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Interview with A Trucker
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Truck driving remains one of the last few professions in America that can provide stable and decently compensated employment

Workers in this field are generally thought of as white men from the heartland of America. During the Covid lockdowns truckers have managed to keep stores stocked, yet at the same time, they have also been targeted for racial violence during black and anarchist riots in major cities since June.

They traditionally symbolize an American archetype: a solitary and independent man who makes his own rules and reaps what he sows — a modern day cowboy on the range.

The rise of large corporate carriers, immigration and surveillance is changing the profession for the worst.

The following is an interview with a veteran trucker, Jack, who has seen his industry change quite a bit in recent years.

Eric Striker: So tell me, first of all, is truck driving still a worthwhile gig?

Jack: At one point I would’ve answered ‘Yes’ without hesitation. Today, things get a little more complicated.

If you get a job with one of the major carriers dominating the market right now, like Prime, Stevens, or Swift, you can expect lousy pay along with all the downsides of being a trucker.

What I do is act as an independent contractor, which helps cut out the middleman. This has its own problems too, of course. My truck, which I finance, runs me about $4,000 a month plus my auxiliary generator, which I use to save on fuel costs. There’s also the insurance. You get paid a lot more, but you’re also getting into debt.

ES: What’s so bad about the megacarriers? Especially if they offer to train you on the job?

Jack: As these companies eat up more and more of the freight market share, they skimp more. They search for the cheapest crackhead hotels to put truckers up in.

I don’t know if these companies are run by Jews or just greedy scumbags, but never take them up on their offer to help you get your CDL.

They tell you “we’ll train you,” and it’s common for truckers to take them up on their offer, but don’t fall for it. It’s much better to take out a loan and go to school for your CDL.

When you get your training with these companies, you get on the road. As a new driver, you’re bound to have at least little things happen to you on the road, like a small trailer bump. It’s inevitable that at some point you’re going to hit something when you’re doing this for the first time. Megacarriers are totally unforgiving and will reach for any excuse to keep you in debt to them forever. Don’t take anything from them because you will be sorry.

ES: I’ve been hearing that truckers are hounded for little things today in ways they never were before. What’s changed?

Jack: When you work for these larger carriers, the safety department will be your bane.

An anecdote is a younger trucker I knew who hit a parked cars tail light in a narrow residential street. The trucker and the other driver exchanged information and you’d think that would be it for such a minor infraction.

Instead, his employer’s safety department — staffed by and large by blacks with a chip on their shoulder — were hounding him and never let him live it down, adding stress to an already stressful experience.

As an independent driver, I don’t have to deal with that crap. And while having to pay your own insurance can be a hassle, you get peace of mind without some minder who has never driven a truck in their lives breathing down your neck.

ES: I see, so everything’s a give or take. Is being an independent contractor not full of its own pitfalls?

Jack: Definitely. There are some good gigs for big carriers, like driving for Wal Mart which pays well, but the problem is they have off the charts surveillance and no respect for a driver’s privacy.

I work for myself at 50 cents a mile, which is a better deal when dealing with these mega corporations who force you into awkward schedules and pay significantly less. At a typical mega carrier you might clear 50 something thousand a year, but they do not treat their employees like human beings and thus have a high turnover rate. One case I saw was a driver for a megacarrier taking his girlfriend on the road with him, only to be punished by the company for not getting passenger insurance.

If you work for the big carriers, you will miss all the milestones in your kids life and grow estranged from your family. When the job starts taking a toll on you and you ask for a little time off, you will either be let go or they will retaliate against you by giving you terrible loads.

Smaller companies run by ethnic whites, like Poles or Serbs, tend to treat their drivers with more dignity, as the owners have more personal contact with their drivers and come from cultures with greater respect for family. So if you don’t want to go in for yourself, these might be a better bet.

Megacarriers go out of their way to wring you of everything you have. Small companies will set your miles and then you get to go home when you’re done.

ES: Truckers have a reputation for being right-wing, how true is this stereotype?

Jack: There is a lot of truth to this, but unfortunately there is a strong individualist conservative mindset that can be hard to break through.

Sometimes I’ll talk to them about my views, particularly on fighting billionaires, and many are under the impression that they’re billionaires in training and tend to see the world from the point of view of Jeff Bezos rather than…that of his truck driver.

Truckers by and large are extremely religious. Many stops have chapels.

This individualist mindset ends up putting these native white truckers at a disadvantage. They will often get mad at Slavic drivers for working together, like creating credit unions and solidarity networks to help them get on their feet and prosper. Rather than emulating this and realizing that individuals always lose to collectives, some of the truckers decide to get upset about it.

What’s particularly interesting is that many Middle Eastern truckers, largely Lebanese or Syrian, are highly conservative and big Trump fans. While they too have some silly views, the advantage here is that you can dependably hit issues about Jews with them and they are receptive.

