Orange County’s reputation as a haven for white supremacists was well‑known within the halls of Blaze Bernstein’s high school. The kids knew the places to avoid.
Be wary of “Skinhead City,” the nickname for Huntington Beach down Route 55, where the young white supremacists with shaved heads would often gather at the boardwalk not far from where the surfers tested the city’s famous waves. Up the Interstate‑5 freeway to the north sat Anaheim, or “Klanaheim” as some of the kids called it, where white supremacists had scarred pockets of Disneyland’s home city with a series of violent episodes. The students at Blaze’s school, especially gays and minorities, knew to venture there only at their own peril.
Perhaps the worst‑kept secret of all was Orange County’s thriving “white power” music scene. Beginning in the mid‑1990s, bands embracing neo‑Nazism had made Orange County into America’s epicenter of white‑power music. At hundreds of shows hopscotching Orange County over the years, the bands have blared their anthems of hatred for the others in beer‑soaked bars and halls, as tattooed young men with shaved heads and Doc Martens boots thrashed about in mosh pits below them.
The soundtrack for their rage, cued up by followers worldwide on major online music platforms, inevitably stoked violence, and it would provide the backdrop for the first in a decade-long string of mass killings by white supremacists when a mainstay of Orange County’s white‑power scene went on a deadly rampage in Wisconsin in 2012.
The names that the bands have given themselves over the years speak to their common agenda: Definite Hate, Blue‑Eyed Devils, Angry Aryans, Jewslaughter. If there were any doubts about their allegiances, the assorted paraphernalia on display at the shows—the Third Reich flags, the swastika‑adorned T‑shirts, the neo‑Nazi recruitment fliers, the Nazi salutes—quickly answered them. “White people awake, save our great race,” they sang.
What Wagner’s operas were to Hitler as musical inspiration, “white power” music has been for new generations of neo‑Nazis around America. It started as a British import: two decades after the original British Invasion brought the Beatles and the Who to American shores, neo-Nazis in the United States in the mid‑1980s began tapping into the race‑baiting, white‑power music championed by influential British skinhead bands like Skrewdriver. The music, with its thrashing, unyielding pulse and its violent, unapologetically racist lyrics, came to embody the neo‑Nazis’ dire view of America’s ethnic decline and the “assault” on the Aryan race.
Orange County became the launchpad for the movement in America, with bootleg cassettes giving way over the years to CDs and digital music. By the 2000s, the ferocity of this music’s following led Resistance Records, a leading neo‑Nazi record label founded by notorious neo‑Nazi leader William Pierce, to declare Orange County, California, “the Skinhead capital of the world.”
Indeed, Orange County boasted one of the country’s best‑known Aryan radio stations, an Internet station called “Radio White,” claiming 100,000 listeners, and Resistance Records moved its operations for a time to San Bernardino, just across the Orange County border. “Imagine what we could do with these millions of aimless young white people if we owned MTV,” Pierce once mused at a white supremacist conference.
But as popular as the recorded music has become to white supremacists around the world, it is the raw, dark energy of the live shows that has drawn thousands of hardcore faithful over the years to a dozen or so Orange County nightclubs in a blaring swarm of unbridled hate. White‑power organizers advertise the “whites only” shows ahead of time through underground networks, the locations and dates kept secret until right beforehand.
Sometimes, a small group of unwitting minorities—Hispanics, gays, others—will stumble into a club, only to face jeers, fists, or worse from the neo‑Nazis in the crowd. Or the neo‑Nazis will crash punk concerts and try to assert their dominance. For punk bands promoting an anti‑fascist agenda, the so‑called surf Nazis crashing their concerts have made Orange County known as a dangerous place to play over the years; punk bands would hire extra security to brace for Nazi salutes and threats of violence from the crowd.
At a 2019 punk show in central Orange County, an appearance by a band named Reagan Youth, whose eponymous song featured a chorus of “We are Reagan Youth….Heil! Heil! Heil!,” turned to bedlam when a gang of neo‑Nazis started hurling racial epithets at non‑whites in the crowd and a brawl broke out. “Orange County is a white man’s town!” yelled one of the brawlers.
It wouldn’t take much to trigger violence from the neo‑Nazis; the faintest whiff of racial dissonance, or sometimes nothing at all, could light the fuse. Once, at a bar in northern Orange County, a gang of about a dozen neo‑Nazi skinheads beat and stabbed an eighteen‑year-old concert‑goer so badly that he was hospitalized with a punctured lung. The victim’s offense: he was wearing a T‑shirt picturing Jimi Hendrix, the Black guitar icon.
“What do you have a [racist expletive] on your shirt for?” one of his attackers demanded as he began pummeling him. “‘Heil’ raisers,” the local media called the mobs.
