Sam Yorty (with Noah Suarez-Sikes)

Air Yordy, you may begin your opening statement now.

Los Angeles.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Gods and No Mayors.

I am November Kelly, the mayor of this episode, cribbing this opening from the only other podcast that I regularly open, Kill James Fond, joined as always by my colleagues, Deputy Mayor Matthew Lebchansky and Deputy Mayor Riley Quinn.

Hi.

Hi.

And we have a guest.

Guest, our senior Los Angeles or possibly Southern California correspondent, depending on how much credit you want to give yourself.

Noah Suero-Sykes is here.

Noah, how's it going?

Well, that was a really bad time to take a bite of a pastry, but hi.

I waited until I could see you doing it on camera specifically.

to like that's why i had the whole like you know uh parole ahead of time was to make sure that i could snipe you with noah wants so bad to do a breakfast update that he's like waving it in front of the camera camera Noah is the entire uh Southern California uh correspondent that means he's got to learn about Orange County he's got to learn about San Diego and talk about all their bears oh my brother in Christ if you don't think that I have to know about I quite literally what I can't say the name of the town so bleep it out but I was quite literally in

the other day in Orange County dealing with their regulations for my job so I am ready for Southern California Orange County, Imperial County.

You know, it could go up to Ventura County.

We could do all sorts of divide, right?

We have, we have you in, you in Southern California.

We have Shanti in Northern California.

We have the whole state sewn up.

What about the Central Valley?

We have the whole state that matters.

Covering the mayor of Visalia, California, a town I rolled out from watching that movie, that horrible movie.

How far does Shanti's mandate Northern California extend?

Does it go up to like Eureka?

Or what are we talking about here?

i think you you two can like hash that out in your own time or turf this is one of those things where like the mandates of noah and shanti extend as far as their bannerman will respond to them right

yeah how many satraps you working with yeah noah are you do you command the loyalties of the of the marcher lords of napa valley there's there's some like brutal brutal frontier violence up there in azusa it's crazy there were some reprisals um we burnt some vineyards they burnt some of our vineyards.

Natma Valley is in chaos, a sort of Three Kingdoms era.

So this is the you, you were the, you were the Antifa who were starting all of those fires, I see.

Gotcha.

Legally, no.

I was in Southern California doing flower wars against my,

against like, like, like, I don't know, like Takuima or whatever.

Yeah.

You know?

So when I said I was the mayor of this episode, I was giving myself a lot of credit, right?

Because I am once again unwell, unwell.

And Noah has heroically stepped in to do most of the legwork to talk about our first mayor of Los Angeles, or as he pronounced it, Los Angeles.

Insanely wrong.

Never heard anyone call it that before.

Sam Yorty.

It's Yorton time.

Yorty, it's your birthday.

Yeah.

Yorty got some apple bottom cheese.

Oh my God.

Sam Yorty, the mayor is so nice.

They named him twice.

Yeah, and Sam Yorti is like a fascinating guy.

I'm indebted to both Noah and also a guy on Twitter called

QuoProQuid, who, you know, helps develop the TNO mod for Hearts of Iron, because

similar obsession with Sam Yorty.

And this is, he is a guy.

He is absolutely a guy.

And I have brought you a guy.

to dissect here today.

He is in many ways, what if Richard Nixon had been from California?

Or like, you know,

a shocking, unthinkable alternate history where Richard Nixon is from California.

Is your Belinda, California, the longest thread in the history of the no gods, no mayors forums.

Is that in yours or Shanty's territory?

It's mine.

Can I tell you a funny Nixon connection?

Is that Yordi was at 1970 Bohemian Grove with Ehrlichman?

That's so funny.

Was this the one that Nixon called the homophobic slur on the tape about having been to the lab?

So we have direct evidence that this is this is the first mayor we've done that we have evidence of Richard Nixon calling him the F-slur.

It's crazy.

There's got to be

there's got to be Ed Koch,

Richard Nixon calling him the F-slur somewhere, right?

It's got to be.

Oh, almost certainly.

Alderman, this

Yordy fell.

Have you seen him?

We're concerned that the Soviets may develop a Yorty mobile to take the Fulbright app.

Yorty.

An armored Yordi Mobile.

We can't give them the Yaugi Mobile this early.

The Yaughty Mobile is a trailer for future attractions.

He's got these Cambodian elephants.

Okay.

Yorty.

Haldeman.

Haldeman, what do we do we know about the elephant audible?

Before we talk about the Yaugi Mobile, before we give them that Yaugi Mobile heat, it's time for municipal updates.

For the first item of municipal update, a listener has written in to my Tumblr Ask Box of all things.

And I'm going to read this message verbatim because it's a fine example of American frontier governance.

So No Gods, No Mares has reminded me of the time on July the 4th, 1882

where two of my county's commissioners and another guy squared off against the other commissioner and the sheriff and the undersheriff.

All three commissioners ended up shot dead and the sheriff and undersheriff later shot themselves, although that's been contested.

The source of the commissioners disagreement was who got to be Republican delegate to the state convention and it boiled over because the two commissioners held a secret meeting on the 4th of July to change the location of the county seat.

The county judge who was fishing on the other side of the lake from all the shooting thought it was fireworks until someone showed up and said all the county commissioners were dead.

Is this one of the stories from the beginning of Magnolia?

I did some checking into this.

I believe it's called Grand Lake, Colorado.

Yeah, back in the day, back in the 1880s, you could just like hang out by a fence line with your like cloth mask and a revolver and try and like shoot three county commissioners.

And that's what happened.

The funniest thing is that, though, that like it was so they could be delegates to the Republican Party in the 1880s.

Like, why do you like love tariffs?

We must oppose tariffs.

Yeah, this motherfucker is trying to get me to stop.

This guy, this guy is going to try to stop me from seeing William McKinley.

Obviously, this is a killing matter.

I got to see Big Bill.

You got to see Bill Bill.

You got to see that Big Bill at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo.

If I see Big Bill, I will give him my demo wax cylinder

of what will become the genre that informs hello, my baby, hello, my honey, hello, my red.

Come down.

cow.

Yes.

And he is going to make it like,

I will be the new John Phillips Sousa if I am able to just get a hand on McKinley.

It's worth shedding blood.

Having a kind of a parasocial relationship with Big Bill McKinley.

Handing Big Bill McKinley.

William McKinley never replied to my tweets, and now I'm the silver standard guy.

Handing Big Bill McKinley my wax record on which I recorded a ragtime number called Fight Song,

which he's going to be playing at all of his campaign events

second second item of municipal update and this comes by way of a journalist called Matthew Castle a Jewish insider new

Andrew Cuomo is expected to launch a mayoral bid

you know honestly you could have just like put this show into into like you know Claude or Chad GPT or whatever and then just said based on what based on the transcripts of the following podcast is Andrew Cuomo going to try to become a mayor?

And then it would have said yes.

We timed this so perfectly.

First episode drops as Eric Adams gets arrested.

And now, as we're like into the first season, guess who's back but Andrew Cuomo?

Alex Press predicted this as much on our episode with her.

I'll tell you what we've done.

We did mayor of the week for the first few weeks.

And then, then, crucially, we have the season's big bad mayor who's going to be like the main arc

of the season.

It's happening, said one of the people, noting that Cuomo's team is setting up an IE operation, not sure what that is, while reaching out to Orthodox Jewish leaders.

So basically, that's like a pack, but municipally.

Okay.

Cuomo's remarks on Sunday at a Jewish event in Manhattan, where he spoke about his support for Israel and opposition to anti-Semitism in the worst voice ever, indicated to some observers that he is positioning himself for a campaign.

He's gearing up, said one Jewish lady.

Italian?

I don't understand this.

When has that ever stopped anyone from being a philosopher?

Especially Italians.

I mean, yeah, I mean, he's chasing the Republicans in the city, which are, you know, the Orthodox Jews.

It's one component of them.

Still, other people informed of Cuomo's plans said he might not enter the race unless Eric Adams resigns or chooses not to run.

Which he won't.

He won't do either of those two things.

Yeah.

He polls best in the black community and doesn't want to be seen as pushing the mayor out, said another Jewish leader.

One Jewish ally of Cuomo said a number of Jewish leaders, by the way, again, I note this is from Jewish Insider, which is why the Jewish angle on this.

It's not just like some insane beef that every paragraph is like.

And by the way, one Jewish leader mentioned.

One Jewish ally of Cuomo said a number of Jewish leaders

are privately urging him to run in the primary,

driven by mounting fears that some candidates have voiced anti-Israel rhetoric or aligned with critics of Israel and could gain momentum.

And then

we get hit with the fucking hammer because the next paragraph, Representative Richie Torres has also been approached about mounting a mayoral band.

