Latest / The Nation Podcasts / Rebecca Solnit on No Kings—Plus, Reforming the LAPD after Rodney King | Start Making Sense

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Rebecca Solnit on No Kings—Plus, Reforming the LAPD after Rodney King | Start Making Sense · The Nation Podcasts

0:08
[SPEAKER_03]: From the nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense.
0:11
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm John Reiner, later in the show, the fight to control the L.A. Police.
0:16
[SPEAKER_03]: A decades-long effort that culminated in 1992 after the Rodney King riots.
0:23
[SPEAKER_03]: When longtime police chief Daryl Gates was finally forced out, Danny Goldberg will explain his new book is Liberals With Attitude.
0:32
[SPEAKER_03]: But first, no King's Day last Saturday, October 18th, was the largest peaceful protest in American history.
0:41
[SPEAKER_03]: Rebecca Solmet will comment in a minute.
0:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Saturday was no king's day in America.
0:49
[SPEAKER_03]: Something like 7 million people joined more than 2700 events to protest Trump's attacks on democracy.
0:57
[SPEAKER_03]: For comment we turned to Rebecca Solnip.
1:00
[SPEAKER_03]: She's a writer and activist who's written more than 25 books including men explain things to me.
1:06
[SPEAKER_03]: or Will's roses and hope in the dark that one changed my life.
1:12
[SPEAKER_03]: She's a columnist for the Guardian US edition.
1:14
[SPEAKER_03]: She writes for the nation and you can read her regularly at Meditations in an emergency dot com.
1:21
[SPEAKER_03]: Rebecca, welcome back.
1:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Always a pleasure, John.
1:24
[SPEAKER_03]: Seven million people at No Kings Day on Saturday, and it was entirely peaceful, hardly a single arrest at any of the events anywhere in America.
1:34
[SPEAKER_03]: The No Kings protest in my neighborhood in LA was really happy fun.
1:40
[SPEAKER_03]: People were excited to see each other, see how many people showed up.
1:44
[SPEAKER_03]: It was a wonderful day here in West LA.
1:47
[SPEAKER_03]: How was it where you were?
1:48
[SPEAKER_01]: I was in San Francisco and I think it might be the biggest march I've ever seen.
1:52
[SPEAKER_01]: I got off the bar train, couldn't get into the crowd was too big and too dense to penetrate.
2:00
[SPEAKER_01]: So I marched at the beginning, got to the rally site about a mile and a half away, pretty early.
2:06
[SPEAKER_01]: The march continued for two hours because there were so many people
2:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Two things that I think are really great are happening in how people are resisting the Trump administration and this rising fascism.
2:29
[SPEAKER_01]: One of them is that they're really representing themselves as kind of, you know, Mr. and Mrs. American, all the ships at sea as really mainstream.
2:38
[SPEAKER_01]: The reclaiming patriotism.
2:40
[SPEAKER_01]: I saw a woman with a sign that said, this is what a patriot looks like with arrows going in all directions, lots of American flags, constitution, refusing what the right has done pretty successfully for years to let them claim it on the flag and patriots and
2:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Just to footnote to that, thanks to the Portland inflatable where it cost him wearing protesters.
3:05
[SPEAKER_01]: We've also reclaimed frogs from whitebirds, the followers of Nick Fuentes, who had peepy the frog as a right-wing meme.
3:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Frogs are now squarely indivisible resistance.
3:17
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd know that amphibian did not belong with those fascists.
3:22
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I'm not just of the massive turnout, but of the massive scale of organizing.
3:29
[SPEAKER_03]: 2700 events means that teams of organizers work in 2,700 different places.
3:36
[SPEAKER_03]: And this takes energy and commitment and also training and planning the indivisible group and its allies who call this event put a lot of work into training organizers and monitors, not only in how to recruit,
3:50
[SPEAKER_03]: people for a big event but in dealing with potential problems and their big emphasis is on non-violence and de-escalation.
3:58
[SPEAKER_03]: 2700 events that's a lot of trained organizers and you know our friends it indivisible say
4:06
[SPEAKER_03]: once people take the invisible training they this is not a one off they they know how to do it now and they're going to keep doing it.
4:15
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure you agree that the most exciting thing isn't just the numbers isn't just how huge it was in New York and LA in San Francisco in Chicago and Seattle and so forth.
4:25
[SPEAKER_01]: It's said that it wasn't all these little towns where 40 people showed up in a town of population 140 because you know it's the county seat.
4:35
[SPEAKER_01]: And something that I could channel with in the crowd counting consortium just reported on Thursday, their very careful data shows that there is far more protests on anti-Trump activity in red counties that voted for Trump than during his first term.
4:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And that just a scale, the number of protests is way way higher than it was in 2017.
