3,733 words
The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story
Directed by Ryan Murphy & Anthony Hemingway
Starring, Sterling K. Brown, Kenneth Choi, Christian Clemenson, Cuba Gooding Jr., Bruce Greenwood, Nathan Lane, Sarah Paulson, Steven Pasquale, David Schwimmer, John Travolta, Courtney B. Vance, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, and others
2016
Jeffrey Toobin
The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson,
New York: Random House, 1996
Part 2 of 2. Part 1 here. [This essay starts with ‘Part 3’; parts 1 & 2 are in the previous article.]
Part 3: Midwestern Whites and Negroes, the Two Solitudes of Los Angeles
Los Angeles claims to be the most diverse city in the world. This could be true – but in its civic culture, the regional English accent, and the backgrounds of much of its white population LA is an extension of the American Midwest. H.L. Mencken called the city “Double Dubuque.”[1] To further emphasize this idea, Nicole Brown Simpson’s father was from Kansas. Walt Disney was born in Illinois and grew up in Missouri. Ronald Reagan was from Illinois. Johnny Carson was born in Iowa and raised in Nebraska. John Wayne was from Iowa, as was Crystal Cathedral minister Robert Schuller. The woman who witnessed OJ Simpson fleeing the scene, Jill Shively, had roots in Indiana.[2]
Most importantly, the man who professionalized the Los Angeles Police Department, William H. Parker[3] was born and grew up in South Dakota. Parker cracked down on corruption, and worked with the Police Union to give the LAPD’s officers civil servant protections. Toobin writes,
Parker’s model for his force was the Marine Corps, and so the police became tantamount to an army of occupation for those in the city who did not share Parker’s ethnic heritage.[4]
Parker’s vision for the LAPD was that of the ultra-professional Sergeant Joe Friday (Jack Webb) played on the fictional TV show Dragnet. While Parker’s vision was Midwestern in its high-trust, orderly, and fair-minded way, there is probably nothing that the LAPD can do to not seem like an “army of occupation” for Los Angeles’s blacks. Midwestern whites are quite different from African-Americans and are less tolerant of black behavior than other white American groups.
For all the talk about Southern whites “oppressing” blacks, there is an underappreciated Midwestern white hostility to blacks that must be examined here without silly, politically correct judgement. During the US Civil War, units from the Midwest were hostile to blacks in a way the Confederate Army was not.[5] Year after year, in terms of whites-to-blacks in prison ratios, the Midwest states lead.[6] In Los Angeles, whites got their Midwestern civic leaders to provide a professional police department, and backed the police up in racial incidents – such as acquitting the police involved in the Rodney King beating despite the enormous media pressure to convict.
The anti-black hostility is probably related to the fact that Midwestern whites are the ultimate producing class. In following their cultural and racial impulses, they built the great Northern Cities, developed the industries, and turned burning deserts into wheat fields. They are orderly, polite, and concerned about others – they’re Minnesota Nice.
The ways of white Midwesterners must be contrasted to America’s black population. While the slave origins in the United States of blacks are entirely related to economic production, they are not a self-starting producing class. The problem is that black productivity doesn’t make up for black social costs. By the end of 1865, whatever economic benefits blacks had produced were consumed in the fire and blood of the Civil War. In the time between the Civil War and the “low speed chase,” black populations were moved around America like a hot potato — a municipality stuck with a large population, like Detroit today, went to ruins. By 1995, blacks in the Los Angeles had already caused a number of race riots, and were in the midst of a crack-cocaine fueled violent crime wave expressed culturally through the Compton School of Rap-Music. Essentially, Midwestern whites tire of black pathology quicker than others.