I think they should both get to be like Vivek and Elon.

Like they should get the Department of Combating Anti-Semitism.

Oh, they should be co-consoles?

Yeah, they should.

No, they should, they should be like Vivek and Elon.

They should be given like a kind of busy box by whoever gets to be the next New York mayor and be the co-heads.

Well, the thing is, Richie Torres might not want it because he might be governor of New York.

Yeah.

And I'm imagining that Torres governor, Cuomo mayor, what New York City looks like in the middle of the year.

In a coffin from leaping from the top of a building.

I literally, I read that.

I read that.

And in its entirety, perfectly clearly in my head, I heard the thought about killing myself dot wav drop.

Are we familiar with this German, this modern German obsession with pretending to be Jewish?

And I don't mean that in any kind of like, you know, sort of identity way.

What I mean is there was a story published about a Jewish guy who like gets invited to a Seder in Germany.

and like finds to his horror the kind of punchline of this story, and this is true as I understand it, as it was reported, reported, is that no one else there is Jewish.

They just like doing the things.

That's going to be New York City under Andrew Cuomo.

Every Italian guy is going to be, he's going to be blowing a Shafar for no reason at random intervals instead of car horns.

That's what I'm saying.

Everyone in New York is already so like minorly culturally Jewish.

But for them to like to start doing the annoying parts, like the religion things, is going to be unbearable for me personally.

No, no.

governor richie tores is is like walking towards you shaking a citron like it's it's gonna happen yeah he's got he's got he's got to fill it and he's like waving it at me like he's gonna he's gonna lasso me like what

i'm sorry every time you say governor richie torres governor richie tores yeah now what's

i i have to apologize because it is my understanding that richie torres is puerto rican So I'm sorry on behalf of my people to everybody who has to exist within issues.

An official Lo Siento.

My sort of mark of dystopian future is that, you know, the year is like 2077 or something, and it's, you know, the Governor Richie Torres Memorial Garbage Dump or whatever.

Yeah, that's what they've, they've, Long Island City is an experiment that is now over.

It is now the Governor Richie Torres Memorial Garbage Dump.

It was the last bit of the city to be incorporated officially.

So it'll be the first one out.

That makes a lot of sense to me.

Yeah, that's right.

All I can say is

we live in hell, and hell is having a surprising amount of like influence in municipal politics specifically since we started the municipal politics.

Just imagine a little plaque that says like pandemonium, Richie Torres, mayor.

Okay, but also just one more thing about Richie Torres that I just want to highlight is that, again, it is my understanding that he has gone on podcasts to complain about how single he is.

Because nobody wants to date him because he's a cell governor.

So I just want to say thank you to the people of New York for ensuring that Richie Torres remains perpetually single

and allowing him to keep this up.

Yeah, going on a podcast.

We can keep this up.

It's Liz Estrada with one guy.

Yeah, going on a podcast to complain about being single is such loser shit.

It's not cool stuff like going on a podcast to get yelled at by two trans women into transitioning.

That's cool.

That's Riley.

That's right.

Hey, wait a minute.

No, it's okay.

It was me earlier.

It was me earlier.

Sorry, you said this was a lore episode.

So we got to talk about that.

This was all I had for municipal updates.

Beautiful.

Cowboys shooting each other, Richie Torre as governor.

Well, just a reminder that Zoran is running in New York City.

We've talked about Zoron, my man.

Zoran is, yeah, I like his videos.

He's a good candidate.

I will say the font.

Every candidate who wants to replicate AOC thinks they have to have a font.

Unfortunately, his looks like it came off the side of a canal boat.

His font is good, in fact.

You're wrong.

I agree with Maddie.

His font is good.

His font is cool.

Font is cool.

Thumbs down on the font, but that was municipal update.

It is now time to go back to the yort.

I like when Sam Yorton

looked directly at the camera and said, it's Yorton time.

And then he just yorted everywhere.

In the notes here, it does say it's Yorton Tim.

That's like a kind of minor Canadian

sort of cowboy, you know?

The terror of Saskatchewan, Yort and Tim.

Why did they call him that?

Impossible to say.

There's a really good Stan Rogers song about Yort and Tim.

So, Sam Yort

from Lincoln, Nebraska.

Awful place.

Yeah, terrible, terrible childhood.

Kept the accent, which is wherefore you get Los Angeles.

I've never heard anyone else pronounce Los Angeles that wrong, right?

I'm used to like, there's two ways of pronouncing it.

One of them right, one of them wrong.

Los Angeles, the way everyone who, you know, lives there pronounces it, or Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California.

This guy fully just like removes a syllable.

And I can only assume it's due to his kind of like Dust Bowl corn husker upbringing.

Doesn't Sam Elliott in the Big Lebaski say it that way?

Los Angeles.

He might.

He says Los Angeles County.

Yeah, it's just like how British people say it uh los angeles

los angeles yeah los angeles which i often say jokingly i have never i've lived here for a decade i have never heard a single goddamn person say los angeles have you considered los angles you've lived there in the wrong decade to hear it oh yeah that's true well apparently this used to be common i lived there one decade from 1920 to 1930

Yeah, this is how people used to say it, like all across the

country, apparently, which makes me it it it gives me chills like imagine you're just walking down the street and somebody says welcome to los angles we should we should start pronouncing more cities differently as a bit you know just to with our chicago descendants if we have any yeah chickago you know the great city of chicago awful

uh-huh also there's only one real way to pronounce it which is los angeles

Los Angeles.

See.

So Irish family, this will come back later.

I'm not sure where the name yorty comes from but it it is his it is given grandfather was a yachter i believe made yort yeah it's it's like it refers to a guy who yorted often you know it's actually the same root as yort and tim

that he yorted everywhere yeah and i know you read his biography that he had commissioned him his biography uh and again uh thanking thanking uh uh tno developer QuoProQuid for sending me all 264 photocopied pages of his commissioned biography, which I read on the train on the way to work on my phone, which is incredibly embarrassing.

But so he

claims that he was inspired to be in politics by Woodrow Wilson.

And that makes sense considering that Woodrow Wilson hosted a screening of Birth of a Nation at the White House and was probably one of the most important things.

I was inspired by the insanely racist president.

It's being like, I was inspired by David Duke to write for a while.

Let's do more specific November.

The president is like the mayor of America.

Explaining the president to an American.

Yeah, I mean, there's obviously there's stuff that Americans have in common, like hating the gun that killed JFK, but explaining niche knowledge, like what the president is.

I'd say that's not even explaining the president to American.

That's explaining the president to someone who lives in a locality or like a municipality imagine the mayor of a whole

we need to start teaching them about the president it's like you know all about your mayor check out the president he's like the mayor of the mayors yeah going to irvine and being like yo you heard about this president guy going to your malinda yeah he's like the capo de

tuti capi of all the mayors kind of in a way

Well, and so, Maddie, remember that bit that you did a couple episodes ago about the electing a mayor based on their musical instrument?

Oh, yeah.

Sure.

Yeah.

So, according to Yorty's own commissioned biography, he learned to play the banjo and had a small dance orchestra band called Sam Yorty's Meladors.

I love to go and listen to Sam Yorty's Meladors play like a barn dance in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Name five albums of the Sam Yorty's Meladors.

Every single album is titled a different racist song.

Did he he play Bluegrass or Clawhammer?

Do you know?

Trying to build an office building in 1960s Los Angeles, just being like, oh, yeah, I love Sam Yorty's Meladores.

They're actually like

my favorite band.

Please give me a fire permit.

Maddie, I have an answer to that, which is that he played Clawhammer because Bluegrass hadn't been invented yet.

That's a great

answer.

So he played at a roadhouse called the Chicken Little Inn.

Good.

And got a regular gig there.

He played at a county fair.

He played songs like,

you're all going to recognize these bangers.

If you knew Susie,

Linger a While.

Oh, yeah.

That guy killed those two other guys so we could go give a demo of Linger a While to President McKinley.

Yeah.

Yeah, pretty much.

He also had an infatuation with William Jennings Bryan of Scopes Monkey Trial fame.

So again, we are.

What a weird fucking kid.

Well, okay, so the thing is like,

what do you, that's a Wes Anderson throwaway character is like

usually played by Owen Wilson, has a banjo band called the Meladors, and is a real thing for William Jennings Bryan.

Yeah, this, this, all of these characteristics would be introduced by Wes Anderson in the form of like a brief montage.

Yes, yeah,

and I would pay $25 to get AMC A-list to go see that movie.

Yep, yep, yep.

I would also be first in line because I love that shit.

I love that.

2680 at the Regal Kaufman Astoria.

Not bad.