Wade Michael Page, a beefy young man with a shaved head and arms bedeviled with neo‑Nazi tattoos, was a frequent sight at many of the shows in Orange County in the early 2000s. He played bass guitar, and sometimes sang, in a motley crew of bands like the Blue‑Eyed Devils, whose signature song, “White Power,” declared unambiguously: “Now I’ ll fight for my race and nation! Sieg Heil!”
A military veteran who grew up in Colorado, Page cast himself as a political warrior for oppressed whites, using his “white power” music platform to effect change in what he called “our sick society.” He was fighting, he insisted, for the very survival of the Aryan race. He told an interviewer for his white‑power label in 2010, with no hint of irony, that he wanted to use his white‑power music to achieve “positive results in our society. If we could figure out how to end people’s apathetic ways, it would be the start towards moving forward.” For Page and others of his ilk, “progress” meant reasserting white dominance.
At his bands’ shows, Page wore a guitar strap decorated with the Confederate flag, just above a large “14” tattoo on his shoulder, symbolizing the “fourteen words” that were a creed for white supremacists: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” His band would play at popular white‑power venues like The Shack in Anaheim, just a short drive from Disneyland, with a Nazi flag sometimes displayed behind them for maximum effect.
If word leaked out about an upcoming “white power” night, opposition groups sometimes turned out to picket, waving signs that read “Honk If You Hate Nazis!” and the like, but many club owners let the shows go on anyway. The cash flowed in from beer‑guzzling neo‑Nazis chanting “Sieg Heil!” in the mosh pit; bar owners who agreed to open their doors to the shows framed it as a free‑speech issue.
A few owners even admitted that they didn’t really mind the white‑power agenda on display at their venues. “It’s obvious the fuckin’ Jews are causing so much of the problems in the world; fuck them,” insisted the owner of a club in central Orange County that was the site of many white‑power concerts in the early 2000s. “If these guys want to annihilate them, I say do it.”
The white‑power shows have drawn neo‑Nazi VIPs from around Southern California over the years. Tom Metzger, the notorious elder statesman of the White Aryan Resistance (WAR) movement until his death in 2020, would drive ninety minutes or so up the coast from his home in northern San Diego County, just across the border from Orange County, to attend.
At one of his appearances at The Shack, a band that Page played in called Youngland dedicated its signature song to Metzger in the crowd; it was called “Thank God I’m a White Boy,” an Aryan twist on the old John Denver classic, and it hailed white pride while taunting “money‑hungry Jews” and other minorities. Another one of their white-power tunes about the threat of minorities in Orange County, called “White Man on the Move,” took aim at “queers,” “jigs,” “spics,” and “n****rs,” declaring that: “When the last White moves out of O.C., the American flag will leave with me….We’ ll die for a land that’s yours and mine.”
Still other songs envisioned a “race war” to rid America of its “mud” and “scum” and to “smash this melting pot.” Metzger, whose bald head needed little shaving to fit into the skinhead crowd, smashed himself headlong into his young acolytes in the mosh pit as the white-power music blasted in his honor.
Metzger, a onetime Grand Dragon of the California Ku Klux Klan before starting his own hate group, had long been an icon among the white supremacists. His notoriety had only swelled years earlier, in 1990, after he and his organization were bankrupted by a $12.5 million judgment in Portland for the brutal beating death of an Ethiopian student at the hands of three skinhead followers, who had been dispatched to Oregon by Metzger to incite “racial violence.”
Undaunted by the verdict, Metzger declared afterward that “the movement will not be stopped in the puny town of Portland. We’re too deep. We’re embedded now. Don’t you understand? We’re in your colleges. We’re in your armies. We’re in your police forces We planted the seeds.”
Indeed, Metzger, who repaired televisions for a living when he wasn’t fomenting “white revolution,” recognized early on the appeal of white-power music as a recruiting vehicle for bringing young skinheads to his Aryan cause, organizing the first‑ever music festival dedicated to hate music in 1988 in Oklahoma. He saw Southern California, and not the South, as crucial to his lofty goals for expanding the movement’s reach in America. “This may not be the Mecca of white separatism,” he once said, “but it is the breeding ground.”
Metzger saw the potential in Orange County. The place had drawn white supremacists and hard‑line political extremists for generations. In the early 1920s, KKK members had served openly on city councils and captured majorities in some cities, pushing a “law‑and‑order” platform and declaring that “good, law‑abiding people have nothing to fear”; in Anaheim, on‑duty police officers robed in Klan regalia would some-times patrol city streets, and in 1924 a throng of some twenty thousand Klan supporters from around the region gathered at a rally in a city park in a show of might, a thirty‑foot electronic cross on display before them.
The Klan eventually lost power, but in the 1950s, dozens of branches of the ultraconservative John Birch Society began sprouting up around Orange County, the heart of the group’s national base. Dominated by white business executives in Orange County, the John Birch Society pushed an anti‑communist and often conspiracy‑mongering philosophy that was branded as extremist even by conservatives like California’s own Ronald Reagan. The Birchers held strong.
