The O.J. Verdict ...

... changed America for the better, at least for a little while.

Excerpted from Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama

After the O.J. verdict, the reign of the race hustlers was completely over.  Not surprisingly, Democratic presidential candidates and Newt Gingrich were the last people on Earth to know– even journalists knew before the Democrats did. …

Even Steve Pagones, the falsely accuser prosecutor in the Tawana Brawley case, finally got paid. In the course of that hootenanny, Sharpton had said “If we're lying, sue us. Sue us right now."[i]  Steve Pagones, the prosecutor these charlatans named as one of Brawley’s rapists, did just that, in October 1988, just weeks after the grand jury report.  About a year and a half later, he won his defamation suit against Brawley. But then nothing happened with his lawsuit against Sharpton, Maddox and Mason for years.  And years. …

It took a 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 O.J. verdict, an amazing thing occurred:  A judge was assigned to Pagones case.[ii]   Two years later – a full decade after the grand jury declared Brawley’s accusations a fraud, 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, while the disbarred Mason is having his wages garnished and Brawley is nowhere to be found.[iii]  Pagones would still be waiting for his day in court, if not for O.J.  Ironically, one of Sharpton’s benefactors in paying Pagones was Johnnie Cochran.

There were other factors tamping down racial hysteria around the same time as the O.J. trial.

First, the generation that witnessed legal discrimination in the country 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 rejected from University of California medical school because he wasn’t black.  That’s the life experience of anyone who is under 50 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 30 years of liberal crime policies in New York. Just six months before Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman were murdered, Giuliani replaced the utterly incompetent David Dinkins as mayor of New York in January 1994, and miraculously turned the “ungovernable city” into the safest big city in the country. A major part of Giuliani’s success depended on his absolute refusal to be cowed by the constant accusations of racism being leveled nonstop by the likes of The New York Times and the Clinton Justice Department. 

…

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, just like the one in 1972.  …

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?"[iv] 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.’"[v]

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

Afterward, Al Sharpton, racial healer, tried to butt into a meeting Bratton had called with the mosque’s leaders. Giuliani refused to meet with Sharpton, calling him an "outside agitator" and canceled the meeting.  Shock waves shot through all of Charlie-Rose New York. Sharpton was in such a tizzy, he vowed that the mayor would be impeached by spring.[vi] 

But then guess what happened?  Nothing.  The mosque leaders came back the next day for the meeting without Sharpton.  While Sharpton denounced Giuliani’s “arrogance” in choosing whom to meet with, the Mosque’s leader, Don Muhammad, came out of the meeting say, "We do not wish to be viewed as persons disrespectful of the law."[vii]  Sharpton can get 30 losers to protest, but if you just ignore him, he’ll eventually go home….

The New York Times issued a patronizing editorial informing Giuliani that "[g]overning is messy, unpredictable and raw, especially in this inherently fractious city."  The Times patiently explained that "presiding over New York City demands flexibility, and above all a willingness to reach out to alienated communities." David Dinkins had lost an election and the Times acted like it was 9-11 and we all needed “healing.”  The paper actually called on Giuliani "to lead the healing process."[viii]  

Of course, a lot less "healing" would be needed under Giuliani because the policies he implemented over the hot indignation of liberals cut the city's murder rate from about 2,000 a year under his Democratic predecessors to 714 the year Giuliani left office. By studiously ignoring the advice of the Times, Giuliani cut the murder rate 20% just his first year in office -- an accomplishment celebrated in the Times with an article titled: "New York City Crime Falls But Just Why Is a Mystery”[ix]

By the end of Giuliani’s two terms in office, The Rev. Calvin Butts, pastor of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church, was describing Giuliani as King Josiah of the Bible, who “brought order, peace, the law back to the land.”  Without Giuliani, he said, “we would have been overrun."[x]

Third, there was Bill O’Reilly’s relentless pursuit of Rev. Jesse Jackson, which began a few years after the O.J. verdict.

Beginning in 1999 and continuing for years thereafter, O'Reilly bird-dogged Jackson on his nightly Fox News show, persistently inviting Jackson to come on and answer questions about his activism and his funding. 

Until then, multinational corporations had quaked at phone calls from Jackson.  But O'Reilly turned the tables, shining a floodlight on Jackson's nonprofits.  Then it was the minister’s turn to sweat and curse.  That’s when the marks stopped paying up.  Until O’Reilly’s brave campaign, anyone who asked about Jackson’s finances, where the money came from and how much he paid himself in salary, would be told: <We don’t keep those records.  How’d you like to be called a racist on national TV?>

All it took was a single television host to stand up to the class bully to prove that the racial scam artists were always paper tigers.  O’Reilly’s reports on Jackson’s can fairly be credited with driving Jackson from public life. …

But if the world were still the kind of place where a cop who used the N-word was more despised than a double murderer, would any of them have been willing to risk being turned into the next Mark Fuhrman, despised from coast to coast? A few years after the effect of the O.J. verdict settled in, even Mark Furhman wasn’t Mark Fuhrman, despised from coast to coast.

It was different world – the birds were singing, the sun shining and lives no longer being held hostage by frivolous charges of “racism.” All the grandstandy “That’s right, I’m courageous enough to say white people are racist,” was over. In the eighties, any white person could get a standing ovation for droning on about racism.  

And with the waning influence of the racial agitators has the world been delighted to discover that there are loads competent blacks out there! Where had they been all this time? We got a brief glimpse of wildly talented blacks during the Clarence Thomas hearings back in 1991, when one after another professionally accomplished black testified on Thomas’s behalf.  And then they all disappeared again.

Perhaps it was the advent of the Internet and cable news, especially Fox, but suddenly there was a renaissance of talented blacks  – Thomas Sowell, Michael Steele, Ron Christie, Ken Blackwell, Allen West, Niger Innis, Star Parker, Angela McGlowan – and those are just the conservatives.  There was also Marc Lamont Hill, Juan Williams, Sharrod Small – there are so many that you don’t even notice it anymore.  Where had they been all that time?   They were probably sitting at home, wondering why no one in the media ever asked them their opinion, instead going to Jesse Jackson for the “black perspective.”

CNN has periodically tried pandering to blacks, with brand new hoax racism incidents,  in Jena, IL and elsewhere – and has been rewarded with the lowest ratings in cable news.

Blacks had won the final civil rights battle: The right to be treated like adults. Liberals would move on in search of new victims to patronize.

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Unfortunately, the subtitle is “Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama” and the “to Obama” part brought the racial demagoguery right back.