Victor Davis Hanson: Blue States Are Betting Your Life on Illegal Truck Drivers

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the latest edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Jack Fowler: Twenty-one states and D.C. sue Trump administration to protect illegal alien drivers from the feds. This is from RedState. 

So, 21 states and D.C. are effectively telling the Trump administration that they are more concerned about protecting the identities of illegal aliens than keeping American drivers safe on the roads. That’s the conclusion one can draw from stunning new lawsuits filed to keep the Department of Transportation from obtaining the identities of illegal aliens who have obtained commercial driver’s licenses. 

Two lawsuits filed on Thursday, that’s a week ago from the day this particular episode is airing. Two lawsuits filed challenge the federal demands for Commercial Driver’s License Information System, CDLIS, records containing driver names, dates of birth, license numbers, and Social Security numbers, etc. 

Victor, that’s my state of Connecticut, your state of California, and 19 others, are just cool and dandy with these lunatics on the road. Your thoughts, Victor? 

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, well, I mean, I’m not a good person to talk to because we just drove back on Friday, the 200 miles from Stanford to Selma, and I can tell you that it is very, very scary to see the professionalism of the truck driver decline to such a degree because, I mean, when that truck, truck is in the right… 

Part of it is the infrastructure of California under Newsom is so ossified. He didn’t do anything to improve it, and it’s Third World-like.  

But when you see that truck driver go in the left lane, he doesn’t look at his rearview mirror to see who’s behind him. His theory is, “I’ve got 20 tons and nobody’s going to mess around with me.”  

And they just pull out, and then they get in the left lane, and they decide how many trucks they want to pass at 65 or 70. Forget the 55-mile limit. No one follows that anymore. And just keep going down the left lane until traffic, you know, that wants to go 80, I guess. 

Now what they’re doing, Jack, is that, and maybe some of our listeners in California have noticed, they have screens, and they pull down on the side, you know, so you can’t look in at all. If you’re in a pickup or an elevated SUV, you can’t see who the driver is, so you have no idea. 

On Aug. 8, we were driving back from Northern California and we, excuse me, from the Sierra, and we were cruising along making perfect time, and we were only four miles from home, and we passed the last exit before our exit, so we couldn’t get off, and the entire 99, three lanes, was just stopped for two hours on Aug. 8.  

And we came in about 11:30. It had been stopped since 8:30. It was backed up five or six miles. It stayed stopped till 10:00 at night, 10:00 at night. And apparently, a truck driver with two big trailer tankers with a total of 8,000 gallons of gas was just driving along fast, saw a small box truck parked in the right lane where it had broken down, and he either tried… 

He either was changing lanes back into the right, no one… The initial reports were he was changing lanes and not attentive, but he hit it. It was clear off the side of the road, and his truck exploded. He wasn’t hurt, and we had this toxic black plume, plume, flume or plume, either one, all over Selma. 

And that traffic, it cost people 12, 15 hours on the main lateral north-to-south route in the center of the state. And to this day, they won’t tell you who the driver was. It’s just a complete news blackout. They won’t tell you who was culpable, news blackout. 

California has sent down apparently an order that if there is a truck driver and the news people have not got to the scene and interviewed him, we are not going to release the information. At least we’re not going to release it in a prompt manner, even though it’s a public highway and even though the employees are public. 

Because I think it could be, I’m not saying, I’m not suggesting it was someone who was not authorized to drive or got one of these pseudo licenses, but it’s very dangerous.  

And when these states do this, they’re basically telling their population, “We’re taking a gamble with your lives because we’re going to play the odds because our virtue-signaling sense of self-guilt is more important than your collective safety. So we don’t want to know that we force poor little illegal aliens who are driving without properly qualifying on a driver’s test. We don’t want to impair their future or their careers, but we’re willing to risk your safety.” 

That’s what it is. Simple as that. 

Jack Fowler: Nearly half the states in America are essentially pro-criminal. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, they are. And we’re willing to take some collateral damage because we’ll get more media play that we’re morally superior to everybody than we will be culpable for the lives that these drivers have and will take in the future. 

And it is scary when you see, when you get on an interstate in California or an intrastate, and you know that 60 years ago they promised there would be three lanes in each direction, and there’s still two. And you see a truck on the left and the right, and that truck doesn’t feel like it’s doing anything wrong. And they’re just plowing down at 65 to 75 miles an hour. 

And you see all these drivers trying to cut in front of you to get around this obstacle. And then you look at how they drive, and when they have two trailers, the other one looks like the tail of a fish. It just goes back. Right. It wiggles, or a dog wiggling. 

And at that speed, they don’t have any idea about speed, calibration… 

Jack Fowler: Physics. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Physics, yeah. 

They don’t have that 10 years of driving 20 tons. They don’t know the history of driving. They don’t know the protocols. They don’t know the language. And so, they do crazy things like flip U-turns or miss an exit and then back up on the shoulder to see if they can still get out after they’ve passed it. 

And they don’t signal when they switch lanes, or they stay in the left lane as if they own it. Or I’ve seen now three lanes on the 99 where they’re in all three lanes for a particular time, for five or six miles. 

And I go to rest stops, and when they come in, they’re of all different nationalities, and they don’t speak English. They speak native languages. I’ve at least seen they speak in an Indian dialect, Punjabi dialect, Chinese, Spanish, you name it. But they don’t, you know, they don’t seem… 

Jack Fowler: Yeah. When I was driving down to see you a few weeks ago, there were some billboards, more than one, that were trucker-related that were, I’m pretty sure, Sikh. The language was… 

So the amount of these drivers just in California alone has got to be massive. 

Victor Davis Hanson: I don’t understand that because allegedly 30% to 40% of the truck drivers are Sikh immigrants. But the Sikh community is a very law-abiding, very successful community. It emphasizes, as I said in the case of [Zohran] Mamdani, if you look at all faiths and ethnicities of India, the census says Indian Americans are the highest-income ethnic group in the United States. 

So they’re very affluent. They’re highly educated. I don’t know why they would be protective of illegal Sikh, if that’s who it is, and Punjabi drivers coming through Mexico to get across the border illegally or overstaying a visa who don’t speak English and then put people at risk because they were able to finesse a driver’s test given that California waived the requirements for illegal aliens, apparently. 

And then they would not join… You know what I mean? 

I only say that because they signed a petition. Do you remember that? 

Jack Fowler: Mm-hmm. 

Victor Davis Hanson: The Sikhs of Canada and the United States suggesting that what I’m saying right now was somehow culturally or racially insensitive. 

But it isn’t, because they’re endangered too on the roads. 

Jack Fowler: Right. 

Victor Davis Hanson: And so it’s not aimed at any one group. It’s aimed at the idea of allowing someone here illegally who doesn’t speak the language and did not pass an authentic test to be let loose on the public with a dangerous machine. 

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.