American Authoritarianism in Los Angeles

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Photo in thumbnail: Donald Trump speaking at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. (By Gage Skidmore | Flickr, Creative Commons)

On this episode of Scheer Intelligence, host Robert Scheer explores the turbulent political and social landscape of Los Angeles and the United States and speaks with Dr. Frances Gill—a psychiatrist, community advocate, and labor supporter. Scheer and Gill dive into the rise of madness, the threat of authoritarianism, the power of organized labor, and the urgent need for collective action in times of crisis.

Credits:

Host: Robert Scheer

Producer: Joshua Scheer

Guest: Dr. Frances Gill

Transcript

Robert Scheer

Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence where the intelligence comes from my guest. In this case, Dr. Frances Gill, who is a psychiatrist and works at the county hospital here in Los Angeles, part of the faculty at USC. She’s also interested in the rights of physicians and interns and has been active in a committee of interns and residents, union organizing. 

And she’s involved with the SEIU, which brings us really to the subject that I wanted to talk about. And as I think I mentioned, yes, the Democratic Socialist Alliance National Political Committee. But I really want to get to is what is happening in LA. You are a reputable leading member of our community. You heal people. You don’t hurt them. 

You worry about their getting more sensible and rational about their lives. And we seem to be in a period of madness. And I want to take just one inflection point of it. Yes, we’ve had our, actually one of our senators handcuffed and pushed around and abused. You know, my God, a historic moment. 

But I want to ask you about the case of David Huerta, who’s the leader of SEIU, much respected here, even by our political leadership in LA and treated in this horrible way, arrested, but using that as an example of the distemper of the moment, of madness. I don’t have your professional ability to analyze madness, but it looks like we’re going crazy here.

Dr. Frances Gill

Yeah, yeah, I think in my professional opinion, we’re going crazy here. That’s accurate. Yeah, I mean, what’s happening is, is really, really horrifying and out of control. I think the the escalation the ICE raids that started last Friday and have continued across LA for the last week. It’s so escalatory. It’s so horrifying. And it’s so violent. 

I mean, just, I can’t even remember if this was yesterday or the day before, but we saw ICE agents ram a car in Boyle Heights, like drove through an intersection and rammed a car to stop the car and arrest someone that was at one of the protests. A car that, by the way, had a woman and a child in it. That’s not an acceptable, rules of engagement seem to not apply here. It’s not an acceptable way to go about whatever you’re trying to do.

And I think, you know, we’ve seen the community react appropriately to this kind of escalation. People are out in the streets, people are angry and upset. Yeah, I mean, but it’s really horrifying. And unfortunately, it’s not clear whether this is going to deescalate at any point soon. They’re saying 30 days, maybe 60 days of raids, the National Guard remains under Trump’s control. It’s a very horrifying and scary moment.

But it’s also clear that they’re trying to see how far they can push this, how far they can push us, and people are standing up and fighting back and saying, not this far. So I think that’s a positive sign in these dark times.

Robert Scheer

You know, people throw around the ideas of fascism and so forth, and really what you mean by that is not just an extreme right-wing or whatever view of how life should be ordered or a racist or a chauvinistic view based on hostility to a group to the point of genocide, in the case of Jewish people treated in by German fascism.

But there’s a theater to fascism that is deliberately terrifying. The storm troopers, the use of costumes. And when I saw the ICE people wrestling a US Senator to the ground and intimidate him. And I kept thinking, is this built into the logic of Trump, of Donald Trump? 

Because after all, he was a creation of Hollywood, almost like a caricature of the bully, you know. With the purpose of abusing people, challenging them, bold– and that’s how he became famous. Not a considerate, decent person, worrying or even a concerned lawyer or a doctor role model, but on the contrary, the bully. And now we have a government of bullying and again, going to your profession, it seems a part of the population wants that bullying. 

Eric Fromm, I think, wasn’t a full psychiatrist as you are, I think he was a psychologist, but I think he wrote Escape for Freedom. And I remember the old explanation of Germany is that people want a tyrant at some point, or at least some section of the population, and they then have to victimize another section. 

