Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! 1969 West Las Vegas Riots

Preface: 

This all started as a gag. Defector is doing their annual roast of the 32 NFL teams, from worst to best. I'm a very heavy commenter there, I've written short fiction in the comments and occasionally shorter movie reviews that are not worth full publication. Seems like people tolerate my brand of nonsense reasonably well, I've gotten decent upvote scores. For the last couple of years, I've been doing series in the comments of 'Why Your Team Sucks' entries, last year it was short biographies of the worst Americans I could find from each city featured. Let's Remember a (Real Bad) Guy featured people like our traitorous, deeply incompetent General James Wilkinson or arch racists like Hoke Smith or extremely obvious picks like George W. Bush. This year I'm doing Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest!, which are stories about riots, strikes, or just one flat-out military battle in or around each city the football team plays in. Usually these are parts of a city's history that almost nobody remembers, parts of American history very powerful interests would prefer we not think about. They were supposed to be like 300 words max and just real short, informative, sometimes humorous things.

Instead this blew up rapidly and nearly all of them are about 1,500 words or more. They got longer quickly. My weakness as a writer is that I will either write nothing at all, or I'll write way too much. Many of these events were too awful to really keep a humorous tone about, just felt like these under-explored elements of history needed detail, and as accurate of reporting as I could give. It is a ridiculous amount of work to do, especially with a demanding full time job and long commutes, so this is amateur work done quickly and admittedly sloppily. I did get to use my BA in History for something at least. But these 32 riots/battles actually do come together to make a halfway decent history of race and labor relations across 200 years in this country, just out of order. If you ever want to know where my politics come from, it's from knowing about events like these.

Also, people kept asking for an easier way to find them. A lot of comments were like "this is great, how do I find the other ones?" So I'm reposting them here, with some revisions, I did make a few factual errors I want to correct. This first one for the Las Vegas Raiders was done very quickly so it is largely rewritten. The other 31 will come out over the course of the next couple of weeks. Original post can be found here.https://defector.com/why-your-team-sucks-2026-las-vegas-raiders?commentID=09f6ffa3-3e8e-4511-934d-d6098233a52ahttps://defector.com/why-your-team-sucks-2026-las-vegas-raiders?commentID=09f6ffa3-3e8e-4511-934d-d6098233a52a

... 

America's history is littered with some real unpleasantness and a great deal of it has been forgotten or ignored. Today's subject would be better-remembered if the Raiders still played in a real city like Oakland, but since they moved to a theme park in the desert, we will instead cover the 1969 West Las Vegas Riots, a much more obscure event.

There have been thousands of riots in American cities. In the 1800s, they were very diverse and could be about anything from Shakespeare to vegetarianism to labor tensions. We'll get to many of those stories. But in the 20th century, especially after World War II, riots began to take on a very familiar pattern. We could easily cover 32 events exactly like this one about the same things. I don't want to do that because it will be repetitive and depressing and maybe even pornographic at a certain point. I will cover the major ones such as Detroit (get hype, Lions fans!). But as you read this, know there is a century of history of undesired peoples in urban areas, brutalized by ever-more aggressive policing, and at certain points this explodes. People can easily mock these riots as self-defeating and "destroying their own homes", riots are not usually praxis. They are societies breaking down and do not need to make sense, also there are two actors in a riot: the rioters and the police. Explosions don't just happen, they are made to happen.

 

1969 West Las Vegas is just an example, but just know: this has happened everywhere.

 

Vegas was a boom town through much of the 20th century, and of course, this is America, so even into the middle of nowhere, we need to export our segregation. "The Mississippi of the West" is what the NAACP called Vegas. At first it really was like a Southern colony in the desert. A lot of the mobsters founded it were from an infamous bootlegger lawless resort city pre-Vegas, what is nicknamed "the Free State of Galveston". Galveston being Texas, and that means Jim Crow. Infamously Sammy Davis Jr could perform in Vegas, but was not allowed to say in the hotels. He could sing about gambling in Ocean's 11, but due to his skin color, he could not actually play craps at the Sands or the Riviera. The Civil Rights Movement had to extend this far out into the desert as well and would fight to integrate the main casinos in the 1960s.