Also, from a Midwestern perspective, blacks, as a group, also have a lack of self-awareness about how their behavior appears to others. Furthermore, as a group they have an inability to practice self-control. The problem, wrote the late Lawrence Auster (1949 – 2013),
…[I]s the relative intellectual and moral passivity of blacks. While there are many decent, upright black people, there is a notable failure on the part of blacks effectively to resist the bad people in their communities. The result is that the bad people—the orators, the hustlers, the corrupt, the despots—always seem to rise to the top. That is why black countries, and black-run cities in America, are the way they are. There are good people living in those places, but for the most part they are only good in their private, familial sphere. They are not actively good in the social and political sense and thus rarely take leadership or succeed in creating a civilized political order. The number of morally courageous and principled blacks who actively resist the corruption and racialist conformism around them is very limited; in fact, such upright and intelligent blacks often separate themselves from the black community when they recognize how unwelcome they are in it.[7]
With the above statement in mind, in Los Angeles, the white, progressive Midwestern civic order, which the LAPD was part of, was at fierce odds with the black community. LA whites are saw the police’s truncheons as a protective shield. Blacks felt the police were the enemy. Thus the minds of most of the blacks in LA were closed from day one of the trial to hearing any evidence collected by the LAPD. Because the trial was expected to be so long, a process was in place that allowed exemptions for jury duty were allowed based on professional “hardship.” The hardship exemption “acted like a vacuum cleaner for educated, white, and male jurors”[8] leaving blacks as the plurality on the jury. The case was thus fought out with the most polarized members of the black half of LA’s Two Solitudes being in the position to decide. After the verdict, a black juror raised his fist in a Black Power salute to OJ.
Part 4: Johnny Cochran, Chris Darden, and Mark Fuhrman
Because the city was so polarized, OJ’s lead attorney Bob Shapiro (John Travolta) planned to “play the race card”[9] from the outset. Shapiro thus brought on Johnny Cochran (Courtney B. Vance),
… [B]ecause he could turn anything into a racial issue. Cochran knew that a black defendant could scarcely go wrong crying racism in the downtown Criminal Courts Building, and he exploited that phenomenon with singular determination and success.[10]
Cochran did his racial magic act and won the case. The book and mini-series both show the different tricks he used, including “tainting” the evidence in the minds of the black jury by showing some of the evidence spent a night in the trunk of a detective’s car in Simi Valley. This Greater LA suburb was the location where the Rodney King Case was tried so it had racist magic dirt.
Johnny Cochran didn’t just convince the black jury that OJ Simpson was not guilty, he also convinced most of the blacks in America. In retrospect, Cochran made it look easy. However, if one can imagine for a second that during the OJ Trial LA’s whites were Irish and Cochran was an absentee English landlord, such a figure would be a moral reprobate. Prior to the OJ case, Cochran’s career was as a racial hustler whose firm specialized in raiding the city’s treasury. One must wonder, why whites allow themselves to be so fleeced by such a person.
Chris Darden was the black prosecuting attorney. He was added to the case to diffuse any appearance of racism on the part of the prosecutors. He had some trial experience, but not the same amount as any of the other lawyers. Of all the lawyers in the trial, including Johnny Cochran, Darden was the only one to come from a genuine working class background. His father had worked at the shipyards in Richmond, California.
The mini-series portrays Darden in a better light than Jeffrey Toobin’s book. Both works show that Darden wore his emotions on his sleeves. While this often works in a social setting Toobin shows in his book that during the OJ Trial, Cochran was often able to provoke Darden into making mistakes. Judge Ito also had tangles with the hot-headed attorney. Like Marcia Clark’s hairdo, Darden’s temper became a distraction.
On the surface, Darden should be the perfect representative of what the “civil rights” program should have become. With any anti-black legislation struck down, a black kid from a black neighborhood, could become an agent of the State seeking justice in a colorblind way. However, he had to “resist the corruption and racialist conformism” of his own community. He got hate mail throughout the trial, and left his church afterwards.