In this case, it’s undocumented workers, okay? It’s people who don’t have the right papers. And everyone here in this community, I don’t care what their politics, knows we couldn’t have the prosperity of California, the ease of life, which in California, I believe, is now the third biggest economy, just as a state, with the third biggest, most successful economy in the whole world. 

And part of that is agriculture, which always required the exploitation of people willing to come across the border, mostly from Mexico and Central America, to pick crops and so forth. Or for the people who raised children for other people while they were becoming doctors or became doctors themselves. We’ve had many successful graduates of the California University system. And suddenly scapegoating these undocumented workers is now fashionable in certain quarters. It’s being hard headed.

Again, going to your expertise, do you accept that maybe we’re escaping a notion of freedom and responsibility? Maybe we’re tired of democracy, or at least half of the people or a third of the people? Is there something alarming in that respect that this totalitarian image has now voter appeal?

Dr. Frances Gill

Yeah, I guess that’s, I mean, that’s a great, definitely provocative question. And I think, I guess I would, a couple things I would add, I mean, first, it’s, yeah, not only is it totally absurd, this idea that you could even have a California without immigrants, like this is, know, Los Angeles is one of the like truly bilingual cities in the country. People speak English and Spanish, like it’s just, it’s so absurd, but also going back, like not that much farther and you know, we’re, like this land was Mexico, like we were invaders here.

So it’s just, there’s so many layers of just absurdity and hypocrisy like baked into the current political moment. And then zooming out a little bit like, and to try to tackle the question of just is, people becoming sick of democracy? I mean, maybe that’s at play to some degree, but I also think, you know, there are weaknesses to the concepts of democracy.

People can be misled, people can be led astray. We’re in this major inflection point where people are able to kind of like choose their own information realities and like have this concept of like fake news, real news. We don’t– people see stuff online that’s AI generated or not real and they might believe that it is or they like choose to only like listen to news sources that already have a particular like political slant.

And that just like creates even this deeper polarization. So I think it’s kind of, it’s less in my view, less that people are no longer aligned with like the concepts of democracy and kind of leadership by the people. I think it’s more that like democracy has weaknesses and during times of major like shakeups and how information is distributed and people are communicating ideas, which we are definitely living through one of those times right now with just like the internet age, those weaknesses become more salient. 

And then you have situations where someone who is an authoritarian or is a kind of tyrant or like, yeah, extreme right wing, easy to call them a fascist, like can mislead people and draw them into a different sort of society.

I think that’s kind of how I see it, although it’s a, I mean, it is definitely a provocative question. And I think also, I guess the other thing too is like democracy is not, you know, it’s an ideal that we strive for, but there is so much that’s undemocratic about our decision-making processes as a country, like the Electoral College being one, the Senate, the US Senate being another, and the like low voter turnout, like all of these things that even though we have an ostensibly democratic system are really, undemocratic practices and we have to build around those and fight through them.

Robert Scheer

Well, you know, you left out one reason why people may be turning against our political system. and I know, yes, it’s easy to blame the media, but, you know, our media lied to us throughout our history. It lied when we had slavery and segregation. It lied when we went to war in Vietnam or Iraq. It lies about a lot of things. But the biggest lie most recently is that we are still a society of equal opportunity and fairness and so forth. 

And I keep scratching my head because I happen to be, my father was a German Protestant, my mother was a Lithuanian Jew. And so when I was born in 1936, I’m an old guy, and I went back to Germany after I went to Lithuania after the war, I tried to figure out how did this one set of relatives I have, their relative, my father came when he was quite young, like Trump’s grandfather from Germany… 

But how did know, most well-educated, the highest science, the real sense of order. And in fact, the anti-Semitism was much lower in Germany than it was even in France and certainly in Eastern Europe. And so what was it that caused this very much admired society and actually the largest group of American immigrants at that point were German Americans, many of whom, half of my family, they were very confused about what was happening to their ladsmen and so forth.

Why were they killing, in my case, why were they, and they ended up killing all of the members of our family in Lithuania. And so their answer when I went to Germany was, well, “you have no idea how bad the economic situation was.” My relatives were farmers and so forth. And I scratched my head because America is the most prosperous country in the world. We haven’t had the Great Depression just now. 