ES: How much has changed in the trucking industry since the election of Trump?

Jack: I’m not a Trump supporter anymore, but his administration has done some good work in helping clean up some of the seedier elements of a trucker’s life.

One angle the federal government has done well on is to crack down on human trafficking, There are fewer prostitutes at stops and less shady activity in general in the industry.

On the I-10 near the Mexican border, young and white Border Patrol agents are more enthusiastic than before when it comes to looking for drug smuggling. Trafficking in contraband as a trucker has become very difficult due to aggressive enforcement of DOT rules, weight stations, and full inspections.

ES: How are truckers dealing with some of the racial violence going on? Is there tension between the races?

Jack: Generally speaking, older black truckers are pretty easy going. There was mutual respect. The most intense debate you’d see between them and white truckers is tits vs ass.

Some of the younger black drivers, on the other hand, often have a chip on their shoulder and like to pick fights with white people. The young black drivers like to go around saying things like “bruthas be taking over this industry!” , which is hilarious since they rarely ever last long.

There is grumbling going on with white truckers though, a common sentiment is “I don’t want to be the next Reginald Denny.” Even many black truckers refuse to enter Atlanta, St Louis, etc. Dispatchers by and large side with the truckers however, telling them to move forward and that they’ll deal with the legalities later. The megacarriers don’t give a crap about the well-being of the driver, but are deathly afraid of their trucks and freight being stolen or destroyed.

What really stands out though is that white immigrants who at least are doing well in the industry are starting to get sick of how intolerable life in America is getting and deciding to return to their home countries. Even the Albanians and Armenians want to return!

A lot of truckers are also seeing a big racial gulf in how rural white people behave vs urban blacks and ungrateful white liberals. During the Covid lockdowns, little kids and their mothers would put up stands for truckers with water and baked goods as a gesture of appreciation. Drive through big cities and you are a target for violence at the hands of blacks and Jews.

One time I had to drive through Lakewood, New Jersey, and was shocked at the totally unprovoked animosity from local Jews on bicycles, who were sneering and jeering at me for simply being on the road. Where do they think their food comes from? Disgusting people.

ES: I hear there are a lot of South Asians and even Africans flooding the industry. What’s the deal with that?

Jack: Yes, Pakistanis and Indian drivers, as well as Somalis.

They often like to drive in teams, which typically is two people, but for Indian trucks we call them clown cars since sometimes 5 of them will get out.

There is a lot of animosity between African immigrants and black Americans. Africans see US blacks as lazy and coddled, while the latter see Somalis as retarded.

Practically speaking, these drivers cause a lot of problems. They have way more accidents, a lot of DOT violations. White drivers and even American black and Mexican drivers all try to keep up on their trucks maintenance. They call in accidents. Somalis are known for hit and runs, running over road signs, just leaving a trail of destruction wherever they drive. Most of the people in the industry understand there’s cameras everywhere and you will be found out and punishedworse, but Somalis don’t have the situational awareness to know this.

Pakistani drivers are known for ruining truck stop bathrooms. If you walk into a shower after a Paki was in there, expect the floor to be covered in their pubic hair. They forget or refuse to flush their toilets Janitors and cleaners hold their faces when they see them come in.

One funny story about Somali truckers is that they like to carve holes at the bottom of their cab to shit on the go. Now, piss bottles are common, but this is something else!

ES: Truckers are the backbone of the American supply chain. Do they know how much power they have if they were to politically organize and starve out cities full of people who hate them?

Jack: Sadly, many truckers lack that conciousness. Most truckers are just guys who want to be left alone. They want to work out, read, joke around, meet people and see the country.

This is starting to change with the younger generation. Young whites from both rural and urban ones are very sympathetic to our ideas. I met a young driver from Boston recently who was saying some pretty radical racialist stuff. I give these guys links to all of our stuff and we are winning new people over, since they have lots of time to drive and listen to podcasts.

ES: What’s the future of the industry?

Jack: Sadly, it’s not looking too good. It’s believed companies like Amazon will swallow up more and more of the market, which if they succeed in monopolizing, will turn truck driving into another shitty $12 dollar an hour McJob.

You also see an increase in woke capital trying to humiliate and politicize the industry. For example, the company Hirschbach (pictured above) was forcing people to drive in its ridiculous LGBT rainbow trucks for “pride month,” which is humiliating.

All in all, it took them a while, but an industry once able to stave off globalization, capitalist excess and political correctness is beginning to morph into something not so desirable.

(Republished from National Justice by permission of author or representative)
 
• Category: Economics • Tags: Blacks, Immigration, Poverty, Working Class 
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  1. Anonymous[122] • Disclaimer says:

    Hey Eric,
    Any updates on that book you said you were writing?

