Cheap Foreign Labor, Managerial Class Killing America’s ‘Last Cowboys’ | Gord Magill & Jack Fowler

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Episode Title:

Cheap Foreign Labor, Managerial Class Killing America’s ‘Last Cowboys’ | Gord Magill & Jack Fowler

Podcast:

Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words (Host: Victor Davis Hanson) | The Daily Signal

Date:

February 17, 2026

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Overview

This episode features guest host Jack Fowler interviewing Gord Magill, a Canadian-born trucker and author of the upcoming book End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers. The discussion explores the decline of the American trucking industry, the cultural significance of “the last cowboys” of America, and the destructive impact of managerial elites and cheap foreign labor. Magill weaves personal narratives, policy critique, and historical context to warn about growing dysfunction and the consequences for the working class.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Legendary Truck Driver: From Heroes to "Precipice"

• Cultural Arc: Fowler reminisces about the image of truckers in the 1970s and 80s as American heroes and cultural icons. Magill contrasts this with today's negative perceptions, shaped by high-profile accidents involving immigrant drivers and industry changes ([05:29–07:03]).
• Industry in Crisis: Magill states the industry is "on the precipice," not of collapse, but of reputational and structural crisis. The public’s trust has eroded due to fatal accidents, regulatory missteps, and the marginalization of American drivers ([07:03–09:08]).
  • Quote (Magill, 07:03): "The image of the trucker, the perception of the industry by the public has gone completely down the toilet. And there's a lot of reasons for that."

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The Broader Crisis: The Managerial Class vs. Skilled Labor

• Not Just Trucking: Magill frames his book as relevant beyond trucking, as a reflection on the working class versus a managerial elite more concerned with regulation and corporate interests than with productive labor ([12:43–14:50]).
  • Quote (Magill, 13:30): "There's way too many people dictating to the working class how to do their jobs, messing with the economics, serving corporate interests instead of letting working people just cook and do what they do best."
• Societal Parallels: He invokes theorists James Burnham and Peter Turchin to warn of the "Overproduction of Elites" and the risk of turning workers into "human resources slurry," undermining community and competence.

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Personal Narratives: The Human Toll

• Family and Identity: Both Magill and Fowler share stories about growing up in trucking families, highlighting pride, sacrifice, and the often overlooked strain on truckers and their loved ones ([15:01–16:50]).
  • Quote (Fowler, 15:38): "There was just something, something to be esteemed in these men that would do these things for their family. ... These are men I think make great sacrifices."
• Personality and Skills: Magill emphasizes that successful trucking requires determination, resilience, and a unique personality—qualities glossed over in recruiting drives that promise easy money but ignore the job's realities ([16:51–17:37]).

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The Freedom Convoy: Symptom of Broader Discontent

• Convoy Experience: Magill details the 2022 Canadian Freedom Convoy, which he joined, describing it as an exuberant, peaceful, and unifying event grossly mischaracterized by the government and media ([18:41–25:33]).
  • Quote (Magill, 24:20): "It was a party. ... Everybody was so nice. ... It was like Mardi Gras or Burning Man at minus 30."
• Anarcho-Tyranny Allegations: He condemns the Canadian authorities for planning to smear the convoy preemptively, using legal persecution to intimidate dissenters, and neglecting real crime to focus on punishing peaceful protest ([25:00–25:30]).
  • Quote (Magill, 24:57): "We have a crushing managerial system in our society ... that spent four years chasing hundreds of people to the ends of the earth with spurious court cases, most of which either got dropped."

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Cheap Foreign Labor & Security Threats

• Current Crisis: Magill outlines how foreign drivers—often with minimal vetting—are replacing Americans, causing both safety and security issues ([27:49–31:48]).
  • Recent fatal accidents are cited as examples.
  • He claims trucking companies, NGOs, state and federal governments, and even USPS contracts have enabled labor import and law circumvention.
  • Data Security Risk: Electronic logging devices, initially promoted for safety, are now being manipulated by foreign actors, circumventing hours-of-service laws and exposing critical infrastructure data.
  • Quote (Magill, 30:25): "America's guts have been opened up to any foreign actor they want by this insource labor problem ... There's all kinds of blame to go around for that."
• American Truckers Squeezed Out: Magill, now working in construction himself, describes how even experienced drivers can’t find viable trucking work due to low pay, surveillance, and managerial micromanagement ([31:52–33:22]).

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The “War” on Truckers: Who’s to Blame?