In fact, when we had the Great Depression, to use this word socialism, we had somebody, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who saved capitalism from its evils, at least temporarily, and was called a socialist at the time, or criticized as such. 

But the fact is, and this is what I said was left out of your list of the unhappiness there, that’s the income inequality. And I mean, I even feel it, and I have a good job, and so forth, but I even go to Subway, and I wonder, wait a minute, how did that cost so much?

You know, and they can go to any other restaurants, 130 bucks. You know, what’s going on here? And even people who thought they had good jobs and good income. And what has happened is that we are and I don’t want to take your time here, but I want to get to that word socialist. It’s wonderful, by the way, for me to talk to somebody who could make a lot of money being just being a doctor, a successful doctor and kind of escape some of these problems that most people have, and maybe that’s one reason we have expensive healthcare system. 

But leaving that aside, what has happened in the last 25 years or so is this incredible increase in income inequality. And so a lot of people that I know personally, they’re all doing okay. They’re kind of in the courtier class. They serve the super wealthy. They live near, Silicon Valley, they benefit from this. 

But for the average American, they find everything from gas to food to their ability to travel, out. And so I’m turning to a very successful, you did well in the meritocracy. You’re one of the winners that Trump even can’t deny. But you’ve embraced a notion of democratic socialism. We’ve to be clear about that but that it’s needed. 

Maybe that’s why we’re such an unstable society and maybe that’s why so many people are willing to throw the idea of democracy and accountability to the public and the trash can because it hasn’t worked for them.

Dr. Frances Gill

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that’s totally the case. Totally the case. Yeah, I think a lot of people, I mean, the income inequality over the last 25 years is so stark. And I think we’ve seen the rise of these just like cartoonish billionaires, you know, and I do think it’s easy for people to kind of get into this headspace of like, well, I want that like I want that level of like wealth. 

And so I almost like can identify more with like these, like Elon Musk, these Jeff Bezos, like these, you know, figures of a different sort of like way of living and lose track of kind of the real enemy, which is the billionaires themselves and see instead like the opportunity to just scapegoat other people like immigrants. 

But yeah, I mean, I think that’s a huge part of it is the income inequality. And then I think also, the just climate crisis, the ongoing climate crisis. Like people, even if they don’t actively acknowledge that the, that we’re facing environmental disaster, I think people feel it in their bones. Like they feel it regardless, this sense of just like, what is, like the world seems to be ending. 

And I think you can you wind up like narrativizing that in whatever way makes the most sense and is the easiest for you to do so, but either way you feel it. And I think that is also animating a lot of our just current political moment.

Robert Scheer

Well, the world is ending. I mean, the statistics are startling. And if we don’t get this straight now, and really what is the spec of time, maybe the next 30 years or 50 years? I mean, that used to be you would have thought somebody was a lunatic who said this could all the planet could end. But now those are realistic figures. So if it’s not 30, so it’s 50 or something. But it’s not five centuries or 10 centuries, you know. And yet.

Who managed this? This is, you know, and this is where I get, you know, we can’t just rally around the Democratic flag is my idea. 

Dr. Frances Gill

Right. 

Robert Scheer

You know, and I’m inclined to, my God, you know, I know some of these people. I knew Clinton. I interviewed him. I mean, so I don’t think he would have ordered his stormtroopers to beat up a senator, even if it was a Republican senator. I mean, there was there were certain manners associated with both the Republicans and Democrats that seem to be dropped now. 

And those benefits are actually reassuring as you go about your daily life. Now, we’re going to have big rallies here. I don’t know when I’ll post this. I’ll post it today. So tomorrow, know, “No King” rallies all over the country and there’s going to be one in LA. And you have to really wonder whether you could recommend, I mean, I do recommend people go to these things, know, exercise your right to assemble and address their grievances. 

But still, we don’t know what, even our own police forget about the National Guard or actually supposed to be our own National Guard, but you know now we’re in the hands of the federal government and I want to get your willingness to use this word socialist. I don’t mean to put you on the spot. I happen to think it’s a very useful word, not that everybody who calls themselves a socialist has the answer or every movement that has caused some of them have been quite awful.

