In 1995, there were two very different versions of the O.J. Simpson trial playing out. For most of the country, the trial was a spectacle. A lot of crazy stuff happened — so much that most people don’t remember all of it.
Overnight, for example, the National Enquirer tabloid morphed into a crack legal publication that broke several exclusive stories about the proceedings. They had 20 reporters working on the case, coming up with transcripts and scoops that everyone else missed. And of course, Norm Macdonald made so many jokes about the case that he was fired from SNL because of it. In the decades since, there hasn’t been any trial remotely like it — covered wall-to-wall, for months, by pretty much every channel in America. It was entertainment.
At the same time, in black areas of Los Angeles, and in major cities all over the country, the O.J. Simpson trial wasn’t just a spectacle. It was also about revenge for the Rodney King acquittals and police corruption more generally. That’s been discussed quite a bit over the last 30 years.
What’s gotten less attention is that, with the O.J. trial, for the first time, it became widely acceptable to think about the deaths of white people as necessary collateral damage to exact this kind of political revenge.
There was no social media at the time, and cable news was pretty sanitized. So no one with a major television platform came right out and directly said this. But they didn’t need to. It was obvious, especially if you looked at how little concern there was among O.J. supporters for Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman and their families.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
Nicole Brown, as you might remember, was repeatedly beaten by O.J. before she divorced him. And then he hunted her down and nearly cut her head off. Everyone knew this, but not everyone cared. It was apparent from the reactions when O.J. was acquitted. It was euphoria, and it broke down along racial lines. Watch:
It’s pretty disturbing footage, especially since at the time it didn’t cause a lot of outrage. Thousands of people all over the country, most of them black, celebrated the acquittal of someone who obviously just murdered two people. At the time, serious people understood that this was jury nullification. But no one really explored the implications. What does a country look like, over the long term, when murdering white people is seen as acceptable, for any reason? What happens when the media and major political figures endorse this barbarism?
No one seemed to care, even after a juror from the O.J. trial came right out and admitted, many years after the fact, that 90% of the jurors knew that O.J. was guilty. But the jurors acquitted him anyway, because they were driven by a desire for “payback.” Watch:
She knows it’s wrong to let a killer go free, but she did it anyway. So did the rest of the jury.
This has all been known for a while now. What’s less widely known is that the Los Angeles DA at the time, a Democrat named Gil Garcetti, engineered this acquittal. An attorney named Dilan Esper has cataloged all the ways that Garcetti rigged the trial in favor of O.J. The big one is that he didn’t try the case in Brentwood, which is in West Los Angeles. That would have been the logical place to hold the trial because Simpson had lived in Brentwood for two decades. But Brentwood is almost exclusively white. And Garcetti recognized that, for O.J. to have the best chance of acquittal, given the racial politics of the case, he needed to pick a new venue. So he chose downtown Los Angeles — where he was able to secure an overwhelmingly black jury with just a couple of white people on it.
Garcetti made several other decisions to swing the case for O.J. For example, he declined to pursue the death penalty after publicly meeting with Johnnie Cochran — who was just about to join O.J.’s defense team. That was a significant decision because a death penalty jury has to answer “yes” to the question of whether they’d be OK with sentencing someone to death. That weeds out a lot of Left-wing jurors immediately. So Garcetti chose not to do it.
Additionally, Garcetti chose to present the prosecution’s entire case during pretrial hearings, giving the defense a chance to scope out all of the witnesses well in advance of trial. As Esper points out, this ultimately worked to the defense’s advantage in a major way. O.J.’s lawyers picked up on one inconsistency in the pretrial testimony — relating to the amount of blood collected by police investigators — and made it a major part of their defense.
These were not errors, or sloppy work by the prosecutors. These were intentional efforts by Garcetti to avoid convicting O.J. Simpson, which would have ended his political career. Pretty much every black voter in Los Angeles would have voted to remove Garcetti if O.J. was found guilty. Indeed, even after O.J. Simpson was found not guilty, Garcetti refused to prosecute him for perjury in the civil trial, even though it was clear O.J. Simpson lied several times. That’s how committed Garcetti was to keeping O.J. Simpson out of jail.
Again, anyone paying attention during this whole saga understood everything that was going on at the time. This is not new information. What is new is that, now that O.J. Simpson is dead — he died yesterday of cancer — mainstream news outlets are just coming right out and admitting it. They’re acknowledging that O.J. Simpson was guilty, but that he simply couldn’t be convicted because of race politics.