• Primary Villains: Magill identifies the American Trucking Associations (ATA), corporate lobbyists, and government regulators as the key antagonists ([34:19–36:55]).
  • ATA uses the myth of a perennial “driver shortage” to lobby for grants, subsidies, and policies that favor high-turnover, cheap labor models.
  • Quote (Magill, 34:45): "The real bad guys ... are corporate lobbyists and the government ... The big one is the American Trucking Associations."
• System Designed for Churn: High driver turnover is systemic; truck driver schools are subsidized, yet almost none of the new drivers remain a year later.
  • Example (Magill, 36:55): "My friend Justin ... was one of 86 students in his class. Within 12 months, he was the only one left."

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Economics: Work Without Reward

• Labor Law Loopholes: Truck drivers are exempt from overtime due to the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, frequently spending unpaid hours waiting for loads—key motivator for quitting ([37:08–38:54]).
  • MIT’s Freight Labs confirms there’s no driver shortage, only chronic under-utilization and wasted labor.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Precipice Warning
  “The image of the trucker, the perception of the industry by the public has gone completely down the toilet.”
  —Gord Magill ([07:03])

• Managerial Overreach
  “There's way too many people dictating to the working class how to do their jobs, messing with the economics, serving corporate interests instead of letting working people just cook and do what they do best.”
  —Gord Magill ([13:30])

• The Convoy Spirit
  “It was this collective expression of, like, finally, this nightmare is over. ... You will never, ever be at a protest anywhere that was as good as the Freedom Convoy.”
  —Gord Magill ([24:20])

• Security Fears
  “America's guts have been opened up to any foreign actor they want by this insource labor problem.”
  —Gord Magill ([30:25])

• ATA Critique
  “The real bad guys ... are corporate lobbyists and the government ... The big one is the American Trucking Associations.”
  —Gord Magill ([34:45])

• Economic Exploitation
  “You don't get paid overtime ... The industry just says it is standard operating procedure that you don't get paid for many, many hours of your time.”
  —Gord Magill ([37:08])

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Timestamps: Important Segments

• Cultural Shift & Industry Decline: [05:29–09:08]
• Wider Societal Themes: [12:43–14:50]
• Personal Tribute to Truckers: [15:01–16:50]
• Freedom Convoy Breakdown: [18:41–25:33]
• Foreign Labor & Security Risks: [27:49–31:48]
• Who’s to Blame—ATA and Lobbyists: [34:19–36:55]
• Labor Law and Exploitation: [37:08–38:54]

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Tone & Style

• Direct, Candid, Personal: Magill is frank, sometimes blunt, weaving hard data with personal narrative and policy critique.
• Reflective and Critical: The tone is often nostalgic concerning what’s been lost but also confrontational towards those he deems responsible for trucking’s—and the working class’s—hardships.
• Advocacy-minded: The discussion is a clarion call for respect, reform, and recognition of America’s core workers.

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Conclusion

This episode delivers a forceful critique of the forces undermining America's trucking industry—cheap, often unvetted foreign labor, corporate lobbyists, bureaucratic overreach, and cultural ignorance. Magill's personal insights, broad analysis, and warnings highlight how the fate of truckers signals deeper problems throughout American society. For anyone concerned about the fate of skilled labor and the working class, this conversation is a wake-up call about the dangers of abandoning “the last cowboys”—and the country’s own security and cohesion.

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Transcript

[A]

The Canadian government really went to great lengths to smear and lie about the convoy in the immediate. In the immediate turmoil it was happening. In fact, it was proven that they were planning a strategy to lie and smear them before they even got to Ottawa. A legitimate democratic expression has to be suppressed and, you know, in any way possible. But while I was in Ottawa, it was a party. It was. My friends and I spent that first Saturday night and, like, these techno raver people showed up. Everybody was hugging each other. It was like love and grinning from ear to ear. All the crap they said about the freedom convoy was total baloney. Everybody was so nice. And it was this collective expression of like, finally, this nightmare is over. People were partying in the streets. It was like Mardi Gras or burning man at minus 30. It was incredible. I think the book is for everybody. I wrote it for everybody. Everybody could read it. And I want people to come away from reading it saying, you know, like, this could be my job next. Maybe it already is your job next. Maybe we need to rethink the idea of our society as being, you know, James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution and Peter Turchin's, like, Overproduction of Elites. There's, like, way too many people dictating to the working class how to do their jobs, messing with the economics, serving corporate interests instead of letting working people just cook and do what they do best.