I got to get AMC A-list because then you can go see like multiple.

Yeah, yeah.

AMC is not sponsored.

If we're doxxing our own movie theaters here,

the Glasgow Film Theater, tiny screens, but like the selection, incredible.

Unparalleled.

Oh, you know what?

Also, sorry, I'm realizing now I should just say, by way of disclaimer, that none of my opinions represent the opinions of my employer.

Well, none of them now.

All the previous ones.

No, also not the

subsequent opinions are Noah's.

Every previous opinion.

No, no, no, no.

Let me be very clear.

Also, not the previous ones.

Your employers are the owners of the Chicken Little Inn.

Where you work.

Your employer's Sam Yorty's Meladors.

Yeah.

You know, look, what can I say?

They bring in my 10%.

You know, they're pretty easy to manage.

I help build their career.

You know, that's how it works.

So he was also, he did track and he became a shoe salesman as a kid and also paper seller.

This fucking kid, just coming up to you, being like, can I get you like a newspaper, new pair of shoes, play you

if you seek Susie or whatever the fuck it's called.

And you're just like, get the fuck out of here, kid.

You're being accosted by like five or six of these whimsical little fucks anytime you go near Lincoln.

Can I ask real quick, what year is this?

Because I don't think we covered that.

Yeah, it could be anything from like 1900 through to like 1950.

This is like

the 1900s.

Like this is from like he's born in like 190 something, and then this is like the 1910s.

Right, he's born in 1909.

Okay.

Yeah.

And at the time,

the the shoes were, the fancy shoes were called Dixie ties.

And he learned how to sell them from, and just, I needed to throw this in here, E.

Burton Campbell, Campbell, store manager known as Humpy.

Uh-huh.

Yeah, I learned my trade selling shoes from Humpy Campbell.

Humpy Campbell taught me the secret to move a Dixie tie.

You just whistle if you know Susie

and imagine you're in the shoes.

This is the world that Joe Biden is from.

Okay, it's from like, you know, across the country, but like the fact that that sentence contains like two incomprehensibly changed by time things and then also a guy with a weird nickname.

That's a Joe Biden story.

Joe Biden learned how to sell a Dixie tie from Humpy Campbell.

Honestly, probably um just like tying an onion to his belt imagine a corn pop in a cowboy hat

or like a corn palm thank you um there we go nailed that one um so so this is a profoundly weird guy no and he became the mayor i know this still shocks strange

uh Los Angeles has only ever had normal mayors.

Los Angeles.

Yeah, sorry, Los Angeles.

Los Angeles.

um so he moved to la when he was uh when he was like high school age um and started doing a variety of odd jobs again yeah once again they're calling him the eclectic kid because if you look at the list of that he did first of all he was trying to get a law degree and it took him more than 10 years across three colleges to get a law degree which is very relatable to me um but he worked he tried to be an opera singer he was a projectionist and was was obsessed with being a projectionist, according to his own biography, which, by the way, is like absolutely like half Joe Biden anecdotes.

Oh, you go to this guy's apartment, he's got the like poster from David Lynch telling them to

the projection department up and framed.

I know this fucking guy.

You got to see

the recording of the Melador's concert in 70 millimeter because

otherwise you miss out on the visuals of it all.

Oh, God.

Okay.

Yeah.

So yeah,

I know this man now deeply.

He is like my half-brother.

He is like, I mean, the thing about him is that he's basically like 1960s Trump in a lot of ways.

Like he's a grifter.

He's a cotton man.

He is like an entertainer.

He has zero political principles and is constantly going everywhere with them.

He met his wife by sensually licking stamps at the post office she was working at.

Say more.

Like input.

Say more about that, please.

Say more about that right now.

Can you say more about how that happened and what that means and why?

What could you say more about that?

Seeing a woman that I think is hot in the post office and being like, I shall make her my wife.

I'm going to come in here every day with all of my business mail from my projectionist job and

letters of application to various like opera conservatories and stuff.

Well, the movie screen used to be so far away that you had to mail the movie to the screen.

And I'm just going to very slowly lick stamps in front of her.

Yes, by analogy to her pussy, I guess.

I mean, I guess.

It was, it was, you know, it was the 19 whatevers, so they had not yet invented, you know, saying the word pussy.

Yeah, this woman is like looking at him and being like, man, I bet it'd feel good for this guy to lick.

I don't know what the rest of this sounds like.

Yeah, well, that's, that's actually what the song If You Knew Susie was sort of about.

Like, there was a lot, it was mostly about that.

Yeah, it was clever because at the time you could talk about you know, you couldn't talk about licking stamps on the radio, so you had to like disguise it.

Susie is a Nebraska rhyming slang for pussy.

Awful.

I mean, this, the worst part is this works.

Like, he does marry you.

He married this woman.

She thought it was incredibly hot that he was such a good one.

By the way, his wife, I think her name is Bet, like Betty, Betty Yortie, which

I pick a struggle.

I'd start going by Liz, I think.

Weirder than he is, there is a recipe that Coipro Quidd posted of hers for a kind of jello-encased salad that is one of the worst things I've ever read in my fucking life.

Horrifying to think about.

Somehow the stamp licking and the salad are not combining well in my brain.

Oh, yeah.

You're going to love this salad we make.

It has the texture of stamps.

Yeah, because

i want to get like you know horned up at the dinner table so i can see my husband licking the stamp salad

it's just stamps floating in like a like a jell-o mold this is this is this is a this is a molded cucumber lime salad horrifying and it goes melt jello in hot water add vinegar salt onion juice when cool add mayonnaise sour cream and cucumber this makes eight small molds on six generous portions served with sour cream dressing I'm actually making this for Thanksgiving tomorrow.

I hope we're all enjoying tasting that.

Cucumber lime was like, I went, oh, okay.

And then you said the rest of it.

And I think like my stomach tried to escape through my esophagus.

So that's good.

So he becomes a California state assemblyman.

Yeah, which is especially at the time, just insanely corrupt as a.

as a place.

He runs for an empty seat that has 12 different candidates where the predecessor will not endorse anybody.

And there are like three different Communist Party candidates and like four Democrats and that sort of thing.

And he wins because of low turnout.

Just drifting, drifting over the finish line.

Right.

I mean, low turnout and basically just like having talked to enough people that people remember him and his sister doing a lot of free campaign work for him.

And basically in assembly, he is like a progressive left-wing.

We love the unions.

We love state ownership of things.

I am going to become friends with the Communist Party.

He reported a bribery attempt on a bill and then got shunned because it's like, you know, narc behavior.

Yeah, he's ruining that bribery racket.

That's what he's doing.

Exactly.

And he was like, oh, the state should own utilities.

You should have strong unions.

It was the 30s.

Everybody was, you know, getting into that New Deal thing.

And then the

thing that inevitably happens to Los Angeles area politicians who are communist in this age happens, which is that at some point the CP endorses somebody other than him running for a political position.

And he responds to that by making the hardest right turn you could ever imagine.

Of course.

Of course.

Publishing an Why I Left the Left essay and whatever the equivalent.

The other thing is, like, slightly later on in his career, he does get like implicated in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

And those two things, being like sufficiently scared by this, even though they don't make the charges stick, he is like scared of getting Dalton Tromboed.

And the Communist Party don't want to support him, the mayor of Los Angeles.

He then becomes a like virulent anti-communist for the rest of his life.

And he gets more racist against Japanese people because it was the 19, the late 1930s.

So he was like, Oh, by the way, I have one other yaughty fact about his time.

Uh, in

he runs for Congress a bit later on, just before the war, like 1938 or something.

And it may be as like an interventionist, as a liberal,

back when there was a thing you could still do by being like, you know, the extremely anti-communist.

He was like an FDR guy.

And in a fine example of hubris, one of his like posters said,

vote Sam Yorti for US Congress, stop Hitler now.

And I'm not averse to the whole stopping Hitler now thing, but I think that thinking that was within his power as like representative for California really captures the guy, right?

This is a guy who like very quickly develops an interest in foreign policy that will go completely unrewarded throughout the rest of his career.

It's like it's just one representative going, Hitler, stop, and Hitler being like,

I guess I told Hitler to cut it out.

It's the onion thing.

He says that in the 70s

in the presidential debate, in the presidential primary debate in his New Hampshire speech, he literally says, I was against Hitler in the 30s, and I said we had to stop Hitler.

Like he told Hitler to cut it out.

There's that classic Captain America cover where he's telling Hitler to cut it out.

Yeah.

They stop that tomfoolery there now, Hitler.

We don't stand for that sort of thing in Los Angeles.

Oh,

the only other thing he does,

State Assemblyman, is

does an investigation into the state relief administration,

which is like, is California welfare infiltrated by communists?

