Read the full transcript of former long-haul trucker and author Gord Magill’s interview on The Tucker Carlson Show, June 1, 2026.
Editor’s Note: In this in-depth interview, former long-haul trucker and author Gord McGill joins Tucker Carlson to expose what he describes as a calculated “war on truckers” within North America. McGill details how industry deregulation, the reliance on exploited foreign labor, and the widespread use of unreliable electronic logging devices have compromised national security and eroded the profession’s traditional standards. He argues that these systematic changes are not merely economic issues but represent a dangerous failure of oversight that threatens the stability of the entire supply chain.
Introduction
TUCKER CARLSON: Gord, thanks so much for doing this.
GORD MAGILL: Oh, hey, thanks for having me.
TUCKER CARLSON: The reason I wanted to do this is because I think it fits. I’m going to give you my 1-minute overlay of why I think this is important. It’s always important when people are hassled and destroyed for things they didn’t do wrong. But I think the fate of truckers in the United States and Canada is part of a much larger trend.
So about 10 years ago, I think this is correct, I put it in a book I wrote, that driving for a living was the number one most common job for high school educated white men in the United States, which is to say the people displaced by deindustrialization. The factories died, the country went from making things to finance and real estate, and the people left behind weren’t helped, they were destroyed. By the Sacklers and drugs, and also by kind of relentless hounding and scolding by the ruling class. I don’t quite understand what that was, but I just noticed it, have noticed it, still noticing it.
So driving, trucking was not only like a huge part of the working class economy, like at the center of the working class economy in the West, but also sort of a symbol of culture and autonomy. Like, “I’m behind the wheel, no one can control me.”
GORD MAGILL: “The last American cowboy,” as it were.
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. And it was celebrated, by the way, in the ’70s and early ’80s.
GORD MAGILL: Oh, massive cultural output celebrating and venerating the American trucker.
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. When ordinary Americans, whose ancestors built this country, were not considered criminals by virtue of being alive. But anyway, I think this is part of a much larger shift and attack on the best people in the country. And last thing I’ll say is the other thing a lot of these guys do is go fight wars, right?
A Third-Generation Trucker
GORD MAGILL: Well, my grandfather landed at Normandy, D-Day plus 3, in a Sherman tank in a Canadian uniform, fought legitimate real Nazis — not the ones that are the figments of people’s imagination. And then came back to Canada and eventually got into the trucking business. I’m a third generation trucker, man.
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so there you go.
GORD MAGILL: I’m sorry, I just wanted to get my Canadian cred out of the way. My dad was in the reserves. We got both. We’re on both bases, sir.
The War on Truckers
TUCKER CARLSON: So tell me — you’ve written a book, End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers. Most people are not aware there is a war on truckers, has been ongoing, this war on truckers. Give us an overview. What does that mean, “war on truckers”?
GORD MAGILL: Well, it’s sort of an analogy, right? There’s wars on workers, as you mentioned — deindustrialization, shipping manufacturing overseas. They couldn’t get rid of truckers, right? We’re here. This is geography. You can’t move things around America without being in America or Canada.
And so I think what we’ve seen is the result of — they tried to, in 1980, open up the market in order to bring the same forces to North America. So you can’t ship the jobs away. So let’s make it so that the jobs are more competitive, in their speak. So the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 comes in. And the idea is that the previous regulatory framework for trucking, the old Motor Carrier Act, which had a regulated business — so you had to publish your rates. It took a lot to actually get what you might call a taxi medallion. You had to have authority to operate a trucking business that was controlled by the government. They did have an argument that this made things too expensive, that it was sort of a cartel.
But the reforms went so far in the other direction that basically anybody with $300 and a pulse could sign up to become a trucking company. And the effects of that, which were brought by people who wanted free market reforms—
TUCKER CARLSON: Free market. Free market.
GORD MAGILL: Yeah. Well, hey, who isn’t? The problem is that since then—
TUCKER CARLSON: We didn’t get free markets.
The Driver Shortage Myth
GORD MAGILL: No, we did not. And since then they have asked the government to help them with the consequences of the reforms they asked for. So after the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 comes about, there’s intense competition. Lots of trucking companies go out of business. Lots of drivers quit. People move into other things because now the competition — you got your lower prices. Not everybody’s going to operate at that price, right?
So now they start seeing that drivers are a little harder to come by. Okay, maybe just pay them more. Figure out your rate structure. You asked for a free market reform. It’s up to you to fix this problem. But instead of doing that, in 1987, this corporate lobby group who I have a very low opinion of — the American Trucking Association — came out with this study and claimed that if we don’t have an additional 600,000 truckers by 1990, the entire economy would collapse.
And for decades since, that narrative has gone through the media. Everybody believes there’s a shortage of truckers. We talked about this backstage last time I was on your show, and it’s never been true. There’s all kinds of people with CDLs. There’s all kinds of people like me around. They just don’t want to pay.
So what they have is a churn and retention problem where the taxpayer subsidizes CDL mills to produce more truck drivers who discover that the job doesn’t pay as good as they say it does. It has a whole lot of problems that nobody wants to solve, and then they quit. Some carriers have a 90 to 100% driver turnover rate every single year, and we’re paying for that.
So they say, “Hey, we don’t have enough drivers.” They go to the government, the government subsidizes the driving schools, or they subsidize the students in many ways. Sometimes they make the students pay for it with these sort of debt arrangements. But in general, the American taxpayer has been financing this sort of bogus narrative basically since the late 1980s.
Replacing American Truckers
TUCKER CARLSON: At a certain point, it was inevitable, though not foreseen by me, that the people who regulate this stuff would try to replace the current population of truckers with foreigners, because truckers were white men and Christian white men, and that’s the group obviously they hate.
GORD MAGILL: About 70%, you know — there’s a lot of Black and Hispanic truckers from the United States too.
TUCKER CARLSON: I would say legacy Americans, people who have been here a while. And so there was an attempt — by the way, that’s a higher percentage than the American population, so it’s pretty high. There was an attempt in the United States to just replace truckers with people from South Asia.
GORD MAGILL: It’s a recent phenomenon and it’s complex. I don’t know if there was necessarily a plan behind this. I think there’s a lot of different factors that all came together in the last few years. And yeah, it’s starting to look like a replacement operation because you look around on our highways, most of the truck stops now — there’s a chapter in my book called “The Truck Stops of Babel” because everybody’s speaking different languages, washing their feet in the sinks. There’s just lots of weird little cultural things going on out on the road.
And then a lot of the problems that have come along with this operation — the non-domiciled CDLs, all this stuff is in the news — a lot of these people are incompetent because they were never truck drivers back home. They just came here as refugees, asylum seekers, illegal migrants, what have you. And there’s these systems in place that already existed to churn through American drivers. There’s the lease operator scam, which sort of indentures drivers to the trucks. The company owns the truck, they lease it to you, you lease it back to them, but it’s kind of like sharecropping, and it’s meant to download the costs onto the driver.
