The Others: What Lies Behind the Orange Curtain

Eric Lichtblau is not from Orange County. He never protected his Black-presenting Puerto Rican girlfriend from red-laced skinheads during lunchtime at an Orange County middle school. He never bought a half ounce of weed from unsavory characters and then had to jump on to a random OCTA bus on PCH while absconding from skinheads. He never went to high school with those same skinheads, as well as the art kids from OCHSA (before it became an independent school in Santa Ana, known as OCSA).

Instead, what Lichtblau has done in American Reich: A Murder In Orange County, Neo-Nazis, And A New Age Of Hate (2026), is added a carefully researched and deeply insightful outside perspective on the long-standing threat of white supremacy and Nazi subculture in Orange County. There is no question Lichtblau is meticulous in his cataloguing and retelling of the history of white nationalism in Orange County and its stronghold in this traditionally archconservative area.

American Reich explores the horrific gay-baiting murder of Blaze Bernstein in 2018 as the focal point for a narrative that seeks to understand Orange County as a nexus for white nationalist domestic terrorism. Lichtblau unearths evidence from the last two centuries that helps the reader better understand what has brought us to the current state of hate in our region, which includes, but is not limited to: hate crime laws from 1871 being passed and then dismantled shortly after by the Supreme Court (59), turn of the century disenfranchising of Chinese immigrants in Santa Ana in 1906 (61), the passing of power from generations of white nationalists from post WWII through the turn of another century, and the white supremacist-fueled rhetoric of January 6 insurrectionists (241-258). Lichtblau is bold in criticizing the government for not taking the threat of domestic terrorism, in the form of the young white male, more seriously (129). While interviewing Daryl Johnson, a senior analyst for a DHS unit focused on domestic terrorism, Lichtblau notes, "The intelligence from Johnson's unit rarely got much attention from top DHS leaders" (65). Lichtblau doesn't stop there. He takes his critique of the government right to the top, consistently highlighting the dog whistles and blatant racist policies of Donald Trump as an important catalyst in the uptick of hate crimes in America.

Lichtblau understates the importance of an online presence to the current rise of Nazi rhetoric in popular American discourse. While he certainly acknowledges the role of the internet in keeping the players in his book connected, he never really acknowledges the imperative role of meme culture in bringing fringe racism to mainstream media. The cursory mention of violent video games and Discord chats do little to inform the reader as to the magnitude of incel/manosphere influencers steeped in white supremacy.

What Lichtblau is able to do is to continually recalibrate and weave his research around the unconscionable killing of Blaze Bernstein. A graduate of OCSA and a student at Penn University at the time of his death, Bernstein is treated with the humanity he deserves, but was not afforded, the night he lost his life. Recounting the words of Blaze's father after the trial, Lichtblau writes, "the guilty verdict seemed to him as if it preserved his son's memory, Gideon [Blaze's father] said, 'with dignity and truth'" (275). Lichtblau honors the life taken by a racist (self-hating?) homophobe, while offering the reader a detail-oriented glimpse of the circumstances that has taken our country to these new levels of duplicitous hate. Lichtblau offers these perspectives as an outsider, as only an outsider would describe Route 55 as a thoroughfare to Huntington Beach (25).

Toren Wallace completed his M.F.A. in Creative Writing with an emphasis on poetry at California State University, Long Beach where he published the dissertation, Less Lonely: Intersections of the Unintentionally Objective. His work has appeared in: The Portland Review, West Trade Review, Poetic Diversity (Los Angeles), and Columbia Journal, amongst others. He teaches English courses at Santiago Canyon College, in Orange, California.