[B]

Well, hello, ladies, and hello, gentlemen. Welcome to Victor Davis Hansen and in his own words. We're recording on Thursday, 12th February. I believe this particular episode will be up on the 17th. And we have a great special guest, pinch hitting for Victor today. And that's Gord McGill. He's the author of the forthcoming book the End of the Inside the War on Truckers. It's coming out in March, I believe.

[A]

Yeah, March 24th.

[B]

Okay. And it's being published by Creed and Culture. You know, Gord on, I never would have thought when this podcast with Victor started five years ago that five years out we'd have a number of episodes where we talked a lot about trucking. But we have no surprise to you, you are a trucker. But you know how this is not a. It's not. It's not a sleepy issue. It's an issue that for any number of reasons, has taken a lot of attention of Americans and Canadians. You are Canadian, you can admit that. And your book is really timely. So we're going to explore the book and what you wrote, obviously what you've written, and we'll talk about a few other things, I hope. And we're going to do all that when we come back from these important messages.

[A]

Since the founding of America 250 years ago, many things have changed. But some things never do. The commitment of husband and wife, the importance of passing along our values to our children. The faithfulness of God. Some wonder how we can ensure America will continue to thrive as long as we keep first things first. We've only just begun. America the Beautiful.

[B]

We are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words, pinch hitting for Victor Gord McGill. Gord, where were you born, by the way?

[A]

I'm from Hamilton, Ontario, originally.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Yes, I am Canadian, but I do live in the United States. I've been here now for 10 years, married a lovely American lady, and I'm in the process of becoming a naturalized citizen, so we'll see how that goes.

[B]

Okay. And you've written a book again. The book's coming out in March. People should go to Amazon or creedandculture.com to find out more about that. You've written a lot, too, about trucking. I first learned about you back in, I think, November. Picked up a piece. Is it Pirate Wire you wrote?

[A]

Yeah, I did a piece for Pirate Wires. I've kind of written all over the place. I didn't really start writing until about 2017. I used to be a participant, a frequent commenter at a little tiny blog, and they asked me to write an opinion piece. So I wrote it. And then that a couple of years later led to some podcast interviews. And then Freedom Convoy in Canada happened, which I went home to to express solidarity with my fellow Canadians and fellow truckers. And then I was given an opportunity to write for Newsweek magazine. And since then I've written 15 different articles for Newsweek. I've written for the American Conservative, the Blaze, American Affairs Journal, Compact, American Compass, pirate wires, Im 1776. I kind of been all over the place, mostly writing either about trucking or about the Freedom Convoy. Okay.

[B]

You know, I'll make a little hopefully it's not a speech, but I'm 65, so I think back to my youth and how truckers and trucking was perceived and, you know, all kinds of movies and Conway Convoy, the song. There was a TV show, I think, Moving on with Claude Aikens, various movies. And there was a great, there was a, you know, really positive overall positive perception of trucking and truckers. And they were kind of cool and they were Americans. It was sense of patriotism, too. And then anyone who's looked at any news source in the Last year has gotten a very different taste and view of trucking, mostly because of these accidents by illegal, well, maybe even legal immigrants drivers. But we're going to get into that. But there really has been quite an arc in how trucking actually is. You're going to tell us about that too, and how it's perceived. So I'm so glad you're here. And again, this has been a relevant issue, and it's relevant to Victor. The first sentence of chapter one of End of the Road is the North American trucking industry stands on the precipice in 2026. End quote. Gord, that's a pretty alarming statement. Just anyone would think if trucking collapses, there's going to be chaos, there's going to be ruin. How am I going to get my, you know, my food? I'm going to get my energy. Why is trucking on the precipice?

[A]

So when I, when I said trucking is on the precipice, what I mean is the, the. The industry is in a very dysfunctional mode. As you just said at one point. Truck drivers had this venerated niche in American culture and a lot of cachet with the average American. A lot of cultural output was expressed in the 1970s and early 1980s about this sort of archetype, you know, the sort of last American cowboy, the rugged individualist who was, you know, doing right by his family and his business in his own honor despite, you know, a sort of impersonal system. Lots of movies and stuff made about them. In the 70s, there was a bunch of different strikes that happened. You know, it was. That was a different time. And my book is a sort of recent historical analysis about why we have gone from that to where we are today. And the precipice is this. As you said, we have a number of collisions and fatalities. The last two weeks. There's been, you know, these four Amish guys were killed in Indiana. A retired couple in Michigan were ran into and killed. And it looks like Mad Max out there. And so the precipice is not like. It's not to say that the trucking industry itself is going to collapse, but the, the image of the trucker, the perception of the industry by the public has gone completely down the toilet. And there's a lot of reasons for that. And the precipice is a question like, are we going to keep trying to replace the American trucker with in source labor? Are we going to keep trying to do f. Safety regulations that are not about safety but about, you Know, keeping human resources managers and bureaucrats pretending like they're doing something while they don't actually do what would make safer highways with more competent people on them. Right. So that's sort of the question I'm posing about this precipice.