And as all these systems start losing customers because people got wise to this stuff, and then we have the sort of open borders policies of various administrations — which really went on steroids under Biden — the country’s flooded with tens of millions of people, and many of them start going into the trucking industry.
Some friends of mine have been studying the issue of CDLs issued by various states. And this has been the sort of locus of Secretary Duffy’s investigations into this stuff — shout out to Shannon and his crew at American Truckers United for doing this. They found that we’re talking hundreds of thousands of CDLs that have been issued in a suspicious or outright illegal manner, many of them to people who do not qualify under federal regulations.
The English Language Requirement
There’s an old federal regulation that’s been on the books since 1937, which stipulates that to drive a commercial vehicle in the United States, you must have a certain command of the English language. You have to be able to communicate with law enforcement, the motoring public, read information signs, read construction signs. We have signs everywhere on our highways — “Hey, this lane is closing,” “There’s construction up ahead,” “You have to put your tire chains on to go over Donner Pass,” “The wind is too high in Wyoming” — and they’re all in English. America is, for better or worse, an English country. This is a safety-sensitive job where you can crash a truck and kill people. You should probably know English.
In 2016, the enforcement of that regulation was waived in the waning days of the Obama administration. They just said, “We’re not going to place trucks out of service anymore. We’re not going to place the driver out of service. We’ll just give them a fine and send them on their way.” So this opened up a loophole where you could bring more people in to drive trucks who did not meet this federal requirement.
TUCKER CARLSON: And what was the effect?
The Human Cost
GORD MAGILL: Well, we’re seeing it all around us. So far in 2025, we’ve had over 30 people in America killed by people who are here illegally. The definition of illegal migrant and legal migrant in trucking is a little bit of a chimera, right? Because a lot of these people showed up as fake asylum seekers. They come to America and say, “Hey, I’m from the Punjab. I’m a devout Sikh. That means the government hates me because they accuse me of being a Khalistani. Can you please let me into the United States?” And they get issued a work visa on the spot, an employment authorization document. No vetting. Nobody knows what they did back home. Nobody knows anything about this person. But now they’re given this employment authorization document and they can go to the DMV.
And here in Florida or Texas or California, a lot of people have tried to make this political — like this is a blue team, red team thing. They’re blaming Gavin Newsom.
TUCKER CARLSON: No one believes that.
GORD MAGILL: The number one state for issuing these non-domiciled CDLs is Texas, of course. And one of the number one states for bribery at DMVs and corruption with issuing these CDLs is Florida. So this is not just Democrats doing this, obviously.
TUCKER CARLSON: And the governor and lieutenant governor of Texas are way more liberal than a lot of Democrats I know, and they’re both Republicans.
Spreadsheet Brain and Hidden Data
GORD MAGILL: These definitions are not very helpful. We’re trying to solve an actual problem. They’re not. And another thing that happens too is there’s a term I use in my book that I got from my friend Ashley called “spreadsheet brain.” There are people who will only acknowledge that there’s a problem if the problem has been certified by an authority and has been quantitatively measured — “We have all the data, we have all the data.” Your anecdotal observations of reality are dismissed. The fact that the acquisition of that data is hampered in many ways is also dismissed.
Because a lot of collisions that are not fatal — maybe somebody just got really hurt, maybe nobody got hurt but the truck rolled over and all these cars are wrecked — they don’t take the immigration status of the driver, or where he’s from, or how he got his CDL. You only get this information if somebody died or if there’s a massive court case that takes place afterwards. So there’s a whole lot of this stuff that does not show up in official statistics, and therefore it gets dismissed by people with spreadsheet brain.
Life on the Road: The Reality of Long-Haul Trucking
TUCKER CARLSON: Before we proceed on policy questions, you’re a truck driver.
GORD MAGILL: Yeah, I’ve been my whole life. I mean, I’m not right now because I’ve been displaced out of my own industry by all this nonsense. I haven’t turned a wheel in 2 and a half years.
TUCKER CARLSON: What’s long-haul trucking like? Describe the job.
GORD MAGILL: Oh man. Well, the trucking industry is very diverse, and I mean in the truest sense of the word. Like there’s different types of freight, different lanes. Some truckers are regional, some guys are long haul going coast to coast. Some guys work within specific industries. They only haul one product. I’ve kind of done quite a bit of things. I started out working for these guys. Shout out to my friends, the Paddocks, back home in Stoney Creek, Ontario. Hauling steel coils, hauling heavy equipment, farm equipment, did all kinds of stuff for those guys.
TUCKER CARLSON: Where were you hauling it?
GORD MAGILL: When I first started, and this is going to speak to the training stuff, at first when I was a teenager, I got my license when I was 18, but I stayed very close to home. So I’m like, I’m preloading trailers for long haul guys, chaining down loads, tarping loads, learning how to do things correctly. So for a couple of years, Hamilton, Toronto, Southern Ontario, then they let me go a little ways further, Montreal, Detroit. Then a little further away again. And then eventually I did the whole cross-country OTR thing. I’ve been to all 48 continental states.
TUCKER CARLSON: And what’s OTR mean?
GORD MAGILL: Over the road. That’s the sort of industry slang for people who go far away and spend days and weeks away from home hauling the really long haul stuff, long distance.
TUCKER CARLSON: What’s that like?
GORD MAGILL: It’s an interesting sort of lifestyle. It’s not for everybody. You have to be psychologically in tune with yourself and happy in your own company because you spend an awful lot of time by yourself in the truck.
You also have to have a certain inner strength to deal with just all the problems you get. A big issue in trucking is detention time. You’ll show up at places to get loaded or unloaded and they take 2 hours, 4 hours, 6 hours, an entire day. For many drivers, they don’t get paid for that. And that’s sort of one of the sources of this claim that there’s a driver shortage. It’s actually a capacity utilization problem. And this was studied by a guy at MIT named David Correll, who told the Biden administration in 2021, by the way, that we don’t need to import more drivers from overseas or expand issues of CDL. You just need to get the trucks moving. So they dismissed that in favor of ATA propaganda about a shortage.
But anyhow, yeah, you have weather problems. You have to be able to deal with the truck breakdowns. You have to be a little bit mechanically adept dealing with cold or really hot. You could be going anywhere in the continent. So you sort of have to be able to deal with adversity and just roll with the many punches that are thrown your way when you’re out on the road.
TUCKER CARLSON: Where do you spend the night? Do you sleep in the truck? What’s that like?
GORD MAGILL: Pretty cozy, actually, at the end of a long day. Most of my most comfortable, restful sleeps have been in the back of a Kenworth or Peterbilt.
TUCKER CARLSON: What do you eat?
GORD MAGILL: Hopefully not truck stop food. Some guys have fridges and freezers in their trucks, some guys cook on the road, some guys eat at restaurants, some guys eat too much fast food or junk. Then there’s like another issue I think we have in the industry, which is a dwindling number of old school sort of homestyle home cooked truck stops. That’s sort of gone the way of the dodo in favor of fast truck stops and fast food places instead of sit-down restaurants.
TUCKER CARLSON: So the quality of the food has declined.
GORD MAGILL: Yeah, in many ways. There’s always notable exceptions to these things, but in general, yes.
