I believe the primary functional reason for it was what a lawyer mentioned to me years ago in an offhanded comment. A normie, BTW, but a sharp one, who thought the case was as it was presented.

He said, "You know, before the OJ case, if there was a domestic dispute the police would try to get everyone to calm down, to keep the peace, to work it out. After OJ, they were only there to haul someone off to jail. Didn't matter who. They'd take the man over the woman, the parent over the child, who called the cops over who just wanted it to end." Given recent trends in the state of "policing", it makes total sense, doesn't it?

Another foundation motivation behind any of these hoaxes is that each one divorces us farther from reality, including our sense of what it is, our skill in detecting it, and even our desire to do so. Keep your radar on for it and you'll start to hear how little most people care about reality any more.

The problem with attributing any event to a distraction is that there's usually no effective way to prove it out. If I was one of "Them", I'd pay people to go around saying everything was a distraction from everything else. It's funny because over the last few years on r/conspiracy, there is so much of exactly that... lol