Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning journalist Lichtblau focuses on Orange County, California, \u201ca petri dish for young white supremacists anxious to take back their culture from minorities they see as an existential threat.\u201d There, one young man\u2014disaffected, taught by his conservative father to despise gay people, obsessed with Nazi ideology\u2014targeted a classmate, gay and Jewish, and murdered him. Sam Woodward, now imprisoned for life, wasn\u2019t 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, \u201cThis may not be the Mecca of white separatism\u2026but it is the breeding ground.\u201d The neo-Nazi drama plays out, in Lichtblau\u2019s fast-paced account, against a backdrop of national politics and demographics: Enrollment in white supremacist organizations accelerated dramatically with Barack Obama\u2019s election, and violent action spiked with Trump\u2019s. \u201cWhile Trump always denied any suggestion that his ugly, racist rhetoric was fueling violence,\u201d writes the author, \u201cdozens of his supporters made that connection explicit in unprovoked hate crimes that invoked his name and mimicked his language.\u201d 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 \u201cGreat Replacement Theory\u201d and the fervent support for Trump that led to the January 6, 2021, insurrection, most of whose participants \u201chailed from counties where the proportion of the white population was shrinking rapidly compared to that of non\u2011whites.\u201d The author\u2019s thorough reporting makes it plain that things are likely to become still worse, for, with Trump\u2019s second term, supremacists\u2019 numbers and actions are rising, while violent hatred has become \u201cthe sad state of normalcy in modern\u2011day America.\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning journalist Lichtblau focuses on Orange County, California, \u201ca petri dish for young white supremacists anxious to take back their culture from minorities they see as an existential threat.\u201d There, one young man\u2014disaffected, taught by his conservative father to despise gay people, obsessed with Nazi ideology\u2014targeted a classmate, gay and Jewish, and murdered him. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5330,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5329"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5329\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}