Blowouts, Road Trains, and the Australian Outback
TUCKER CARLSON: What happens if you blow a tire?
GORD MAGILL: Well, that’s a good question. Back in the old days, you changed it yourself. And when I was in Australia, I changed my own tires. They still do that sort of thing down there.
TUCKER CARLSON: What’s that like? What’s a road train?
GORD MAGILL: I drove road trains for a company in Western Australia. A road train is a truck with like 2 long trailers or 3 or 4, depending on what part of the country you’re in, because it’s a road train. Yeah, exactly. It’s a train on the road.
TUCKER CARLSON: Name describes it.
GORD MAGILL: So that’s something I’ve always wanted to do. I’ve been a trucker my whole life, and that’s kind of like one of the holy grails of trucking in our sort of culture and world, to go drive in the outback and pull all these trailers. So it took me 3 different attempts at doing it, but I finally got a visa figured out, and I went and worked for these guys in Perth. And when you’re 700 miles north of Perth in the middle of nowhere, you can’t just call Bridgestone or whoever to come rescue you.
TUCKER CARLSON: Probably hauling ore, I would imagine.
GORD MAGILL: I never did the ore stuff. I hauled equipment for offshore drilling rigs because— you went there, you went to Dampier, didn’t you? Yeah. You were on tour in Australia. Yeah. So off that shore, off that coast, there is one of the world’s largest deposits of natural gas. And so I was hauling equipment and drilling mud and salt and all the different things they need on drilling rigs. There was also an onshore natural gas processing facility in a little place called Onslow. I hauled equipment and scrap and all kinds of stuff in and out of there. Used to haul some things to Newman.
But like, on the question of changing tires and fixing your own equipment, when you’re in these remote areas, you have to be able to sort of do that. You have to have a skill level and a competency level to look after your gear. And that is something that, at least here in America and Canada, has slowly been attacked.
They don’t want you to change your own tire. Just call a tire guy. They don’t want you working on the truck. They’ve attacked the idea that you are a skilled, competent operator that knows what you’re doing, because they want things done cheap. Get somebody that’s just a steering wheel holder and does what they’re told and looks into the driver-facing camera and submits to the electronic logging device that manages your hours. You just don’t have any choice. You don’t have any agency behind the wheel anymore. That’s what the industry is moving towards.
TUCKER CARLSON: Before, you know nothing about the machine. You’re just the guy holding the steering wheel.
GORD MAGILL: That’s the system in place to train drivers in North America for the most part, and it operates on that premise. So it’s degraded the pride that people have in holding the job in many ways.
TUCKER CARLSON: So it’s turned men ever closer into machines. You’re just the human robot. I get it. This is part of, again, of a larger—
GORD MAGILL: Oh, it’s much larger.
Runaway Trucks, Brake Failures, and Undertrained Drivers
TUCKER CARLSON: Often when you’re coming through passes in the West or even in the East through mountain passes, you see a runaway truck lane. Will you explain what that is?
GORD MAGILL: If you’re going down a steep grade and you lose control of your truck or the brakes burn off because you’re going down the hill not knowing what you’re doing, weren’t trained properly, you’re supposed to go into one of these lanes and it slows you down so you don’t wreck. You don’t run off the road and crash.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s like soft gravel or sand or something.
GORD MAGILL: Funny you bring that up. There’s been a few incidents, one very recently in a place in Colorado called Wolf Creek Pass, which is the name of a song by a guy named C.W. McCall, or at least that was his stage name. He’s the guy that wrote the song “Convoy,” and was very popular back in the ’70s. So Wolf Creek Pass has got a number of these runaway truck ramps because it’s— I don’t know how many thousands of feet up—
TUCKER CARLSON: 11,000 or something.
GORD MAGILL: It’s very high. Wicked. And one of these insourced drivers from India went down that hill, apparently had some kind of massive brake failure, couldn’t read the signs about the runaway truck ramp, didn’t know what it was, and then went off the side of the road. The truck rolled over numerous times and he’s now dead.
There was a crash in Colorado very famously where I think the gentleman was from Cuba, went down this hill on Interstate 70 in Colorado and ended up crashing into a bunch of people, set off a giant inferno. He survived. A bunch of other people didn’t. Same thing. Didn’t know what he was doing. He drove right by all these runaway truck ramps. Because if you can’t read English, then you don’t know what “runaway truck ramp” means.
TUCKER CARLSON: How do you burn your brakes? You said if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can burn up your brakes when you’re going down.
GORD MAGILL: Down the hill, you’re supposed to let your engine compression or an engine brake, or just driving down the hill slowly, downshift.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
GORD MAGILL: And you have to be taught that. A lot of these truck driving schools today, again, this process of de-skilling and making people less competent, less proud, which overlaps with the kind of people that won’t fight back, they just don’t teach you that. There’s a few schools that do. I interviewed a guy that runs a truck driving school in British Columbia who specifically teaches people how to get through the mountains, very well regarded. But again, he’s the edge case. He is the minority in the industry today.
TUCKER CARLSON: Amazing. Before we even get to that, you alluded to it’s too windy in Wyoming. What does that mean?
The Human Cost: Exploitation of Immigrant Truckers
GORD MAGILL: Trucks, you know, it’s a big wind sail. Imagine a van trailer, a 53-foot van trailer, right? And it’s 8 feet high. So it’s like, you know, it’s nearly 500 square feet of like wall, right? And when you don’t have anything in the trailer or you have a very light load, you get a 50, 60, 70 mile an hour wind, it just blows you over, right?
So they close the road all the time in Wyoming and other parts of the country where there’s really high winds. Kansas, they get these crazy windstorms and they just take you away. So you’re supposed to park, right? And again, they have warning signs for this all along various interstates saying, hey, high-profile vehicles must stop.
You know, if you just showed up here from Somalia and you don’t speak English and you just charge right on through and you get blown over by the wind, the people that hire these folks, not training them, which is part of the point, are setting them up for failure.
You know, I mentioned this gentleman who crashed in Colorado on Wolf Creek Pass. There’s this thing called the Donkey Route, which is a human smuggling route that goes through Central America. And they have agents in India. You know, there’s been a documentary about this. I’m not making it up.
And these young guys in India who see videos of their co-ethnic friends here in cars and girls and houses and, “Oh, I’m going to go to America and make it.” But they can’t get visas for whatever reason. So they go through this Donkey Route. They get to the Mexican border. They claim asylum. “Oh, I’m seeking asylum from Narendra Modi. He’s going to attack me because I’m a Palestinian.”
He’s not attacking your family who are still at home and who have leveraged everything they have to pay the human smugglers to get you here. And now you’re in debt to them, right? And then you go work for some trucking company, usually but not always owned by your fellow Indians, and they don’t teach you very much of anything. Just get in the truck and go make money. And if you don’t like it, we’ll just send you back home. And now you’re $30,000 in debt to human smugglers, right?
So the exploitation going on here, this is not just a matter of beating up on immigrants, right? We have a mass—
TUCKER CARLSON: The immigrants aren’t the evil ones in this story.