[B]

Okay, I'm going to ask you about some of the actual combatants in this war later. Later on. But first, Gord, you know, we gotta pay our bills.

[A]

Pay the bills. Pay the bills, man.

[B]

Yeah, you know, who am I to talk about long hours to a trucker? But I got home last night at 1am after all day back and forth to Washington, D.C. where I was at the Daily Signal, which is the happy home of this podcast. And those who are watching the podcast could see over what is my left shoulder, a device. That's my Cove Pure machine. I came in at 1am the first thing I did was went to that machine. It was an exhausting day, but I just wanted. I just wanted water. I needed my water. I wanted my good water. So why. Here's the thing, folks. Everyone has jumped into the new year. It's still the new year. Buying new supplements, trying a new diet, new workouts, but they completely ignore the most important basic thing, and that's water. Every mild, even mild hydration impacts energy, focus and metabolism. And when you think about all the garbage that's in our water, you're starting behind the curve before you even begin. And talk about garbage in the water. If you come to Connecticut, I don't know if you've driven through Connecticut, Gordon stopped to get some local water, you're like, what? What is going on? What's the funk in this thing? So let me tell you how Covpure solves all this. COVPure changes all that immediately. Their Clearwave technology is certified to remove up to 99.9% of contaminants. Pretty much anything that isn't water. PFAS, microplastics, pharmaceuticals residue, fluorides, all of that gets removed. It's about the purest water you can get. I love it because it is pure. I don't want water to have a taste. It's interesting to say this tastes good because it doesn't taste at all. But there's a refreshingness to co and I use it for everything now water the plants with it. Why should I put chloride water in my plants? Ice cubes, even the dogs, dog dish, they get. They get good treatment through CO Pure. So now I want you all to consider buying CO Pure. Now, what am I going to say? Code Pure Makes it so easy to get pure water with the push of a button. So this year, make a New Year's resolution that sticks. Improve your health with clean water. Right now you can get $200 off for a limited time if you use the L covpure.com V D H which stands for Victor Davis Hansen. That's C-O-V E P U-R-E.com VDH to start this year, New year. Right. And we thank the good people from covpure for sponsoring Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. And yes, I love having my machine in my office where I work. So Gordon McGill. Let's see. I lost my glasses, so I.

[A]

Happens to me all the time, sir.

[B]

It's a struggle here, but I'll make it happen.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Let's say there's this average Joe. I'll be an average Joe who's no more interested in the trucking industry than he might be in the farming industry or the home building industry or any industry. He doesn't really care about that. Why should he purchase your book? You know, is because is this book, obviously it's about trucking, but is it about more than just trucking? It's. So it seems to have a larger societal theme.

[A]

Yes, I think it's much larger than trucking. And I've written it for everybody. At times, you know, it can be a little bit technical in some of the sort of arguments and economics and policy stuff. But I open every chapter with an anecdote from my own career or my dad's. I mention my family a lot. I want it to be a very family friendly book. And there's a lot of questions about the sort of relationship between our managerial ruling class, government regulation and the average working dude. Right. Like it's not just about truckers. And the questions asked in the book and the situations discussed, the policies discussed, the economics discussed apply to everybody, I think in the. Across the broader working class and a little bit, you know, about like what it means to be a citizen of a nation when, you know, we have the powers that be who seem to be more interested in just turning everybody into human resources slurry and not respecting craft, competency, skill, nation, neighborhood, locality, family ties, community. And you know, I think, I think the book is for everybody. I wrote it for everybody. Everybody can read it. It's not like, it's not like too heavy on the policy wonkery. It's not too autobiographical. But it is a little bit of all of these things. And I want people to come Away from reading it saying, you know, like, this could be my job next. Maybe it already is your job next. Maybe, maybe we need to rethink the idea of our society as being, you know, James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution and Peter Turchin's like Overproduction of Elites. There's like way too many people dictating to the working class how to do their jobs, messing with the economics, serving corporate interests instead of letting working people just cook and do what they do best. So I think everybody in the working class will appreciate this book.

