by Gregory Hood, The Unz Review:
Every decade seems to give us a spectacular legal case that shows America’s racial reality. In the 1990s, it was the OJ Simpson case. When OJ was acquitted, whites around the country reacted with stunned horror while blacks celebrated. It might have been because they thought he was guilty that they celebrated. The more charitable explanation is that blacks simply wanted to believe the best about one of their own.
A YouGov poll taken in 2024, by which time most Americans thought Simpson had been guilty, found a plurality of blacks were “not sure,” though more blacks thought he was guilty than not. One doubts whether those who thought him guilty would have voted that way on a jury.
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In 2012, there was the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case. This case, along with the 2014 case of Michael Brown, coincided with what Matt Yglesias called “The Great Awokening.” Media mentions of racial injustice and police brutality surged, and social media turned formerly isolated cases into media frenzies.
Neither Martin nor Brown were formerly beloved national sports heroes or movie stars, just random black kids. However, then-President Barack Obama famously said that if he had a son, that son would look like Trayvon. It was in these cases that we saw the true birth of the Black Lives Matter movement, which would reach the heights of cultural influence in 2020 and remake America.
Something else happened during that time. What became the Alternative Right started to take shape during the Martin and Brown cases. Independent online researchers, avowedly right-wing online opinion sites, and social media users began discussing and deconstructing the media’s narratives about the cases.
George Zimmerman was not white. Travyon Martin was not an angelic child but a teenager who displayed typical behaviors of the black underclass. The prosecution’s key witness against George Zimmerman, Rachel Jeantel, was not a “smart cookie,” as Piers Morgan described her. Instead, Steve Sailer may have been right that her hostile, sullen turn on the stand was one of the few glimpses mainstream America gets of the low end of the bell curve. Most of American life is largely built around not dealing with such people, and here it was on every screen.
There were certainly race realists and white advocates who talked about the OJ Simpson trial in the 1990s. Pat Buchanan, in his historic 1992 “Culture War” speech, cited the Rodney King riots, which were shockingly violent by today’s standards. Yet such dissent either had to be channeled through the media or was relegated to the fringes. The mainstream media were not really challenged on the facts the same way they were during the Trayvon Martin trial, thanks to the internet.
