judge at Woodward’s sentencing on November 15, 2024. Four months earlier, a jury had found Woodward guilty of first-degree murder with a hate-crime enhancement. In sentencing Woodward to life in prison without the possibility of parole, the judge connected the “hate and rage” that drove his crime to what Lichtblau describes as “the unsettling climate in America as a whole.” With the reelection of Donald Trump just 10 days earlier—a result that neo-Nazi groups celebrated—that climate has only grown more permissive of hate, as Lichtblau makes clear in an epilogue. Devastatingly, the new era of hate that American Reich illuminates, and that Bernstein’s murder exemplifies, may not have reached its zenith yet.•
AMERICAN REICH: A MURDER IN ORANGE COUNTY, NEO-NAZIS, AND A NEW AGE OF HATE, BY ERIC LICHTBLAU
Kristen Martin is a writer and cultural critic. She is the author of The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood.