However, Chris Darden was still deeply tied up in the Black Narrative. Toobin writes about an important part of Darden’s worldview,
A history professor in Afro-American studies, Gloria Alibaruho, had become a mentor to him. Darden later wrote that when he studied the world of his ancestors, “my eyes opened like slipped blinds and all of a sudden my own life was explained to me. Martin Luther King had taught me what was fair; the Black Panther newspapers screamed at me what was unjust; but it was Gloria Alibaruho who taught me who I was. It was like discovering gravity. It explained the universe to me. So, this is why people treat me the way they do. This is why women grab their handbags when I get on an elevator.”[11]
While understanding one’s racial origins is well and good, Afro-American studies is an uneven field of scholarship that holds within it both serious history and Afrocentrist nonsense about Negroes flying into space in rocket-propelled, Egyptian Pyramids.[12] Afro-American studies is also more of an expression of racial solidary and resolve than scholarship, indeed it is a moralizing force. As a result, Chris Darden was thus every bit as bedeviled by Mark Fuhrman’s use of the nigger word as the black jurors.
Both the book and the mini-series show that the big-ego lawyers on the Dream Team had a hard time getting along. However, it was in their collective self-interest to get along and other than some odd behavior by Bob Shapiro when he was replaced as lead by Cochran, the Dream Team proved to be an example of teamwork under pressure. The team that the LAPD and Prosecutors should have been didn’t materialize due to Detective Mark Fuhrman.
Johnny Cochran was able to work his racism magic act because the detective on the case that discovered the key evidence, Mark Fuhrman, “was a racist.” Detective Fuhrman had become, in today’s terms, “red-pilled” during his service as a Sergeant in the US Marine Corps.[13] After his enlistment was up, Fuhrman joined the LAPD and sued the city for a workman’s comp claim after he got tired of “noticing patterns” about non-white crime in Los Angeles. Dream Team investigators got wind of the suit and found the details, including Fuhrman’s use of the nigger word in the city’s archives. (Jeffrey Toobin discovered it independently.)
Once the suit was discovered other people came forward with their own story of Fuhrman’s use of the nigger word. Fuhrman had also been recorded by a screenwriter unwisely using the deplorable insult along with other venting of frustrations with the politically correct arrangements in the LAPD. All of this perfectly fit in to the Dream Team’s “race card” strategy.
It is strange why the LAPD and Los Angeles DA’s Office didn’t have a plan to deal with accusations of “racism” or the use of the nigger word. It was not a secret that accusations of racism sunk cases. As it happened, Clark and Darden, drunk on virtue, disavowed Fuhrman as the trial went along. They could have coached Fuhrman to admit he’d said nigger under cross-examination, they could have also claimed the worker’s comp suit was a “cry for help,” or even PTSD.
At the time, Fuhrman was disgraced and retired from the LAPD. However, Fuhrman went on to have his reputation rehabilitated. He became a bestselling author of several books. He reopened an investigation on a cold case murder that put away a cousin of the powerful Kennedy family (it seems race trumps Camelot as well as sex) and has been given many sympathetic interviews on female-centric talk shows including at least two interviews on the Oprah Winfrey show. An idea on why Fuhrman got redeemed can be found in the closing arguments below.
Closing Arguments
As mentioned above, the OJ Simpson Trial proved that the pro-black “civil rights” metapolitical narrative was the most powerful of the revolutionary social arrangements coming out of the 1960s. “Civil rights” allowed an irresponsible black jury to be picked, allowed Johnny Cochran’s antics to be tolerated by the LA government, and saved an obviously guilty man from prison. This narrative, this institution, this semi-religion would remain powerful for the next two decades. Indeed, in 2012 a black president would be re-elected based partially on claims of police misconduct and racism as spurious as that directed against the LAPD in the OJ Simpson case. Yet when human institutions appear to be most powerful, they usually have already taken a mortal wound. High water means a receding tide. The OJ Simpson verdict was a mortal wound for “civil rights.”
The enormous, still-growing pro-white movement that influenced the 2016 election has sprung up seemingly out of nowhere. Yet this movement didn’t come out of nowhere. It arose in part because the white response to black behavior during OJ Simpson Case.
To explain further, the “civil rights” revolution of the 1960s was not a lasting victory of blacks over a prostrate, vanishing enemy such as the US Cavalry’s victory over the Sioux. It was a new social arrangement based upon an unwritten contract between two races, and the contract requires the consent of whites to exist at all. The contract, very simply put, is the following:
- Black pathology is assumed to be due to segregation and other legal barriers arrayed against blacks by whites.