And they put out this report saying, yes, of course it is.

It is massively infiltrated by communists.

They're everywhere.

They could even be on this podcast.

He blames a lot of it on the University of California,

two of which he went to.

So, you know, real, real like poacher turned game.

I wasn't just, you know, skiving off of my studies to go like learn learn how to sell dixie ties better with humpy i was doing i was doing elvis style investigations looking for like communists and drug dealers at the university of california system nixon sending elvis after humpy

by the way the the reason why he doesn't win election to the senate is that his uh his opponent a guy called hiram johnson yes filed uh i guess you could do this i didn't know this this is a guy that like joe biden would be best friends with back in the day when he was like 150 years old hiram johnson filed to run in every primary and therefore shut everybody out of it like republican and democrat the only people he didn't shut out were the prohibition party who got 13 of the vote statewide you know what that is you know what that sounds like to me that's like we that's american peronism is i will run in every primary and be inescapable yes yes yeah he was a liberal republican so you know know i mean i and he he you could do that back in the day and i think we need to bring that back i want to see what joe biden would have done in the republican primary you know

so so

i mean basically much the same yeah uh world world war ii breaks out he joins the air force uh much like richard nixon uh joined the was it navy i think has a completely like undistinguished career he was in intelligence probably sounds cooler than it is um and he gets back and he's like what i really want to do is i want to run for mayor of Los Angeles.

It's getting fewer syllables every time.

By the end of his career, he's like, yeah, I love being mayor of.

Yeah, that's what the L-word was about.

Sam Yorti refers to Los Angeles.

And because he's a crank and because no one cares about him, he gets like 3% of the vote.

This is the thing.

He has a KD.

He has a win-loss ratio of exactly 50%.

He won half the elections he ran in, and he ran for everything, which is a real kind of James Michael Curly.

You know what it is?

He got a passing grade, and that's all that matters.

Yes.

Is it 50% a passing grade?

I assume so.

I would consider that deeply shameful,

personally.

So

he gets elected as a representative.

He goes to the U.S., the United Snakes of America.

He goes to the U.S.

Congress.

And the first and really only thing that he does is he gives gives a couple of speeches, has those speeches assembled into a four-page pamphlet.

And then

members of Congress have something called franking privilege, which means as many frankfurters as you want.

Yeah.

Using my franken privilege to do unspeakable things.

So

as a guy who like loves stamps, curiously, he chooses to forego them in this instance.

Because like franking privilege, the idea is instead of posting letters with a stamp, if you're a member of Congress, it's official mail.

You just stamp the thing with a thing saying, I'm a Congressman, and they mail it out.

You should be able to just write that on an envelope.

Yeah.

And so he tries to send every voter in California this pamphlet of his opinions for with the government's money.

And it costs them like what would now be about one and a half million dollars and took up six hundred and eleven mail sacks, most of a railroad car, to ship this.

He invented posting.

He invented it.

This is the first post.

I mean, literally.

Yeah, literally.

He ended up on the front page of the LA Times for this for the first time in his entire life.

It's just, yeah, this jackass that you elected your representative has cost the government eight times his annual salary to have you shipped a little book of his posts.

And it was a four-page pamphlet too, which is like exactly the worst possible size.

He made a fucking one-page zine.

He made a zine.

He made the world's most read zine.

That's still the number one.

It's true.

If he was doing like, you know, Fabianism, right, if he was trying to bring the government down from the inside, you get enough like crypto communist representatives in Congress, you could bankrupt the federal government overnight.

All of these posts flying back and forth.

You know, they've got to honor them.

Yeah.

The United States has been franked into oblivion.

This is the plan.

This is the plan.

So the year is 1960.

Los Angeles is, it's not the city that it is today, right?

It's still, it's the third largest city by population, but it doesn't, like, it's not really famous, even Hollywood, like Hollywood's not within LA city limits, a lot of it.

And it's like pre a lot of the big freeway construction as well.

And in some ways, it's this kind of

relatively municipal backwater, right?

Yeah, I mean, like the freeways, the freeways are like finishing up, but like, you know, at this point, like the, you are entering the transition period from LA as being a city where you have, for example, a Pacific Electric and you have a dense downtown core to LA being a city with multiple regional cores, you know, places like at the time Century City is being built, but, you know, having,

you know, the like the valley develop various urban cores and malls and all that.

Yeah, you're getting a lot of like strange sort of like Hitlerite suburbs developing.

And if you I saw who framed Roger Rammit.

Yeah.

Exactly.

You're getting a lot of 15 minute cities,

you know, you're, you're getting, which is great.

And also like, One of the most important things about LA is at the time, like in the in the 40s, 50s, and then still into the 60s a little bit, it was the white spot of America racially,

in the sense that it was dominated by.

Yeah, they marketed it that way.

They marketed it that way.

It was dominated by white Protestants

who

were in the 40s.

There was a Supreme Court case called in 1948, Shelley v.

Kramer, which made racial housing covenants illegal, which is what people in the Los Angeles metro area had been using to keep black people,

the Mexican-American community, basically, you know, anybody who's not white out of their

sub-developments.

And as these suburbs are being built, you know, they're entirely, they're just entirely all-white suburbs.

And now that's falling down.

So what they decide to do is just incorporate all of these separate little cities, which is why the boundaries of the city of Los Angeles look like they have leprosy.

There's all these like little holes everywhere.

And a lot of those holes are, if you look at it versus the size of the county, a lot of those holes are where, for example, Compton was carved out of what should be territory of the city of LA to become an all-white subdivision, which obviously is not anymore.

And so there's probably some of the worst housing segregation in the country, other than like in my hometown, Chicago, Illinois.

Chicago.

Yeah, Chicago.

Sorry, Chicago, Illinois.

And,

you know, places like Glendale start developing, which right now Glendale's all-Armenian, but at the time, it's not all Armenian, but it's very heavily Armenian.

At the time, Glendale was the stronghold of the American Nazi Party.

So that's something.

And

so there's still a manufacturing industry, but some of it's starting to decline.

Like 60 to 70% of America's aerospace was in the region around Los Angeles.

Yeah,

building Howard Hughes' insane sort of like spruce

like cargo planes and stuff.

Yeah, and the freeways have come in.

So, So, you know, you've destroyed, for example, black middle-class communities like Sugar Hill and built a 10 through them, which divides Los Angeles into white LA north of it and black LA south of it.

Yeah.

But yeah, so the governance of Los Angeles at this time is the most corrupt shit you've ever heard of in your fucking life.

It's like five to ten like cigar smoking wasp guys in a, in a like a back room

and the chief of police.

um this is this is noted down here as digression that will take like 45 minutes this could be three hours i'm gonna really suppress it for time william h parker um as like uh lapd commissioner and uh in many ways the guy who invented cops um in many ways also the guy who invented uh like gang warfare and and like you know sort of like drug traffickers as an enemy of cops um

like horribly racist, authoritarian dictator, kind of like Los Angeles J.

Edgar Hoover, in that he ran the LAPD as his own personal fiefdom.

Hated J.

Edgar Hoover because they were the same guy.

A dog seeing another dog in a mirror.

Yeah.

Yes, genuine.

That's like 90% of like political history anywhere

is like hating a guy who's 90% you

and

did a lot of like surveillance and blackmail and compromise of like LA politicians.

But even just on a statutory basis, you know, he said the mayor of Los Angeles is a pretty weak position.

Well, one of the reasons why is that there is next to no influence, especially at this time, over the LAPD, which is just completely

like Bill Parker's sort of private army, and he uses it as that.

It is an occupying military force, especially in community we'll talk about later.

Also, when Nova says he invented cops,

he participated in the

uh radio and then TV serial uh dragnets.

Oh, yes, yeah, I don't just mean like those two things go hand in hand, right?

Be an interesting thesis here is like, um, that uh, the invention of the cop in media happens at the same time and sort of mutually in a sort of symbiotic way with the invention of

the modern cop.

Yeah, absolutely.

You can't see what you can't be.

He's the guy who like you can't be what you can't see, whatever.

You can't see what you can't be.

I disagree.

I disagree with that.

The LAPD pre-Parker is like guys walking like foot patrol beats doing insane corruption.

And one of Parker's things is like, we're going to have a standardized police academy.

We're going to have radios.

We're going to put them into patrol cars.

And all of this is done under the auspices of like, we're going to straighten the LAPD out.

There's going to be less corruption.

And that's, it sort of works in the sense that he becomes the game in town for that that corruption.

Like the LAPD shakes off the mob by becoming a fascist dictatorship.

By becoming the mob, yeah.

Exactly.

Yeah, absolutely.

So you're mad at them for getting organized?