5:01
[SPEAKER_01]: His first year of his first term,
5:03
[SPEAKER_01]: They are making so many enemies, and some things got to give.
5:08
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know how I don't know when, but it's a wild, wild moment.
5:13
[SPEAKER_03]: Of course, the Republicans, in this case led by House Speaker Mike Johnson, spent the week saying that no kings would be a day when the pro-Hamas hate America crowd would gather.
5:26
[SPEAKER_03]: the group they call the terrorist wing of the democratic party.
5:30
[SPEAKER_03]: I think they're talking about us.
5:32
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, Aaron Blake at the CNN point about this is a weird strategy because what they're saying is so obviously untrue, you know, these weren't the first no kings rallies after all.
5:43
[SPEAKER_03]: They were
5:43
[SPEAKER_03]: held back in June at 2,000 places, and it was all very normal looking ordinary Americans gathering happily, and obviously nobody was intimidated or persuaded by these attacks coming from Trump and his people.
6:01
[SPEAKER_03]: So why do you think they're working so hard to portray us as violent weirdos who hate America?
6:08
[SPEAKER_01]: An authoritarian is nothing without
6:11
[SPEAKER_01]: a marginalized outsider, other to enemy that poses a terrible threat because that's always the justification for a crackdown, a suspension of rights and liberties and maybe the lot self-militarization, denormalization of society.
6:30
[SPEAKER_01]: And they've been claiming it's immigrants and other claiming it's immigrants in Antifa and now they're claiming that all those nice middle-aged white people I saw marching are Hamas supporting terrorists and that's probably news to all the dentists and accountants and retired school teachers and military veterans who were in those crowds.
6:54
[SPEAKER_01]: On the one hand, I think anybody who's participating who sees it kind of stuff probably gets a little more ferocious in their opposition.
7:03
[SPEAKER_01]: On the other hand, there's a way we've been talking about for nine years and that lies are kind of a show.
7:10
[SPEAKER_01]: They're kind of dominance behavior in a baboon sense.
7:14
[SPEAKER_01]: They're showing us their rumps.
7:16
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, the sense that facts, truth, science, law, history don't contain them that they can, as I always like to say, bully the truth and whatever, you know, it's like
7:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Carl Rove, way back during the Rock War when he was Bush's advisor saying, you know, oh, you're still a member of the reality-based community.
7:37
[SPEAKER_01]: We make our own reality now.
7:40
[SPEAKER_01]: But she didn't work out that well for them in the long term.
7:42
[SPEAKER_01]: But what's really striking to me as I,
7:44
[SPEAKER_01]: continue to watch it get weirder and weirder is you can see it as a sign of strength as I just described.
7:51
[SPEAKER_01]: You can also see it as a sign of weakness.
7:53
[SPEAKER_01]: These are people if they told the truth about the Epstein files about the economy about why Congress has been out of session for most of the last three months about massive corruption, about lack of support.
8:10
[SPEAKER_01]: They're incompetent, they're vicious,
8:13
[SPEAKER_01]: their wildly unpopular.
8:14
[SPEAKER_01]: And so you can see lies as a sign of strength, but you can also see them.
8:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And this has been a real shift for me as a sign of weakness.
8:22
[SPEAKER_01]: They cannot possibly tell the truth about any of those things.
8:26
[SPEAKER_03]: A sign of weakness.
8:27
[SPEAKER_03]: Actually, there was new evidence of that on Saturday when we got a new AP poll showing the current approval ratings of Trump.
8:37
[SPEAKER_03]: It's the worst major poll for Trump since he took office in January 37% approved 61% disapproved.
8:47
[SPEAKER_03]: And if you look at independence, let's leave out the Republicans and the Democrats.
8:51
[SPEAKER_03]: If you look at the independence on specific issues, on immigration, independence,
9:03
[SPEAKER_03]: independence disapprove of Trump 78 to 18 on health care independence disapprove of Trump 79 to 16.
9:15
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's not a case that we are not alone.
9:19
[SPEAKER_03]: The case here is when it comes to disapproving of Trump.
9:22
[SPEAKER_03]: We're in the great majority.
9:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, they're doing great organizing work for us.
9:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Those numbers are really interesting.
9:29
[SPEAKER_01]: I think so many of the problems over the past
9:33
[SPEAKER_01]: few decades at least in this country are from terrible mainstream media coverage that leaves us with an uninformed and misinformed public.
9:43
[SPEAKER_01]: On abortion, on climate action, on immigration, those are really mainstream, centrist, uncontroversial ideas, but the mainstream media keeps representing them as some kind of edgy, marginalized, radical thing, which doesn't help.
10:01
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the beauties of something like no kings is people feel a sense of belonging of membership.
