This message comes from NPR sponsor Capella University.
Interested in a quality online education?
Capella is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission.
A different future is closer than you think with Capella University.
Learn more at capella.edu.
This is Fresh Air.
I'm Dave Davies.
Many Americans appalled by the violence of the January 6th assault on the U.S.
Capitol likely assumed that the rioters came from regions where Donald Trump had his deepest support.
But researchers from the University of Chicago found that most came from places Joe Biden had won in the election, often counties where the white population was shrinking relative to non-whites.
One example is Orange County, California, south of Los Angeles.
That's a region highlighted by our guest veteran investigative journalist Eric Listblau, in his new book.
He argues that America is seeing a nationwide surge in violent bigotry and white supremacy, unlike anything since the bloodiest days of the civil rights movement, often spurred on by incendiary racial rhetoric from Donald Trump.
Lischblau writes about young men who follow neo-Nazi organizations and in some cases commit horrendous crimes, including the brutal murder of a young gay Jewish man in Orange County, a central focus of his book.
Eric Lischblau is a Washington-based journalist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, who spent years working for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times.
He's written three previous books, including the bestseller The Nazis Next Door.
His latest book is American Reich, a murder in Orange County, neo-Nazis, and a new age of hate.
Well, Eric Lispow, welcome back to Fresh Air.
Thanks very much for having me, Dave.
It's great to be back.
You know, a lot of the troubling incidents of white supremacist violence that you recount in this book were reported at the time.
What made you decide there was a broader story here you wanted to tell?
Well, we're really living in a decade of racial tyranny in terms of the epidemic of racial violence that we're seeing.
And it began, not coincidentally, at the time of Trump's rise as a political candidate 10 years ago in 2015, when he came down that golden escalator at Trump Tower.
And here we are a decade later still talking in incredibly racially inflammatory terms about minorities of all types.
His second term in the White House.
And we're seeing a doubling down of not only the racial rhetoric but of the violence by his supporters in terms of hate crimes and violence against minorities, which have reached record levels at or near the highest level since the FBI recorded them, beginning in the early 1990s, with record numbers of assaults against virtually every type of minority.
So I wanted to try and document and better understand what the The source of this violence was and the tip of the spear really is the growing power and influence of the white supremacy movement, which has really been emboldened by Trump himself.
Now, as I mentioned in the introduction, you know a lot of people would assume that people in the January 6th assault on the Capitol would have come from Trump's bases of support.
But there was the study that showed actually it was places often where Biden had won, where whites were shrinking in number.
One of them Orange County, California.
Tell us about it, what it was traditionally known for, how it's changed.
Yeah, that's a really good point.
And that was a really interesting study from the University of Chicago.
Counterintuitive in a lot of ways that a lot of the January 6th rioters were not from the conventional Trump country.
The deep, deep red places.
They were from places going under change, places that Biden had carried, places that were seeing a lot of shift from red to blue places.
In Orange County, there was certainly a staunch base of support for for Trump, including among white supremacists.
It had been for generations known as the Orange Curtain, because it was seen as the strongest of Republican bellwethers, the place that had given rise to Reagan and to Nixon, the place where Reagan liked to say good Republicans, go to die.
Some of the biggest extremists in terms of anti-communists, the John Birch Society where the Klan was headed, the local city councils in Anaheim and other places.
The most far-right extremists in Congress served for years in the 50s and 60s and 70s, but it had undergone major, major changes just in the last eight to 10 years.
And I think what you've seen there is sort of a microcosm of what you've seen in the country was that with the changing demographics in the voting patterns, there was a real backlash from the far right in Orange County and in the country as a whole.
That's not to say that this hadn't existed before.
Orange County had been the home to the white power scene for many, many years and had a long history of gory hate crimes going back to the 60s and the 50s and before that.
But it really It seemed to rise up with this rebirth of stirring up white supremacy as the country, as the county I should say, was getting bluer, this kind of stirred up, this hornet's nest.
I was interested in using Orange County as kind of a microcosm of what was going on, what we're seeing nationwide, with again this really record-setting decade of violence in terms of hate crimes and white supremacy, looking at the country and at one sort of test case of what it was that was stirring that both nationally and locally.
One of the interesting things that you write about is the white power music scene.