Yeah.

Interesting how you want workers to organize.

And yet, when one group of workers...

Workers are the world's largest scare quotes that you can see from space.

Yeah.

I am listening and I'm learning.

And

I'm trying to hold space for those workers.

As far as inventing cops, Parker also invented cop identity politics because when he was asked a question about racism and racial segregation, he said, I think the most oppressed minority in America today are police officers.

That is a real quote.

Yes.

There is no one, he complained, concerned about the civil rights of the policeman.

Set the night on fire, page 39.

Real good stuff.

Also,

yeah, so he let the screenwriters of Dragnet just have access to like LEPD files and tag along on things and insisted that they had to be referred to as officers and not cops because cop was a derogatory slur.

Incredible psycho.

Cop with the O, like censored with an asterisk.

The mayor of Los Angeles at this point is one of these like old money guys called Norris Paulson.

Yes.

And Norris polson hates public housing and he's like the the the 50s mayor he hates public housing he destroys shadows ravine which is you know this mexican-american community that was supposed to be a big uh you know opportunity for public housing he destroys that public housing and then builds he builds dodger stadium on top of it your illegitimate stolen baseball team doing a land acknowledgement on dodger stadium who's got the uh

just won the world series i shit?

Christ won it.

I don't know.

And so,

like, our boy Yorti decides to run for mayor against Paulson, who he identifies correctly as weak.

He alienates the entire local Democratic Party by endorsing Richard Nixon against Hubert Humphrey.

Yes.

And there's this weird, like, reading about the campaign.

It's, it's really quite Biden Trump in that

Paulson is sick the whole time with laryngitis.

He spends most of his time in Palm Springs on the advice of throat specialists.

My opponent is too nice.

Nancy Reagan, active in politics, even though.

And then, like, while he's convalescing on the fucking Magic Mountain, the LA Times is posting more and more hysterical editorials about how good a mayor he is and how crazy it would be to unseat him and how they have like faith in the democratic process and stuff.

And Yorti just kind of slings mud, right?

It was so crazy how

Sam Yorty, like two days before the election, went on the Joseph Rogane Princess Flower Variety Hour

to, you know, to re-root liberalism.

I love MMA, actually.

So, like,

Paulson's main attack line, right, is that the Yort is affiliated with the mob and has a financial interest in his main policy that he wants to do, which is some garbage-related bullshit.

Three main policies, but yes.

And then also, he, Yorty's like, you represent downtown interests,

which sounds like more of a dog whistle than it actually is in the sense that like downtown LA at the time is still filled with like old money Republican financiers.

You say downtown interests, and I'm like, the stores that sell quintian year addresses.

Yeah, he's he's tuned to like that one.

He's running to support that one like Jamaican patty place.

Yeah, that's in a movie theater for some reason.

Yeah.

Sure.

Yeah.

Right.

He's ready to support Redbird.

He's ready to support Perch.

All right.

That's some LA landmarks there.

Thank you.

I've been.

It's for the LA heads.

One of the things that he wants to do is something of the garbage.

And Paulson's thing is: Yorty owns a dump.

And the dump is like shitty.

It's like a substandard dump.

I heard you're checking my dump.

I won't even brace this dump with the title dump.

Yeah, this is a god-awful dump this is a i heard you're checking my dump and um also the guy that he owns the dump with a guy called joseph satin

um has a criminal record gay stalin yeah yeah but basically like

he's trying to imply that that yorse is like mobbed up right and and yorse's rebuttal to this is you are old and dying and he was um yeah and and therefore wins like it it turns out that it's pretty easy to win an election against a guy who's mostly dead.

I mean, while Paulson is out, you know, in the Palm Springs desert, becoming some sort of immortal sandworm,

the

God Emperor of Palm Spring.

Duncan, Idaho, renting

in Palm Springs.

So he is going on like radio shows and he's getting out there with the voters and he's amassing a coalition of city hall outsiders.

Yeah.

Paulson never went on radio shows because he was like, oh,

all of the hippies who work for me are going to get mad if I go on radio shows.

That's true.

All of the beatnicks that work for me are going to get really pissed off if I go on the Joseph Rogane

Smile Flower Variety Hour.

He gets some support from rank and file black voters and people like,

I want to say Seeley's King,

who's a Tuskegee airman.

And he got some east side support from the Latino community, which is starting to develop on the east side.

And the.

I mean, he's running an anti-establishment campaign.

He is.

And there are lots of goods.

Not least that they're racist.

Yeah, they're racist and they picked a dying guy to represent them.

Yeah, well, he promises he's going to get the LAPD under control, which, spoiler alert, he does not.

Well, and then he also appeals to what

a lot of this is indebted to the book Set the Night on Fire, LA in the 60s, which I recommend, by Mike Davis and John Riener.

The

folks who are the sort of like Midwesterners that came to LA at the end of the 1800s and early 1900s

and went between being KKK supporters and supporters of Upton Sinclair's epic movement.

So basically they were average,

they were median voters.

Yeah, they were like median American voters.

We explained the median, the median 1950s American voter to

this ape and he killed himself kind of thing.

Yeah.

Yeah, they're basically like the people that Kamal Harris failed to appeal to this last election and who voted for Trump.

But yeah, so those people, the folks, like a lot of them were in the valley and a lot of them had this really

this really weird political tendency where they just saw this showman and they were like,

he's a funny guy.

He's

that's a cool anti-establishment dude.

And that's never happened again.

Also, the San Fernando Valley

is like idiosyncratic and looked down on by the rest of LA.

He's the first, and I think still only mayor to be from there.

And one of the things that he promises is that they will actually get a city council seat.

Like they will become electors in the Holy Roman Empire of Los Angeles.

Yes, we have, just for those who don't live in LA, we have 15 city council members and there are so many people that live in LA, like it's like what four million now, something like that.

Um, no, it's more than that.

Um, basically, what you have is you have a sort of medieval Venice-style city council at this point.

Well,

so every city council district has like 250,000 people in it now, which is more than most U.S.

House of Representative uh districts.

So, uh, not to brag, but it's impressive that DSALA has four of them now.

Uh-huh.

But yeah,

it's very much like a, especially back then, it's this insane situation where you have this tiny city council

that is has all of these corruption going on.

And

so he wins.

And this is unthinkable to most people, including Bill Parker.

The LA Times' editorial after he wins is quite funny because it's like, all we can do is watch is democracy dies in darkness.

And it's like about a guy who is slightly more racist becoming mayor of Los Angeles.

There's a fucking guy who says Los Angeles in the...

Yeah, there's a goddamn cheese in City Hall.

And so the thing about this is like he starts kind of making good on some campaigns.

They would have called it a cheese doodle at that time.

They would have said

there's a cheese doodle.

in City Hall.

Yeah,

his main thing is like, so he's going to bring the cops under control.

And out of protest that he might actually do this, the entire police commission resigns in advance.

And then William H.

Parker enters the mayor's office with a briefcase, has an hour-long meeting, leaves, and all of a sudden, Sam Yorti loves the LAPD for the rest of his life.

Yeah, Carl Rundberg, who is the city councilor, remember that name, the city councillor for the Pacific Palisades,

said, Parker enters the mayor's office at the briefcase when Parker came out of that two-hour meeting.

They've been sweethearts ever since.

I'd like to get that file Parker has.

Two hours of combination blackmail bribery is like an intense experience, I think.

It's like

we have folded an envelope out of a list of everything we found in your garbage

must you have done that it takes two hours to enumerate all of them.

But that's it.

It's two hours.

It's one hour and 55 minutes of I'm I'm unrolling

this long parchment of every bad thing you've ever done that we have evidence for.

And at the end of the parchment, it's $120,000.

I mean, sure.

That's why he was

such a tyrant of an LAPD conditioner because he had the big parchment.

The other thing is garbage, right?

Los Angeles has this Binsman has this insane system

where you put out your like wet garbage, which is collected by the city, but your dry garbage is, you just burn that in your own backyard.

Unrelatedly, Los Angeles has terrible smog problems.

Nobody can breathe.

Like it's choked with people's burning garbage.

It smells terrible.

And his thing.

The more things change.

Yeah, his thing is like, no, you can just separate it at the curb and the city's going to pick up all of it.

This is his one actual like tangible thing.

And he does do this.

Like this is one of the reasons why Los Angeles does not have the smog as like anywhere near as badly anymore is because you don't just burn garbage in your backyard.

He may also have had a stake in the garbage business, but you know, capitalism imperishes.

It's impossible to say.

Housewives love this.

It's like this is, he gets a lot of support from housewives on his campaign because he also nominally integrates some city departments, including the LAPD.

Not really, though.

It's, it's very like tokenistic.