The county’s vast expanse of orange groves and cattle farms began to give way to megachurches, military contractors, Walt Disney’s first theme park, and one new suburban neighborhood after another with ubiquitous orange‑tiled roofs. The county population grew fivefold by 1960, but it remained overwhelmingly white and Christian—and racist extremism flourished.
Even as the county’s population was swelling, racial restrictions—both formal and informal—continued to keep minorities out of many whites‑only neighborhoods in those years. “If we had a colored or Oriental family here, all hell would be raised,” one local realtor remarked after a prominent Korean American, Dr. Sammy Lee, was stopped from buying a house in Garden Grove in 1954.
Lee was an American success story: a first‑generation American, born to Korean immigrants, a physician, a retired army officer, and a gold‑medal‑winning Olympic diver for the United States in the previous two Olympics, but he and his family weren’t welcome in Orange County. “I don’t want to sound like a crybaby,” Lee said. “I just want a home without bigotry and prejudice.”
The cold rejection of an American Olympian made international headlines, a sign that bald‑faced bigotry in America reached beyond the Jim Crow South, all the way to the bright shores of Southern California. “The story of Major Lee’s reception in Garden Grove,” the San Francisco Chronicle declared, “will embarrass our country in the eyes of the world.”
In 1968, Forbes magazine declared Orange County to be America’s “nut country” because of its extreme brand of politics, much to the chagrin of the proud locals. Orange County’s Republican politicians, with a stranglehold on the county’s congressional seats for decades, were notorious as perhaps America’s most extreme conservatives, with an unabashedly pro‑Christian agenda that often took brutal aim at minorities of all types.
Bashing the others often seemed like political sport for Orange County’s congressmen, whether they were attacking opponents as “lesbian spear‑chuckers,” likening South African icon Nelson Mandela to infamous Black murderer Willie Horton, or warning, baselessly, that “a large contingent of barefoot Africans” were planning to invade America with help from the United Nations. The racist, sexist, and homophobic rhetoric from one of the county’s most notorious politicians, Congressman John G. Schmitz, was so extreme that even the far‑right John Birch Society dumped him.
The broadsides made clear to minorities in Orange County that they were considered second‑class citizens in the eyes of their most extreme political leaders. In 1988, Orange County Republicans even hired uniformed private security guards at polling places on Election Day in heavily Hispanic neighborhoods with signs, in English and Spanish, warning ominously that it was a felony for noncitizens to vote. The strong‑arming tactic evidently helped lead the Republican candidate to a narrow win.
With its long lineup of far‑right politicians and deep‑pocketed donors, Orange County also became the well‑funded launching pad for decades of far‑right political campaigns lashing out at minority groups. In 1978, a failed statewide ballot initiative originating there aimed to keep gays from working in public schools, and another, the notorious Proposition 187 in 1994, would have denied public services such as schooling and medical care to undocumented immigrants. Federal courts ultimately blocked the measure as unconstitutional.
The fevered pitch of the anti‑minority rhetoric only seemed to embolden Orange County’s white supremacists, with a series of brazen, unprovoked attacks on minorities—whether Black, Hispanic, Jewish, Asian, gay, or otherwise—punctuating the tension and seizing public attention sporadically throughout the 1990s. A pair of tattooed skinheads were harassing minorities near the pier in Huntington Beach one night in 1996 when they confronted a young Native American man named George Mondragon near a lifeguard tower on the beach.
“Do you believe in white power?” they demanded to know. When Mondragon turned and ran, the skinheads gave chase and stabbed him twenty‑seven times.
“They tried to murder another human being,” a police lieutenant said, “because of the color of his skin.” Remarkably, Mondragon survived that brutal hate‑crime attack, but two years earlier, Vernon Flournoy, an African American mechanic and a grandfather, had died when another pair of white supremacist skin-heads accosted him on the sidewalk outside a McDonald’s in Huntington Beach, then shot him dead. “My husband was murdered because he was a Black man,” Flournoy’s grief‑stricken widow said.
Politicians didn’t like to talk much about the hate crimes or Orange County’s reputation over the years as a magnet for neo‑Nazis. It conflicted with the image that the county had worked so hard to cultivate as a tourist destination not only for Disneyland, with its staggering revenues estimated at more than $75 million per day, but also for its bucolic shorelines, oceanfront resorts, and luxury shopping malls.
Reports of neo‑Nazi killings, or of swastikas spray‑painted on the car of a Holocaust survivor, didn’t foster that image. Just as hate‑crime reports were starting to soar in Orange County in 2017, Orange County officials went so far as to temporarily block the publication of an annual report on such episodes by a county‑run commission.
The report “makes Orange County look bad,” one commissioner said. In other words, Orange County should be focusing on all the good things that it was doing, not on hate crimes and bigotry.
***