10:06
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not alone.
10:07
[SPEAKER_01]: People share my beliefs and my commitments.
10:10
[SPEAKER_01]: The real world is not the media bubble that we get from the mainstream, which is why alternative media, you know, is such an important part of it all.
10:24
[SPEAKER_01]: And ultimately, I feel like we're watching the dinosaurs of legacy media lumbering into their tar pits and extinctions.
10:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And the truth is, where much better people who want a much better future than the mainstream media will ever tell us is, we are or is possible.
10:42
[SPEAKER_03]: In your new piece at thenation.com, you take up the argument that's coming from some establishment sources that the left is more violent since Trump took office than it has been in the past.
10:58
[SPEAKER_03]: And this is coming not just from Trump's White House and Christie Nettlements, there's
11:09
[SPEAKER_03]: concluded in a recent report, 2025 marks the first time in more than 30 years that left wing terrorist attacks outnumber those from the violent far right.
11:21
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, we thank you for actually looking into this, looking at this report, how many violent left wing events did they identify?
11:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my god, John, are you sitting down?
11:34
[SPEAKER_01]: It's gonna take me one hand to count them.
11:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Five.
11:37
[SPEAKER_01]: It was crazy because it's been played up so much of like, oh, there's this surge of left wing terrorism.
11:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Cause they're not just calling it violence or calling it terrorism.
11:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the claim is that left-wing terrorism outnumbered right-wing terrorism, which was so exciting to somebody on the White House staff that she tweeted this graph where you could see the decades of really high incidences of right-wing violence, and then suddenly it goes way down and they've got these whole five incidents to sight as left-wing, but the truth about those five incidents is the ones I could find were by solo actors
12:16
[SPEAKER_03]: The most prominent one, of course, was the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
12:21
[SPEAKER_03]: The assassin allegedly was Tyler Robinson.
12:25
[SPEAKER_03]: What do we know about Tyler Robinson?
12:29
[SPEAKER_01]: I know only reason he's portrayed as left wing is he didn't like Charlie Kirk and it's a ledge that he had a trans lover and I got to say we know lots of people with lots of sexual desires, lots with lots of political orientations and here's gay Peter Teele on the far right funding JD Vance.
12:48
[SPEAKER_01]: stuff like that.
12:50
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think that proves anything.
12:53
[SPEAKER_01]: What we do know for sure is he grew up in a southern Utah Mormon Republican family.
12:59
[SPEAKER_01]: His dad was a sheriff.
13:01
[SPEAKER_01]: His family was very kind of trigger-happy in that lots of pictures of them with guns.
13:06
[SPEAKER_01]: They taught him to use guns.
13:08
[SPEAKER_01]: The gun he allegedly used, he's still...
13:11
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, very far from being tried and found guilty is said to have been his grandfather's.
13:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, and he's very young, I think he's 22 and so he emerged out of this far right gun culture and the idea that somehow, you know, people do rebel against their families.
13:29
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think when you're 22, the way you were brought up counts for a lot and he was brought up in red, red, red, crimson, Scarlet America.
13:39
[SPEAKER_03]: And one of the other cases that's gotten a lot of attention is the Army veteran who in April broke into the Governor's Mansion in Pennsylvania and set it on fire while Governor Joshua Piro and his family slept.
13:54
[SPEAKER_03]: This person's name is Cody Balmer, where told he was angry about Gaza, what else do we know about the arson attack on the Governor's Mansion in Pennsylvania?
14:06
[SPEAKER_01]: The Gaza thing was only thing mentioned about him in this report, IOS, taking a part when I did some independent research I found out he's a military veteran, which often radicalizes people by trading them to use weapons, giving them PTSD, normalizing kit.
14:24
[SPEAKER_01]: killing you literally have to disinhibit soldiers to make them killers for military, but he also had a history of domestic violence, which is a real marker for other kinds of violence, and which I see as misogynist and authoritarian, you know, as a kind of domain, the authoritarian of the household.
14:42
[SPEAKER_01]: And according to his mother, he has some pretty severe mental health problems.
14:47
[SPEAKER_01]: including bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
14:50
[SPEAKER_01]: There was a fantastic piece in the New York or some years ago that said, when people of schizophrenia and India, the voices they hear in their head tend to tell them to do things like stay up all night cleaning the house.
15:04
[SPEAKER_01]: It's in the United States that the voices, skits of friendics here, and here I want to say, most people with schizophrenia, most people with mental illness are not violent.
15:14
[SPEAKER_01]: But,
15:14
[SPEAKER_01]: People with schizophrenia in the U.S. do hear voices that tell them to commit violence.
15:19
[SPEAKER_01]: What I see with a lot of mental illness and violence is that people, it's like you don't have a strong immune system against what's in the air.