Tell us about that and how it fed this movement.
Yeah.
So the white power music became huge in Orange County in the 70s and 80s.
And sometimes with tragic and violent results.
In 2014, one of the members of one of Orange County's biggest white power bands, Wade Page, went to Wisconsin, to a Sikh temple with an AR-15 and killed seven members of the temple in what was really the first mass hate crime in what would be a whole series of them, out of just pure hatred.
And then gunned down a police officer who miraculously survived that assault.
And he had been the bass player for one of these white power bands.
Wade was the bass player.
Yeah, Wade Page was the bass player.
Not the police officer.
You know, it was striking as I read through the book.
I began to keep a list of nationally known hate crimes which had an Orange County connection.
You mentioned the attack at the Sikh temple outside of Milwaukee.
Yes.
Another one was the horrific attack at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.
I mean the shooter was not from Orange County.
That was Robert Bowers.
But he was influenced by an Orange County group called the Rise Above Movement, right?
Yeah, he was inspired by these guys who were sort of martial arts bros, I guess you would call them, who trained in martial arts and were white supremacists.
They trained on the beaches of Orange County for years.
And Robert Bauer, who was ultimately the shooter in the horrible Pittsburgh Tree of Life attack in 2018, which killed 11 Jews the The worst attack on Jews in American history and American soil, was a supporter or sympathizer of the Rise Above movement.
He had posted a bunch of things supporting them along with others.
He posted things attacking Jews, attacking illegal immigrants, sympathizing with Trump.
They were pushing the so-called replacement theory, that whites were being replaced by others right.
Yes, yes.
He posted things that were right-wing conspiracy theories and Trump's caravan of – a lot of it baseless, Trump-supported conspiracy theories that the Jews were –.
Illegally bringing in through HIAS, the organization that he ultimately tied to the Tree of Life Synagogue, which he ultimately attacked, that they were behind this huge conspiracy to bring illegals in and overthrow the political system.
And the Rise Above Movement.
These guys in Orange County who were training on the beaches and in playgrounds and in other places in martial arts and other combat warfare, were some of his heroes.
And so they were inspiring him to his horrible mission before he went into the tree life.
So I want to talk about Sam Woodward, who was the guy who murdered Blaise Bernstein, a gay Jewish college student, which is one of the stories at the heart of this.
He became interested in extremist thinking as a teenager.
What were his influences?
What got him there?
Yeah, he seems to have become enamored with this at a young age, even beginning as a preteen.
I spoke with one of his few friends.
He was, you know, your prototypical loner, and he seemed to become fascinated with kind of the dark side of gaming and, into Germany's role in World War II, became interested in Hitler and
Hitler's ideas about racial purity.
And his father seems to have really pushed him towards this through a very anti-gay philosophy at home.
He was a convert to Catholicism.
His mother was Catholic.
And Sam went to a school that was a magnet school for the arts in Orange County where, as you might imagine, there were a fair number of LGBT kids there.
And Sam, although he was a bit of a brooding loner, did show some inclination for arts.
He had done some theater stuff.
But he really didn't fit in there.
And he really resented his parents sending him there.
And it was, by all accounts, a bad fit.
And he resisted especially the LGBT culture.
And he had his father telling him at every chance he could that homosexuality was wrong and it was to be avoided at all costs.
And then he began to loathe just about anyone who was not white Christian.
He was in a very evangelical Christian home, in a setting in school where there were lots of kids who were minorities, there were lots of kids who were LGBT, and after a while he hated just about everyone who was not like him.
He switched high schools eventually, left the art school.
He did eventually switch high schools for a more traditional Orange County public school.
He was still a loner who didn't quite fit in, but at least he didn't stick out quite so much.
But by then he had burrowed himself into these online extremist sites that were much easier to come by.
Right.
You mentioned that he tried college and then quit and came home and began keeping a journal on his cell phone, which eventually was examined after his arrest.
What kind of entries were there in this journal?
Yeah, he kept what he called a journal of hate, in which he lashed out against virtually every minority group.
He would tell stories about going online and posing as a gay person himself, either on gay dating sites or just even non-gay dating sites, luring people into thinking he was gay and then getting off on the thrill of scaring them and making them think up until the last minute that he was really gay, and then sort of coming out of the closet and then revealing he was not and scaring them, sometimes even meeting them in person, he said.