- Whites would take down those barriers. In turn, blacks would behave like whites, or at least participate in civics in a virtuous way.
- Part of the adjustment of black behavior is that blacks must justly evaluate evidence in a trial.
Although it has taken some time to recognize this, the OJ Simpson verdict voided the “civil rights” contract. In the 1990s the pro-white movement, such that it was, was very small – unusual people in the hills and dales. In 1995, the pro-white movement had little, if any, support from educated, civically-minded middle-class whites. After the OJ Simpson case, things quietly changed. The tiny white advocacy movement began to get the support of solid citizens. Magazines like American Renaissance got more dedicated subscribers. The website stormfront.org started up during the trial, it is now one of the top 10,000 websites on the internet. The OJ Simpson verdict was delivered on October 3, 1995. In the November 1995 issue of American Renaissance, Jared Taylor wrote,
On the day of the verdict, the AR office received the following message from a mainstream conservative who is not a subscriber: “Today I moved a little further to the right. Tomorrow I will go shopping for a good rifle and a good handgun. Never before have I felt so alienated from blacks or so doubtful of their ability ever to participate as equals in our society.” This man, like so many others, was chilled at the sight of blacks celebrating the acquittal of the man who killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.[14]
This sentiment was not unique. In an article about how American Renaissance subscribers, “saw the light” on racial matters, Terrence Silva of Columbus, Ohio wrote,
My racial consciousness had been quietly forming for years before I became fully aware of the fallacy of egalitarianism and the folly of integration. What pushed me over the edge were the differing reactions of blacks and whites to the O. J. Simpson verdict.[15]
Dawn H. of Ventura, California expressed similar ideas,
I watched much of the trial on television. Mr. Simpson was obviously guilty but he got away with it because he was black, rich, and could afford to hire the best lawyers who blatantly used race to deflect attention from the evidence. As I watched blacks cheer the verdict, I realized that these people hate us. And they hate us because we are white.[16]
Lawrence Auster wrote a great deal about the OJ Simpson Trial’s aftermath. One of his email exchanges with a reader on the matter was published and said,
My [black] friend and I were at work together on the day the verdict came in from the O.J. Simpson trial. As soon as the verdict was announced he started dancing and cheering. I had already become extremely dismayed at the fact that this, supposedly educated man, a man I cared for, would believe that O.J. was framed. When he celebrated the acquittal, I was stunned. My good friend had just celebrated the acquittal of an obvious murderer. He was not just happy about the not guilty verdict. He was ecstatic. I could never reconcile this event with the loving, caring man I thought I knew.[17]
Lawrence Auster himself said,
After the Simpson verdict, the [mainstream media] line was, “Two Americas across a chasm, not understanding each other.” The assumption was that the two races had two different points of view. This implied that the blacks had a rational point of view. The problem was that they didn’t. They just had a racialist, resentment-driven, pro-criminal attitude that was unappeasable, not appealable to by reason, and that would justify any crime against whites as payback. This was the deep black “attitude” that whites “failed to understand.”
So the way you respond is by identifying the actual black attitude, showing its irrationality and worthlessness, and saying that whites make a fatal error by entering into “dialog” with blacks in which it is assumed that the blacks are rational actors like the whites, whereas in fact they are not rational, but have what is essentially a criminal mentality, wherein they identify with and support criminals, especially anti-white criminals (even if they are not criminal themselves). [18]
Of course, the “civil rights” idea is not yet dead and gone. The government still funds the Equal Opportunity Office, the 1964 Civil Rights act is still on the books, and there is still a park with a stone idol of Martin Luther King Jr. in DC. Yet “civil rights” is off the moral high ground.[19] Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman may be the price for the coming white Promised Land.
Notes
[1] http://articles.latimes.com/1987-02-19/news/vw-4329_1_land-of-la-la
[2] Also: Famous Greater LA crime victim Denise Huber was from South Dakota and she lies buried in that state after her body was discovered in a freezer. In cultural works, Midwestern roots for fictional Los Angelinos are often deliberately written in. For example, Ruth Fisher, from HBO’s Six Feet Under drama, was said to be from Nebraska. White Advocate Ben Klassen learned the real estate trade in LA, and got there by way of Saskatchewan.
