Dept of Labor Betrays Its History Thru Anti-Immigration / Kim Kelly

This Is Hell!

News

4.9 • 937 Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2026

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kim Kelly, author of, "Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor," (Atria Books) host of "Unite and Win: A Guide to Workplace Organizing" podcast at workerorganizing.org, speaks with This Is Hell! to discuss her writing at The Baffler, "A Piece of Work: The Department of Labor’s anti-immigrant turn betrays its history." Kim Kelly is a labor reporter for In These Times magazine and has been a regular labor columnist for Teen Vogue since 2018. Her writing on labor, class, politics, disability, and culture has appeared in The Nation, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Baffler, The New Republic, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and many others. Kelly has also worked as a video correspondent for More Perfect Union, The Real News Network, and Means TV. Previously, she was the heavy metal editor at Noisey, Vice’s music vertical, and helped organize the Vice union. A third-generation union member, she served three terms as an elected councilperson for the Writers Guild of America, East Council. Her first book, Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor, was published in 2022, and the young readers edition, Fight to Win! Heroes of American Labor, was published by Simon & Schuster Kids in 2025. We will have new installments of Rotten History and Hangover Cure. We will also be sharing your answers to this week's Question from Hell! from Patreon. Help keep This Is Hell! completely listener supported and access bonus episodes by subscribing to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thisishell

Transcript

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0:00.0	The President
0:02.0	The President
0:10.0	Mickey Giac! This is hell. This is hell.
0:37.3	And I am your bitter, blind, broke-captooth radio show, podcast. This is hell.
0:43.3	And I am your bitter, blind, broke, cap tooth radio show, podcast, live stream host Chuck Burtz.
0:43.9	Producing today's show is Chris Koolfan.
0:45.7	Chris, I got to know when you were talking to our guests before the show started.
0:51.8	Was that on the live stream?
1:10.8	No, that was not. Oh, damn it, because what I overheard of that conversation was really good. And so I was hoping that would have been on the live stream. Yeah, she has a friend on the Instagram page, and I grew up on a metal DJ called Kim Kelly in Chicago, and eventually, he's like, no, there's a middle DJ with your name.
1:12.1	She's like, I was a metal DJ.
1:13.5	And I was just like, in Chicago?
1:14.1	No, Philly.
1:48.9	But like, what a coincidence. Same name. And then eventually I was like, there's a great metal page, Instagram page out of Philadelphia called Metal and Coffee. And she's like, that's my college, but that's my college friend, Ebony. I was just like, it was just really like very metal and intertwined, but yet if she was never in Chicago as a DJ, it was just, yeah, weird. That's very weird. That's why I was wishing that would have been on the live stream. Maybe we should start up the live stream like a few minutes early just for people who listen to the live stream and don't listen to the podcast. Yeah, if they want to hear me do like sound checks and make mistakes, that'd be great. It would be. Sure, it would be. Live from the United States, where it is impolite to call a fascist a fascist for whatever freaking reason,
1:55.4	this is hell you may not have noticed. At least, I know I didn't notice, the degree to which white supremacist,
2:03.1	Christian nationalism is sweeping through the Trump administration and the federal government
2:07.3	as a whole. I mean, sure, I knew white supremacist, Christian nationalists, or those who play them
2:12.6	on TV to con suckers into voting for them. I knew they were a big part of the Trump administration, but I did not recognize just how
2:20.0	entrenched the racist, fascist, bigotry was becoming institutionalized.
2:26.4	Worse yet, we got at least three more years of this.
2:31.2	Who knows how long it will take to disentangle all this structural white supremacy
2:35.9	from the state? Even worse than that, if and when they are finally purged from the government,
2:40.9	can you imagine the far-right media uproar when Christian nationalists claim they are victims of
	...

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