  2. See. Conservatism is bad because it is self-defeating. As a white working-class former-Trump-voter makes so eloquently clear. Conservatives are so stupid they won’t unionize.

    • Replies: @haha
    , @Digital Samizdat
  3. Thanks for the article–lots of interesting info from a “real person”.

  4. Vinnie O says:

    This is a simply AWFUL article. I gave up maybe half-way through. He says the same things over and over and over… And they’re ALL about how truck companies are evil and it’s great to be an independent, except when it isn’t. I’m writing Striker’s name down so I can make sure I NEVER bother to open ANYTHING else written by him. Have a nice day.

    • Troll: Exile
    • Replies: @fnn
  5. fnn says:

    Does this guy think he’s fooling anyone? An idiotically pro-Antifa article in the Chicago Sun-Times:
    https://chicago.suntimes.com/2020/6/29/21300795/antifa-trump-terrorism-antifascist-right-wing

    While the nation reeled from a wave of rioting and violence sparked during protests over the police killing of George Floyd last month in Minneapolis, President Donald Trump laid the blame on a bogeyman he’s frequently targeted: Antifa.

    Members of the nebulous group are terrorists, he insisted.

    But local anti-fascists said that label couldn’t be further from the truth. Rather than taking part in looting or acting as “outside agitators” during recent protests, self-identified anti-fascists told the Chicago Sun-Times their work overwhelmingly revolves around identifying and exposing far-right extremists, neo-Nazis and racists who are potentially taking part in violence. They worry the president’s rhetoric may now put them in danger.

    In fact, one anti-fascist activist from Chicago — an information security professional in his 30s who works for a Fortune 1000 company — contended he and other anarchists are actually advocating for “less violence, not more.”

    Antifa is characterized by a broad leftist ideology and individual efforts aimed largely at identifying and fighting perceived neo-fascist threats. What’s more, adherents said there’s no overarching organizational structure or known leadership in Chicago or elsewhere.

    Basically the whole article is like this.

    • Replies: @Justvisiting
  6. fnn says:
    @Vinnie O

    Your reading comprehension is in need of more subtlety and nuance.

    • Replies: @Vinnie O
  7. Blankaerd says:

    This article reminded me of Bob Matthews. He also spoke to a lot of independent truckers back in his day, and often remarked about how racially aware they were. After reading this however, I can see not much has changed since then, apart from more appalling working conditions. Failure to organize will be the downfall of us all.

  8. Sometimes I’ll talk to them about my views, particularly on fighting billionaires, and many are under the impression that they’re billionaires in training and tend to see the world from the point of view of Jeff Bezos rather than…that of his truck driver.

    Reminds me of an observation once made by journalist Ronald Wright:

    “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

    (I guess we can now retire ‘millionaire’ in favor of ‘billionaire’ — inflation and all that.)

    • Replies: @Mario Partisan
  9. Anonymous[399] • Disclaimer says:

    Very nice article.

  10. haha says:
    @obwandiyag

    So what exactly is good about liberalism, especially of the woke, super-progressive variety? The kick in the ass to commonsense and basic logic? Or the goodbye to all human traditions and the family? Or perhaps you love the liberty of being able to choose your gender on a day to day basis? Ah, and how delicious it must be to burn and loot, beat people up, destroy cities, and silence all opposition in the name of stopping hate speech! The do-gooder liberals have killed more human beings than all the Fascists and Nazis and dictators put together. They call it promoting human rights and bringing democracy to other countries. Fortunately, the liberals are destined to self destruct, now that they have embraced full blown idiocy, loathing of learning and ability, and every conceivable kind of lunacy and perversion.

    I shall be there at liberalism’s funeral, with joy in my heart and shaking my head in amazement at how nominally sane people ever fell victim to batshit craziness.

  11. @fnn

    Rule of opposites–when the lefties say:

    no overarching organizational structure or known leadership

    that means there is an overarching organizational structure and known leadership trying to hide from scrutiny.

    Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to identify the organizational structure and find the political and financial leadership.

  12. KenH says:

    Even the Albanians and Armenians want to return!

    You know things are getting bad in America if those two groups want to return home.

    The other things a couple of truckers I once knew told me is that if you work at the megacarriers they start you out by giving you the worst/least desirable routes which means New York City and that city is a nightmare for truckers from what I’ve been told. I don’t think truckers get a daily meal allowance from their companies so that has to be deducted from their weekly or monthly take home pay. The bigger carriers make you drive more than federal regulations allow and there’s fudging of the log books or whatever they use to track their driving time.

    An older black truck driver told me that if you start out with a megacarrier you rarely get time off and only get one day off per week although sometimes they even renege on that but that was over 20 yrs ago so maybe things have changed. But from what Jack said in this interview it doesn’t seem so.

