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O.J. Simpson’s defence was a harbinger of post-truth politics

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ORENTHAL JAMES (O.J.) SIMPSON, who died on April 10th, was in many ways an inspiring figure before he murdered his ex-wife. He overcame a childhood disease, rickets, which made him slightly bow-legged. In 1973 he was rated the “Most Valuable Player” in America’s National Football League. He was “the first black athlete to become a bona fide lovable media superstar”, according to People magazine. He starred in movies (“The Towering Inferno”, “The Naked Gun”), and made a fortune endorsing Hertz rental cars.

Then, on June 12th 1994, his former wife, Nicole Brown, and a friend of hers, Ron Goldman, were found stabbed to death. Simpson, whom Brown had previously accused of violence and threats, was immediately suspected. But on the day he was supposed to surrender for questioning, he fled. A cavalcade of cop cars slowly pursued his white Bronco truck along the freeways of Los Angeles. News helicopters beamed live coverage to sitting rooms around the world. His trial brought America to a standstill. Perhaps 150m people watched it on television. As the verdict was read out, trading of stocks and currencies all but ceased. When he was acquitted, white America gasped with disbelief. Black Americans celebrated: more than 80% agreed with the jury. Gil Garcetti, one of the prosecutors, lamented that the verdict was “based on emotion that overcame reason”.

Simpson’s grim story illuminates two enduring ills. Most obviously: racial division. Simpson was black; Brown and Goldman were white. The jury that acquitted Simpson was three-quarters black. The jury that reached the opposite conclusion in a civil trial in 1997, finding him liable for the two murders and ordering him to pay millions of dollars to the victims’ families, was mostly white. Presented with the same set of facts, white and black Americans saw a different reality.

The second ill is conspiratorial thinking. The techniques of persuasion deployed by Simpson’s defence lawyers were a harbinger of those deployed by populists such as Donald Trump today. In effect, they urged the jurors to disregard the facts—Simpson’s blood was found at the crime scene, both victims’ blood was found in his car and in his house—and back the group they identify with. Just as Mr Trump has persuaded his supporters that all the criminal charges against him are cooked up by malign Democrats, so Simpson’s lawyers invited the jurors to imagine a nebulous conspiracy perpetrated by an institution they distrusted: the police. Someone else committed the murders and racist cops planted evidence to incriminate Simpson, they suggested.

One of the cops, Mark Fuhrman, had indeed used racial slurs in the past. But no actual evidence of a conspiracy was produced. Nonetheless, in a city where, only a couple of years before, three cops had been filmed savagely beating a black motorist, Rodney King, and were then acquitted of all charges, many African-Americans found the idea of one plausible.

Simpson’s lawyer fanned this notion with incendiary, them-and-us rhetoric. He likened Mr Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler, saying that Hitler won power because people didn’t try to stop him, and suggesting that it was the jurors’ duty to stand up to Mr Fuhrman before he took “all black people” and burned them.

Americans are less racist than they were in the 1990s. At the time of the Simpson trial, only half told Gallup, a pollster, that they approved of marriage between black and white people. Now 94% do. But conspiracism shows no sign of ebbing: half of Americans think President John F. Kennedy’s assassin had accomplices and a quarter think the billionaire financier George Soros has a secret plot to rule the world. Two of the three highest-polling presidential candidates this year, Mr Trump and Robert Kennedy junior, habitually dabble in conspiracy theories. If the lesson from the Simpson trial is that skilful demagogues can win over a big chunk of the public by inflaming divisions and “flood[ing] the zone with shit”, as a Trump adviser once put it, it has been well learned.

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China to impose 34% retaliatory tariff on all goods imported from the U.S.

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Chinese and U.S. flags flutter near The Bund, before U.S. trade delegation meet their Chinese counterparts for talks in Shanghai, China July 30, 2019.

Aly Song | Reuters

China’s finance ministry on Friday said it will impose a 34% tariff on all goods imported from the U.S. starting on April 10, following duties imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration earlier this week.

“China urges the United States to immediately cancel its unilateral tariff measures and resolve trade differences through consultation in an equal, respectful and mutually beneficial manner,” the ministry said, according to a Google translation.

It further criticized Washington’s decision to impose 34% of additional reciprocal levies on China — bringing total U.S. tariffs against the country to 54% — as “inconsistent with international trade rules” and “seriously” undermining Chinese interests, as well as endangering “global economic development and the stability of the production and supply chain,” according to a Google-translated report from Chinese state news outlet Xinhua.

Separately, China also added 11 U.S. firms to the “unreliable entities list” that the Beijing administration says have violated market rules or contractual commitments. China’s ministry of commerce also added 16 U.S. entities to its export control list and said it would implement export controls on seven types of rare-earth related items, including samarium, gadolinium and terbium.

CNBC has reached out to the White House for comment.

Beijing, which also entertained a tenuous trade relationship with Washington under Trump’s first term, had warned that it would take “resolute counter-measures” to safeguard its own interests after the White House disclosed its latest sweeping tariffs on Wednesday.

Other U.S. trading partners had held off from announcing retaliatory tariffs amid hopes of further negotiations, with the European Union nevertheless voicing a readiness to respond.

The mutual U.S.-China levies are set to impact a trade relationship worth $582.4 billion in goods in 2024, according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

Analysts expect the U.S.’ protectionist trade policies to steer China toward other trading partners and see it implement further stimulus measures in an effort to galvanize the economy. China has been battling a property crisis and weak consumer and business sentiment since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic.

China’s retaliatory tariffs announced Friday exacerbated declines in global markets which had already been thrust into turmoil by fears of inflationary, recessionary and global economic growth risks following the White House’s tariffs.

Mohamed Aly El-Erian, chief economic advisor for Allianz SE. 

El-Erian says U.S. recession risks are now ‘uncomfortably high’

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Economics

Donald Trump is attacking what made American universities great

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The conservative counter-revolution began with a secret memo, at least as the tale is often told on America’s political left, with the mix of fear and envy characteristic of the conspiracy-minded. In the summer of 1971 Lewis Powell was an eminent corporate lawyer, soon to be nominated and confirmed for the Supreme Court, when he drafted a confidential proposal for the US Chamber of Commerce. Powell laid out a costly, co-ordinated, years-long programme to counter the left’s influence in the media, the courts, the boardroom and, above all, universities. “There is reason to believe that the campus is the single most dynamic source” of an intensifying assault on free enterprise, he warned.

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Economics

How Donald Trump is shaping other countries’ politics

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He is boosting the centre and centre-left and delighting the hard right

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