GORD MAGILL: No, no, no, no, no, I agree. And the exploitation— and they’re the ones getting killed too, right? So all these crashes that have been in the news, there’s usually also a guy driving the truck, you know.
I went and searched GoFundMe the other day and punched in “truck driver Singh,” right? This is a few weeks ago, and I was writing an article for my Substack. 249 campaigns by Indian families trying to get their husbands’, uncles’, fathers’ remains sent back to India because they came here, got in a truck, had no idea what they were doing, got involved in a collision. 250? Yeah. That’s just the one name Singh. I mean, that’s not any other nationality. That’s not any other last name.
TUCKER CARLSON: Just Singh, Sikhs.
GORD MAGILL: Yeah. 250 of these guys with active campaigns run by their families either to pay medical bills or to have their bodies sent back to India.
TUCKER CARLSON: That is shocking.
Media Silence and the Bigger Picture
GORD MAGILL: It is. And you know what’s even more shocking is the fact that nobody wants to talk about this. So I’ve been writing about the trucking industry now for a few years, which sort of led to this book, you know, on the side, right? Like I’ve written for Newsweek and the American Conservative, a few other places. Your friend Oren Cass, American Compass.
And I have tried to alert through my various media contacts folks in the mainstream media or the left, right? Washington Post, New York Times, various smaller leftist places. “Guys, we have a problem here in trucking.” They were talking about it in the right-wing media because, you know, apparently they’re all anti-immigrant secret racists or whatever. But like, you guys are not talking about it.
TUCKER CARLSON: And there’s a lot of racism here, but it’s not from truckers. It’s from the people who run these countries who hate the native populations of these countries. Our countries— Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, UK. That’s just a fact. That’s where the racism is. Stop lecturing about racism.
GORD MAGILL: Stop. Yeah. And I think it’s also, like you say, it’s so much exploitation, but these guys don’t want to talk about it, you know? And when they do, it’s these really terrible puff pieces, right?
So there was one in The Guardian the other day, “Trump is meanie for enforcing English language rules.” There was a couple written back before Christmas, one in The New York Times, one in the LA Times about California-based Indian trucking companies that can’t get drivers anymore because their drivers are afraid of ICE or being abused out on the highway. The other truckers are racist to them at the truck stop or whatever.
But in none of these pieces do they investigate the safety records of the carriers involved. Do they investigate the human smuggling? Do they investigate the fact that this is kind of a program from Narendra Modi, right? We have this sort of “profit through immigration” policy of his, of sending his people everywhere.
This is not just limited to H-1Bs and tech. This is also in trucking. And India’s GDP is now like what, 3 or 4% built on remittances. And they’re not the only country that does this, but it’s official policy from Narendra Modi, right? “Send my guys over there, let them go.” Now they’re less of a political problem to me. They send money home. That’s not through the IMF or some financiers. There’s no strings attached to remittances, right? They just come home, it gets spent.
And it’s like a pressure release valve for countries with dysfunctional economies or dysfunctional governments to just send all their people into the West. And the whole Indians getting into trucking thing is not unique to the United States. It’s a problem in Canada, New Zealand, Australia. And again, the problem is less that these people are from India. The problem is the lack of training.
In Canada, there’s this thing called Driver Incorporated, which is this sort of tax avoidance scam, kind of like hiring employees on a 1099, which would be misclassification. That’s rampant in the Canadian trucking industry. In Australia, they call it sham contracting. And it gives the companies that employ these guys a business advantage because now their overheads are lower because they’re not paying for Canada Pension Plan contributions or unemployment insurance or payroll taxes. They’re just not paying any of that, right?
And now the drivers are also precarious because they’re essentially being paid cash, right? And if you don’t get paid, then what? There’s been a number of stories in Canada of drivers who went to work on this sort of Driver Incorporated thing, and then they find themselves not being paid. The companies just don’t pay them. And then what are you going to do about it? It’s just another form of exploiting the government, it’s exploiting the drivers, it’s exploiting everybody.
And it introduces a whole lot of people onto our highways, which are a common space. They’re our highways. The interstates are paid for by the taxpayer. They were built by our forefathers. The highways are public, and we are allowing people who are engaging in criminality to put untrained, unvetted, oftentimes illiterate people that have no idea what they’re doing, who are being economically exploited, to be this most critical link in the entire economy.
Truckers move everything, and we have allowed the entire industry to just be parasitized by foreign gangsters. It’s criminal.
The Dangers of the Job
TUCKER CARLSON: I know it’s been a tragedy for you personally, but I’m glad you’re not driving anymore because this is— I can’t imagine a more informed, articulate, wise observer of what’s happening than you. I mean, if you’re a representative of the average American trucker, we need to protect them at all costs.
GORD MAGILL: I appreciate the sentiment and the compliment, Tucker. I’m just a guy, man. I was approached to write the book. A friend of mine, my buddy Oliver Bateman, shout out Oliver, he encouraged me to start a Substack and a podcast. And I just— I don’t know, people said there’s something going on here. Maybe you should look into it. And I said yes.
TUCKER CARLSON: How dangerous is it as a job? I mean, it seems inherently—
GORD MAGILL: It’s one of the top 10 most dangerous jobs in America, actually, because of the risk of collision and falling off loading docks and getting in and out of trucks. There’s other stuff going on here, but it’s mostly all the collisions. You’re just at risk of being hit by other truckers.
TUCKER CARLSON: What’s the most dangerous? So as someone who’s done long-haul trucking, what did you think were the most dangerous moments?
GORD MAGILL: Oh man, good question. I mean, there’s managed danger, right? I hauled a lot of logs. I hauled logs down volcanoes in New Zealand when I lived in New Zealand. And if you’re trained correctly and you have good, well-maintained equipment and you’re working for a competent company that cares about you, that pays you well, those dangers are mitigated.
People used to ask me, because I did four seasons up on the ice roads in the Northwest Territories, “Oh, isn’t that crazy? You’re driving around on frozen lakes.” I’m like, it’s boring. They plow the road 100 feet wide. It’s totally managed. They have these guys driving around with ground penetrating radar. They manage the ice, they flood the cracked parts. You’re doing 17 miles an hour. There’s no cars to interact with. It’s actually the most safe road in the world per ton miles traveled.
The most unsafe thing you can do is drive up and down Interstate 81 or across 40 or whatever.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, 95 over the GW Bridge.
GORD MAGILL: Yeah, the remote, seemingly dangerous things are actually very safe, and the unsafe stuff is to drive around on an American interstate right now.
TUCKER CARLSON: You spent four seasons ice trucking?
GORD MAGILL: Yes, sir.
TUCKER CARLSON: You ever see anything weird? You’re just so in the middle of nowhere.
GORD MAGILL: You’re so alone. Yeah, I’ve seen herds of caribou and Arctic foxes, and when you get north of the tree line on your way to the mine, you sort of get out into subarctic tundra. It’s all very beautiful. Aurora borealis and stuff at night.