And I think people kind of recognize that.

He has a female deputy, the first mayor of the female deputy, Marion LaFollette, who became a Republican, who's insane about drugs.

So that's

since we are going long here, I'm going to run through the bullet points of his time as mayor, right?

So it's hard to say how much credit to give him for like the stuff that happens in Los Angeles positive at this time, but like Dodger Stadium gets built, the zoo gets built, the convention center gets built, and you know, he's, he's in favor of all of those, But the main thing he's in favor of is not being in Los Angeles.

They call him traveling Sam because he spends like one day in three like on trips.

He's like, he goes to, he goes to South Vietnam during the war to like support the anti-communist struggle.

There's lots of photos and video of him, like with a sort of a pointer in front of a big map of Southeast Asia.

And it's like, dude, you are the mayor.

You are the mayor of Los Angeles.

He's the Grace Belden of mayors.

Here's the thing.

Here's the thing.

He was like, look, Jane Fonda is doing it for the communists.

What if I go and support the anti-communists by hanging out with a bunch of maps, maybe looking some stamps?

I could frank some mail.

Who's anti-communist, Jane Fonda?

We need the rightist to Jane Fonda.

A few other things about him.

He is weirdly.

They're calling her Hanoi Jane.

They call him Saigon Sam.

They did call him the

Saigon

Weirdly, he is healthier than most of his enemies because in a real California moment, he like eats right, exercises a bit, and does yoga and transcendental meditation, which is really, really funny to be like, you know, meditating on anti-communism.

Siri play California Uber Allis.

He did also kind of claim that he was psychic because he was Irish.

Yeah, that's right.

He was tapping into like his irish psychic powers he could summon a shillali from anywhere

there's

and uh yeah i have a quote here at one point while yorty was in israel one la times editorial writer asked what the what the hell is the mayor of los angeles doing in a lat And once he got back from these trips, you know, A-Lat is always the first stop.

He would call up the feds and offer them unsolicited political advice to just be like, hey, it's the mayor of Los Angeles here.

I think what you should do about the Ho Chi Minh Trail or whatever is

so funny.

And he's also on Johnny Carson a lot to talk about the woke agenda.

1960s Joe Rogan.

Yeah, it's the woke agenda.

So I'm updating my mental model to stop being, because I was thinking about 30s and 40s,

radio shows sponsored by like baked goods companies.

I'm updating it to

Johnny Carson.

Yeah, we're going to like Rowan and Martin's laugh and like doing a sketch about him.

He's doing Dick Cavot.

He also gets way worse because the Democrats try to run one of Roosevelt's like kids, I think James Roosevelt, against him.

Yeah, his son.

Yeah, this like ready patrician campaign that massively overspends that you can't move around LA without seeing the Roosevelt kids like face on a billboard somewhere.

And

like essentially he taps into Nixonland, into this like the various hitlerite suburbs uh and and like white suburbans and to an increasing extent uh like mexican americans uh who are willing to like vote for a more right-wing more populist candidate and he wins wins handily he absolutely like kicks the out of a roosevelt and and he decides it is time to become more racist riley can you do this jarring shift in tone thing uh well all i say when we have a jarring shift in tone in tf is i just say well it's time for a jarring shift in tone now.

Yeah, there we go.

So it's time for a jarring shift in tone now because the year is 1965 and

Watts contains about 80,000 of the poorest people in LA in a tiny little area of about 50 square miles that, and you know, including the surrounding area that is very heavily black.

Underfunded schools, high unemployment, 30% among men, 60% among women.

LAPD stopping and frisking and arresting random people all the time to build up conviction, or not convictions, to build up an arrest record so that they could then not be employed.

And Yorty decides that he's going to get more racist by becoming the only mayor in America to refuse federal anti-poverty funds from the Office of Economic Opportunity for the government as part of the war on poverty, because the condition on those funds is that people from the community have to be slightly involved in an advisory role.

This is how those get to be.

He wouldn't even do the token thing.

He wouldn't even do the token thing.

So all the money goes away.

All the youth programs shut down.

The youth jobs programs shut down.

It is hot.

It is August.

And the LAPD arrests a gentleman named Marquette Fry on August 11th for what they presume is drunk driving.

And his brother Ronald goes to get their mom at their house nearby, who comes back.

The LAPD tries to handcuff Fry, which he refuses, at which point they call in 26 squad cars.

They were just there.

They're 26

wasted.

They were circling the block.

Every third car and what was a collapse car.

For decades.

For decades, the LAPD had basically maintained this huge presence in South Africa.

When we say like occupying military, there's really like not a kind of, you know, poetic metaphor.

That was how the LAPD policed these places.

Constantly stopping and frisking people, constantly arresting people and the slightest bit of suspicion, attacking people in the streets, that sort of thing.

And, you know, so they do just that.

They They attack and beat Marquette and his brother Ronald and arrest them.

They pin their five-foot-tall mother, Rena, to the hood of a car and arrest her, too.

And Marquette is savagely beaten as he tries to exit the car.

So a group of onlookers arrive and this devolves, as you might expect, with the cops attacking

the crowd and beating the shit out of people.

Part of this is that also it is known in the neighborhood that a cop recently arrested, and content warning, a cop recently arrested on false pretenses and raped a young woman named Beverly Tate, which had largely been kept out of white media, but was known in the United States.

Yeah, the DLA Times printed that as a rumor like a week later.

So then everything goes up in flames by Friday, the 13th.

This is on August 11th.

So it basically it devolves, it goes from youths battling the police to community retaliation against the police, attacking them, and also exploring the people.

It doesn't end until they send in the National Guard.

And by the time they do, this is their shooting people out of hand.

The first National Guard they send in come out of Glendale, which you'll remember, the Nazi headquarters, and they immediately killed two people.

Yeah, and they killed like two dozen people total, I think.

The LAPD killed 10 people by the 13th, including a pregnant woman that they shot in the back of the head.

Overall, by the end of it, they have arrested 3,500 people, killed 34.

or sorry, 34 people have died, and 23 were shot by troops.

Yorse, meanwhile, is in a helicopter, in a police police helicopter,

like flying above this, talking about how good it is that the cops have the National Guard there, and says, that's the kind of force we've got to have.

You know, it's emotional support troops for the LAPD.

Yeah, I mean, like, to be clear, all of these guys are fascists, and they're funny and they're weird, but like,

this is what they're fascists for, right?

is for exactly this kind of like inflection point.

And the, you know, the riots are like brutally suppressed.

the day after he says that as the Watts uprising is continuing a man named Aubrey Griffith is killed by a firing squad of shotgun toting cops They he is hit 11 times by 11 shotgun blasts fired by 15 cops through his front door just instantly basically torn apart by shotgun blasts and Yordy is like this is fine actually this is good the they are freaked out about snipers.

The LAPD is comparing this to the Viet Cong, which is actually what Parker says.

And Pat Brown obviously sends in the National Guard.

They brutally repress the Watts uprising.

And Martin Luther King Jr.

shows up.

And Yordy starts being like, he is bringing, he's doing a great disservice to the people of LA and the nation.

Outside agitators are shit.

He's bringing lawlessness.

And he blames everybody but himself.

So he blames Parker.

He blames the OEO.

He blames Governor Brown.

Yeah.

Communists.

He refuses to fire Parker and goes law and order mode.

And that gets him much more like his popularity with the whites goes way up.

Yeah.

I should say, just to skip ahead a bit, right?

Like, he tries to ride this to the governorship of California of being like,

I'm the guy who put down the Watts riot.

By the way, William H.

Parker dies at a dinner in his honor.

Thank you to the 2nd Marine Division for, I mean, cheers to the 2nd Marine Division for throwing a dinner honoring William H.

Parker, but cheers to the 2nd Marine Division for him dying of a heart attack at it.

Also, how on earth was Yorty going to become governor of California?

He's not, his last name isn't Brown.

Yeah, exactly.

And that's why he gets

37% of the vote.

And then Reagan beats Brown because the Democrats are kind of cooked.

I will also say

he's trying...

after he loses out on the governorship to get a cabinet commission, a cabinet position out of Richard Nixon because he had endorsed him early.

And Richard Nixon hates the guy.

Like he, you know,

called him the F-slur, right?

Like, Richard Nixon's sort of like complicated emotional relationship with Sam Yorti, or as I like to call it, Rick and Yorty.

Rick and Yorty is such a good show, but the problem is it's fans.

I gotta dig us out of the jarring change of tone somehow.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, geez, oh, geez, Rick.

I'm doing a racist.

The other thing, the other thing here is is that there's a cartoon angle.

If we go to page 12 of the notes, we see that the LA Times,

the LA Times always hated Sam Yorty, right, from day one.