Here for example is a CNN journalist explaining on-camera yesterday that in 1995, a lot of black people loved to see a black man get away with murdering two white people. She catches herself mid-way through, but it’s clear what she’s saying. Watch:
We’d have a much better understanding of today’s race politics, and how to put an end to it, if we could have admitted this back in 1995. A lot of people wanted to see a black man get away with murder. The two white people were simply collateral damage.
A professor named Marc Lamont Hill spelled this out very clearly yesterday:
O.J. Simpson was an abusive liar who abandoned his community long before he killed two people in cold blood. His acquittal for murder was the correct and necessary result of a racist criminal legal system. But he’s still a monster, not a martyr.
In other words, you can kill white people without penalty. As long as the criminal legal system is racist — and people like Marc Lamont Hill believe it’s irredeemably, irreparably racist forever — then it’s fine to basically decapitate white people. That’s according to someone who collects a paycheck paid by the government of New York to teach the next generation.
Yesterday, Hill elaborated on his reasoning, essentially saying that O.J. had every right to kill his victims because a police officer involved in the case used a racial slur at some point in the past. Watch:
You’ll notice there’s no regard whatsoever in Marc Lamont Hill’s mind for the two victims. Their families aren’t entitled to justice, all because a detective on their murder case used a racial slur. If you use the n-word, then any white person who’s tangentially related to you deserves to die. That’s basically what he’s saying. A lot of people thought this in 1995, but they didn’t say it in public. That’s changing.
The reason several mainstream outlets spent yesterday eulogizing O.J. Simpson as some kind of victim is that they approve of what he did. There’s no other way to spin it.
The New York Times, for example, wrote that quote, “A jury in the murder trial …. cleared Mr. Simpson, but the case ruined his world.” They quickly edited that out of the piece when people pointed out that he stabbed two people to death and therefore “ruined” their worlds, too.
For its part, NPR wrote the following headline on something called “Threads:” “BREAKING NEWS: The football great Orenthal James Simpson, known as O.J., has died.”
The Associated Press, meanwhile, tweeted: “Legendary athlete, actor and millionaire: O.J. Simpson’s murder trial lost him the American dream.”
Those are all real headlines. Everyone knows exactly what’s going on here. The only way to get glowing headlines like this from the corporate media is if you kill people they don’t like. It’s the same reason The Washington Post described that ISIS leader as an “austere religious scholar.” O.J. Simpson killed members of a disfavored demographic, so they’re mourning him as a victim, not the people he killed.
This kind of attitude was everywhere yesterday. There was no focus on the victims whatsoever. CBS News interviewed one of O.J.’s lawyers from the 1995 trial, named Carl Douglas. In the interview, he comes out and declares what he saw as a main benefit of the trial. Again, it had nothing to do with justice or finding the truth or the “real killers.”
Instead, it was about showing to the world that black lawyers can get defendants off, too. Watch:
“And whatever you think of this verdict, for Black Americans, it was not speaking about O.J. Simpson per se.”
That about sums it up, straight from one of O.J.’s lawyers. The O.J. trial was not about O.J. Simpson. The trial was arguably the beginning, or at least a landmark moment on the way towards, our current era of racial insanity. The race hustlers of the time rallied around O.J. not because they thought he was innocent but because they saw him as an agent of revenge. And Democratic Party elites in Los Angeles like Gil Garcetti did everything they could to ensure O.J.’s acquittal so that he could serve that function.
But nobody was more explicit than CNN contributor Ashely Allison, a former senior advisor in the Obama White House. Listen to what she chose to say out loud on national television yesterday:
“He represented something for black Americans because it was two white people who’d been killed.” That’s what black Americans connected with, according to this woman. They felt affinity with O.J. because he brutally slaughtered white people. Talk about saying the quiet part out loud. Although, as we’ve seen, it’s hardly the quiet part anymore.
This mentality has metastasized over time, helped along by Barack Obama, leading to the rise of BLM, and culminating in Floyd and the 2020 riots, and then the post-Floyd era of DEI. Now, 30 years later, so-called “race relations” have deteriorated to the point that the race hustlers finally feel comfortable coming out and telling us what their motives were all along.
Yes, O.J. Simpson is dead. But the legacy of that trial, particularly the racial violence and distrust that it normalized, is still very much alive.