 

But what we think of as Vegas is technically unincorporated land in a legal fiction called Paradise, Nevada. It also does not represent the entire city at all. Westside Vegas, on the literal other side of the train tracks, was the poorer, less developed area. It was the black neighborhood neglected by the city, in some cases lacking electricity or plumbing. There was a brief flourishing of a rival "Black Strip" around Jackson Avenue. It had a few nightclubs inspired by the Harlem Renaissance and smaller casinos modeled on "Vegas" (still technically Paradise). However, these businesses seem to have struggled. A very ambitious integrated casino in 1955 called the Moulin Rouge Hotel floundered that same year. People really wanted to make something better of West Vegas, but it never happened. Post-integration, the Black Strip really had no reason to exist. The entertainment venues declined, and this area only kept getting worse.

 

By the late-60s, the country was deeply on edge, and we'll cover a lot of the reasons why. There have been two major waves of urban riots in '67 and '68. African Americans everywhere feel harassed by over-policing and redlining and the predictable problems of the mid-20th century.

 

Today's event begins on Oct. 5th, 1969, when the police pull over a speeding taxi driver in Westside. One of the cops is actually black himself, Robert Arrington, which is rare since police forces were overwhelming white in this era. Meanwhile, a local black man named Gerald Davis just happened to be outside fixing his mother's car and sees his buddy, the taxi driver, in a bad police interaction. Davis probably should not have gotten involved. But when he did, the cops took this very personally. They followed Davis back to his mother's house nearby, saw that he had a legally-owned firearm, and decided to violently arrest him. Then they stormed inside, macing everybody, including his Mom. At this point, 150 onlookers are watching what is a snowballing situation. They begin to chant and protest, since all of them are familiar with this pattern of intimidation and cruelty. This goes on for hours, simmering, but not quite a riot yet. The evening ended with a tense stand-off, hundreds of cops and protesters focused at a strip mall around the corner. The police do retreat, trying to not set this off worse than it has.

 

However, the next day, the 6th, the riots seem to have truly begun. Two white men drove into the strip mall and were beaten by the protestors. The rioters armed themselves with molotov cocktails and were in open revolt against the Vegas police. There is the usual pattern of looting, sniping at police officers, and almost 40 blocks of the city in chaos. The battle would rage for about two more nights, with two deaths on the 8th, both involving an attempting robbery. At this point the West Vegas riots seem to have lost their energy and peace was restored. The mayor never needed to call in the National Guard. It could have been - and was - much worse in other cities.

 

It is very difficult to find sourcing on this riot, there is not even a Wikipedia article on it. I was able to confirm details with local newspaper reports from the time. I am reasonably sure this is accurate. Some events are better-remembered than others. You will find a Wikipedia article on the West Vegas Riot in 1992 in response to the Rodney King verdict (get hype, Rams fans). West Vegas did not feel any better about its place in the social structure decades later. I've been to Vegas a couple of times, each time I stepped off the Strip it felt like I was in Fallout, so I imagine this is still a very rough area.

 

Anyway, 31 teams to go. I'll keep reposting these. 

The Odyssey and the Current War: We Will Not Return From This

I will talk about the movie in this essay. This is going to connect to Christopher Nolan's new movie The Odyssey... eventually. However, we have a bummer of an opening first, then historical/philosophical context to get through. Maybe step out now if you're having a good day, I don't want to spoil that. If you just want to know about how cool the ocean looked in IMAX or if the cyclops was awesome, I'll write that review at the end of year when I'm doing my Top 15. First I have some other stuff to talk about.

In the poem and movie, it takes Odysseus ten years to come home from the east after destroying Troy in Homer's epic. He was the military genius who made possible the sacking of city that included the rape of innocent women, the murder of babies, the annihilation of a nation from history forever. The gods are punishing Odysseus. They are also granting him and his island kingdom, Ithica, a kind of mercy. Thousands of years later, outside the world of myths and gods, we live in the United States, in the general European "West". We still go east, and we still destroy. But no gods will be merciful to us.