And they published this cartoon of him, which is making fun of his tendency to like...

give Washington advice and try and like get himself a job where he's in his office

on the phone and a bunch of guys with

like a straight jacket, a bunch of orderlies are there and the caption is, I've got to go now.

I've been appointed Secretary of Defense and the Secret Service men are here.

It's pretty good.

Got his ass.

This is pretty good.

Got his ass.

He sues them for $15 million.

You know, we love to make municipal connections on this show, right?

Do you know who did basically exactly that?

Darren Lyons.

Huh.

Oh, my God.

Yeah,

he sues them for

implying that he is mentally deranged and that this is libel.

Simply for the way he behaves.

Yeah, he takes this to the Supreme Court, by the way.

They don't take it, but this does establish.

Oh,

because here's an interesting fun fact from when I worked at a publication where we had lawyers looking over every single thing we did when the nib was under First Look Media.

There is no Supreme Court precedent for satire being protected, but there's also no precedent for it not being protected.

It's like the one thing we actually don't know.

So all, every, every legal thing.

That's good.

Every legal thing with satire is what's your exposure on it.

And can you deal with getting sued?

And can you fight it off?

Because like we're all pretty sure it's fine, but there's no precedent.

Yeah.

It's crazy.

Well, the Supreme Court won't hear the case.

Ultimately, it gets decided in the California Court of Appeals.

And Yorsey not only loses, but he creates starotasus in Yorse and Chandler.

The editorial cartoon necessarily uses rhetorical hyperbole and that, you know, literally reading it isn't libelous.

Which, cool.

Thank you to Sam Yorsey for that.

Thank you for me personally.

Yeah, it is interesting that the LA Times were willing to like fight this out in court for their cartoonists.

To be fair, their cartoonist,

Paul Conrad,

Paul Conrad, is like one of the

you know how like it's weird how there are people who can become political cartoonists where their job is like if you look at like Paul Conrad, a lot of what he does is you know, write like the deficit on stuff because we've all been looking for this cartoon for a while they'll have eventually found it which means we've been looking at a lot of Paul Conrad cartoons

there are he labeled so many things the national debt yeah and to keep an intelligence like that you've got to be willing to fight for them he was he was like he is like I would you know I would I would use this term lightly but like a legendary political cartoonist in which he was like the alley times guy for like 60 years or something.

Like he's a well-known figure, but yes, he's very much, when you think of of like political cartoonists, it's just like the most, he's just that.

It's like the most milqueto shit imaginable.

15 million adults with the national debt on me.

Just like this,

I'm going to skip the next bit and say one thing about Sam Yorsey, which is he maybe killed RFK.

Say more?

Not directly.

Allegedly, alert?

I don't know.

So we're familiar with Robert Kennedy,

not the more fucked up looking.

Yeah, no,

not the one who looks like beef jerky, the one who was like JFK's brother.

Yeah.

So Yorsey fucking hates him, always has.

He's always hated Democrats.

He's always hated like patrician Democrats, especially.

And RFK is running for president in 1969.

He's won the California primaries.

He's at the Ambassador Hotel in beautiful downtown Los Angeles.

It's on Wilshire.

It's not in downtown.

It is in Koreatown in beautiful Koreatown Los Angeles.

Basically downtown.

Shut up.

No, it isn't.

And Sam Yorsey is like, yeah, obviously the like fascist LAPD or whatever don't need to provide a protective detail for Robert Kennedy.

And RFK is like, okay, cool.

Well, we've got to leave the ambassador hotel.

His one of his last things he ever says is, Mayor Yorty has just sent me a message that we've been here too long already.

RFK's last thought was of Sam Yorty.

Yes, yeah.

And then he goes down a corridor and a guy does some anti-Zionist direct action to him.

Yes.

Well,

yeah.

Sir Han Sir Han shoots him with an Iva Johnson 22.

Also, Yordi is like so happy when he finds out about this.

He's thrilled.

He lived an amazing life.

I'm just hearing about this for the first time.

He lived an amazing life.

What can you say?

And it was an amazing.

He's literally like, he's so happy because one of his enemies has just gotten shot in his city.

And he's like, yeah, fuck them, Kennedy boys.

Because also, Kennedy, Kennedy sat him on in a committee and like grilled him over the Watts, with the Watts uprising and the racist and horrific way he handled that and embarrassed him.

So he's like, oh, that motherfucker's dead.

It's a very,

it's a very Trumpian thing to do.

And so he gets up there and he starts revealing details of the case that are not public, including that he was able to get Sirhan Sirhan's diary

and

was like reading excerpts from it to the point that

he got like nationally condemned in the media and a he got a court order, a gag order served to him by Judge Arthur Ararcon.

And he was like, well, this gag order doesn't for some strange reason apply to newspapers.

Like, yeah, buddy, that's how that works.

Moving from one sort of fixed enemy to another, from the Kennedys back to the LA Times.

My favorite part about this is after he's become this like national hate figure, you know, libs everywhere, traumatized, RFK is dead, he's been like in front of cameras gloating about it.

He tries to go to the funeral.

And there's a headline from the San Francisco Examiner, which just says, unwanted Yorty says he'll attend the funeral.

Yep.

And like seven Dem clubs write to him and they're like, please don't go.

Please don't go.

I like the sub-headline here that just says, in quotes, confused.

Ardeen said Yordi has no idea why Mrs.

Kennedy would make such a compliment and said Yordy is entirely confused about it.

The one after it, refused, is also.

They used to write newspapers in this country.

They did.

So in 1969, he's up again for the mayoral election.

He runs against longtime city council member Tom Bradley.

Yeah, the liberal cop.

Yeah, who actually, so I feel like the thing about Bradley and Yorty is that if they're like, if you took Eric Adams Adams and divided him in half, we're like, Tom Bradley.

Yeah.

I sure hope it do.

So Eric Adams, you know, Yorty gets the insane person.

I am going to travel around the world.

Los Angeles is the

cycle.

It was the first stop.

Yeah.

Right.

And then Tom Bradley gets the, I am a police reformer.

I am, you know, I was a cop.

I know how bad it is.

I, you know, so he gets like what people originally thought Eric Adams was going for.

Inside Yort Hall are two Eric Adams.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And he ends up being a good mayor relative to the camera.

Yeah, the Yorti campaign is, hey, have you noticed that this Tom Bradley guy is black?

Wins by like, you know, landslide.

So they, they,

Don Rothenberg, who's his field lead, gets a call from a dude who says that Yorti's campaign offered him money.

to run a black power for Bradley caravan through the valley and that he wouldn't do it if they gave him more money than they

can.

And obviously they don't.

And so he's able to red bait off of Rothenberg, who, you know, was associated with the CP.

Bradley also ran a really like, he ran a great campaign in terms of getting like Jewish votes on the west side.

And he's able to get a lot of, he's able to get a turnout from the black community.

He is not able to get Latinos on side.

And so that became a whole thing.

And just want to point out that Yordi's campaign was run by a guy named Henry Salvatore, who's an Italian dude from Abruzzo who founds the Henry Salvatore Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World.

Oh, that's fun.

Yeah, okay, cool.

I love to go to the polling school of the Americas.

Yeah.

So, by the way, he hates being man.

He is won by like race-basing.

He is so bored, he wants to do something else.

He wants to be governor.

So he runs again in 1970 and loses very badly.

It's so, sorry, it's also so fucked to hate being mayor but love being powerful it's like if you're the governor you have to deal with so many interests that you're you know it's it's the highest level of patronage politics it's it's the thesis right that this is this is the ceiling for like if people really really like if you if you have like an inability to network and everybody hates you and you you don't have a caucus mayor of a large city is as high as you can get yeah i hate to i hate to see you mayor mayor, but I love to watch you walk towards it.

And so he loses badly to a guy who can network,

this guy, fascinating Californian political figure, Jesse Big Daddy Unruh, like, not sure if related to the Twitter guy.

Jesse Big Daddy Unruh was like state treasurer when nobody cared who that was.

And he and his enormous chin and moustache became this kind of power broker in Sacramento.

And ultimately, he was able to parlay that into governor.

That's a fucking guy who called Big Daddy.

Yes.

Yeah,

before he becomes state treasurer, he's like running for a variety of...

He runs for governor

and beats Yorty and then loses to Reagan again.

But like he also is going to later run for mayor.

But he, you know, he,

November, do you want to say the quote?

Yeah, I have a quote from Big Daddy Unruh on lobbyists here.

If you can't eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women, and then vote against them, you've got no business being up here.

They don't, again,

politicians, they don't make them like this again.

Bring back Big Daddy.

Bring back Big Daddy Unruh.

Look up a photo of this guy because he looks incredible.