[3] https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=5285
[4] Jeffrey Toobin, The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (New York: Random House, 1996), p. 27.
[5] This hostility first appeared during the US Civil War (1861 – 1865). On one spectacular example of this, on 8th of December 1864, during Sherman’s March to the Sea, the Union Army’s XIV Corps pulled up the pontoon bridge at Ebenezer Creek stranding thousands of blacks on the other side. Until that time, the Union XIV Corps had been followed by thousands of blacks that had left their plantations and followed the Union Army. The men of the Union XIV Corps got tired of the blacks. When the bridge was pulled, the blacks stuck on the other side of Ebenezer Creek knew they’d be captured by the Confederate Army and returned to slavery. Many blacks panicked, attempted to swim across the creek and drowned. An official inquiry followed.
All of the field artillery batteries in the Union XIV Corps were from the Midwest, of the 46 infantry regiments, all but three were Midwestern (north of the Ohio, west of the Appalachians). Of the three non-Midwestern infantry regiments one was from the Midwestern’s Eastern Seaboard cultural hearth of Pennsylvania. The regiment serving as the Union XIV Corps rear guard, the 2nd Minnesota Infantry, makes no reference to blacks trapped at Ebenezer Creek in its official history. It states, “This day [8 December 1864] we crossed the Ebenezer creek as rear guard, and were closely pressed by the enemy while our bridge was being taken up.” https://archive.org/stream/storyofregimentb00bish/storyofregimentb00bish_djvu.txt
[6] http://takimag.com/article/whats_the_matter_with_wisconsin_steve_sailer/print#axzz4ntpF0drN http://www.vdare.com/articles/mapping-the-unmentionable-race-and-crime
http://www.sentencingproject.org/the-facts/#detail?state1Option=U.S.%20Total&state2Option=0
[7] http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/001132.html
[8] Toobin, op. cit., p. 196
[9] Toobin argues on page 109 that the racial issue emerged as early as the Low Speed Chase. “Local reporters broadcasting live from Sunset found a stark racial division at the scene. The whites, a minority of the revelers, were curiosity seekers— ‘looky loos’ in the LAPD phrase—who had come simply to experience the bizarre scene. The African-Americans, on the other hand, had mostly come to show solidarity, and their chants and shouts made their feelings clear. ‘Free O.J.!’ they repeated again and again. Interviewed on KCBS, one of them said, ‘I feel that the black people ought to come together. They’re trying to make us extinct.’ A woman then added, ‘First it was Michael [Jackson] and Mike Tyson and Rodney King. I’m calling for the unification of the black race!’”
[10] Ibid, p. 180
[11] Ibid, p. 290
[12] http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/afrocentrism-ancient-astronauts-and-black-sea-africans
[13] It is baffling to this author why there is not a greater outcry about the racial problems in the integrated US Military. Race problems come up as a factor in every unit or ship history after World War II. In his account about the 1967 Israeli sneak-attack on the USS Liberty, James M. Ennes Jr, then an officer on the ship, wrote a long footnote about the racial issues aboard the vessel. He explained that the white enlisted men felt they were abused by the non-white petty officers in key positions of authority.
[14] https://www.amren.com/archives/back-issues/november-1995/
[15] https://www.amren.com/news/2009/07/how_i_saw_the_l/
[16] Ibid.
[17] http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/022173.html
[18] http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/005904.html#grant
[19] To add to this is the rehabilitation of Mark Fuhrman. The “racist” detective has had more than one interview with Oprah, and been sympathetically shown on female-centric daytime TV shows. He is also a respected commentator on Fox News. OJ Simpson is a pariah.