15:28
[SPEAKER_01]: You're easily
15:30
[SPEAKER_01]: launched into kind of an overreaction to whatever is in that misfear that we have to do something about that, these people are dangerous, etc.
15:42
[SPEAKER_01]: We just don't know what that much else about him and the mental illness is like that's not such a left.
15:49
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
15:51
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, he's not a great specimen.
15:52
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm out of these five and then the guy cited Luigi Mangeoni the handsome young fellow who assassinated a health care CEO point blank on the streets of Manhattan and was caught a little bit later.
16:07
[SPEAKER_01]: It's from a wealthy Baltimore family and according to a friend of his he had some right-wing views, he had some left-wing views.
16:14
[SPEAKER_01]: None of the people cited were textbook leftists.
16:18
[SPEAKER_01]: So this whole attempt to build up this big alarming case that somehow the left is much more dangerous, really plays into right-wing stories and really doesn't hold water at all.
16:32
[SPEAKER_03]: Of course, there have been violent left-wing movements.
16:36
[SPEAKER_03]: In my lifetime, we remember the weather underground of the early 70s who they decided.
16:42
[SPEAKER_03]: that the American people were hopeless, no point in trying to organize or convince them and that a small group who engaged in what they've regarded as mostly symbolic violent attacks on official targets was the only way to stop the war in Vietnam.
16:58
[SPEAKER_03]: How did that work out for the Weather Underground?
17:01
[SPEAKER_01]: It worked out terribly, I think a couple people blew themselves up, a few people got life sentences and I'm friends with Mark Rudd who was part of the weather underground he didn't commit violence but he had gone
17:17
[SPEAKER_01]: into that offshoot of SDS because he was so so precise himself about the war.
17:23
[SPEAKER_01]: He's long ago recognized that they were just wrong and mistaken, morally wrong, mistaken that this was a useful way to do anything.
17:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's been a passionate advocate of non-violence.
17:37
[SPEAKER_01]: And something that I don't think people understand well enough is that, yeah, there was a bunch of left-wing violence in the 60s and 70s.
17:47
[SPEAKER_01]: feeling to me as somebody who, with came up a little later, kind of fantasy driven that they were going to be the great guerrilla armies we were seeing in Latin America and Africa and Asia and so forth.
17:59
[SPEAKER_01]: And they never were a cheque of the Viet Cong, whatever it was.
18:03
[SPEAKER_03]: And of course the Viet Cong told them, don't do this.
18:06
[SPEAKER_03]: We went a mass movement with millions of people, not a couple of you guys
18:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, in a way, violence was an experiment tried by the left, it failed, and not only did it fail, but I think one of the most underrepresented things, and the sort of history of the American left, is the profundity of the anti-nuclear
18:32
[SPEAKER_01]: movements embrace of quicker consensus process and feminist kind of equalization of participation, a lot of violence involved charismatic leader dudes and a lot of inequality kind of cultish following and creating a kind of internal democracy, a kind of
18:58
[SPEAKER_01]: It's really part of every movement I've ever participated in in this country and as at global influence and really picking up from the row and Martin Luther King.
19:10
[SPEAKER_01]: But also from Quakers and feminists to build a whole new way of building mass movements, doing direct action, trying to keep everyone safe.
19:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, the media and the right likes to conflate property destruction, with violence against living beings, and they are quite different things.
19:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Property destruction is often done by young hotheads.
19:32
[SPEAKER_01]: It's often untrategic, but, you know, if no humans were harmed in the making of this movie, it's quite different than a mass shooting a terrorist incident.
19:42
[SPEAKER_01]: January 6, 2021.
19:48
[SPEAKER_01]: I am, they were fucking terrorists.
19:50
[SPEAKER_01]: And the fact that that's just kind of yet another thing gone by.
19:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And the Trump administration hides its atrocities behind its atrocities.
20:02
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, its obscenities behind its obscenities, its corruptions behind its corruptions.
20:07
[SPEAKER_01]: The ones this week distract us from the ones last week.
20:12
[SPEAKER_03]: So, no kings.
20:14
[SPEAKER_03]: People join no kings day.
20:16
[SPEAKER_03]: because they want to change the world.
20:19
[SPEAKER_03]: You have some wonderful passage in your new piece in the nation about what it takes to change the world.
20:25
[SPEAKER_01]: To actually change the world, usually takes years to decades and has a lot more to do with collective work to build coalitions, shift public opinion, or past legislation, which happens through stuff like meetings, maybe some lawsuits, maybe some protests and public events.
20:42
[SPEAKER_01]: More meetings definitely some fun raising.
20:46
[SPEAKER_01]: and maybe a few meetings sides that.