[B]

Gord, you're 10 years old. Is dad leaving on a Sunday night and he comes back Friday? What was it like to have a dad who was. Oh, did he, was he a local?

[A]

So my dad went through a couple of different phases when I was a kid. He did local trucking, he did long haul trucking, he came out of the truck and did other things. A career path I've sort of followed a little bit. So you know, I've been the kid whose dad was away trucking. I've been the kid who was, whose dad was gone 12, 14 hours a day, but still working in a local capacity. I've been the kid who watched my parents get divorced. Not necessarily because of trucking, but you know, it certainly didn't help my parents relationship. So I've been on all sides of that.

[B]

Yeah, my wife, her dad was a trucker, long haul trucker, independent. And I remember when we were dating Central Massachusetts on a Sunday. We, we, we went out to dinner early and we came back, we were walking and her father was driving off a big, you know, toot the horn. But, but I was, I felt melancholy. Like this man, he's a great man. He's a former Marine, God rest his soul. He passed away. But there was just something, something to be esteemed in these men that would do these things for their family. I've got to feed my family and this is what I'm going to do. I'm not going to bitch about it either. I mean, I always felt that it seemed like this is an alluring life right on the road and meeting characters wherever you go. But these are men I think make great sacrifices.

[A]

Yeah. And most truck drivers are, you know, there's a certain humbleness and modesty to, to the job, obviously. There's also some people who, you know, make it an element of their identity and they're very out about it. And that's fine too.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But yeah, truck drivers are asked to do things that most other people would not work 60, 70 plus hours a week, the long haul guys are asked to be away from home for weeks at a time, separated from your family, separated from your community. It's not a job for everybody. If you are going to be successful at trucking, you have to want to do it. And it has, you know, it attracts a certain personality type and you have to have a certain personality type in order to be successful at it. Which is not something that the sort of pimps for the driver shortage narrative or these CDL mills will tell you. Yeah, they just say, oh, you can make all this money. Well, maybe they don't tell you about all the bad parts.

[B]

Yeah. Well, we're going to come back from some messages and I'm going to ask you about the aforementioned Freedom Convoy and we'll do that when we come back. Hey, folks. Back with Gord McGill, author of End of the Road, Inside the War on Truckers, coming out in March, published by Creed and Culture. And look Gord up. He's written in a myriad of places as he's just described. So, Gord, tell us about the Freedom Convoy that exploded in Canada in 2022. Was it fun in some parts, exciting in others? What was troubling about it? Did it expose the lengths to which modern democracies and their leaders or of elite institutions would go in order to force compliance and suppress dissent? Give us the flavor of the, of, of the actual convoy and the consequences of it?

[A]

Wow, that's a whole, that's several other books.

[B]

You could write a book about that.

[A]