But it’s just an idea that this world that we’ve been celebrating of capitalism in the name of democracy has not worked out very well. And I just want to bring up a point that I often bring up in these interviews. In the debate when Hillary Clinton was challenging Donald Trump, and she said, she criticized him for, he’s going to make America great again. And she said, “America has always been great.”

Now, in there, it’s just the whole misunderstanding, I think, of the unhappiness of a large number of Americans. You know, you don’t have to proclaim yourself a proud boy and act in that way and look for scapegoats for your problems if you really think America is great and has always been great. The fact is people feel cheated of the image that we’ve been promised. 

So here you are and I think it’s truly admirable. You could just as easily, and not just you, anybody who’s say a full tenured professor at a major university, they’re probably making over 200,000, maybe 300, not everybody, but a lot of them are. They make good money. They can get by. They can accept, and then they don’t notice the homeless, and they don’t notice people who are not making a living or so forth. 

But the fact of the matter is, and this change, I mean, I grew up in a working class family. I worked in different jobs, you know, and you could make a decent living. You could have some free time. You could, you know, a vacation. Those days are gone for most people, you know, and it’s a lottery now. And, you know, even this idea of a meritocracy, you get you could be a very good student at some state college somewhere. 

And unless you happen to be in a particular, you know, skill that is needed by Elon Musk or somebody, just being a good school teacher or doing some other jobs effectively, being a good cook in a restaurant, that won’t cut it. You’re gonna be miserable much of the time. And so why have you allied yourself with the labor movement is a good example. Why is that important to you?

Dr. Frances Gill

Yeah, and I guess just one clarification. I’m not faculty at USC. I just did my residency at USC.

Robert Scheer

Oh okay yeah I am faculty. I’m not, you know, but that’s not my point. I’m not putting down those faculty members who do make good money. They deserve it. They work hard, you know, and so forth. I don’t have to be in that top rank, but that’s fine. That’s not my point. We have a 40-year class, I call it, that caters, doesn’t fundamentally challenge the really wealthy, are useful to them in some way, if not other ways, just at least educating their children at the right schools or what have you. 

But most Americans are not in on that, right? And that’s, I mean, otherwise I can’t understand Trump. Why would you want to blow up a country as clearly as happening now that was working for you, right? I mean, why, what is going, I mean, really, from your professional point of view, there’s a certain.

I use the word madness. Why are we, why do we want to destroy Los Angeles or any city in America? Why do we want to destroy the country? You know, mean, it’s, you know, hey, you know, a lot of people eat. I mean, we have opportunities, we have good weather. What’s going on? And it is a form, I mean, I don’t have your expertise, but it seems to me again, I want to get back to you. know, and Eric Fromm, when he talked about the escape from freedom.

It was that people did not feel they had the power to make it better and they were on the wrong end of it. They weren’t getting it one way or another. And so they go for a demagogue. We don’t have that much time. You’re very generous with your time. But let’s understand. Let’s try to understand not only the people who follow Trump, but Trump himself. Why is he not nurturing the country? Why is he not protecting it?

I can understand he took a lot of nasty shots from the Democrats, they challenged him on any and every level, you know, they didn’t give him credit for anything. But why, you know, he’s got children. I mean, why why would you act in this irrational way?

Dr. Frances Gill

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think people, I definitely don’t know. But I think like one thing that I feel is relevant here is that even though Trump and his administration’s actions seem irrational, you know, it’s kind of like a follow the money thing, right? Like right now we’re experiencing these horrifying ice raids in LA. 

It’s creating, like you said, this theatrical spectacle. It’s an incredibly violent spectacle and it’s, you know, ruining people’s lives, hundreds of people’s lives who have been detained and separated from their families and will be deported. But it’s also happening at the exact same time that they’re passing this horrific budget reconciliation bill that is a major transfer of wealth from working people to the billionaire class. 

Like they’re cutting Medicaid, they’re cutting all these social services, and they’re putting money into military and tax cuts for the wealthy. So it’s a huge like historic transfer of wealth to the capitalist class. And not a coincidence that that’s happening at the same time that they’re creating this huge media narrative about democratic run cities and violent criminal immigrants or whatever. 