How cold is it? It’ll average anywhere during the season, it’s in the -20s, -30s most of the time. You’ll get down below -40. I’ve been outside making a repair on my trailer at like 53 below, so it can get pretty cold.
TUCKER CARLSON: Wow. And you don’t turn the truck off?
GORD MAGILL: No, no, no, no. You set it on high idle when you’re sleeping or unloading or whatever.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yep. What’s it like driving through a crowded urban area in a big truck?
GORD MAGILL: Well, now see, that’s fun. I used to do a lot of deliveries around Toronto when I was younger, and that’s where I sort of cut my teeth at this sort of stuff, right? You’re driving around places where everyone’s driving like a maniac and there’s lots of people around, and that’s the challenge.
I think one of the more dangerous jobs I ever had was hauling fuel to gas stations. I did that for about a year or so in the Greater Toronto area, and people cutting you off and in and out of traffic, and you see people doing really dumb things at gas stations, you know, smoking and just ignoring the fact that there’s a truck here with fuel coming out of the hoses into the ground tanks and there’s a giant bomb next to that, getting too close to you.
TUCKER CARLSON: When you’re driving a fuel truck, do you ever imagine what would happen if you had an accident?
Automatic Transmissions and De-Skilling the Industry
GORD MAGILL: I mean, you are aware, you try to imagine not getting in one and you try and envision all of the factors at play. You’re constantly — when you haul stuff that’s considered dangerous, like fuel, or when you’re going down a mountain with logs, you have to have full situational awareness. You have to be constantly thinking about where’s my out if somebody cuts me off, what’s going on as I go around this corner, what’s that guy doing over there? You’re constantly — it keeps you awake and it’s actually pretty mentally and physically draining because you’re just always constantly aware. I mean, this is why I’ve never been involved in a collision. I’ve never hit anybody. I’ve been doing this for almost 30 years and it’s just because you have to be fully aware of what’s going on at all times.
TUCKER CARLSON: Are the trucks moving to automatic transmissions?
GORD MAGILL: Oh yeah, that’s been going on for decades now.
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so you don’t have 16 gears and double clutching?
GORD MAGILL: I don’t drive those trucks. There are still sticks. This is a bit of an interesting trucker culture debate — automatics versus sticks. And one of my main critiques — I mean, you want to drive an automatic transmission, whatever, but the development and the imposition of automatic transmissions into big trucks was done on purpose.
TUCKER CARLSON: Why?
GORD MAGILL: To de-skill the job and get more people behind the wheel. It may have the fringe benefit now that we’ve had big truck automatic transmissions for a couple of decades — yes, in some cases they get better fuel mileage, matched with certain types of engines, and that’s fine and that’s great. But the imposition of them was not for that. It was to reduce the barrier to entry into the job and get more people in it who are less skilled and less competent. And again, you see the results all around you.
A Third-Generation Trucker’s Perspective
TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t mean this in a patronizing way, but how did you learn so much about the world? If you’re driving all the time, you can’t read while you drive.
GORD MAGILL: I do listen to podcasts, listen to audiobooks.
TUCKER CARLSON: Is that common?
GORD MAGILL: Oh yeah. My book will be out on audiobook narrated by me, as a matter of fact.
TUCKER CARLSON: So if you do it right, long-haul trucking is like kind of a college course as well as a job.
GORD MAGILL: It can be. Part of the reason I wrote this — and people say I’m passionate about it and I get worked up about it — is that truck driving has been very good to me. It’s critical to the economy. Everything we have here was all delivered by truck. The industrial processes which make everything involve trucking. It’s the same in every country. It’s an important and critical job.
And again, third-generation trucker. My dad’s a trucker. He’s still out on the road. My Uncle Chris drove truck for years, established a freight brokerage in Canada, an honest one — unfortunately, they’re not so honest anymore. My Uncle Bruce hauled logs and heavy equipment in northwestern Ontario, the kind of place you would love to go fishing. My grandpa drove truck across the Trans-Canada Highway when it was first built in like 1960, across Lake Superior, in a truck with no bunk, sleeping across the seats, no air conditioning, at threat of the truck freezing up in the winter. My grandpa was a tough bastard, and truckers in general were that way. The technology’s improved and whatnot, but I feel very strongly about this industry that served my family so well and so many other families so well.
The Great Freight Recession and American Trucking Companies Closing
One of the things that’s not talked about with this displacement problem as of late is that many multigenerational American trucking companies have gone out of business in the last few years. Since 2022, the freight market has been in what some people call the Great Freight Recession. We’re starting to come out of it here in the last few months.
There’s a website called FreightWaves — I’m friends with the guy that runs it and a few of the people that write there — and they have a section of their website called Layoffs and Bankruptcies. They have people whose full-time job is to document American trucking companies going out of business or closing, or drivers being laid off or having financial difficulties. And it’s been humming for 4 years.
Meanwhile, we get more and more people on our highways from places like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and India and Pakistan and all across Central America, sending their wages home in remittances or paying human smugglers to get them here. And American trucking companies are closing.
TUCKER CARLSON: And that hasn’t stopped under the current administration.
The Trump Administration’s Efforts and Their Limits
GORD MAGILL: Well, there’s a bunch of stuff going on right now. I think President Trump and Transportation Secretary Duffy are trying really hard to fix trucking. President Trump’s up to some interesting things here as of late, but we’ll leave that to the side. I think what they’re trying to do to help American truckers is good. They reinforced this English language proficiency thing — the enforcement of which was waived under the Obama administration. Interestingly enough, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration functionary who sent out the memo saying don’t put these guys out of service anymore, he’s now in charge of the hazmat division of FMCSA. So this guy that helped open up the problem is still working there. Maybe Duffy could fire him or something. I don’t know.
TUCKER CARLSON: What’s his name?
GORD MAGILL: I can’t remember. And I don’t want to be mean to the fellow. On the question of the administration doing things, ELP was great, but it’s only nibbling around the edges. The sort of parasitism of the industry — I think Duffy and the FMCSA and USDOT don’t quite understand that we are dealing with people who don’t view our safety-driven compliance culture in the same way we do.
TUCKER CARLSON: For instance, cultural orientation matters.
Foreign Drivers and a Broken Safety Culture
GORD MAGILL: It certainly does. Let me give you an example. A few weeks ago, this was all over the news — these gentlemen in Indiana were killed in a very tragic incident where a driver from Kyrgyzstan, working for a company owned by a guy from Kyrgyzstan operating out of Chicago, stopped traffic. Instead of driving into the field to the right, the guy from Kyrgyzstan drove left into oncoming traffic, hit a van with a bunch of Amish guys, and it killed 4 of them. A tragic incident. He’s been arrested. That’s all happening.
A week later, on the same road in the same county in Indiana, another truck blew a stop sign, almost killed somebody else. The cops pull the truck over — owned by an Indian company, driven by somebody who illegally immigrated here 2 years ago. No CDL at all.
TUCKER CARLSON: Commercial driver’s license.
GORD MAGILL: No commercial driver’s license. The CVSA — Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance — which is this loose organization of enforcement authorities in Mexico, the United States, and Canada, they do these blitzes and compile statistics on what are the violations, what are truckers doing wrong every year. One of the number one driver violations is not having a CDL at all or a medical card.
