Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From the Seventies to Obama

  Most memorably, Harris described the evidence presented by the prosecution as “a whole lot of nothing.” 26 At this point in the trial, the evidence included drops of blood leading away from the two victims to Simpson’s Ford Bronco, to his driveway, to his front door, into his foyer and then to his bathroom; and a bloody left-hand glove found on the grounds of OJ’s estate the night of the murders that matched a right-hand glove found at the murder scene.

  And consider that this was even before evidence had been adduced on the key question of whether Mark Fuhrman had ever used the N-word, throwing the glove evidence into turmoil.

  Overall, Harris seemed less concerned with OJ’s guilt than with the racism of some of her fellow jurors and court personnel. She alleged that the deputies had given white jurors more time at the Ross and Target department stores and that a white woman on the jury had kicked her without then saying “excuse me.”27 As she told Larry King, “growing up in Los Angeles, you’re faced with racism every day.”

  Normally, something that happens every day stops being noticeable, like crickets in the country or traffic noises in the city. But with Harris, constancy seemed to have sharpened her racism sensor, perhaps with a little nudge from a media consumed with talking about racist America every single day.

  After the trial, two black female jurors quoted in the Los Angeles Times said they knew OJ didn’t do it and the evidence didn’t convince them otherwise. One explained: “In plain English, the glove didn’t fit.” The other juror said she thought the glove was planted, but she too acknowledged that she believed OJ was innocent before the trial began.28

  Manifestly, none of the evidence was of the slightest interest to the jurors. But no one dared blame the mostly minority jurors for the “not guilty” verdict. (For my younger readers, blaming black people for anything they did used to be illegal in the United States.)

  Inasmuch as the media couldn’t blame the jurors, the prosecutors (one was black) or defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran (also black), there was only one acceptable target for the media’s wrath: Mark Fuhrman. He used the N-word in 1985. Ergo, the jury had no choice but to acquit OJ.

  As Geraldo Rivera said of Fuhrman: “History will always say that he is, by far, the single most responsible person for O. J. Simpson walking free.”29 I would vote for the jurors being a smidgen more responsible, but, then, I don’t get a kick out of patronizing black people.

  Ron Goldman’s sister, Kim, called Fuhrman a “despicable human being,” asking: “What if he told the truth? How would that have affected the case? What if he just came clean and it all came right out in the open? How would it have affected the case? And I will never know that.”30

  I know the answer to that, Kim! It would have made absolutely no difference.

  The media were as unanimous as the OJ jury: It was Fuhrman’s fault. The San Francisco Chronicle said Fuhrman’s “perjured testimony”—about using the N-word—“helped undercut the prosecution’s case.”31 Yes, in addition to the fact that jurors thought a trail of blood from the crime scene to OJ’s house and a bloody glove in OJ’s yard matching the one at the crime scene was, and I quote, “a whole lot of nothing.”

  Calling Fuhrman “a major factor in Simpson’s acquittal,” The Sun-Sentinel said the “trial might have had a completely different verdict” if Fuhrman hadn’t lied about using the N-word.32

  The Post-Intelligencer said “documented racism” was “a key element in Simpson’s acquittal by a jury, nine of whose members were African Americans.”33 (And that white juror kicking Jeanette Harris didn’t help things either!)

  On and on it went. Some newspapers went so far as to endorse the jury’s verdict. The South Bend Tribune (Indiana) said the jurors were correct to ignore questions of OJ’s “guilt or innocence” given that Fuhrman was “a racist and a liar.”34 Durham, North Carolina’s Herald-Sun—which a decade later would be championing the false rape claims against Duke lacrosse players by a stripper who is now on trial for murder—said Fuhrman was “so overtly prejudiced against blacks that, yes, it’s reasonable to agree…that Furhman was part of a police conspiracy to frame OJ for the killings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.”35

  Oh, come on.

  Would these holier-than-thou journalists have reacted the same way if a Jewish jury refused to convict Bernie Madoff because one of the Securities and Exchange investigators had used the H-word word (Hymie)? If anything, an all-Jewish jury might have given him the death penalty. Would they have cheered a jury for letting off Leona Helmsley if an officer with the Internal Revenue Service had used the C-word?