And there was evidence in court that was produced with other people other than the eventual victim where he did this.
You know, he wrote in his journal, they think they're going to get hate-crimed.
And that was a real thrill for him.
Woodward meets a guy named Tristan Evans who recruits him to come to Texas and join a group called the Atomwaffen Division.
First of all, does that have a meaning in German?
Yeah, it means atomic bomb.
Okay.
What is the Atomwaffen Division?
So Adam Waffen was one of dozens and dozens of these new neo-Nazi groups that began sprouting up in the mid-2010s.
Many of them an outgrowth of a network, an online network called Iron March that grew in record numbers, that were sprouting white supremacy and neo-Nazism of young men, almost all of them in their late teens or early 20s, that were preaching the replacement theory of white men having to take back America from this growing threat that was posed by minorities from the left who posed an existential threat to the white man, reestablish white dominance in their society.
So Atomwaffen Division was started by a handful of guys in Florida.
Key among them was a nuclear physics student named Brandon Russell.
Florida, who was quite a gifted science student and quite adept in building bombs.
And he stockpiled a whole cache of weapons in his garage and was building a budding organization of several dozen young men in Florida of neo-Nazi followers, and they were calling themselves Atomwaffen and they wanted to build a more activist that would actually do things, not just talk about white supremacy, as they said, and neo-Nazism, but do something.
And so they were stockpiling weapons.
They were talking about attacks.
They were talking about hate crimes.
He had kids coming down from Massachusetts and other places in New England.
There were some in Texas.
And Atom often was already spreading.
It had name branches in a number of states by then.
It had relocated to Texas with a pair of brothers in Texas who were very willing to assume the mantle of Atomwaffen.
They were doxing minorities all over the country at that point.
They were taking what he had built and putting it into action.
And Sam Woodward was attending a hate camp in Texas at that point.
So Sam Woodward, this guy from Orange County, goes to Texas with this group of Adam Woffin followers.
How much did his parents know about where he was going?
How did they react?
They knew some of it.
He had told them of some of his beliefs, and they were worried.
Fair to say that that much came out at trial, at his murder trial.
They thought about doing a few things to stop him, but didn't actually do. take any measures.
They thought about calling an old friend of his father's in Texas to maybe trail him.
They thought about trying to cut off his money.
They didn't end up doing any of that, as far as we know, or taking more aggressive steps.
You know, they were seen as sort of powerless to stop him.
Oh, he's an adult at that point.
He was about 21 years old.
So he comes back.
He's living with his family and he has this interaction which leads to a murder here of this young man, Blaise Bernstein.
These two guys knew each other.
They were at the same high school for a while.
They were never close, but they did know each other.
What kinds of interactions did they have?
Very limited.
They were never friends.
They were barely acquaintances, you know.
Blaze was a very artsy kid, a poet and a writer.
He, unlike Sam, was sort of a poster child at the Orange County Art School where they both attended very into writing and performing and theater.
And at Penn he was one of the leaders of the culinary magazine, where he wrote and prepared dishes for the magazine, was thinking of going to medical school but wasn't sure because he loved writing so much, had lots and lots of friends.
He was the opposite of Sam in many ways from their experiences at the art school.
Blaze saw him as really a loner, someone, if anything, to be feared.
We will get to how this led to a murder in a few moments.
First, we need to take another break here.
Let me reintroduce you.
We are speaking with Eric Lisblau.
His new book is American Reich, a murder in Orange County, neo-Nazis, and a new age of hate.
He'll be back to talk more after this short break.
I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
This message comes from Carvana, who makes buying and financing your next car easy.
Thousands of vehicles, terms up front, and 100% online.
Even get it delivered to your door.
Buy your car the easy way with Carvana.
Delivery fee may apply.
This week on Up First, the Trump administration and Venezuela.
Can the U.S. run a foreign government, as the president says?
They simply may not adopt the policies that Trump would like to see.
It's a complex, fast-moving story.
As always, we're working overnight and every night, so you can start each morning knowing what matters.
Listen to Up First on the NPR app or wherever you get podcasts.
Netflix's Stranger Things has reached its end and we're unpacking the biggest moments in the final season.