Those things are all kind of rational together. And it’s just, I think it’s irrational in the sense that like, why would anyone be so evil? But I think it’s not irrational in the sense of like, they’re making decisions that line their own pockets. They’re making decisions that put money in their friends’ bank accounts.

Robert Scheer 

Yeah, but they’re also making decisions that make it impossible to even go hear the symphony in LA. We have a curfew. I have to get out of this office by eight o’clock tonight. And no, I want to, it’s really, there was a certain logic to capitalism as Adam Smith and others defined it, of an invisible hand, of a free market, of certain efficiency. And you know, okay. 

And we know, communism and socialism can get quite bureaucratic and become inefficient and so forth. What is at stake here now is a level of irrationality that I think the practitioners must know. I mean, for instance, Elon Musk, he makes more than half of his cars in China, all right? He knows China is not responsible for our problems. Yet he’s going along and financing a president, by the way, the Democrats did the same thing.

We want to blame all our problems on China, which actually has been quite successful in lifting, you know, what, 400 million or 500 million people out of terrible poverty. But somehow they’re the enemy. And if there wasn’t China, it’ll be India. You know, it’ll be Brazil if they’re successful. this whole weird turning against the global market, turning against trade, wanting high tariffs, not just a high wall to prevent people from coming across the who pick your crops and clean your house and raise your children, right? 

After all, used to be for a relatively open border because they wanted to get these people to come in and work and so forth. You know, it was the Democrats more concerned about labor unions that actually were for a tighter border. But leaving that aside, right now, just take a figure like Elon Musk. Do you really want a war with China?

And so Trump actually even seems torn, right? He wants to make deals, but he doesn’t wanna make deals. He says he doesn’t want war, but he goes along with war. I get back to an old thing that you don’t seem to have adults watching the store. And I don’t know if that’s a fall into a traditional psychiatric framework, but the one thing you thought you would have from having limits on government and right to vote, and particularly once we let women vote and so forth and.

You know, that there would be something like, hey, don’t blow the place up. Don’t destroy it. You know, I still have to take my kids to school. I still want to go shopping in the morning. I still want to, you know, not be frightened with sirens. We have sirens going on in LA. I live downtown, you know, it’s all night long. Sirens. And then I go by the police station. You can’t just blame Trump, you got a wall of police around. I want to get you back to the labor union thing, which is why I asked the interviewer in the first place.

Because I think it’s so refreshing that there is something of a rebirth of the labor movement because I think the labor movement is what saved capitalism in this country, saved the country from capitalism. And it was because of the Great Depression, we suddenly had the industrial workers united and the CIO and so forth. And that’s the family I come from. People could be welders, they could be machinists, make a decent living, be able to go fishing on the weekend, be able to even have a house of some kind.

And that world has been destroyed. And the reason I bring up this psychological thing, people with wealth should know clearly that this is gonna hurt them. The whole idea of philosophy, whether it’s Confucius or Aristotle, is to appeal to the emperors to beware that the peasants out there can rise up and kill you.

There’s chaos. There seems to be on the part of these wealthy people, yes, they want to line their pocket, but they think they can get away with it. They think there won’t be chaos. And yet you look at what’s happening and all around is that people are saying, yes, you’re creating chaos. How short-sighted can you be? This is why I need the help of a professional. I mean, I’ve interviewed, I interviewed Nelson Rockefeller and David Rockefeller. 

I’ve interviewed wealthy people and there are people like Warren Buffett who get it, know, and they don’t want to blow everything up. Right now, we seem to be in the hands of people who have the short term, yes, line my pocket, get even more than I could possibly ever need. So I think it’s for a psychiatrist to explain.

Dr. Frances Gill

Well, I mean, I think a lot of them are also not particularly bright and maybe just don’t see the bigger picture or aren’t thinking beyond the medium term. And then I think also with the climate crisis looming, people, it’s like they’re preparing for the end of the world and for them to be the only ones that get to survive it. 