  Of course not. But it was the official position of the elites that blacks could not be treated like the rest of us adults. Well, of course he threw a tantrum! You forgot to give him a cookie.

  Even the change in trial venue was premised on the idea that blacks cannot be treated like our fellow citizens. Not enough black people lived near Brentwood, so the OJ trial had to be moved to downtown Los Angeles. If a white person is arrested for committing a murder in Washington, DC, no court would order him tried in some whiter neighborhood, such as western Virginia.

  The chattering class may have reprised its role as Chief Patronizers of Black America, but the rest of the country had changed. Thus, while the unanimous legal opinion given in the media was that Furhman’s perjury would cost the Goldman family a win in civil court,36 that jury ordered OJ to pay the Goldman and Brown families $33 million in damages.

  Simpson took the stand in the civil case and, as respected legal reporter Stuart Taylor wrote, there was “ample evidence that Simpson lied rampantly and shamelessly under oath in his civil trial and deposition.”

  Guess who wasn’t prosecuted for perjury? Suddenly perjury wasn’t such a terrible crime, after all.

  The police officers in the Rodney King case were tried twice. Mark Fuhrman was prosecuted for perjury over whether he had used a word ten years (or only nine and a half years) earlier. But OJ wasn’t tried for perjury for denying, as Taylor notes, “that he ever hit or slapped his former wife, or that he ever received his girlfriend Paula Barbieri’s message breaking up with him the day of the murders, or that he ever owned ‘ugly ass’ Bruno Magli shoes of the type that left bloody footprints at the murder scene.”37

  Still, no matter how much politicians, prosecutors and the media tried to convince Americans that Fuhrman was a greater criminal than OJ, the insanity on race was over. No one was buying it anymore.

  The media couldn’t even convince themselves—at least when they were making business decisions in corporate suites and not chitchatting on TV. A few months after the verdict, OJ marketed a video of himself arguing that he was innocent, for $29.95 each. TV stations refused to run commercials advertising the video.38 The star of the trial of the century sold fewer than 40,000 copies. Around the same time, a Weather Channel video about storms sold 100,000 copies.39

  OJ’s acquittal and Fuhrman’s conviction was the last gasp of the white racial guilt that had gripped the nation for so long. The blinders were off and, no matter how much pompous liberals tried, blacks would no longer be treated as subhuman beings.

  CHAPTER 10

  POST-OJ VERDICT: PARADISE

  Right up until the OJ verdict, the race hustlers were riding high, to no one’s benefit. It’s hard to believe now, but when Jesse Jackson ran for president in 1984, he came in third in a field of seven candidates in the Democratic primaries. Jackson received more than 3 million votes, about 20 percent of all votes cast, winning primaries in South Carolina and Louisiana outright—and almost beating the eventual nominee, Walter Mondale, in Virginia. This made Jesse Jackson a major figure in the Democratic Party, ensuring him a speaking spot at the Convention and the right to make demands and impose rules changes.

  In the 1988 presidential campaign, Jackson did even better, coming in second in a field of six Democrats, winning nine states, and walloping third-place Al Gore by more than a two to one margin. Jackson ended up with nearly 30 pe
rcent of all primary votes cast, not far behind nominee Michael Dukakis’s 43 percent. (In Jackson’s defense, he’d make a better president.) That same year, David Dinkins became both the first black mayor of New York and—judging by the results—the last black mayor of New York.

  But after the OJ verdict, the reign of the race hustlers was completely over. Not surprisingly, Democrats were the last to know. Even journalists knew before the Democrats did. (Except at CNN.)

  During the 2000 presidential race, all the Democratic candidates flew to New York to kiss Al Sharpton’s ring. Bill Bradley was the first and most ardent of Sharpton’s suitors, attending a public meeting with Sharpton and his National Action Network in New York and absurdly leading the audience in a chant of “No Justice, No Peace!”1 Al Gore met with Sharpton on the sly, at first denying that he had done so, but eventually admitting to having bumped into Sharpton at his daughter Karenna’s Upper East Side apartment.2 Bradley was slaughtered in the primaries, winning only 2.7 million votes, or 19 percent of the votes cast. Jesse Jackson had done better than that.