We'll talk about what we thought of the finale, what happened to our heroes when they set out to battle the forces of evil one last time and, of course, the terrible wigs.
Listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Up first is a Golden Globe nominee because of you.
Your support makes it possible for public media reporters around the world to bring you three essential stories every morning.
Up first, now a Golden Globe nominee for Best Podcast.
So it's January 2nd 2018 and Blaze had been to the University of Pennsylvania, where he'd gotten very involved and was back home for break.
And he gets this online outreach from Sam Woodward.
What happens?
Yeah, he had actually heard from Sam about six months earlier with this same sort of dalliance.
And there had been this friendly back and forth, almost flirtatious, you know, is he flirting with me?
Can't quite figure it out.
This does not seem like the same Sam Woodward sort of bully homophobic guy that I knew back in high school.
And then the first go around, it just sort of stopped.
And in fact Sam was the one who more or less pulled away at that point and said well, I'm not really interested.
And then it started up all over again that December break, when Blaze was again home from school from Penn.
And this time it went a step further and there were a bunch of back and forth online exchanges.
And this time it went a step further, with Sam saying hey, why don't we get together?
Just want to catch up and see how things are going.
And Blaze had been hesitant to do that the first time around.
And this time he sent him his address, said, okay, fine, let's, you know, go meet up.
And so Sam came by and and picked up Blaze at his house, and they went off to a park together near Blaze's home, and they just walked around for a little bit, and that was the last anyone saw of Blaze alive, unfortunately.
Right.
Now, Blaze hadn't told anyone that he was going to meet Sam.
He did not.
His parents discover he's missing and it seems pretty clear that this was unusual.
They couldn't find anything missing.
Then Blaze's sister discovers from Blaze's Snapchat he had met with Sam Woodward.
So the parents reach him, talk to him, and the police talk to him.
What did Sam Woodward say to them?
Yeah, there was immediately this search.
Blaze was supposed to be at the dentist the next day and he was going to meet his mom for lunch and doesn't show up.
So there's immediately this search effort.
And in fact, it pretty quickly became a full-scale Southern California search effort with Blaze.
Kobe Bryant tweeting stuff out because there was a crossover in their church to Kobe Bryant.
And so it became, you know, very quickly an all hands on deck search kind of thing.
Friends in their living room, you know, looking for every lead they can.
And then his younger sister manages to crack into his phone and discover this name of someone who had been in touch that night, whose name they didn't know, which was Sam Woodward, and that puts a different spin on things.
And they did reach him and Sam gives this cover story really, of having seen him that night but then left him in the park and Blaze, having gone off to meet a third friend and not having seen him again that night and supposedly having then gone back hours later to see if he could find him.
But then that story begins to fall apart for various reasons.
And the police weren't originally focusing on Sam, but within a few days they do begin to see him as a suspect.
Right.
And his story falls apart pretty quickly.
I mean, he's been...
Changing details.
He's been changing details.
He concocts a girlfriend whose name he can't really remember.
He has cuts and bruises on his hands.
Right.
And so he's clearly not telling the truth about what happened that night.
Then some rainfall comes and that uncovers a shallow grave in the area where they said they'd walked.
And it's clearly Blaise Bernstein's body, right?
Yes.
So then they have the forensics examination that confirms, tragically, that it is him.
But what they're still lacking then is really the motive.
And most of what cracked open the motive.
A lot of that was done from outside journalists digging into it, especially from ProPublica, which did a lot of great reporting on white supremacy in general, including this case, to their credit, by showing that There were all sorts of internal chat logs where they were basically celebrating the murder of a dead gay Jew, as they put it.
And this was literally something to be celebrated, as horrible as that sounds, at Atomwaffen.
Right.
So until that information came up, neither the victim's family nor the police really knew how involved Sam Woodward was in these extremist groups.
Right
So was journalism making a difference?
Not at all.
Yes, that was journalism making a difference.
Now the police after that were able to get into his phone, and that revealed a lot of further evidence of just how – deeply embedded he was with the neo-Nazi movement.
There was tons more evidence that then was produced at trial, of reams and reams of stuff that he had on his phone.
There was so much they had to limit how much was introduced at trial.
So that was just a tranche of racist, vile, anti-Semitic stuff on his phone.