20:48
[SPEAKER_01]: I've seen climate and environmental and indigenous and feminist and queer rights victories one after the other for decades, following the underlying shifts in public opinion.
21:00
[SPEAKER_01]: None of it at the point of a gun, all of it from the often tedious crimes exhilarating work of activism of nonviolent activism and organizing.
21:11
[SPEAKER_03]: Rebecca Solnett, she wrote about Trump's claims that the left today is violent and how the left has responded with dancers in frog costumes and mass ukulele renditions of this land as your land.
21:25
[SPEAKER_03]: You can read her piece at the nation.com and you can read her newsletter meditations in an emergency.com.
21:34
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you, Rebecca.
21:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, John.
21:50
[SPEAKER_03]: Now it's time to talk about the fight to control the L.A. Police.
21:54
[SPEAKER_03]: Decades long effort that culminated in 1992 after the Rodney King riots, when longtime police chief Darrell Gates was forced out.
22:05
[SPEAKER_03]: How that happened is a subject of a terrific new book.
22:08
[SPEAKER_03]: It's called Liberals With Attitude,
22:10
[SPEAKER_03]: The author is Danny Goldberg.
22:13
[SPEAKER_03]: He's a political activist and author and a music business guy.
22:16
[SPEAKER_03]: He's written five previous books, including the best seller, serving the servant, remembering Kurt Cobain.
22:23
[SPEAKER_03]: He served on the boards of public citizen and new Jewish narrative.
22:27
[SPEAKER_03]: He was chair of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California.
22:31
[SPEAKER_03]: From 1987 to 1994, which, of course, includes the events in the book.
22:37
[SPEAKER_03]: He's also been personal manager for Kurt Cobain, Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Bonnie Rate, and others.
22:43
[SPEAKER_03]: And he's been president of three major record companies at Lantic Warner Brothers in Mercury.
22:49
[SPEAKER_03]: Danny Goldberg, welcome to the program.
22:51
[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks.
22:52
[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks for having me on.
22:53
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, Darrell Gates was L.A. Chief of Police from 1978 to 1992, 14 years.
23:02
[SPEAKER_03]: You say the first person you wanted to talk to about Darrell Gates was Maxine Waters.
23:08
[SPEAKER_03]: Member of Congress from South L.A. First elected in 1991, what did she say?
23:15
[SPEAKER_00]: black people hated narrow gates.
23:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Maxine Waters called for gates to resign 10 years before the Rodney King beating after a woman named Yula Love was killed by two LAPD officers.
23:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought she's the only person alive.
23:35
[SPEAKER_00]: that was in politics then and still in politics now and you know her career spans the years of both aerogates and Donald Trump.
23:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And she's just still incredibly articulate and funny and brilliant so you know but but but she she remembered those events vividly.
23:54
[SPEAKER_03]: Maxine Waters would have been the first to tell you that the problems with the LAPD did not begin with aerogates.
24:01
[SPEAKER_00]: No, the structural problems starts in the late 1930s, during a period when I guessed there had been a lot of corruption in the city hall, and so at that point the city charter was rewritten to make the LAP the virtually autonomous, and the portion of the charter
24:24
[SPEAKER_00]: that applied to the LAPD was written primarily by William Parker, who was kind of running the equivalent of the policeman's union at the time, and who then becomes chief shortly there after, and is one of the most powerful police chiefs in American history.
24:45
[SPEAKER_00]: He was the mentor of Darryl Gates as a young
24:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Cadet, just out of the police academy, was Parker's driver and he was groomed to be the chief.
24:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And like it, Darrell Gates, his mentee, Parker was a very lentil racist, he wouldn't even say the word Negro.
25:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And when he was in charge, he did not permit black and white officers to share the same police car.
25:13
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, after the 65 Watts riots, he said that Martin Luther King did not speak for the black community and refused to have a meeting with him.
25:25
[SPEAKER_00]: That was Gates's mentor in Gates.
25:27
[SPEAKER_00]: It proudly said it many times and I think in his memoir, he considered himself a clone of Bill Parker.
25:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And in terms of race relations, he was a clone.
25:39
[SPEAKER_03]: So the Rodney King video was first aired on TV in Los Angeles, March 4, 1991, 82 seconds.
25:53
[SPEAKER_03]: which showed for LAPD officers beating an unarmed Rodney King, hitting him 56 times with metal batons, kicking him, while more than 20 other cops watched.
26:05
[SPEAKER_03]: What did L sharpton call that video?
26:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, after George Floyd's murder was captured on video tape in 2020, Sharpton referred to the Rodney King video as the Jackie Robinson of police tapes.
26:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And the reason is because Kim courters had just become
26:25
[SPEAKER_00]: a price at a low enough level that regular citizens could get him and do what we now all do on our phones.
26:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And George Holiday, I think it was a plumber he lived in an apartment building that looked down on the place where King was beaten.
26:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And it happened that the Gulf War hit ended three days earlier.
26:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And CNN had risen to popularity based on 247 coverage of the Gulf
26:51
[SPEAKER_00]: And they didn't have anything to show, so they showed the Rodney King tape dozens and dozens of times.
26:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And within a month there was a poll that showed that more than 70% of the American public and more than 90% of people in LA had seen it.
27:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And 90% of those who did see it thought that the behavior of the police officers was brutal.
27:12
[SPEAKER_03]: And what exactly was Darrell Gates's role in dealing with actions of Ellie's most brutal cops?
27:20
[SPEAKER_03]: Did he approve of their behavior?
27:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you know,
27:24
[SPEAKER_00]: It's impossible to read his mind, but we can look at what he did after the King Beating Mayor Bradley, as Warren Christopher, who is going to become U.S. Secretary of State the Fong Year to have a commission to study racism and brutality on the LAPD.
27:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And at that, Jesse Brewer, who had been the Assistant Chief to...
27:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Gates, and the highest ranking Black LAPD officer ever up until that time, had just retired a few months before the Rodney King Beating, and when he testified that his famous quote was, we know who the bad guys are on the force, we just don't do anything about them.
28:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And he went on to say that there had been, there was, they believed there were around 60 officers, and this is out of 8,000, less than 1%.
28:14
[SPEAKER_00]: but those 60 officers had patterns of racism and brutality that rodhavic on the community, and there was a code of silence that made it very difficult for other officers to turn on them, but even when other officers did want a sanction, or in some cases fire officers for brutality,
28:36
[SPEAKER_00]: The testimony of Brewer was that there are against 100% of the time refused to ever sanction officers for and would overrule his own subordinates.
28:46
[SPEAKER_00]: At the time of the meeting, Gates, who was very sophisticated about politics and about the media, said that he felt that the meeting was an aberration.
28:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And a few weeks later, Jesse Jackson at a rally outside of Parker's Center said the
29:06
[SPEAKER_03]: So when the Rodney King events took place, the mayor Tom Bradley was 74 years old.
29:15
[SPEAKER_03]: He'd been mayor for almost 20 years.
29:17
[SPEAKER_03]: LA's first black mayor, a great triumph for progressive LA when he was first elected in 1973.
29:25
[SPEAKER_03]: But in 1991, the Reverend James Lawson, the LA civil rights leader who had worked with Martin Luther King,
29:32
[SPEAKER_03]: complain publicly that Bradley failed to call for the resignation of Darrell Gates.
29:38
[SPEAKER_03]: What do you think of Tom Bradley's actions in 1991?
29:41
[SPEAKER_00]: He had always been a very eccentric politician.
29:46
[SPEAKER_00]: He was no left-winger.
29:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Him and Maxine Waters often disagreed on issues and often supported different candidates for city council races.
29:54
[SPEAKER_00]: He was very business oriented that had very
29:59
[SPEAKER_00]: a very proud of the Olympics coming to LA in the 80s, and he also was a risk-averse politician, and he knew that Darrell Gates was very popular, and he had hated Darrell Gates for 40 years.
30:14
[SPEAKER_00]: At Tom Bradley started as an LA PD officer himself, and he rose to lieutenant, and then in those days a black man couldn't go any higher in the LA PD, and that's when he answered politics,
30:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And a lot of people in the black community had criticized them over the years for not confronting barrel gates more.
30:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And Bradley said, look, I don't want to start a fight that I can't win.
30:40
[SPEAKER_00]: He was that kind of a politician.
30:42
[SPEAKER_00]: At the time, Lawson criticized him, was right after the Riding King Beating, when the ACLU and one LA politician, former Council Member Mike Wu,
30:50
[SPEAKER_00]: called for Gates's resignation, and Bradley took about six weeks before he called for Gates to step down.
30:57
[SPEAKER_00]: So during that six period, Mike Leaf now is that Berkeley was going to call for Gates's resignation, but Lawson had no way of knowing that when he made that statement.
31:06
[SPEAKER_00]: and Bradley was formulating the strategy that he eventually executed to finally get the city charter change so that the LAPD was more accountable to the rest of the city government and get gates to finally workshop power.
31:22
[SPEAKER_00]: But Bradley was very methodical, careful.
31:25
[SPEAKER_00]: He was considered like a good poker player.
31:28
[SPEAKER_00]: You could never tell what he was thinking by looking at him.
31:30
[SPEAKER_00]: But he was brilliant.
31:33
[SPEAKER_00]: He put together the coalition when he was elected mayor in 73.