What I’m trying to get at here is we have people operating in the American and Canadian trucking industry who do not share our compliance and safety culture. And because the money they’re making is being sent back home to prop up other countries’ economies, they don’t care. ICE could arrest some guy at a truck stop and kick him out of the country — the guy that owns the truck is just going to put another one of his co-ethnics in the truck.
They have to start seizing trucks. The English language proficiency stuff is all well and good, but the economic forces at play here — either from the corporations that continue to hire these guys through brokers, or the incentives for these guys from overseas to continue sending their people here to parasitize off of our trucking industry — are too great. They are not just going to follow the rules. You can make all the new rules you want. A lot of these guys are just not going to follow them. You have to remove the people and then you have to seize the trucks.
TUCKER CARLSON: Has that happened?
Seizing Trucks and the Power-Only Model
GORD MAGILL: Well, there’s been some ICE stuff at a few inspection stations. Some states are cooperating. Oklahoma is a good example of this. There was one in Indiana. Arizona — ICE is working with DOT truck inspections, pulling guys out. That’s fine.
But again, these corporate lobbyists. Arizona tried to propose a rule to seize the trucks — if a truck is found to have an illegal immigrant or somebody with a suspicious work authorization, the truck would be seized, and then the company would have to come and explain themselves: why are you hiring these people to drive trucks? Why are you doing all this illegal business? And then maybe you’ll get your truck back, maybe you won’t. The people who objected to that were the Arizona Trucking Association.
So what’s going on here? Let me tell you a little bit of industry lingo. There’s something called power only. This is a model of trucking where the truck and the driving part of a business is subcontracted out. The trailer, the load, the service is still owned by another company. The people who perfected this was Federal Express, years and years ago. It used to be a good model — you could have your own truck, be a subcontractor to FedEx, pull their trailers and make money, and it was fine.
That system has run into this sort of importation of insourced illegal migrants, for lack of a better word. Now Amazon does it — 90-something percent of Amazon subcontractors are owned by these small carriers that are often headquartered overseas or headquartered in Chicago in ethnic enclaves like Elk Grove Village, or in Glendale, California with the Armenians. They employ their co-ethnics or guys with suspicious work visas or no work visas or no CDLs, and they go and haul all of Amazon’s stuff through the Amazon Relay program. I think 6 of the executives of the Amazon Relay program are Indian guys or from India or live in India.
Anyway, that model — the big trucking companies who are represented by the American Trucking Association have looked at Amazon and FedEx and said, why should we even bother owning trucks? We’ll just have our trailer pools and our customers, and we’ll subcontract out the driving and the owning of the trucks to all of this cheap labor. JB Hunt does this, Knight-Swift, Werner — they just don’t want to own trucks because hiring Americans and paying for trucks — there are business reasons for this too. The cost of compliance, the cost of insurance, the cost of dealing with all this — it’s a very hostile business environment. So I sort of understand what they’re doing. But the power-only model right now mostly rides on insourced labor. And what this does is it allows them to say, “Hey, we are still this American trucking company, look at us, we’re servicing our customers.” But they’re not actually employing — they’re trying to get away from employing people at all and moving to the power-only model.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s a skin suit, it’s not really an American company, right?
Chameleon Carriers and the Skin Suit Problem
GORD MAGILL: Yeah, there’s a whole lot of that skin suit stuff going on. And there’s this problem with chameleon carriers. So what people ask us all the time, like, what’s going on with the enforcement? These guys get in crashes, they kill all these people, but then they just pop up again somewhere else.
So we have a problem which I think Duffy and Derek Barnes at the FMCSA are working towards solving. But a company will register under an LLC and they’ll have what’s called a motor carrier registration number. And that motor carrier registration number is how all of their violations and inspections and whatnot are accumulated to, and then the government is supposed to impose accountability on them.
But what happens is, when a company’s motor carrier number gets too many violations, they get too much heat from the feds or whatever state, they just shut that company down. They move the equipment and the drivers to another one under a separate motor carrier number, and there’s an open market in buying and selling those, which they’re supposed to be clamping down on, but I’m not sure how that works. And they just keep operating.
There was a very famous incident here where this Cuban migrant working for a company called Hope Trans crashed into a family, killed almost all of them in Texas. And Hope Trans has been on the Fed’s radar forever. I think they were run by people from Moldova. Again, they have no skin in the game here in America. Why would they? They don’t care. And they hire migrants and people that don’t know any better. And they backdoor into their electronic logging devices.
The Electronic Logging Device Mandate
Yeah, this is another honor thing. So in 2017, American truckers were forced to accept into their trucks this thing called the electronic logging device. It’s supposed to manage your hours and make it so that you can’t cheat on your hours and just keep working. The problem with that—
TUCKER CARLSON: And the justification was safety.
GORD MAGILL: The justification was safety. And it turns out that it has not improved safety. In fact, it has made it worse. And because of the self-certification process with electronic logging device providers, you can just sort of sign off and say to the government, “Yep, we met all of your requirements.” Meanwhile, there’s a guy in an office in Serbia who you text on Telegram when you say, “Hey man, I’ve almost run out of my hours,” and they backdoor into the ELD, rewrite everything, and then you just keep driving. And roadside enforcement people have no way of catching that.
TUCKER CARLSON: So it’s like electronic voting. It can be subverted.
GORD MAGILL: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good analogy.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it’s anything. Anything digital can be subverted.
GORD MAGILL: Yeah, that’s exactly what’s going on. And even before we became wise to the fact it was being subverted by these foreign actors working in our trucking industry, the ELD mandate never accounted for the incentive structure for drivers, many of whom only get paid by the mile, are constantly being delayed. And so if you hold them up and they only get to drive so many hours a day and they’re only being paid by the mile, they end up driving like maniacs.
There was a study done by Overdrive Online, a trucking magazine, in conjunction with these other guys. And it proved that after the ELD mandate, all of the safety concerns it was said to solve — aggressive driving, guys driving tired, guys speeding, guys getting in crashes — all of that stuff went up after the ELD mandate was imposed.
And there was this lady who was in charge of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration for a while named Robin Hutchinson. She was asked about reviewing that. “Hey, look, the numbers don’t match.” “Well, we’re not going to change it.” When the government has shown that a policy or regulation or mandate they impose on Americans doesn’t work, they’re not going to change it. They have their thing now. And whatever you say doesn’t matter.
Freight Fraud and Cargo Theft
TUCKER CARLSON: You’re describing a chaotic and corrupt system that’s becoming more chaotic and more corrupt, like a lot of systems. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that we just had a tractor-trailer full of our nicotine pouches, Alp, stolen. And apparently somebody just walked into the facility with a fake ID, got in the truck and drove it off, and then it just somehow disappeared. So that sounded fantastical to me. Like, I couldn’t believe that happened.
GORD MAGILL: Oh, freight fraud and cargo theft is just astronomical.
TUCKER CARLSON: So that’s my question. This is not unusual.