  By the time Al Sharpton ran for president in the 2004 election, well after OJ, he didn’t win a single state in the Democratic primaries. He had only “single-digit showings in contests from coast to coast,” as the New York Times put it. Sharpton couldn’t even get a majority of black votes in his home state of New York. Twenty years earlier, Jesse Jackson had won 85 percent of the black vote in New York and 25 percent of the vote overall.3

  The only fun Sharpton has anymore is tormenting Howard Dean.

  In 2004, presidential candidate Vermont governor Howard Dean, never having met a black person, cowered before Sharpton during a Democratic presidential debate when Sharpton demanded to know if Dean had a “black or brown” person on his cabinet. Dean said he had “a senior member” of his staff who was black. Toying with a terrified Dean like a cat with a mouse, Sharpton summarily dismissed the staff member as irrelevant.

  Throughout the rest of the debate, Dean burbled and apologized to Sharpton for not having enough brothers on his staff. At some point, Dean announced that he had more endorsements from the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus than any other candidate on the stage. Trying again, he said, “I will take a back seat to no one in my commitment to civil rights in the United States of America.” Still later in the debate, Dean apologized to John Edwards for saying he wanted to be “the candidate for guys with Confederate flags” in their pickup trucks.4

  Days after the debate, Dean announced that he had requested a black roommate at Yale and even produced the roommate to attest to his racial broadmindedness.5 As soon as the other black candidate, Carol Moseley Braun, dropped out of the race, Dean hired her for his campaign.

  It apparently never occurred to Dean to mention that blacks account for 0.5 percent of Vermont’s population, making it extremely difficult for any Vermont governor to put blacks in his cabinet. Nor did it occur to him that he was talking to Al Sharpton. Dean’s epitaph should read: “Al Sharpton’s Last Lickspittle.”

  Except for the occasional Vermont governor, no longer do we have to endure pompous whites treating blacks like children: “Do you like your ice cream? Is that good?” Now everyone laughs at Jackson and Sharpton, and other black people will laugh with you. These days, people roll their eyes when Janeane Garofalo says criticism of half-black Obama is “racism, straight-up.” With the OJ verdict, blacks had finally triumphed over liberals’ condescension.

  In 1984, CBS’s Dan Rather gushed that Jesse Jackson’s address to the Democratic National Convention was “one for the history books”—and that was before Jackson gave his speech. Similarly, on ABC, David Brinkley said, “We are seeing something truly historic” while waiting for Jackson to take the stage. NBC’s Tom Brokaw called Jackson’s execrable speech “splendid and memorable.” The Democratic governor of Florida, Bob Graham, said of the speech: “America is never going to be the same after tonight.”6

  Flash-forward through the eighties, through the OJ verdict, to Jackson’s speech at the 2000 Democratic National Convention. We find NBC’s Tom Brokaw sharing a laugh with author Bill Bennett about Jackson’s usual rhymes.

  BENNETT: I thought some of the phrases were resonant, not quite as resonant as they’ve been in the past. They should rhyme. I’m waiting for a rhyme from the Reverend Jackson.

  BROKAW: You want to go from the outhouse to the courthouse…

  BENNETT: Yeah, exactly.

  BROKAW:…to the state house to the White House.

  BENNETT: To the White House, exactly.7

  Even Steve Pagones, the falsely accused prosecutor in the Tawana Brawley case, finally got paid after the OJ verdict. In the middle of that hootenanny, Sharpton had said “If we’re lying, sue us. Sue us right now.”8 Steve Pagones, named by these charlatans as one of Brawley’s rapists, did just that, in October 1988, just weeks after the grand jury reported its findings. About a year and a half later, he won his defamation suit against Brawley, which was meaningless because she had no assets. But then nothing happened with his lawsuit against Sharpton, Maddox and Mason for years. And years.

  No one had an appetite for stirring up the racial hatred crew, so one judge after another recused himself from the case, depriving Pagones of his day in court for nearly a decade.

