One night in early 2018, while he was home from college, an Ivy League student named Blaze Bernstein snuck out of his parents’ house in Orange County. Waiting for him in a car outside was an old high-school classmate: Sam Woodward, someone who Blaze mostly remembered as a brooding, bigoted loner. But that night, after months of flirtatious messaging, Sam had succeeded in coaxing Blaze—a gay, Jewish sophomore at UPenn—out for a rendezvous. No one would ever see him alive again.

In American Reich, veteran investigative journalist Eric Lichtblau uses the story of Blaze’s life and death to shine a light on the epidemic of hate in Southern California and, increasingly, the nation as a whole. Orange County has long been a bastion of the ultra-right: carved out of farmland as a haven for wealthy whites fleeing the diversifying metropolis to the north, it was the birthplace of the far-right John Birch Society, a hub for neo-Nazi recruitment, and a powerful springboard for race-baiting Republican politicians including Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. But in the years leading up to Blaze’s disappearance, Orange County was changing: like the country as a whole, it was rapidly diversifying, to the outrage of many of its white residents. No one was more opposed to the changes than America’s resurgent neo-Nazi groups, one of which had recently gained a new member: Sam Woodward.

Revealing how Orange County has exported racial hatred to the rest of the country and the world, American Reich weaves this tragic tale together with stories from across the nation, showing what this haunted place and the colliding paths of two of its residents reveal about America’s fractured soul and our hope for healing.

Eric Lichtblau is a Washington author and investigative journalist and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. His latest non-fiction book, American Reich: A Murder in Orange County, Neo-

Nazis, and a New Age of Hate, was released in January 2026, and he has written three previous books: the New York Times best-seller The Nazis Next Door, Bush’s Law, and Return to the Reich. He was a Washington reporter for the New York Times for fifteen years from 2002 to 2017, where he earned two Pulitzer Prizes, the first in 2006 for the disclosure of the secret NSA eavesdropping program under President George W. Bush’s administration and the second in 2018 as part of a team investigating Donald Trump’s ties to Russia. He was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times for fifteen years, and has written for The New Yorker, TIME Magazine, and other publications, including being a contributing columnist for USA Today. He has been a guest on NPR, MSNBC, C-SPAN, and elsewhere. A Cornell University graduate, Lichtblau has spoken at many universities and institutions, and taught writing and journalism at Georgetown, UCLA, and the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Md.

Congressman Jamie Raskin has proudly represented Maryland’s 8th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives since 2017. Prior to his time in Congress, Raskin was a three-term State Senator in Maryland and the Senate Majority Whip. He was also a professor of constitutional law at American University’s Washington College of Law for more than 25 years. He has authored several books, including the Washington Post bestseller Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court versus the American People and the highly acclaimed We the Students: Supreme Court Cases For and About America’s Students. Congressman Raskin is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School and a former Editor of the Harvard Law Review. He and his wife Sarah live in Takoma Park.