6 Comments
L.A. justice is dubious at best. Two trials in 1992 and two trials in 1994 – all four decided by the race of the jury matching (or not) the race of the defendant. I ask everyone I know “What does the Bill of Rights mean by the right to a jury of one’s peers?” A long time ago, if I were driving down Imperial Highway at night toward LAX, and after stopping for a red light I hit the gas on green and a young black child suddenly darts into the street – I swerve but hit the child a glancing blow, but unfortunately the child falls, head strikes the curb, and the kid dies. A long time ago I might have gotten a fair trial, if a case for vehicular homicide came to trial. But what do I get today? – A jury of residents of South Central L.A.? Then I’m screwed, and the Bill of Rights means nothing. Just ask the four officers in the Rodney King case when the federal government went against them on the dubious “civil rights” charge.
Dale: I was thinking that, the real question of the trial ending in (mostly) acquittal of the four officers in Simi Valley in 1992 is what would that White jury have done if the defense team had not introduced any evidence and analysis that went beyond what the news media had offered to the public. I would think they would have returned a guilty verdict. But that’s just me, though.
That jury saw the full video available and heard the cops account of what happened. Namely, the other black occupants of the vehicle got out as ordered by the cops and cooperated fully. King didn’t and endured repeated (admittedly injurious) blows from the cops due to narcotics in his system.
To me, that is the difference between blacks and Whites, in Simpson and Simi Valley trials respectively. Blacks didn’t care what the evidence was; and it was undeniable and overwhelming. Whites did care. This is the reason that blacks were not allowed on juries in past generations before integration.
Interesting, but I don’t agree that the Simpson trial was the universal red pill that this article contends. It’s merely a data point that may have influenced individuals who were unusually dense to events around them. In my experience most intelligent, aware whites fully expected the verdict in advance.
The modern WN movement is (I think) mostly thanks to the advent of the World Wide Web, and its breaking of the media’s stranglehold on the valves of our people’s attention. People doing searches run across interesting articles from amren, too, countercurrents and are attracted to their content. They follow the links on amazon to your books. “Hmm, these people are smart, they may be right about other things…” In turn, discussion boards such as this one lead to amalgamation and tempering of our message and platform into something coherent and a rational assessment of the forces arrayed against us. The key issues have been formulated by scholars and communities so as not to seem so fringe-group, conspiracy nut sounding, as they did in the old days. Most of human thought, while it’s common to attribute ideas to individual big brains, is really a synthesis of many good minds working together. Atomized as the “movement” was in the old days, it was difficult to synthesize a coherent picture or message, although many of the ideas discussed in these forums were very much in evidence back in the days of Instauration and Wilmot Robertson, and revilo Oliver. Why are leftists so hot to shut down the websites, after all?
Also, prior to 1991, I think that the communism iron curtain issue was an enormous distractor, muddler from seeing the world as it really is. Buckley, from my limited understanding, basically transfigured the whole conservative movement into a crusade against communism, the bull charging the matador’s cape again. And how ironic that WNs were the loudest voices against the soviet block back then, but those countries behind the curtain are doing much better than we are in terms of white advocacy now! Yockey was way ahead of us, I guess is what this means.
I had seen some race problems, all due to black behavior, in the US Army in the early 1980s. I read that the military had a Project 100,000 during the mid 1960s and it ended up causing massive disciplinary problems, especially in the Army since that is where most of the lower-social-order negroes and mestizos went.
I was told it was worse in the early 1970s, no doubt due to this Project 100,000, with outright gang organizations on military posts, world wide. I was told on good authority that during the late 1960s and early 1970s the captains of some Navy ships had to use the Marine contingent as a sort of riot police, assigning them to the mess hall during meal times due to the negro penchant for mob violence (chimp out) happening there.
It looks as if it took the military up until 1980 to get most of these types of negroes and mestizos out of the service. I am sure some political correctness delayed the departures whereas in earlier times the hooligans would have been sent packing very quickly.