  Everyone just moved on, and to hell with Pagones. Sharpton ran for mayor of New York. He marched in Howard Beach and Crown Heights, protested outside Freddy’s in Harlem, defended MOVE in Philadelphia. After a Central Park jogger was viciously beaten by a mob of black teenagers, he showed up at the trial, claiming he was there to “observe how differently a white victim was treated and how the accused in this case have been mishandled [sic] a lot differently from the people she [Brawley] accused.”9

  Pagones’s life was ruined, a sacrifice to the race hustlers. White America’s eternal hope was: Maybe this will finally satiate them…As long as it’s not me being accused of racism, please God, don’t let it be me. But the racial hatred machine could never be satisfied. Every sacrificial lamb just made the hucksters hungry for more.

  It took the race-based acquittal of a double murderer in the trial of the century for Pagones to finally get his day in court. Less than six months after the OJ verdict, an amazing thing occurred: A judge was at last assigned to Pagones’s case.10 Two years later—a full decade after the grand jury declared Brawley’s accusations false—Pagones won his defamation suit and was awarded damages of $185,000 from Mr. Mason, $95,000 from Mr. Maddox, $65,000 from Mr. Sharpton and $187,000 from Ms. Brawley.

  By January 2001, black leaders and businessmen had paid off Sharpton and Maddox’s debt to Pagones. The disbarred Mason was having his wages garnished.11

  Pagones would still be waiting for his day in court, if not for OJ. Ironically, one of the men paying Pagones on Sharpton’s behalf was Johnnie Cochran.

  There were other factors tamping down racial hysteria around the time of the OJ trial.

  First, the generation that witnessed racial discrimination against blacks is getting old. Anyone who grew up watching The Brady Bunch entered a world in which blacks were only the beneficiaries of race discrimination—as Allan Bakke found out in 1974 when he was denied admission to the University of California medical school because he was white. That’s the life experience of anyone who is under fifty years old. Accusations of racism have as much sting for such people as being accused of involvement in the Teapot Dome scandal.

  Second, there was Rudy Giuliani’s overturning thirty years of liberal crime policies in New York. Just six months before Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman were murdered, in January 1994 Giuliani replaced the utterly incompetent David Dinkins as mayor of New York and, over the next few years, turned the “ungovernable city” into the safest big city in the country. A major part of Giuliani’s success derived from his absolute refusal to be cowed by accusations of racism leveled at him by the likes of Al Sharpton, the New York Times and the Clinton Justice Department.


  Former mayor Ed Koch had been called a bigot merely for supporting Giuliani. The head of a black police organization, Eric Adams, promised racial violence if Giuliani beat the city’s first black mayor, saying blacks would arm themselves with bullets.12

  A little more than a week after Giuliani’s inauguration—and hours before the new police commissioner was sworn in—there was a melee in Harlem. A 911 call had come in claiming there was an armed robbery in progress on the third floor of a building at Fifth Avenue and 125th Street—which happened to be Louis Farrakhan’s mosque, though the police didn’t know it. It was an ambush, eerily similar to the one in 1972. Two police officers arrived at the nondescript building and ran to the location of the alleged holdup, completely unaware that the third floor was a mosque. They were met by Farrakhan’s “Fruit of Islam” guards, roughed up and thrown down the stairs after having a gun and police radio stolen from them.

  A standoff ensued with the police outside and the Fruit of Islam guards inside. To the alarm of liberals, the mayor was demanding arrests. “You have officers injured,” Giuliani told his negotiating team over the phone. “You have stolen police property. Why aren’t you going in?” 13 As the new police commissioner, William Bratton, said: “For twenty-five years, [African Americans] and other groups in the city had been treated gingerly by City Hall. Now Giuliani had come in and said, ‘Everybody’s going to be treated the same.’” 14

  Giuliani didn’t get arrests that night, but the police were allowed to enter and search the mosque, retrieving the stolen gun and radio.

  Afterward, racial healer Al Sharpton tried to butt into a meeting of mosque leaders with Bratton and Giuliani, but the mayor refused to meet with an “outside agitator” like Sharpton, and cancelled the meeting. Shock waves shot through all of Charlie Rose-New York. Sharpton was in such a tizzy, he vowed that Giuliani would be impeached by spring.15