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The Horror of Personal Transportation
There is no question that all good people agree that buses and trains and subways are good, and private cars are bad. Just look at Europe, where everyone goes everywhere on public transportation and loves it.
But here in the US, don’t try to get to a World Cup game by public transportation. Fuhgeddaboudit:
the US is utterly dependent on cars and trucks to function.
At Unherd, B. Duncan Moench, “a writer and scholar of American political culture” writes that:
When a society is built around highways, oil dependence, and endless suburban sprawl, it begins… to look… like the logical extension of an atomistic infrastructure that operates with no concern for the public.
Did you know that the auto companies, with malice aforethought, ripped out the electric streetcars in the 1930s after the electric companies were forced to divest themselves of their glorious urban transportation networks, because monopoly? Oh well.
So now everyone goes everywhere in automobiles and we have “a sedentary population unable to tolerate walking even short distances.” Oh well.
And we need forever wars to keep the supply of gasoline going.
Cheap gasoline becomes a constant strategic necessity. Foreign oil fields become matters of American national security.
On the contrary, I think that cheap, reliable personal transportation is the best thing since sliced bread. It only really got going after World War II when Americans hearkened unto Dinah Shore and decided to “See the USA in Your Chevrolet” and bought suburban homes with picket fences not in Pottersvilles but in Levittowns.
I understand that the best sort has always rather sneered at suburbs and freeways and strip malls, although the Euros visiting the USA to see the World Cup are presently marveling at Buc-ee’s. But then the best sort has always traveled private. In Jane Austen the best people have their own coach or barouche, and if you can’t afford your own coach you have to wait for the rich Mrs. Jennings to invite you along. In Dickens it is clear that only the rough crowd travels on the stage coaches. There was a troubling period when, e.g,, Lady Mary Crawley took the train from Yorkshire up to London to see her doctor. But now the rich all fly private. So that’s all right.
Yes. Today we all fly by air for anything more than a three-hour drive. But really, darling, the crowds at the airports are not to be endured.
Although the liberal narrative on transportation is that cars are a patriarchal imposition on society, I believe that cars and suburbs and picket fences are actually most appealing to women. Women like to raise families away from the hurly burly of the city. And if you’ve ever watched a woman puttering about her SUV in the driveway, loading and unloading it with this and that, you will understand that the smart set will only be able take women’s SUVs out of their cold dead hands.
I wonder if, one fine day, we will all get to fly private on Uber Air. Of course we will, and the best people will organize to stop it, just as they have organized and protested for the last 50 years to stop cars and freeways and suburbs, because the Planet.
| Thu, 18 Jun 2026 22:49:14 GMT |
Experts Agree: Trump Knuckled Under
So, is the US-Iran Memorandum of Understanding a humiliation for President Trump? Given that regime change was the vision at the beginning of the Bomb Iran efforts of the last few months, we’d have to say it was a failure.
But. I get the impression that the experience has created a sea-change among the Sunni regimes like Saudi Arabia and the regimes along the Persian Gulf. I suspect that it has solidified them against Iran. We can view this in the context of the Abraham Accords.
The first version of the Abraham Accords was a shock to me. That Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner could negotiate such a deal between Israel and the Arab countries was “inconceivable.” It started in 2020 with a deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
In July 2025, it was reported that the second Trump administration was seeking to expand the Accords to include Syria, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia[.]
It’s not hard to figure out what is going on. The name of the game is the tech economy, and Israel is in the front rank. Who wouldn’t want to get in the game?
Then there is Saudi Arabia and MBS. In a piece in Quillette:
He is constrained by an internal war inside the Kingdom that he has been fighting since the day he took power. These enemies are far more dangerous than the IRGC: they hold the deed to Mecca and they know how to cash it in Washington, Doha, and Ankara.
On the one hand is the House of Saud. On another hand is the “custodianship of the holy sites.” Another question is the project of countering Iran. Then there is the oil wealth, and the question of what the young people of Saudi Arabia are going to do with their lives.
My image of MBS is the 2025 picture of him in flowing robes watching a speech by Donald Trump with Elon Musk in the frame with him. But the holy sites!
What then of regime change in Teheran? Of the Iran proxies: Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis?
And what of the SAVE Act, gas prices, and the midterms?
And what of the hard left turn of the Democratic Party to socialism with woke characteristics?
And the real contest, between AI and green energy.
| Wed, 17 Jun 2026 21:47:33 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Laffer: the more you redistribute, the greater will be the drop in total income.
Critical Theory creates cultural gang warfare.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
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