GORD MAGILL: This is not unusual at all. And in fact, it’s a major, major concern. We’re talking hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in it. It’s not just the cargo theft. So there’s this thing called double brokering, which is illegal, where a load broker — which is one of these intermediaries that goes between shippers and trucking companies — well, a shipper will say, “Hey, load broker, we need to move this load.” The load broker will advertise it on some kind of board or an app, and then trucking companies will bid on it. Other brokers will get themselves involved and then broker it again and then take their cut. And then sometimes, because there’s all these intermediaries and nobody’s quite sure who’s who — and a lot of them are located overseas — just the theft going on with that is incredible.
And then there’s organized gangs, for lack of a better word, who abuse all of the holes in the system that are presented with this sort of technological distance between all of the people involved. I’m sure that happened with your case. And I would suggest to your friends at Alp, hire an American trucking company, go talk to them in person. Don’t use load brokers.
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, well, that’s probably wise advice. So I’m a little bit confused by how this works. I was aware of the electronic monitoring of truckers because I know some truckers and they resent it. I know that a truck is being followed at all times. It’s Find My Phone on a big scale. So how could you — if I take my truck, which is a Chevy Silverado 2017, and try and run away, the authorities can find me because GM will track my truck.
GORD MAGILL: But you have an old one too though, right?
TUCKER CARLSON: You’ve got like a 1987 also.
GORD MAGILL: Yeah, you should drive that one more.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it constantly breaks. So if I was actually going to run away, I know some good mechanics.
GORD MAGILL: I do too. You quoted my book.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s just old and it’s a bad climate, but it’s not about me. My only point is your truck that you have in your driveway that you put your kids in, your pickup truck — can be tracked, period. All of our vehicles can be tracked by the government and are. How can a thief steal a big rig and not be tracked? What is going on?
How Thieves Evade Tracking Systems
GORD MAGILL: Well, the information doesn’t necessarily go to the government right away. And also they can spoof it, they can switch. So you can take a trailer with a truck that’s being tracked, meet another guy at a truck stop, drop the trailer, unhook from it, hook it up to another truck and keep going. And that may have been what happened to your load.
I recommended my friend Ryan Joyce at GenLog. These flock camera things are around like spying on everybody. There’s a network in place like that for trucks of video cameras, and this company called GenLog manages it. I sent Lexi their contacts and maybe they can help you find your — or Alp’s — load. But there are all these tracking systems, and again, they can be spoofed. You can switch trucks. When you’re dealing with thieves who steal whole truckloads of things, they know this, they’re not stupid. It gets unloaded right away, transferred to another rig, distributed to whoever’s going to sell the stolen material.
TUCKER CARLSON: So there’s got to be — I mean, there’s obviously an entire network of what we used to call fences, people—
GORD MAGILL: Many networks. Yeah, there was a network of these people in California busted a little while ago, and they were the Singh organization because everybody involved had that Punjabi name Singh. It’s an appellation. It means lion. It means a devotee of Guru Nanak. It’s not actually a last name, but there’s tons of this. It’s hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars between stealing the loads, moving them around, stealing the cargo, skimming off truckers.
Some of these load brokers that are scummy will hire a trucker and just not pay them. They’ll get their payment. “We’re in Serbia, we shut down, who cares.” Or some other country. It could be Serbia, Moldova, Colombia, Pakistan. The entire world is involved in the American transportation system.
Military Freight and National Security
Another interesting development that’s come up is that military freight — my friend Danielle has been covering this very well. Everybody should go follow her. Her name is Danielle Choffin. She writes a Substack called Highway Veritas. Excellent researcher. She knows the whole thing top to bottom. And what we’re seeing is that these guys who are here from whatever country — Moldova, Ukraine, India, Russia — are hauling US military freight. And that military — yeah, they’re hauling US—
TUCKER CARLSON: We’re at war with half the world.
GORD MAGILL: I know. And they’re hauling our freight on our highways. The loads are being distributed illegally.
TUCKER CARLSON: What does that mean, distributed illegally?
GORD MAGILL: So basically there’s this regulation — and I can’t remember the name of it right now — within the United States military procurement stuff, Department of War. That says for certain types of military equipment moves, you may not use a broker or a third-party logistics provider. It has to be an approved carrier by the United States military. That regulation is constantly being ignored.
You’re seeing the same thing with the United States Postal Service. The United States Postal Service has a regulation that says nobody but Americans may touch the mail or something like this, and their entire freight contractor network of people who are pulling trailers full of US mail is using all these carriers sometimes who are based overseas, many of them using these non-domiciled CDL drivers — don’t speak English, dangerous, poor safety records. That’s who’s hauling our mail. They tried to stop doing that in October and the whole system almost seized up and they haven’t figured out how to get these guys out or hire back Americans to do the job.
And back to the military thing. On the point about data and these ELDs, all the information about bases, pictures of the loads being hauled, what they are, military documents about the military equipment being moved gets entered into these logging devices because they have interoperability. It’s also like accounting and monitoring the truck’s performance and sending communications back and forth between the dispatcher and the driver. So all of that data, all of that metadata about the location of bases and the stuff being moved is being sent overseas. And then to who? Who knows. It could end up at an office in Ukraine somewhere. It could end up at an office in Europe or South America or India. And then those guys could be selling it to Russia, to China, to who — nobody knows.
All of this military move metadata is leaving the country via technology that our government forced on us to make us more safe, which did not make us more safe, and is facilitating our replacement by people from overseas. You got it?
A National Security Issue
TUCKER CARLSON: This is where we’re bumping up against the point where this interview is bumming me out too much.
GORD MAGILL: Oh dude, hey man, I want to be trucking. I don’t want to be a writer.
TUCKER CARLSON: I’m a little bit of a nerd, but I’m not that much of a nerd.
GORD MAGILL: I would like to be out trucking and I’m not because the industry doesn’t pay. They don’t honor skill and competency, and many actors within it would rather hire people from overseas who are exploited labor. End of story. That’s all there is to it.
TUCKER CARLSON: It just does challenge the nature of our system because you can’t run a country in the way that we’re running it. Because you’re just too vulnerable to exploitation and attack and subversion and destruction, especially if you’re in conflict with other big countries. It’s not going to work. So that makes me sad on that level.
GORD MAGILL: It’s all very silly. And again, it’s not just like me losing my job. This is not some “woe is me,” or woe is my fellow truckers. This is a national security issue.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that’s very obvious. Okay, I just — I never do this, but I think it’s important. End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers by Gordon Magill is the book. I’m not a bookseller, but I think this book is worth selling.
Pending Legislation and Legal Battles
GORD MAGILL: I wish— since I finished writing it, so much more has happened. I submitted the final manuscript in October, and now, again, back to Duffy and President Trump, the government’s trying to respond, but it’s in sometimes mealy-mouthed ways where everyone and their dog in Congress introduced a new law to deal with the English language stuff. I’m like, it’s already a law, just enforce it. You’re making a law for no reason.