He looks like we have Tom Selick.

He looks like Tom Selick mixed with Arthur Morgan.

So obviously, like, he hasn't won as governor.

He's stuck as mayor.

What else is there to do but run for president?

The last refuge of the day.

Yes, he shows up in fear and loathing because he had a like customized Winnebago with a back porch for him to do speeches from, like a railroad car that he called the Yorty Mobile, and which played Sousa marches and his own speeches from micro from like speakers.

Played his own wax cylinders from 1930.

If this Yorty Mobile's rockin', please come and knock in.

There's one picture extant of the Yorty Mobile.

I think that's the episode art.

It's beautiful.

Yeah.

I do love the Yortymobile.

He runs for president and he's like

at the New Hampshire debate, he's like, now I'm mayor of Los Angeles and I love the war.

I still love the war and we should do more of the war.

Maybe we should use nuclear weapons.

I don't know.

And he gets 6% of the vote.

Beautiful.

And then he ends his bid before he gets to California and loses it.

And then it's like, support Humphrey over McGovern because McGovern is a dangerous anti-war guy.

In 1973, he finally, they finally kick him out of City Hall.

Tom Bradley, the liberal cop, the guy he had like racistly won against a few years before, like finally wins and is mayor for the next like 20 years.

Yes, he steps down.

Actually, in an ironic parallel,

he retires after the 1992 uprisings in Los Angeles, which also occurred,

well, which occurred while Bradley was mayor.

And obviously, you know, he had a terrible relationship with Daryl Gates, who was the LAPD.

We will do a Tom Bradley episode.

We will do that.

That'll cover every reason.

Exactly.

So, so, and, you know, Bradley is the liberal cop.

He's a lawyer.

He has been a city counselor for a long time.

And he's a pretty good mayor.

I will say, for the rest of his career, more or less, Sam Yorti Yorti is running against him.

Even having been exiled to an apartment in Studio City, getting like 1% of the vote, every time he's up for re-election, Sam Yorti runs and loses.

He's trying to be his municipal, like the municipal fury, always hounding him.

Yes.

And he never, he never gets over being beaten by the first black mayor of LA.

Like, he never gets over that.

He's all going to take that too.

I mean, he does.

I'm so glad he gets to die racist and aggrieved.

He gets to be on TV,

like local TV,

with a very strange, like, talk show, only one clip of which survives.

And then he gets kicked off the air by Heehaw.

Do we know what Hee-Haw is?

I'm aware of what He-Haw is.

The kind of comedy country music review album.

Yeah, it's a

variety show

where people dress up in like

redneck face

and

sing country music.

And that beats Sam Yorsey, which is, you know, coming from Nebraska, he finally gets displaced by a caricature of himself.

It's like the end of tar.

Yeah,

they find a younger version of him, which is the donkey mascot of Hee Haw.

He finally dies at the age of 88 because he's a Nazi.

Yeah, he dies at the age of 88 because he's a Nazi and also because he does transcendental meditation and is like, you know, reasonably healthy, unlike all of these other guys who die at like 50.

The only thing that's going to be...

Yeah, like Jason Unra is doing nothing but like, you know, swilling premium booze that's given to him by lobbyists and then telling them to be a pop.

Big Daddy Unruh died at the age of like 36 looking 70.

I want that for me.

Why can't that be me?

Sam Yorsey dies at age 88 looking like 50.

The only thing named after him was one meeting room at the convention center, which they have since renamed to West Hall, which is not named after a person named West.

He got displaced by a cardinal direction.

And just to rub it in, so many things are named after Tom Bradley in LA, including one of the worst parts of LAX, the Tom Bradley International Terminal.

Yeah, there's even a there's even a famous Los Angeles West.

It could have been the Jerry West room.

And now,

it could have been the Jerry West room.

It's like purely like now he is only remembered to invoke old-timey racism in a Los Angeles municipal context by us.

Wow.

And by

CuoProQuid, who knows more about Yorty than he was on an episode of Chips as the mayor, where he deploys a secret LAPD martial arts squad.

So that's pretty cool.

Well, that sounds maybe like a bonus episode at some point.

That probably exists for real.

Watching an episode of Chips just for Sam Yortie.

The Boney Island chip fish.

Oh,

the Boney Island white.

Whitefish and chips.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There it is.

Oh, God.

I hate my job.

That's Sam Yorti.

What a life.

What a journey.

What a strange map.

Life well Yorted.

Sam Yorti has endured the Los Angeles practice of removing

all

references to him from public life, i.e.,

Demnatio

Mayort mei.

Oh, I thought you were going to go with Demnatio Memoriale.

Or

Demnati Yort Memoriae.

There we go.

Got it.

Got it on the second.

Demnati Yort Memoriae.

Samuel William Yorti, as Noah has described him in the notes, the white Eric Adams.

R.I.P.

Samuel William Yorty.

You were okay on chips.

Yeah.

Just important, important, just disclaimer.

He is very funny, but important to remember, he is a god-awful piece of shit who is burning in hell right now.

That's the no-gods, no mare's promise.

American Hitler.

Yeah, of course.

Yeah.

No, actually,

because we only portray characters we agree with.

So we agree with everything Sam Yorti did.

You can tell because we're portraying him.

There's a big

button that comes on that tells you whether or not the hosts of the podcast agree

with the.

We have an established list of

political platforms, but none of them are Sam Yorti are good.

They are still only one, respect for the nation of Albania.

Two, explode the SS Richard Montgomery to see what happens.

And three, Frank Ney was okay as far as we know.

I stand by that.

I'm willing.

Let's not.

That's how many three principles.

That's as many campaign promises as Sam Yorti ran on.

So I think we're good.

Did Sam Yorti go to Albania?

I'm googling that shit immediately just to find out.

We could start referring to these things as like um as as like confucian principles like these are the three precepts of no gods no mayors you know

i was going to add to the doc as we come up with more we just stop at three and those are the that's the golden path he never went to albania but he may have gone to king zog of albania's california estate sorry do you say king zog

i i that's all that's all i have that's all i can give you yes that is a traditional name for albanian kings i promise you that that's real it's It's not what it's not

that.

It's not that.

His autochthonous existence.

There was one other thing.

There was one other thing that I want to mention about Sam Yorsey that I can't source, that only comes from Coproquid, which is that on these trips to Asia, to meet, he met with a lot of like, you know, politicians like South Vietnamese, for instance, dignitaries and stuff.

And he didn't speak any Asian language, but he did try to sound it out himself from first principles.

The most racist man you can imagine.

Just classic guy from the valley.

Sorry.

Like classic guy from

the valley.

And

that's Sam Yorti.

Yeah.

Yorty is dead and Tom Bradley has the statue at the top of City Hall.

I don't know.

Is there anything you'd like to plug?

Thank you for joining us so much and doing so much research for us.

Oh, of course.

I'm sorry that I went into a fugue state and produced that many pages of notes.

It's hard not to do with him.

Yeah.

You went into Yort space.

That's fine.

Yeah.

Yes.

I'm still having Yort visions.

When does this come out?

A couple weeks.

Okay.

So

does plugging vote Zoran in New York whenever that election happens?

Next summer.

It happens.

But vote now.

Get in line.

Vote now on your phone.

Vote now on your phones.

He's the one.

Stay in line.

So vote for Zaran.

As people know, I am involved with the Democratic Socialists of America, Los Angeles, who recently scored a huge blow against city hall corruption by getting rid of alleged racist Kevin De Leon, whose various comments can be heard on the Fed tapes.

and replacing him with a tenant lawyer, Isabel Jurado, who's great.

So you should, in a time of increasing fascism in the United States, get involved with that chapter.

If you are in LA and we are going to be having committee elections coming up soon, so I will have recommendations on those.

Let me know.

Otherwise, I am just around.

You can follow me at noahs.bsky.social on Blue Sky, and then I am at Noah Basaran on Twitter.

Yeah, we'll throw your stuff in the notes.

I want to imagine you, the reader, I am sensually licking a stamp and putting it on 300,000 000 bags of mail going to your house that say thank you for listening to the free feed there is a patreon uh for five dollars a month you can get more episodes of this show twice as many in fact yeah we're gonna watch that episode of chips yeah probably

we don't christmas is coming Christmas is coming we're gonna watch something something's getting watched look we're we are we are all the teacher and also we're all the class and we're all rolling out the TV for Christmas time that's right um so be prepared We're going to watch some movies.

We're going to have some TV.

We're going to cover, we mostly cover more mayors.

There's some two-parters you can listen to from Early in the Run that are set.

The second part is there.

But thank you so much for listening.

Bye.

Bye, everyone.

Bye, everyone.

Bye.