And I think that’s just, I think that’s just kind of how it is. I don’t think there, I don’t know that there’s any psychiatric diagnosis that’s helpful here. I think some people are just not too smart and not too kind.

Robert Scheer

Yeah, is that it or are they just driven by some obsessive animalistic drive for power or contempt for others? There seems to be some often informed by hatred, you know. Isn’t that, there’s something, maybe we haven’t always been great.

Maybe that’s the problem. You know, even if you just begin with, let’s say we’re just an ordinary nation. Let’s say we don’t have the secret sauce. Then you know. Religion has told us this. Philosophy, psychiatry has told us this. You have to struggle with your demons, right? You have to challenge these forces that will make you destructive, right? There’s part of the human experience where power, corruption, and also possible as well as decency and so forth. 

That’s the struggle. And right now, we’re accepting a situation again of madness. That’s the only way I can describe LA at this moment. We’re actually intelligent, well-informed friends of mine, whether they are more conservative than me or that, or so forth, actually think we could become Hitler Germany. They say this over eating dinner. And I say, are you kidding me?

So, I mean, I visited Germany after war. I’ve been in totalitarian countries as a journalist. know, I’ve seen what this does to people, the fear, the horror, you know, the killing and all that. How could we possibly just be eating our food here? Are we really in a pre-fascist or fascist emerging situation? And if we are, how come we’re just going about our normal business?

You know, because these very same people very often will blame the protesters. They’ll say, look, it made it hard for me to get to work. You know, even on our campus, some people complain, look what’s happening here. We have this confusion and, I don’t even know. And can’t we just stop that? And then the administration brought in the LAPD and arrest people and blame people for what? Speaking up for human rights, speaking up against the tyranny of power. Right. 

And so. Again, we get back to manners and convenience. There’s a form of denial. What happened when Martin Luther King condemned the United States as the major purveyor of violence in the world because of the carpet bombing of Vietnam, killing so many people, and everybody said, Martin, get in your lane. Just talk about civil rights. He said, I can’t do that. So, you got a few more minutes. 

What fascinates me about you, is that you have taken time out from your careerism, maybe even challenged it a little bit, I don’t know how it works, but actually say I have to do something about it, so I have to care about what are the working conditions here in LA. I mean, let’s just end this by why do you care about SEIU and what it does and whether, and one of its leaders is brutalized in this way or intimidated in this way.

Why do you have a civic obligation aside from your medicine to be involved?

Dr. Frances Gill 

Yeah, I guess, and maybe this kind of gets to why I don’t feel too compelled to go down the road of psychologically assessing our Elon Musk’s and our Donald Trump’s, because I think it does just come down to a question of raw power. And I think when people have power, they’ll try to assert it, they’ll try to grow it. And I think the only force in society that is really capable of

contesting the way that power is distributed right now is organized workers. And I think organized workers exercising their power as workers in the workplace is the only path towards really remaking society and changing it for the better. And so to me, guess it’s, don’t even know if I would call it like a civic obligation.

I think it’s just, like I’m not of the billionaire class. Like I’m of the working class. Whether I, even if I’m like a fairly well-paid worker that has some stability, it’s still, you know, it’s still my role to be a part of organizing workers to leverage our power and to fight back. Yeah, I think for me it’s just kind of a material assessment of like, this is the only path.

Robert Scheer

Oh no, it’s more than a material assessment because let’s just finally, because I’m involved in trying to get a union at USC. I think it’s the only, let me make a pitch for it, the only way we can continue to serve our students because otherwise we have to listen to just trustees. We have to listen just to be, well, in this case, Trump has really pulled one out when, because,  humbling of Columbia and Harvard and all these schools. 

Pointing out, hey, you folks are using a lot of public money. We give you a lot of big contracts, defense contracts and everything else. You’re going to do it our way or we’re going to smash you. And suddenly, well, didn’t you think of that before? Didn’t you know that power might corrupt? Didn’t you think that you maybe were selling your soul for this money? You know, I mean, come on. 

What’s been happening since the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement is basically we bought off the intellectual class or the powerful people there. They, look at who was, mean, you know, some degenerate people get chairs named after them at Harvard, right? You know, so really there’s a big, I want to, okay, let me just take one minute. I just want to understand this word greed, you know.