  13. KenH says:

    The other thing is that among white truckers you will be hard pressed to find race doesn’t matter leftards. A lot of truckers have to drive through and deliver to racially diverse cities and are forced to deal with diversity as part of their job, so they usually have a racial conscious as a result.

    Since truck drivers typically don’t have college degrees that means they don’t think systemic racism is the reason blacks are generally surly and lawless.

  14. @obwandiyag

    Conservatives are so stupid they won’t unionize.

    If you’re referring to the truckers, they do have the Teamsters. But big business is very politically powerful in America and has been able to undercut that once very powerful union, along with many others. Plus, gobs and gobs of immigration make any kind of unionizing essentially impossible, which is why virtually all unions used to favor immigration controls until the Democrats betrayed them.

  15. Eric,

    Ever hear of audio? It was invented in 1901.

    Ever hear of video? It was invented in 1910.

    Try using it?

  16. Albanians want to go back to Albania….Code of Lek blood fued? Just WOW! As for drivers from India, seems like a lot are Sikhs…they wear turbans….–from someone that wanted once to be a truck driver.

  17. Vinnie O says:
    @fnn

    Um, the guy is ILLITERATE. There AIN’T no subltey, or any of that “new ance”.

  18. @Digital Samizdat

    I recalled the same quote as I read the article as well. What explains the American workers’ perception of themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires?”

    Short answer: the American frontier.

    Broadly speaking, “socialism” is just a collective response to the difficulties faced by an industrial working class. It is not something that is obvious to people, but is something that people learn to turn towards when individualistic solutions to the coal mine company towns and 15-hour assembly line shifts are unavailable.

    Had the US never expanded beyond the original eastern seaboard, Americans may have found a sympathy for their own brand of socialism.

    But the conquest of the west allowed disgruntled American workers of the late 19th century to move west, become cattle ranchers or make another living as an independent small bourgeois. So there was no emergence of a pro-labor party similar to all of the parties that emerged in Europe, where there was no frontier.

    Of course, other factors have played a role: the fact that the American working class was largely composed of different newly arrived white groups (Italians, Poles, Irish, etc.) made the formation of an American working class outlook difficult.

    It took several decades for the American working class to achieve a level of cultural homogenization and assimilation to allow for it to achieve an effective organizational structure during the depression. But the outbreak of WWII and the subsequent Cold War, with much of the working class employed in the permanent war industries or as career military made adopting socialistic stances unwise or unpalatable. As Upton Sinclair said, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.”

    The result was that the modern or new left that emerged in America was one of various minorities, effeminate misfits and circus freaks led by the usual (((suspects))), almost like it was intended to repulse normal working class males by design.

    While much of the UR commentariat might not want to hear it, the current collapse of the American Republic is, in my view, as much the result of the failure of a true Labor Left to develop as it is the fault of the freak show pseudo-left.

    • Agree: RadicalCenter
    • Replies: @Justvisiting
  19. @Mario Partisan

    The “true labor left” has always been strong in several European countries, and illegal immigration and insane deficits will have them arm in arm with the US as it “progresses” over the cliff into the abyss below.

    I subscribe to the cycle of civilizations approach.

    Long version: https://wtf.tw/ref/tainter.pdf

    Short version: Rich countries get fat and lazy, and then hungry internal and external predators eat them.

  20. “The rise of large corporate carriers, immigration and surveillance is changing the profession for the worst.”

    You left out “deregulation.” Growing up in the 1960s and obtaining my first driver’s license in 1968, I began driving at a time when truckers were truly the “knights on the road.” Practically all of them were very courteous and professional. They were also relatively well-paid. Most people admired and respected truckers because most everyone realized what an important job truckers had and how much responsibility went along with being a truck driver.

    I am a 69 year-old retired industrial electrician and I still have the utmost respect for truckers. A while back, I talked with a gasoline tanker driver unloading at a gas station and went up to him and I told him how much I admired what he did for a living. I told him what my occupation was and said that I could never be a trucker, having to deal with all that responsibility and the road rage nowadays.

    The trucker told me that he admired what I DID and that he could never work around the higher voltages, the safety aspect, etc. I told him that any one with the normal amount of intelligence and common sense could become an electrician and that it was HIS JOB that took the brains & guts. I told him that in my opinion, truckers (and airline pilots) were the most underpaid people in this country of ours.

    We said our good-byes and that was that.

    • Agree: anarchyst
  21. Pakistani drivers are known for ruining truck stop bathrooms. If you walk into a shower after a Paki was in there, expect the floor to be covered in their pubic hair.

    Pakistanis shower?

    • Replies: @Plato's Dream
  22. @Boy the way Glenn Miller played

    Muslims wash their asses under taps, shower heads etc – which is no bad thing in theory, but they do not bother making an effort being careful and tidy, so end up with splashes of brownish water everywhere. You wouldn’t believe the state of some of the bathrooms in exclusive beach resorts in Dubai…

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