The Atlas that Finally Shrugged

Anyone familiar with my scribbling knows that I separate modern society into two categories: World Turners and The Useless.

Me? I’m no World Turner. I’m one of The Useless. What I mean is this: If everyone who does what I do for a living stopped doing it today, the world would keep right on turning. Society would roll along just fine without me and mine — maybe better. Sure, a few people might miss my musings, but only for a little while. And the same is true for anyone who makes a living spewing their half-assed opinions (especially Jonah Goldberg).

In fact, you could wipe society’s table clear of every writer, artist, actor, musician, professor, dancer, reporter, tastemaker, producer, influencer, teacher, lobbyist, politician, everyone on TV, everyone who doesn’t get their hands dirty, and our world would keep turning just fine. Would we miss things like the newest Marvel movie? Sure. Those things are the spice of a life as bountiful as ours. But that doesn’t change the fact that our world would keep right on turning.

Now try to live without the World Turners, those sneered at by America’s left-wing elite, by the CNNs and Morning Joes and NPR — the working class. Try to imagine your life without mechanics, farmers, coal miners, oil drillers,  plumbers, roofers, electricians, pest control, the people who stock the shelves, who make our steel, police our streets, put out our fires, pave our roads, dig our ditches, haul our garbage, and plow the snow. Within a month, our world stops turning. Within six months, welcome to dystopia. Within a year, we’re eating one another.

But if you really want to know who keeps our world turning, it’s the truck drivers. Nothing moves without truck drivers, and I do mean nothing. Without truck drivers, it all goes to shit in about a week. No gasoline, no heating oil, empty store shelves, empty pharmacies, no seeds to grow your own food. It all grinds to a halt.

And still, despite their necessity and the value they add to our lives, everything our useless elites despise can be found in the person of a truck driver, for they are the modern-day cowboy: the rugged and resourceful individualists doing the dangerous, difficult, skilled, and tedious work of keeping us fed and absurdly comfortable.

Thanks primarily to truck drivers, modern societies’ poor live a life of luxury no Pharaoh could have imagined: central heat, air conditioning, microwaves, plasma TVs, cheap food, clothes, and furniture, cheap everything…

You don’t have to thank these guys. In fact, they’re perfectly content living in a world where no one gives them a thought. That’s how they’re built. If one quality defines most truck drivers, it’s that they just want to be left alone. They’re loners comfortable in their own company and eager to escape into the cab of their rig where the world makes sense, where the complications and unnecessary dramas that define modern life don’t exist. All that exists is hot coffee, a loyal dog, the radio, the companionship of the like-minded at the next stop, and the road.

We need truck drivers a whole lot more than they need us, and they know it. The leverage they hold over our society has always been there, but because truck drivers are men and not babies, they don’t use it. Instead, they just go about the business of going about their business. But if you don’t allow them to go about their business…

Guys like this, guys who just want to be left alone, those are the last guys you want to push around to the point where they push back.

And now the world’s truck drivers, especially in fascist Canada, have had enough, and now they’re shrugging. Brother, are they shrugging.

And can you blame them?

You don’t need a vaccine passport to attend the Oscars, but you do need one to be a truck driver.

On what planet is that okay?

Only silver-spooned bullies like Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden live on that planet.

And never forget that unlike the Brownshirts in Black Lives Matter and Antifa, these men are laying something on the line, something real. These are working people, not professional activists, criminals, and students. These men have families, mortgages, a nut to crack every month. But they’re still out there without the burning and looting that define the modern left. The risks are also real —  crippling fines, imprisonment, truck confiscation, a fascist state eager for violence — but their cause is the most righteous of causes in the history of man: the right to be left alone.

Who is John Galt?

Now we know.

By John Nolte on February 11, 2022