Because after all, not only every major philosophy, every major religion, everything has always warned us that there’s something in the human makeup that could be terrible to the survival of the species, something maybe that cockroaches and beetles don’t have. They just go about their business and they survive a long time. Humans may have a relatively short span in the survival of species and that word greed comes into it. 

And that’s why we have the climate crisis, right? We’re willing to build in any which way and destroy the air and everything to get more money in to get… So, okay. What’s a positive way to think about this? Well, I mean, really, will labor turn out? Will that save us here in LA maybe?

Dr. Frances Gill 

Definitely. Yeah, I mean, labor is fighting back really hard. I think that the labor movement is well positioned to fight back right now. And the fact that they came after a labor leader in LA, an immigrant labor leader is an immigrant rights activist and labor leader is unacceptable and people are ready to stand up.

Robert Scheer

Well, let’s end on that because he has the same name as Dolores Huerta, right? I don’t know if it’s spelled the same way, David Huerta. And I’ve always admired Dolores Huerta. I remember her from the original with Cesar Chavez in the Farm Workers’ Recording. And one thing, and I’ve interviewed her a number of times even for this show, and one thing she would always say is, know, “I didn’t cross the border. The border crossed me.” My family was here for, you know, whatever.

And the border shifted. And there’s such a wisdom to that. I know he’s not related to her, but here’s an example. Somebody trying to improve the life of people who are on this side of the border or that side of the border, you know, but we have a common stake. 

And that whether you’re Chinese and trying to improve your life or you’re in Brazil trying to improve it, this is what we have lost in this whole super nationalism, America, make America great. 

We think it’s a zero sum game. I have to screw you or you’re going to screw me and we have to divide it. And I thought the example of this union organizing, which in LA organizes the most vulnerable people. It’s not just the top crafts, which was a lot of traditional labor organizing, but people who are really exploited in the extreme, you know, the hotel workers, you know.

Service industries and so forth. So maybe we could end on a positive note. We’ll go for 40 minutes. It’s 3820 now. Give me the sermon.

Dr. Frances Gill 

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think that the labor movement in LA will not stand down. I think we’re some of the one of the most– LA is a union town, you know, we’re one of the most powerful labor cities. And I think part of that is just because of the synergy between the labor movement and the immigrant rights movement in LA. And I think people are not going to stand down. People are not going to accept this kind of unjust reality. 

So the labor movement is going to fight back and there’s no doubt in my mind that when we fight together, we win.

Robert Scheer

On that note, and I want to thank you, I’m only here in LA because actually my mother was a garment worker and she came from Lithuania, but she came to LA in 1931 to organize workers here. It wasn’t too successful. It wasn’t always a labor town. The LA Times that I worked for 30 years tried to smash the union every chance it had, but now it is. 

And it is a very positive feeling when you realize that a lot of people around you that you run into, that’s been happening to me the last weeks, whether at the university or on the streets, we’re on the same side. We just don’t want people bullied. And so it’s really quite moving. I want to thank you, Dr. Frances Gill, for taking this time and also for being a heck of a role model for people, including myself. 

I want to thank Joshua Scheer for being our executive producer, putting this all together. Diego Ramos, whose family came from Chile all the turmoil there, is our managing editor at ScheerPost where we run this. And who did I leave out? Max Jones who does the video. And I want to thank the JKW Foundation as well as Integrity Media Foundation for providing funding to help us do this on a basis. And see you next time. Thanks again.

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Robert Scheer

Robert Scheer, publisher of ScheerPost and award-winning journalist and author of a dozen books, has a reputation for strong social and political writing over his nearly 60 years as a journalist. His award-winning journalism has appeared in publications nationwide—he was Vietnam correspondent and editor of Ramparts magazine, national correspondent and columnist for the Los Angeles Times—and his in-depth interviews with Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev and others made headlines. He co-hosted KCRW’s political program Left, Right and Center and now hosts Scheer Intelligence, an independent ScheerPost podcast with people who discuss the day’s most important issues.

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