31:36
[SPEAKER_00]: The black population was 18%.
31:38
[SPEAKER_00]: The other black mayors in America that had been elected than Newark and Cleveland.
31:43
[SPEAKER_00]: The black proportion was double that in those cities.
31:46
[SPEAKER_00]: So he had to put together a multiracial coalition kind of like what Barack Obama had to do.
31:52
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, a quarter of a century later when he was elected president and, you know, he was methodical and he took his time, but he did rise to the occasion and I'm pretty sure if Reverend Lawson were still alive, he would acknowledge that because the result was what Lawson and the ACLU and Maxine Waters wanted, but Bradley did it in his own way.
32:12
[SPEAKER_00]: and he did it in a way that had teeth and was going to stick and not just be therapeutic virtue signaling, but he actually wanted to get the change accomplished.
32:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think Bradley's a role model for putting together a coalition that was successful on law enforcement and race, very rare accomplishment in America.
32:32
[SPEAKER_03]: The trial of the COPS who beat Rod McKing ended on April 29, 1992, the jury deliberated for seven days and then acquitted all four officers.
32:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Then, of course, the riots began, which lasted for six days resulted in widespread destruction, 63 deaths, thousands of injuries, a billion dollars worth of damage in destruction.
32:56
[SPEAKER_03]: The first afternoon,
32:58
[SPEAKER_03]: A truck driver named Reginald Denny, who was white, was dragged from his truck in South L.A., the corner of Florence and Normandy, nearly beaten to death by four black men.
33:10
[SPEAKER_03]: The whole thing was broadcast live on TV from a news helicopter.
33:14
[SPEAKER_03]: The L.A.P.D.
33:15
[SPEAKER_03]: did nothing to help.
33:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Reginald Denny.
33:19
[SPEAKER_03]: He was eventually rescued by a group of black residents.
33:21
[SPEAKER_03]: It was one of the most unforgettable episodes of the riots You argue in your book that Darrell Gates failure to send the LAPD
33:30
[SPEAKER_03]: to Florence and Normandy to rescue original Denny for hours.
33:35
[SPEAKER_03]: And the way he held back the police response after the riots began, you argue that was intentional, that Gates's message was, you don't like the LAPD, see how you like L.A. without the L.A. PD.
33:51
[SPEAKER_03]: But please explain why you think it was intentional.
34:01
[SPEAKER_00]: When the riots started, he drove to Brentwood, which was an hour or so, depending on traffic, to a fundraiser, to oppose the passage of the ballot initiative that would create term limits that would require gates to leave.
34:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Even after coming back from the fundraiser, he was completely disengaged when he had a reputation for his previous 13 years of running the department as being a control freak who was hands on about everything.
34:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Gates gave different explanations for it at different times.
34:33
[SPEAKER_00]: At one point, he said that he was depressed because his son, who was a drug addict, had Odin and was in the hospital, but Gates hadn't really spoken to his son much the last few years.
34:45
[SPEAKER_00]: He believed that was a tough love approach.
34:47
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not second guessing him as a father, but I find that highly dubious that this would have interfered with him performing his duties.
34:56
[SPEAKER_00]: So my speculation is that Gates may have wanted the riot to be as bad as possible because he may have felt it would endure to him politically.
35:04
[SPEAKER_00]: The Charter Amendment, which was called Charter Amendment F, was running ahead in the polls seven or eight points.
35:11
[SPEAKER_00]: It looked like it was going to pass.
35:12
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1965, Gates was in charge of the response to the Watts riot.
35:17
[SPEAKER_00]: He was then a commander on the LAPD, and was a purely aware of the effect that riot had 25 years earlier on the politics of L.A. And then, in the 60s, the popularity of the LAPD and its chief went up.
35:33
[SPEAKER_00]: after the ride for the kind of reasons that you're suggesting people think because people feel itchy that's all that's protecting us from violence and chaos we better support the status quo of course no one can read his mind and he passed away some years ago but but that's my speculation in the book yes that that he
35:51
[SPEAKER_00]: He, he, it was a Hail Mary pass hoping that it would change the political dynamic in the city.
35:56
[SPEAKER_00]: It ended up having the opposite result and charter F passed by a wider margin than it would have were not for the right, but I don't see how Gates could have anticipated that.
36:05
[SPEAKER_00]: He would have probably been looking at the sixties and thinking maybe history would repeat itself and endure to his benefit.
36:12
[SPEAKER_03]: the outcome of all this was not just getting rid of the chief of police, it was restructuring the LAPD to make it less independent to limit the police chief's term to two five-year terms to make the police department subject to the city council.
