Lee Smith interviews Roger L. Simon in The Weekly Standard on his new book I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already, political nostalgia, and the cultural moment that started his turn from the Left:

You devote some attention here to one of the key cultural moments of the 1990s, the trial of O.J. Simpson. How did this shape your political views?

The O.J. trial was the beginning of the end for my leftism, although I didn’t know it at the time. What disturbed me, as a former civil rights worker, were the depths of black racism the trial revealed. I wasn’t naïve. But I hadn’t realized, or accepted, that this reverse racism had gone so far as to control the results of a murder trial, especially when the obviously guilty defendant, Simpson, had lived to a large extent as a white man. What was going on? Why were the lawyers so gleefully participating in this desecration of justice? Looking back, I could say the O.J. trial prepared the ground for my ideological change after 9/11.

Read the full interview at The Weekly Standard.

For more from Roger L. Simon read I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already.