So that really confirmed what ProPublica had already kind of turned on the spigot to find.
So in the end the jury renders a quick verdict of guilty and he is sentenced eventually to life in prison without possibility of parole.
Without the possibility of parole, yeah.
And it's worth noting that there have been more than a dozen other Atomwaffen guys who have also been put away on a variety of other hate crime and terrorism and doxing charges.
So there was guys out there to this day who are being arrested from Atomwaffen.
And did you talk to the Bernstein family, the parents of the... I did, yeah.
In the course of my research, yeah.
And obviously they were, as anyone would be, devastated by this.
And have tried to recover from that by starting a foundation, a charity called Blaze It Forward, to sort of give back and partially through pro-LGBT causes.
Their son had never totally been out with them at least, and so they've tried to create a more openly friendly LGBT environment, and his mother has a podcast that she does for anti-hate crime and pro-LGBT causes.
So she's devoted herself to a lot of that now, working with local politicians, Democratic politicians in Orange County.
We need to take another break here.
We are speaking with veteran investigative reporter Eric Lichtblau.
His new book is American Reich, A Murder in Orange County, Neo-Nazis, and a New Age of Hate.
We'll be back after this short break.
This is Fresh Air.
NPR's podcast Trump's Terms is your source for same-day updates on big news about the Trump administration.
Short, focused episodes, one topic at a time, about five minutes or so.
We carry out reporting from across all of NPR's coverage, so you are always getting the biggest, most urgent stories.
Listen to Trump's Terms on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Your book is really about this dramatic rise in hate crimes and hate groups and their activities.
The FBI over time, and other federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, did become more focused on hate groups.
What was the effect of those efforts?
I guess this would have been during the Biden administration and during the first Trump administration too, I think.
Right.
Well, there was a period of a few years in 2017 2018, 2019 after the Tree of Life attack, after the El Paso attack when really out of necessity, they had to do something.
I mean, there was this series of high-profile hate crimes when it was too hard to ignore.
You know we'd been through this period of really almost 20 years when the FBI's focus and DHS focus had been on Islamic-inspired terrorism at the expense of domestic terrorism.
And I think you really saw that when you had these homegrown terrorists, terrorists in South Carolina, in El Paso, in Pittsburgh, then in Buffalo.
And that was becoming too hard to ignore.
But then what happened certainly under Trump was that it has moved away.
And certainly in the second Trump term, with the focus on ICE and immigration.
The mission of the FBI has been almost totally recast into an arm of immigration and the traditional law enforcement agency is secondary to the immigration role.
And I think whatever momentum there was in terms of identifying violent, subversive elements like Atomwaffen and the base and Boogaloo Boys and you could go on and on the Proud Boys That has been, I think, once again minimalized.
And that's also been minimalized by Trump and his own priorities.
He's not going to go after the Proud Boys if that was his agenda.
He has done just the opposite.
He has given those groups a platform.
Well, the pardons of the January 6th rioters was a pretty powerful statement, wasn't it?
It was a very powerful statement.
I mean, he has given the white supremacists an influence that they have never had before over the course of the last decade.
You can trace it through the debate with Biden, where he told the Proud Boys to stand by and stand down.
You can trace it through January 6th, where he spoke with such equivocation and even support about the rioters who were standing there with Confederate flags and anti-Semitic symbols and screeds and racist paraphernalia.
You can look at the pardons, of course, probably more than any other single act of those white nationalists who were there that day.
You can look at the myth of the cat-eating and dog-eating Haitians in Ohio, which was a myth that was first started by a neo-Nazi group in Ohio.
You could look at the trying to bring in the white Afrikaners, which was another myth that was started by a neo-Nazi group in South Africa.
You know, and on and on.
These are all points of pride for neo-Nazi groups that look to Trump as an icon.
It's interesting that a good part of your career, or at least two of the books that you've previously written, have dealt with the original Nazis in Germany.
Your book The Nazis Next Door was about how the United States government had eased the way for so many Nazis to come in and live lives in the United States, including people who had been involved in various aspects of the Holocaust and other issues.
Deprivation of rights.
And then another book was about a Holocaust survivor who became an American GI and did some amazing stuff undercover in Germany.