36:31
[SPEAKER_03]: expanding civilian power to discipline officers accused of misconduct, the main lesson of the victory in reforming the LAPD, you write, is cooperation between the political left and center is required to overcome white grievance and unaccountable power, close code.
36:51
[SPEAKER_03]: Previously, you said you give Bradley a lot of credit for that.
36:55
[SPEAKER_03]: Tell us a little more about how that cooperation came about from your position in the ACL
37:00
[SPEAKER_00]: He definitely made some moves that were explicitly to create messages both to the left and the center.
37:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Why the left because that's the base, that's the activist support, that's the black community, that's what keeps the story alive.
37:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Typically when there are these problems, public interest fades after a few weeks, but people are worried about crime 365 days a year.
37:27
[SPEAKER_00]: the waiting game has often served the purposes of police officers and officials who were resistant to change.
37:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And so Bradley puts the family shine down on the police commission.
37:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The shine down was a left-wing philanthropist.
37:42
[SPEAKER_00]: He was my mentor, so I do eye-lice him, but he had
37:47
[SPEAKER_00]: He had run the ACLU board for 10 years, was his idea that I'd take the role that he used to have as a chair.
37:53
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a, he had married Betty Warner, who was the ares to the Warner Brothers fortune, and was one of the leading left of center.
37:59
[SPEAKER_00]: The philanthropist along with Norman Lear, his best friend in the city.
38:04
[SPEAKER_00]: and that was a shock to people because he had no background in city government and everyone knew his job was to confront derogates and to keep beating the drum on the moral argument.
38:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The same week Bradley appointed Warren Christopher, who was the ultimate insider Democratic party insider.
38:23
[SPEAKER_00]: He had been assistant secretary of state under President Carter.
38:26
[SPEAKER_00]: He was managing Barnard O'Melky and Myers, which was one of the biggest, if not the biggest corporate law firm in Los Angeles.
38:34
[SPEAKER_00]: He had very different, very much of a centrist, big Bill Clinton supporter and he becomes Clinton Secretary of State.
38:42
[SPEAKER_00]: He has Richard Reardon.
38:43
[SPEAKER_00]: to be a back channel to a gates and to a John Ferraro who was gates his biggest supporter on the city council and who had the title of president of the city council.
38:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Reardon was then kind of a well-known Republican fundraiser, conservative Republican fundraiser.
38:58
[SPEAKER_00]: He ends up succeeding Bradley his mayor and Reardon had been a big supporter of the arrow gates after the Rodney King beating and then a couple of months later he did a 180.
39:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Ramon Ripps then who's the executive director of the ACLU called me and asked me to meet with Reardon because he wanted to create his own back channel relationship with the ACLU.
39:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And it shows Bradley's ability to get people with very divergent ideologies to work together on a narrow-focused issue.
39:27
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not like the ACLU agreed with him on everything or that the Maxine Waters agreed with Warren Christopher on most things, but they understood the
39:38
[SPEAKER_00]: that they put aside their other disagreements and work together against the conservative racist rights that supported gates.
39:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's a good role model for today because the bitterness between the center and the left can be just as bitter as between either of them and the right.
39:57
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we don't have to go through it.
39:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I'm doing this from New York City where Hakim Jeffries, the,
40:05
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, senior Democrat in the House and a resident of Brooklyn, New York has not endorsed the Democratic nomination for mayor.
40:11
[SPEAKER_00]: We heard about that.
40:13
[SPEAKER_03]: That is not what Tom Bradley would have done.
40:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Tom Bradley would have disagreed with her on Montgomery when every fellow like it, but he would have understood this is our candidate.
40:18
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, and we have to be together or else Donald Trump controls the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the
40:28
[SPEAKER_00]: the New York City government.
40:30
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think Bradley really was a role model about how to create those kinds of coalitions and that's what kind of echoes to me today.
40:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The psychology of meeting to get sort of moderate whites to feel safe enough that they can be in favor of racial justice requires a certain kind of political genius that I do think a Tom Bradley had.
40:53
[SPEAKER_03]: Danny Goldberg, his new book about reforming the LAPD is titled Liberals With Attitude.
41:00
[SPEAKER_03]: Danny, thanks for talking with us today.
41:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks so much, Sean.
41:13
[SPEAKER_03]: You've been listening to Start Making Sense, a podcast from The Nation magazine.
41:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Renee Reynolds is our associate producer, Alan Minsky is our producer, Jack Merkinson is executive producer.
41:26
[SPEAKER_03]: Baskar Sunkara is president of The Nation, Katrina Vandenhuvul is editor and publisher of The Nation.
41:33
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41:37
[SPEAKER_03]: You can find out more about StartMakingSense at thenation.com and you can subscribe to StartMakingSense on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
41:49
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm John Weener.
41:50
[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks for listening.