OJ Simpson and his lawyer Johnny Cochran together impacted this nation like few others, and the devastating effects of that impact are still being felt today! If you want to know where woke insanity began, we can trace it back to OJ Simpson.
– Commentators argue that OJ Simpson’s acquittal laid the groundwork for modern woke identity politics.
– Simpson’s defense team, led by Johnny Cochran, exploited racial tensions and shifted focus onto LAPD’s alleged racism.
– Cochran’s defense strategy successfully tapped into racial dynamics, shaping the jury’s perception of truth.
OJ Simpson is dead, and now the assessment of his radically controversial life has begun. The major takeaway from Simpson’s tumultuous and torturous public life is that he, more than anyone else, infected our nation with the woke mind virus. Several commentators are already recognizing this. Conservative commentator Clay Travis tweeted, “OJ Simpson used the legacy of American racism to escape responsibility for his double murders of two innocent people. His acquittal was, in many ways, a forerunner of the modern woke identity politics movement, which uses history to escape responsibility for present acts.”
He’s not the only one. Podcaster Ed Zitron tweeted, “OJ Simpson has died after a prolonged battle with the woke mind virus.” In the late 90s, there was an academic study on the way Simpson’s defense attorneys, particularly, Johnny Cochran, racialized truth. The study was conducted by Cornell University professor Michael Lynch, and it highlighted just how powerless evidential truth was when confronted with what the study called experiential truth.
Mark Fuhrman was the LA investigator who discovered a second bloody glove at Simpson’s home. It was later determined to be the match of the glove found at the murder scene. Through DNA testing, the blood on the glove found in Simpson’s home was determined to have come from both victims. Even though DNA evidence was very new at the time, most legal commentators thought that the case was closed. It was like discovering the perpetrator’s fingerprints on the victim’s body.
But of course, we all know, that’s not what happened! The Simpson defense team, led by Johnny Cochran, turned the whole case back in on the LAPD. Cochran accused the LA police officers, particularly Fuhrman, of ‘planting’ rather than discovering evidence in OJ Simpson’s home. This trial took place in the shadow of the Rodney King drama. He was filmed being beaten by police in March 1991. Then the acquittal of those police officers caused riots in ‘92. The second trial of those same police officers (which was a clear violation of double jeopardy) occurred in February of ‘93.
The OJ trial in ‘95 was happening in the shadow of these race-related events. They were presented as race-related by the legacy media at the time. Cochran exploited that, and he turned the whole case back on the LAPD, basically telling the mostly black jury that this was their chance to set things right with this police department that’s had such an explicit history of racism and discrimination.
Given the racial dynamics that were in play, there was a radically discrepant reaction between whites and blacks to the verdict.
The study from Cornell University found that what really happened here was that even though the empirical link between OJ and the crime scene was ironclad, the DNA proved that the victims’ blood was inside Simpson’s house via the glove. That empirical link didn’t come close to the experiential link between the primarily black jurists and the supposed racism of the LAPD. The empirical relation between the glove and the murder victims was eclipsed by the experiential relation between the jurists and the racist reputations of the LAPD.
That experiential vs empirical clash is what Cochran exploited in the trial, to the shock of the prosecution. They were obviously completely blindsided by that defense. Michael Lynch observed that Cochran successfully relativized all the scientific evidence presented in the form of unequivocal quantitative facts to a far more powerful and influential demographic epistemology centered around the narrative of an ongoing conflict between the black community and the LAPD.
It was genius, in an evil sort of way, on Cochran’s part, because it obviously worked. The jury trusted their own racially-tinged experience over the evidence. Scholars have noted that this moment was a very real fixed point in our nation’s history. If you want to get a sense of where all of this woke insanity that we’re experiencing today comes from, there it is. OJ Simpson’s lasting legacy is that he effectively racialized truth. That racialization has morphed into a cultural Marxist identity politics that now sees truth as purely political, and the only truth that’s allowed to be advanced is the truth representative of supposedly oppressed group identities.
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