On February 28th, 2026, the US military fired a missile into the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran just next to the Sayyid al-Shuhada military complex. The attack was ordered by sloppy leaders based on faulty intelligence, just one of the many miscalculations in a war that was based on complete fantasies. There was no coup d'état, no quick victory, no easy way out of the conflict, and nobody wanted this*. Our government just did it on a whim, erupting a quagmire of confusion and incompetence that has lasted months and destroyed the freedom of global trade. In a way though, commerce and politics feel trite compared to the human impact of this one act. It feels disgusting to worry about gas prices when you consider the infinitely larger cost to the families in Iran. We do not yet know whether this particular attack was an accident or an intentional act of terror. Intentions matter a lot less when you look at these kinds of consequences. The missile collided with the structure, exploding instantly, causing the roof of the school to collapse sometime around 10:30 AM, only minutes after the American-Israeli joint attack on Iran began. They were hit before there was any hope of evacuation. 156 civilians were murdered. The estimate now is that 120 of them were little girls guilty of nothing more than sitting in a classroom.

We may never know the name of the operator who fired the missile, this soldier, agent, or contractor, just somebody who pressed a button. The person who fired that missile was probably sitting at a desk behind a computer in a room full of coworkers on a base. They took illegal orders from criminal officers, on the direction of a criminal civilian government, and pressed a button. On their screen, a little dot connected with some structure, followed by a flash, and that was as close as they ever got to their victims continents away. It was just another task in probably a very busy, very stressful day of many more buttons being pressed. Maybe they have reasonable deniability that it was their button and their missile that killed 156 people, 120 little girls.

I'm going to engage in some fiction writing to imagine who this person is, because we'll never have the truth, let alone justice. I imagine they were here in the US as they worked. Some minutes or hours later, this button-presser's shift ended and they left the room. I imagine they just clocked out, said goodbye to their exhausted coworkers, got in a car, and drove outside the military checkpoints, putting the war behind them. It is that easy to go from killing hundreds to going back home now. They drove on an American highway next to a thousand strangers in their own cars, no monsters, no adventures, just making a final turn on some regular street, down a perfectly mundane neighborhood, to return to their home and family. I bet they smiled as they were greeted at the door. Their dog welcomed them, their children told them of their day at school, they had a meal, and their spouse shared their bed. 

That's how easy it is to welcome that much evil back home. That button-presser, that family, that nation, that culture, will never wash the sin away. You may think there are no consequences because things appear so normal, but you could never imagine the psychic horror that is seeping out of this house. This is the most haunted place in the world, we should bury it in a sarcophagus of concrete for 10,000 years to seal away the radiation. We won't, and that moral pollution is spreading to all of us. One day every single one of us will have to explain why we killed those 156 people, 120 little girls. I have excuses, but I've been here long enough, breathing in this air, drinking this water, these are my countrymen, and I'm guilty too.

Nobody will write an epic about this button-presser's journey, or direct a blockbuster about it. It is an awful story with no ending.

The Baby Yoda Movie

Star Wars is back in theaters! Disney wants me to call this new movie 'Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu', but I never will. People who use the word "Grogu" are cops, just like Disney Adult influencers who are required to call Star Wars Land its full legal name "Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge". I'm not doing that. We do crimes here. So this is a review of 'The Baby Yoda Movie', starring Baby Yoda. If there are any issues with these decisions, please contact my customer service line. Dial 0 for a live agent.

After a seven year hiatus from cinemas following Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, it is interesting to see how little hype there seems to be around this movie. Box office followers were certain a month ago that this newest movie would have one of the lowest launches in franchise history. Reports seem to confirm that trend. But box office discussion is as empty and bad faith as the dreaded Dead Game discourse, a meaningless way of discussing a work of art. More substantive are the review scores: 63% at time of writing is technically a pass on Rotten Tomatoes. However, I find critics have been curving the grade for years now to avoid audience backlash. A 63% is probably in reality less than 50%. The audience score at 89% means even the fandom army are not that excited to fight for this one. (Michael, for example, with its hardcore MJ stans, sits at 97%, and that movie has a much worse critic score.) It is hard to say any movie in 2026 will be able to build the kind of excitement that even mid-tier Marvel productions could pull just ten years ago, but The Baby Yoda Movie has gained this reputation online of being a movie nobody is that interested in. That's become the narrative. 

Even I was pretty sure I would hate this, and I was there on Friday night, with a Baby Yoda doll in hand, a dapper Baby Yoda doll wearing a bow tie (see picture). I had people on both sides of me with Baby Yoda dolls. So on second thought, this is one of the only movies this year that feels worthy of being an event. 2026 has been a great year for movies so far, but nobody was making Mother Mary into a big family outting. And The Baby Yoda Movie on that scale feels big, big enough I'm bothering to review it. Even if a lot of the space online feels annoyed and frustrated that they have to deal with Star Wars again.