But then there’s this other one called Delilah’s Law introduced in the Senate by Senator Jim Banks from Indiana, named after this little girl who President Trump alluded to in his State of the Union speech — who was hit by a driver, an illegal driver from India. And now she’s got cerebral palsy. She was in hospital for months, had to have her brain reconstructed. Terrible, terrible, terrible story. I know her father, Marcus, and that’s in front of Congress now. They just introduced some amendments to it yesterday to hopefully clamp down on this.
There’s a Supreme Court case right now that just finished hearing oral argument — Montgomery v. Caribe — which hinges on this question of freight brokers. Because one of the problems with the safety issue is this division between the people that own and drive the trucks and the people farming out the loads. And right now, all the load brokers have been taking advantage of the fact that they don’t have to do any of the safety checks and they own no liability or accountability. And this Supreme Court case—
TUCKER CARLSON: The all upside economic model that Americans love, right? Yeah.
GORD MAGILL: No, it’s all upside. Yeah. So there’s another little piece of news I’ve been asked to relay to you by an anonymous source about another court case that’s going to be filed here soon by some trucking companies in Oklahoma against JB Hunt, against C.H. Robinson, TQL, all these big brokers — that’s going to attack this problem and say, you guys can’t keep doing this. You can’t keep using these unsafe carriers and saying it’s not our problem. You can’t come and take our work.
These guys in Oklahoma are trying to show that we have these customers we haul for. And then the brokers come in, undercut us, don’t even use their own trucks, and farm the loads out to these operations that are all kind of illegals. So that’s going to be entered in soon. And I think one of the lawyers involved are Nix Patterson, who are part of the opioid stuff and fighting the tobacco companies. So that’s news. That’s just yesterday. I just got the document sent to me yesterday.
Life on the Road
TUCKER CARLSON: This is such a minor question, but do truckers still smoke?
GORD MAGILL: Some do. Some pop Zints, some eat Alp. I don’t know. I’m not a nicotine guy, but yeah, I think there’s a few guys.
TUCKER CARLSON: How did you make it so many years in the cab without nicotine?
GORD MAGILL: Willpower, loud music, and coffee and staying healthy. I don’t know.
TUCKER CARLSON: When you’re driving up on the ice in the Northwest Territories and there’s no radio reception, what do you do for music?
GORD MAGILL: Oh, there’s satellite radio and back in the day, CDs. Audiobooks, music on your phone, stuff like that. I miss Canada. It’s kind of a shame what’s going on with it right now.
What’s Happening in Canada
TUCKER CARLSON: We’re going to do a very long segment as soon as I can find the right person to do it on what’s happening in your native country, Canada. But I just want to end with your assessment of what is happening in Canada because I feel like it’s one of the great uncovered stories of this time.
GORD MAGILL: Yeah. So last time I was on your show, I talked about these guys called the Coutts Four. And then you went to Alberta and talked about them when nobody else would, and thank you very much for that.
TUCKER CARLSON: Of course.
GORD MAGILL: I know all those guys. They extend great gratitude towards your highlighting of their situation.
TUCKER CARLSON: Of course. I love Canada, actually.
GORD MAGILL: Yeah. When the Canadian media just either lied about them or misinformed everybody about it. But they’re all out of jail now. There’s an appeal to the minor charges in their case because the original — the big thing that got everybody scared, this conspiracy to murder police officers — was thrown out, not guilty.
It looks like they were made into the fall guys by the Crown prosecutor involved in the case. And there were a number of charter breaches in how the case was prosecuted, warrants — the whole thing is very messy. And right now the last two guys — so two guys got out almost two years to the day of their arrest on unrelated charges, which were bogus. They’ve been out for a while. The other two gentlemen, Chris Carbert and Tony Olynyk, were recently released under something called bail on appeal. And those two — there were the minor charges that they were convicted of, which were also BS, are being appealed. And that appeal — the ruling on that appeal was supposed to come down last month in February, but because it’s so hot and the Canadian government is involved, it’s going to be September of this year or maybe next year. I’m not 100% sure. But those guys are out. That’s good.
My friends Chris Barber and Tamara Leach — they are on house arrest right now. They were the most pursued members of the Freedom Convoy. Tens and tens of millions of dollars were expended by the government to pursue peaceful protesters. And although that part of the story is coming to an end, this Mark Carney guy — one of the things Trudeau tried to do in the wake of the Freedom Convoy was clamp down on free speech.
TUCKER CARLSON: There was this bill, I think it was called C-63, and Human Rights in Canada, right?
GORD MAGILL: Pretty much. And that died when they had the election, and now it’s being resuscitated under this bill called C-9. They don’t want you to notice that youth unemployment is through the roof in Canada. They don’t want you to notice that Chinese companies are buying up Canadian mines. They don’t want you to notice that there’s 5 million extra people in the country on temporary work permits that the Carney government is talking about letting some of them stay. They don’t want you to notice that your whole country is just sort of falling apart at the seams economically. They don’t want you to notice that the government just allows thievery to happen.
There was this Stellantis — the guys that own Chrysler — the Canadian government gave them $15 billion to invest in Canada. Stellantis ran away with the money, and a couple of days later, they’re in the White House with Donald Trump announcing $13 billion worth of investment in the United States. They’re just thieves. And Mark Carney and his cabinet, if they had any sense of honor, they would step down.
There was a Superior Court ruling against Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act against the peaceful protesters from the Freedom Convoy — the Mosley decision. It found that it was against the charter, unreasonable, unjustified. The government filed an appeal 14 minutes later — thousands of pages of documents, but they were ready to go 14 minutes. And then that ruling on the appeal came down and said, “Well, you guys did wrong.” And in the parliamentary system, when members of a cabinet or a government are found to be involved in something so breathtakingly anti-democratic, it’s not the rule, but it’s sort of accepted practice that you step down, at least from your cabinet position.
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay. No, you put in prison people who criticize you. I think that’s the rule.
GORD MAGILL: Yeah. Carney and 9 of his cabinet ministers were all part of Trudeau. Carney wrote op-eds in the Globe and Mail encouraging Trudeau to freeze everyone’s bank accounts and do the Emergencies Act, and he’s still wandering around in power doing his thing, trying to sell Canada to China and the EU and getting in fights with Trump. And it’s just all — it’s pretty bleak up north right now.
TUCKER CARLSON: Do you feel safe going there?
GORD MAGILL: I mean, yeah, whatever — they haven’t completely erased free speech yet. I mean, I’m going home in a couple weeks. Hopefully I don’t get arrested, but so far so good.
Closing Thoughts
TUCKER CARLSON: Gordon Magill, thank you for taking all this time to do this. There’s so much going on. We’re trying — there’s a lot going on, but what’s happening here is always the most important thing and how our economy functions and we get food on the table is maybe the top thing.
GORD MAGILL: Yeah. Pretty important to have full grocery stores and gas stations and parts for everything and factories having their stuff delivered to — and that entire system, we’ve just sold off to the highest bidder, to people from overseas who don’t care about us.
TUCKER CARLSON: Amazing. Thank you for doing this.
GORD MAGILL: Thank you, sir.
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