In regard to the author’s listing of some people’s emails just after the 1995 trial, expressing shock and sudden awareness of how negroes they had thought were “all right” would show solidarity for another of the same race, and blatantly guilty at that. It has happened on the national stage as well. Colin Powell went through remarkably the same career track as John McCain, at least a lot of it was. They both served in the military, then national security apparatus, McCain went to politics and Powell went to the top of not just the Army but the whole military. They both were “establishmentarians”, if you will. So, they were exposed to the same ideas, ethos, culture. Yet, Powell sided with Obama. For what reason? Or was it reason (logic) at work? The only thing the two had in common, that I can deduce, was that both were bi-racial. If anyone else can point out a shared ideal between the two, I’d be glad to hear it. But I don’t see it. It seems that after all the White created culture of federal gov’t, Powell didn’t care and he responded to his racial group.
Obama himself is the same. He was abandoned by his (supposedly) African, muslim father and raised/cared for by his White Christian mother. Yet, who does he identify with? His African muslim father; muslim sounding name, identifies as fully negro, wrote a book with the sappy title Dreams of my Father.
The moral would seem to be that no matter how well the negro is treated by Whites, no matter how much better the negro’s life is by being accepted by Whites, the negro will turn on the White for any/every reason. Negroes practice racial identity and loyalty, no matter what. Whites have been duped for decades in doing the opposite. That is why Whites keep going through this with negroes.
Does anyone really believe that blacks would have celebrated the verdict so ecstatically if they were convinced that an innocent negro had been wrongly accused of a double murder and had “gotten justice” by being acquitted? They were ecstatic because they knew full well that a famous negro had gotten away with butchering two white people. This includes the blacks who made noises about O.J. being “framed.” Blacks are perfectly capable of expressing perfervid, ersatz indignation about “planted evidence,” and then, later, howling and cavorting in a seizure of gratified bloodlust when a fellow black that they know to be guilty returns to a life of leisure.
The 1990s were an odd decade in America, and Los Angeles was at ground zero.
The West had won the Cold War, but it was becoming evident that marxism was not defeated, certainly not on the university campuses nor among the radical organizations which continued to agitate in the ‘hood. There was the blitzkrieg Coalition victory over Iraq in 1991’s Desert Storm, but that war concluded with Saddam Hussein still defiant in Baghdad.
Both the 1992 Rodney King Riot and the 1995 Simpson Trial have to be seen in this light. It was as if there were some ennui at work, where the appearance of victories in far off lands distracted from the process of White dispossession at home. The retirement of LAPD chief Daryl Gates just after the Riot was interpreted in some quarters as the end of traditional (White) policing and with that, of traditional (White) governance. For the identity-politics Left, it would be just a matter of time until the demographics shifted enough for them to inherit the power.
True enough, COPS style TV programs broadcast non-stop victories in wars on crime and drugs, 13 channels of SWAT teams kicking in doors. America had the situation in hand, all right, since every night the telescreens proclaimed the Biggest Drug Bust in History. Yet during the 1990s, the gangs transitioned from traditional thuggery into African style warlordism, dominating the inner city terrain and going national. As for Los Angeles, a city which once promised monorails and Moon landings began its slide towards Blade Runner style optics.
The real issue was race.
During the 1990s, I had conversations with conservative activists about ending affirmative action. You’d think that after 12 years of Reagan-Bush and then Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, the GOP could have mustered the votes in Congress to dismantle the equal opportunities regime which had atrophied into quotas, red tape and jackpot lawsuits. Well, the activists admitted that a dismantlement was not in the cards. They could recognize the first stages of White dispossession, but it was the upper conservative leadership which refused to take any action. Why this is so ought to be a topic for debate.
The 1990s were, I believe, the last time that a solely electoral solution could have turned around the racial situation in America. A couple of popular initiatives were passed in California to end affirmative action and halt illegal immigration (209, 187), but these were upended by the university establishments and courts. Of course, GOP office holders did little if anything to fight for these initiatives even though they had the (White) voters behind them.
Adding to the ennui were Waco (1993) and Ruby Ridge (1992), as well as the killing of Malibu millionaire Don Scott by a counter-narcotics team (1992). These incidents did much to alienate elements of the Right from the System, and stimulated a turn towards militant libertarianism and constitutional militia formation – antecedents for the Ron Paul movement.
All this led to a growing realization that a break with past conservative politics was required. And perhaps in that realization came the first stirrings of the Alternative Right.