Well, no. And a bunch of people have. I believe there's four or five books that have been published about the Freedom Convoy that I'm aware of. Maybe there's more. It was a momentous period in Canadian history. I mean, it's the genesis of my book. Right. So, you know, one of the questions downstream of the convoy that I was asked by various people here in the United States I write for is, you know, why was it just truckers like. And to my mind, it wasn't simply about the vaccine mandates. It was about something much deeper. The convoy itself and the reaction it, it received in its wild popularity in Canada and elsewhere. Spoke to the Times and the, and the suppression of life by the COVID regime and our decrepit ruling class, you know, and on all the people that just wanted us to hide and be away from each other and close down society for a marginally effective virus. I'm not having any arguments about any of that stuff because that's pointless at this, you know, at this stage, however, this question about why was it truckers? Is sort of what animates part of what animates the buck. And I went home in 2022 to express solidarity with the convoy. I drove to Ottawa. I welcomed the Western Canada portion of the convoy into the city. I spent that first weekend there. And then I was writing about it and talking to people in Ottawa and Alberta and all across the country in the weeks that followed. And, you know, the Canadian government really went to great lengths to smear and lie about the convoy in the immediate. In the immediate turmoil it was happening. In fact, it was proven that they were planning a strategy to lie and smear them before they even got to Ottawa, because that's the way trust and Trudeau is and the way our managerial regime is. Legitimate democratic expression has to be suppressed and, you know, in any way possible. But while I was in Ottawa, it was. It was a party. It was like, my friends and I spent that first Saturday night and, like, these techno raver people showed up. Everybody was hugging each other. It was like love and grinning from ear to ear. All the crap they said about the Freedom Convoy was total baloney. Everybody was so nice. And it was this collective expression of, like, finally, this nightmare is over. People were partying in the streets. It was like Mardi Gras or burning man at minus 30. It was incredible. I have never felt so much love, so much solidarity with my fellow man as that first night I was in Ottawa. Everybody else that was there will tell you the same thing. It was effing awesome. You will never, ever be at a protest anywhere that was as good as the Freedom Convoy. And this is. I think this gets to the point of, like, why the government had to crush it because it was so wildly popular. And crush it they did. And they didn't just leave it at, like, you know, hey, February 19th, we've already passed the Emergencies Act. We kick everybody out of Ottawa. We arrest all these people. They spent four years engaged in a project of lawfare, chasing peaceful participants in the Freedom Convoy to the ends of the earth, spending tens of millions of dollars on lawyers in court time and not dealing with actual crime. So, like, the way the Canadian government prosecuted the Freedom Convoy for years after the fact serves as an example of what some people might call anarcho tyranny, where legitimate crime against people, robbery, theft, rape, sexual assault, you know, murder, you know, there was a. There was a drive by shooting at a wedding in Ottawa in September of 2023, when the main trial for the two sort of titular Heads of the convoy, Tamar Ilic and Chris Barber, began. And to this day, that shooting has never been solved, in part because three of the city of Ottawa's murder detectives were busy as being part of the prosecution against a peaceful protest instead of investigating a murder. So, like, you know, I think the Freedom Convoy and the suppression of it serves as a useful example to show again, you know, going back to Burnham and the managerial revolution and Peter Turchin and all his overproduced elites. We have a crushing managerial system in our society across the west and in Canada. It spent four years chasing hundreds of people to the ends of the earth with spurious court cases, most of which either got dropped, found not guilty, all settled out. We had this public order emergency Commission, which, you know, reviewed Trudeau's, reviewed Trudeau's invocation of the Emergencies act, found it wanting, found all the things the media said about the convoy to be lies, found that the government was just a bunch of Keystone cops. We had another ruling here in 2024 about the invocation of the Freedom Convoy. One of not the Supreme Court of Canada, but the next level down, said Trudeau's invocation was unjustified and unnecessary and unreasonable. Trudeau immediately appealed it. A few weeks ago, that appeal was turned down. It stands our current Prime Minister, Mark Carney, seven of his cabinet ministers were in Trudeau's cabinet and under the sort of decorum and, you know, sort of modus operandi of Parliament. When you're involved in something of this magnitude and the government is found to have acted incorrectly, it would be expected that you would step down. And Carney has not stepped down. His seven ministers have not stepped down because they don't care. They believe that they can tell other people how to live to the nth degree and use all these government resources to pursue regular, normal working people who object to their lives. Often enough when protests happen, you know, there's kind of stereotypes about protests. The Freedom Convoy was about people who wanted to work, who were being prevented from working. So this is the productive members of society, the most productive, hardest working people on the working class side of things, 60, 70 hours a week, week in, week out, being prevented from working by the government saying, hey, we want to work. We want to keep feeding our families. And the government was like, messing with them. Wow.

[B]

There's certain parallels to things in the United States. Obviously, we're not going to get into that, but thanks for that. What an answer. Hey, a little more bill paying here, my friend. Folks, viewers, listeners, if you've studied enough history, you' start to see a pattern. Nations don't lose their way overnight. They drift through debt and division until one day you realize the foundations you thought were permanent were never permanent at all. Today, America is spending at levels once reserved for wartime. We've normalized deficits that would have stunned earlier generations. And policymakers now debate whether the only path forward is more intervention, more printing, more distortion. But here's the historical truth. Every society that pushed its currency beyond discipline eventually paid a price. The wise never waited for collapse. No, they prepared for the correction. And that's why so many thoughtful Americans, especially those nearing retirement or in retirement, are reallocating part of their wealth into something that has outlasted every paper experiment in human history. Physical gold, not as speculation but as insulation. Our reputation at Victor Davis Hanson, in his own words, matters to us. Which is why we've partnered with Allegiance Gold, a company distinguished by integrity, reliability and and an A rating with a better Business Bureau. For years, they've guided Americans through transparent education and long standing relationships built on trust. And right now, they're extending a special liberty offer to our listeners and viewers to help you get started with real gold, whether your funds are in a retirement account or sitting in the bank. So if you believe as we do, that the best time to reinforce your position is before the storm becomes obvious, call 8447-909191-84479,09191 or visit protectwithvictor.com One more time, 844-7909-1918-4470-9191 or visit protectwithvictOR.com History rewards those who take the long view. And we thank, as we always do, the wonderful people from Allegiance Gold for sponsoring Victor Davis Hansen in his own.