Luckily, if expectations are low, the ambitions met them. LucasFilm is not out here promoting a Rise of Skywalker or anything, no triumphant return to glory. The Baby Yoda Movie feels like the studio slowly tip-toeing back into theaters with the kinds of movies they wanted to make: small, annual events with low stakes about little corners of the greater Galaxy. The fate of the universe is not threatened. In fact, neither is the major duo listed in the Government Name of this movie. The Baby Yoda Movie is a big episode of the TV Show, The Mandalorian. That's it. It is not the series finale, it's not even a season finale, it is not the most important part of either one of these character's lives. You don't need to have seen any of the Star Wars from before to watch this. And if there's a Baby Yoda 2, don't worry about Baby Yoda 1.

This movie has all the gravitas and drama of Ant-Man 2, possibly the least interesting movie in the entire MCU. It is a couple of adventures on a few planets with a darling little puppet at its center fighting goons with his badass dad. And if you can except a movie that is only that, well... that might not be so bad.

Always Be Hatin': Super Bowl 2026

Let me remind you of my motto when it comes to sports. And indeed, this is my motto when it comes to most everything else too. It is three letters: A.B.H.

A. - Always

B. - Be

H. - Hatin' 

Always Be Hatin'. I hate a lot of things. One of them includes the New England fucking Patriots. There's a lot of things wrong in the world, but the Patriots one of the few we can see corrected. I hope they lose tomorrow. I hope they lose by 200. We can all go to bed after the Daddy Yankee show because Seattle will already be up by 60 at the half.

I'm a born hater, I'm good at hating. Growing up, I hated school, I hated summer camp, I hated going to Synagogue, I hated visiting most relatives, and I hated going outside to play. Today I hate waking up early, I hate my commute to work, I hate every health insurance, I hate how helpless my damn patients are when it comes to this industry, I hate networks, I hate copays, I hate deductibles, I hate premiums, I hate prior authorizations, I hate EOBs, I hate form 10-10172, and I hate my commute home. I hate the government, I hate the cops, I hate the useless cowardly media that pretends all this is perfectly normal. The president and endless reductions in how much Medicare Part D covers and crooked-ass Cigna Health Plans who love to deny every claim just for the fun of it are not going anywhere. 

The Patriots are going somewhere. Win or lose, they're going away after tomorrow night and won't be back until September. Goodbye and good riddance. The Patriots have earned nothing and deserve even less than that. Always Be Hatin' Edition Super Bowl LX: Fuck the Patriots.

Top 15 Movies of 2025: Honorable Mentions, Dishonorable Mentions, Other Stuff

Every year way too many truly great movies come out to ever talk about in a Top 15 List, so here's a lot of other movies I have something to say about. 

Plus all the other stuff, then 2025 is finally over:

Honorable Mentions:

Kohuko, dir. Lee Sang-il

Fun fact: this is the most successful live action Japanese film of all time. It only released for a brief window in the US, I made a point to see it at the Angelika ASAP when it came out. The plot involves two boys who are raised into a storied kabuki actor family, one of the noble bloodline, the other an adoptee. The conflict arises when the newcomer, Kikuo (Sōya Kurokawa as a child, Ryo Yoshizawa as an adult) proves to be much more talented than his brother, Ryusei (Keitatsu Koshiyama as a child, Ryusei Yokohama as an adult). In this art form, you are not just a son, you actually inherit a mighty name, and these two fight like Biblical brothers for their father's blessing. 

Then there is the gender complication. Kabuki theater still does not allow female actors. Female parts are played by men. Kikuo and Ryusei are both masters of the feminine side of the production, finding themselves as brothers, rivals, and even tragic lovers on stage. I'm reminded a lot of the novel and film, Farewell My Concubine, set in the similarly mono-gendered Peking Opera. Kohuko is a very pretty movie, a great big family epic of people chasing the mastery of art at the expense of all else.

I'm going to shoot out a stray bullet for a movie I disliked to catch: Kohuko is a better movie about the loneliness of the superstar than Jay Kelly.