I'm wondering, as you've done this research, if you've reflected on the similarities and differences between the neo-Nazis of the United States and the Nazis that took power in Germany.
Yeah, I have.
I mean that's one of the reasons that I started down this road was that I had written about the World War II era Nazis and I wanted to understand, after that kind of horrible ugly fascism, how is it that 70 years later we have this whole new generation that has opened its arms up to those horrible people and wants to do it all over again?
How did we get to this place?
Well, let me offer one counterpoint to something that would be a little bit encouraging, and this comes from your book.
I mean, you tell the story of Haijun Si I hope I'm pronouncing this correctly a Chinese-born businessman who settles in a community in Orange County, in Ladera Ranch.
He's a new arrival for Asians in that community and he has kids banging on his doors all hours of the day or night, dumping trash, yelling at him everything.
It's horrible stuff.
And then a neighbor, Layla Parks, hears about this, is mortified.
She organizes patrols, which so many people want to sign up that they can't even – they have too many to fill the shifts.
And this kind of put a stop to it.
Again, not to minimize it, but I think these horrible views really are still way, way in the minority of most Americans.
I'd like to think
Yeah, the response was it was sort of a feel good moment where you had these, these kids, and they were teenagers who really put them through hell for several months there, where they were leaving all sorts of racist and sexual material, and they had two very young kids who literally couldn't sleep at night and they were.
They were just terrorized day and night and and asking like why do they hate us and what did we do wrong?
And why don't they, why don't they want us to live here, and and They went to the police.
They put in who wouldn't do anything.
They put in new fence and ring doorbells and all sorts of other things.
Got videos.
Went to the town council and nothing.
Then these neighbors set up this patrol and gradually it stopped.
And, you know, sometimes it just goes to show that...
Public shaming can do something where even the police and other public action can't.
And you realize there are some good people out there and there are a lot of bad people out there, at least enough that can make people's lives miserable.
It only takes one or two to make their lives miserable.
Are you aware of any organizations or strategies out there to combat the spread of online hate that might help the next Sam Woodward from being radicalized?
There are a number of very effective hate speech monitors, especially in Europe and the EU, but the Trump administration has tried to silence them and last month took steps against five prominent Europeans to keep them out of the United States altogether, accusing them of supposedly censoring free speech and accusing them of overly burdensome regulations, which a lot of hate speech advocates saw as just another pretext for opening the door to more hate speech.
Well, Ernest Blau, thank you so much for speaking with us.
My pleasure.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Eric Lichtblau's book is American Reich A Murder in Orange County, Neo-Nazis and a New Age of Hate.
Coming up, Justin Chang reviews the new film Marty Supreme, starring Timothee Chalamet.
This is Fresh Air.
Our film critic, Justin Chang, says the sports drama Marty Supreme, now playing in theaters, is one of the year's most exhilarating movies.
Timothee Chalamet has won several critics' awards for his performance as a table tennis pro living in 1952 New York, where he's trying to hustle his way into global ping-pong stardom.
The movie, which was directed by Josh Safdie, also features Gwyneth Paltrow and Kevin O'Leary.
Here's Justin's review of Marty Supreme.
Last year, while accepting a Screen Actors Guild Award for A Complete Unknown, Timothee Chalamet told the audience Many criticized him for his immodesty, but I found it refreshing.
After all, Chalamet has never made a secret of his ambition in his interviews or his choice of material.
In his best performances, you can see both the character and the actor pushing themselves to greatness, the way Chalamet did playing Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, which earned him the second of two Oscar nominations.
He's widely expected to receive a third for his performance in Josh Safdie's thrilling new movie, Marty Supreme, in which Chalamet pushes himself even harder still.
Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a 23-year-old shoe salesman in 1952, New York, who dreams of being recognized as the greatest table tennis player in the world.
He's a brilliant player, but for a poor Lower East Side Jewish kid like Marty, playing brilliantly isn't enough.
Simply getting to championship tournaments in London and Tokyo will require money he doesn't have.
And so Marty, a scrappy, speedy dynamo with a silver tongue and inhuman levels of chutzpah, sets out to borrow steal cheat sweet-talk and hustle his way to the top.