[A]

Words.

[B]

Gord, not you. The hypothetical you. You can barely drive. You can't read English, you may have a criminal record, you may be in the country illegally, all that, but you can nevertheless obtain a commercial driver's license and take 18 wheelers down our roads and interstates and under and sometimes into overpasses. How does this sit with the Gord McGills and similar Teamster brethren? And let's stipulate that this is indeed a problem here in America. Tell us from your perspective and experience how big a problem it is and how consequential it is.

[A]

Well, we're seeing that problem every day on our roads. You know, a week and a half before recording this, four gentlemen in Indiana were killed by a driver insourced here from Kyrgyzstan, entered The country illegally. The last year or two has been a litany of crashes and collisions. Drivers either brought here, came to America illegally, granted work authorization by Biden or Trump. This doesn't matter. I'm not a partisan about these issues. We have a systemic problem. The feds have a problem. Our immigration policy under the previous administration was a problem. Trump's trying to clean it up. Good for him. We have states issuing CDLs willy nilly to whoever. We have NGOs and nonprofits trying to help refugees in air quotes who are actually just economic migrants. We have other foreign governments who are waging economic warfare against Americans by sending their citizens here to do Americans jobs and then send money home in remittances, especially India. We have trucking companies based in Moldova hauling American military equipment between bases. We have the United States Postal Service who are not able to, you know, operate under the law. If you're not an American citizen, you're not supposed to touch the mail. In October, they tried to comply with the law and then they almost completely shut down because the trucking industry in the United States has been completely infiltrated and penetrated by insourced labor. And there's a whole bunch of reasons why that happened, which is why I wrote the book about how we got here. But you know, yeah, the American government, the states, the feds, trucking companies, their customers, the associations, like the American trucking associations are, you know, they are heavily implicated in this. Everybody should curse their name. They have decided that the American truck driver should be replaced. And this is what we're seeing, collisions left, right and center. The suppression of American drivers, wages and a massive security risks from foreigners with no vetting. The government made us put these electronic logging devices in the trucks saying that it was going to be for safety. What's happened is that those electronic logging devices are being manipulated and backdoored from overseas to change the hours of the drivers in the trucks. So allowing these guys from overseas to work twice as many hours as American drivers would normally under the law. So they're fatigued, they're getting in accidents. Those electronic logging devices also capture all kinds of data about critical infrastructure in the United States. Shippers, including the military, including the postal Service, including all kinds of other government contracts. And where is that data going? Nobody's in control of this. America's guts have been opened up to any foreign actor they want by this insource labor problem, which is there's all kinds of blame to go around for that.

[B]

Wow, you could write a book.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, I could write Another book. So you mentioned that. I mean, it sounds like a joke. So as I'm in the process of writing the book, right. Like, I've never written a book before. I'm a novice author. I do this on the side. I'm not even trucking anymore. I work in construction because I can't get a job trucking because the whole industry is upside fucking down and I cannot get the money that I need to survive here doing that job anymore. Or if I do get a job, I've got a camera pointing at me and I've got some manager trying to tell me how to do my job, even though I've been doing this for 28 years. It's either an insult or it's underpaid, or it's both. It's usually both. So I'm out. I'm doing construction. Yeah. This problem, like I say, it's so big and so deep and so much. I'm working with Bill Kaufman, great editor.

[B]

Oh, I know. Bill's terrific.

[A]

Yeah. So I'm sending all this stuff to Bill as like, you know, I would complete a chapter, I'd send it to him, we'd go back and forth. We're going through this process. And at one point he says to me, you could write an encyclopedia about trucking. And I'm like, yes, I could, but who's going to buy an encyclopedia? And then we finished the book. I finished the book in, like, October, November. We're tightening it up, doing last minute final edits between November and now, which is February. So in like, three, four months, about everything that's happened in the last four months. I could write another book.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

It's just insane.

[B]

Yeah, well. And deeply troubling because, as you say, open up the guts of America. Who would think that it would be through trucking that all this would be exposed? Hey, Gord, I have one more break to take and one more question, and maybe we'll retrace some of the ground you mentioned, but we'll do this. We'll get one final question to you after this final important message. We are back. Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Gord McGill is here. End of the Road Inside the War on Truckers is his forthcoming book published by Creed and Culture. Gord mentioned Bill Kaufman. And, folks, if you read the Spectator magazine, you'll find Bill has a column there. He lives upstate New York. He's a terrific guy, terrific writer, terrific editor.

[A]

Gord.

[B]

This. It's a war, right? So just if you don't mind the combatants in the war, you've talked about a lot of them, but, you know, we have regulators, brokers, cops, other truckers. If you had to prioritize who the real bad guys on the other side are, I don't even know what the other side is. You know, maybe we're under siege. Maybe on all sides. Yeah.

[A]

Who are the real bad guys who have been engaged in the war against American truckers the longest are corporate lobbyists and the government, various levels of government. And the big one is the American Trucking Associations. They are a corporate lobby group. They have run the table on, quote, unquote, advocating for truckers or in. In D.C. that's what they claim. They actually represent very large carriers. Who they're really representing. Those carriers, customers, Fortune 500America, keep their transportation costs down as far as possible. And they have been lying about this thing called the truck driver shortage for almost 40 years. There's never been a shortage of truck drivers. What they have is a retention and churn problem. But what they found is that calling it a shortage and giving it this sort of, like, mystique allowed them to come to various levels of government to say, give us money for our training programs so that they could, like, keep turning through people. Some of the very large trucking companies in the United States have 100% turnover year over year or higher.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Yeah. They'll. They will hire a driver and they're gone within a year. And that's their entire company. And that model is being subsidized by the taxpayer. It's a corporate welfare project. And what they've done is they've abused the American puritan work ethic notion of like, hey man, these guys are getting us jobs. We're going to get, you know, this grant to this trucking school is going to get a bunch of jobs in our district. Nobody goes back and asks how many of those people stayed. Right. I have an anecdote in my book about my friend Justin. He went to work for this big trucking company, one of the major mega carriers, went to their truck driving school in Wisconsin. When he entered that truck driving school, he was one of 86 students in his class. Within 12 months, he was the only one left. 85 people had gone through that truck driving school, got into trucking and quit. And he was the only one still standing a year later.

[B]

What's the primary motivator? Like, it's, you're one month in, like, screw this job. This is not what they said it was going to be. Like. What is the principle, the key Thing that first kicks somebody in the gut.

[A]

On you realize that you don't get paid overtime. So truck drivers are not entitled to overtime pay per an Exemption in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards act, which allows companies to just abuse your time. So you will be driving your truck. You show up at a customer, they say, back into this door. We'll get to you when you get to you. And then six hours later, they finally come and unload your truck, or a day later, or eight hours later, or three hours later, and you don't get paid for that time. And that happens time and time and time again. It makes it impossible to schedule anything. You're far away from home, missing out on family stuff. And the industry just says to you it is standard operating procedure that you don't get paid for many, many hours of your time. This has been studied by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT had their own subdivision called Freight Labs. And they told the Biden administration, you do not have a shortage of truck drivers. You have a capacity utilization issue. 40% of American trucking capacity is sitting, being wasted, and the drivers not being paid because of our own customers. Instead of trying to, like, poke these people and say, you need to fix up your systems, you need to get trucks turned around faster as a supply chain issue, as a national security issue, so that we don't need as many truck drivers. We don't have to pay for these truck driving schools. We just need to utilize the capacity we have. The government has completely ignored that and continues to throw bodies at the problem, and then they hand the bill to the taxpayer. Because most of these truck driving schools, CDL mills, are subsidized in some way by local, state or federal government.

[B]

Well, suck it up, Buttercup. Is not a policy, but maybe it is the policy. Certainly not a good policy. Well, Gordon, you know, wow, you're a great interview.

[A]

Cool, dude. I know what I'm talking about. I'm not pulling this out of my.

[B]

Ass like, yeah, no, thank you again. The book is the End of the Road Inside the War on Truckers. I really appreciate you coming on here to talk about this again. This is an issue that we have talked about, Victor, especially as he says he rants, but he doesn't rant, but talked about it at great length. So he appreciates your being on. I do certainly also. Thanks so much for being here. We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor. No, not the Victor. It's Victor Davis Hansen. I got to get this right. I should know the name of the show Victor Davis Hansen, in his own words. Thank you and God bless.

[A]

Yeah, thanks for having me. God bless everyone. Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal.

[B]

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[A]

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[B]

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