He spends almost the entire movie on the run, shaking down friends and shaking off family members, hatching new scams and fleeing the folks he's already scammed and generally trying to extricate himself from disasters of his own making.
Marty is very loosely based on the real-life table tennis pro, Marty Reisman, but as a character he's cut from the same cloth as the unstoppable antiheroes of Uncut Gems and Good Time, both of which Josh Safdie directed with his brother Benny.
Although Josh directed Marty Supreme's solo, the ferocious energy of his filmmaking is in line with those earlier New York nail-biters, only this time with a period setting.
Most of the story unfolds against a seedy, teeming post-war Manhattan, superbly rendered by the veteran production designer Jack Fisk as a world of shadowy game rooms and run-down apartments.
Early on though, Marty does make his way to London, where he finagles a room at the same hotel as Kay Stone, a movie star past her 1930s prime.
She's played by Gwyneth Paltrow in a luminous and long overdue return to the big screen.
In this scene, Marty calls Kay and worms his way into her life.
Okay, could I help you with something?
Maybe.
I just ordered one of everything off the room service menu.
There's no way I'll be able to eat it all alone.
Ah, so you'd like me to come up to your room?
Mm-hmm.
Perhaps I should send my husband in.
Oh, sure.
You can come up here, and I'll come down and meet you.
Okay, wonderful.
Thank you.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
I want to keep talking.
Why is that?
Because I never talked to an actual movie star.
Well, now you have.
I hope the experience was all you thought it would be.
You know, I'm something of a performer, too.
Are you?
Yeah.
You don't believe me?
I... What?
What?
You're a performer?
Yeah, I'm a performer.
You got the Daily Mail in front of you?
I do have it, yes.
Okay, well, turn to page 12.
Okay, what am I looking at here?
Down the middle, in the center.
This is you?
Yeah, the chosen one.
Marty is soon having a hot fling with Kay, even as he tries to swindle her ruthless businessman husband Milton Rockwell, played by the Canadian entrepreneur and Shark Tank regular Kevin O'Leary.
Marty Supreme is full of such ingenious, faintly meta bits of stunt casting.
The rascally independent filmmaker Abel Ferrara turns up as a dog-loving mobster.
The real-life table tennis star, Koto Kawaguchi, plays a Japanese champ who beats Marty in London and leaves him spoiling for a rematch.
And Geza Roerig from the Holocaust drama, Son of Saul, pops up as Marty's friend Bela Kletsky, a ping-pong champ who survived Auschwitz.
Bella tells his story in one of the film's best and strangest scenes, a death camp flashback that proves crucial to the movie's meaning.
In one early scene, Marty brags to some journalists that he's Hitler's worst nightmare.
It's not a stretch to read Marty Supreme as a kind of geopolitical parable, culminating in an epic table tennis match pitting a Jewish player against a Japanese one, both sides seeking a hard-won triumph after the horrors of World War II.
The personal victory that Marty seeks would also be a symbolic one, striking a blow for Jewish survival and assimilation and regeneration.
I haven't yet mentioned a crucial subplot involving Marty's close friend Rachel, terrifically played by Odessa Azayon, who's carrying his child and gets sucked into his web of lies.
Josh Safdie, who co-wrote and co-edited the film with Ronald Bronstein, doesn't belabor his ideas.
He's so busy entertaining you as Marty ping-pongs from one catastrophe to the next that you'd be forgiven for missing what's percolating beneath the movie's hyperkinetic surface.
Marty himself, the most incorrigible movie protagonist in many a moon, has already stirred much debate.
Many find his company insufferable and his actions indefensible.
But the movies can be a wonderfully amoral medium.
And I found myself liking Marty Mauser.
And not just liking him, but actually rooting for him to succeed.
It takes more than a good actor to pull that off.
It takes one of the greats.
Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker.
On tomorrow's show, we hear from actor Tessa Thompson.
She stars as a former news anchor back in the public eye after a murder in the new Netflix series His and Hers.
We'll also talk about her career, including her acclaimed turn as Hedda Gabler, and why she's drawn to playing powerful, complicated women.
I hope you can join us.
To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air.
Fresh Air's executive producers are Danny Miller and Sam Brigger.
Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.
Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Whistler.
Our digital media producer is Molly C.V.
Nesper.
Roberta Shorrock directs the show.
For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
