Rebel News Podcast - SPECIAL： Frank Buckley on his new book, “The Republican Workers Party”

00:00:00.000 Tonight, on this Thanksgiving holiday, we have a special feature interview with Frank Buckley,

00:00:04.920 the Canadian who wrote campaign speeches for Donald Trump.

00:00:08.500 It's October 8th, and this is The Ezra LeVant Show.

00:00:16.640 Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?

00:00:20.440 There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.

00:00:24.160 You come here once a year with a sign, and you feel morally superior.

00:00:27.140 The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.

00:00:37.980 Well, you'll remember Frank Buckley. He's the law professor from Washington, D.C.,

00:00:42.000 who shocked the CBC by telling them something they had never heard before,

00:00:47.640 namely that not everyone thinks Chrystia Freeland is the diplomat of the year.

00:00:52.820 And they sent down Chrystia Freeland to negotiate, and she went out of her way to convey her contempt for Trump. 0.99

00:01:00.180 And that just struck me as about the stupidest thing you could do. 0.99

00:01:03.940 Unless, of course, you would be just as happy to see the whole thing fail. 0.99

00:01:09.560 Convey her, sorry, can you give that to me again?

00:01:12.440 What example do you have of the minister expressing her views on Donald Trump?

00:01:16.080 That was gorgeous, and wouldn't you know it, Professor Buckley was right.

00:01:20.540 He knew something that not a single one of the CBC's thousands of employees had ever heard before.

00:01:25.940 They were shocked to hear it, until Donald Trump himself said it.

00:01:30.080 We're very unhappy with the negotiations and the negotiating style of Canada.

00:01:36.040 We don't like their representative very much.

00:01:38.400 So maybe he's a bit more plugged in to Canada-U.S. affairs than the usual Ottawa suspects all running errands for Justin Trudeau's liberals.

00:01:46.640 I've said it before, and I'm sure I'll say it again.

00:01:48.700 Other than a handful of alternative online news sites like ours, and the Toronto Sun on its good days,

00:01:54.320 if you want to know the problems with Justin Trudeau's government, you have to rely on foreign media.

00:01:59.640 Whether it's serious things like Trudeau bringing that terrorist with him on his trip to India,

00:02:04.420 or silly things like Trudeau saying the word people kind, remember that? 0.74

00:02:08.860 Or Trudeau's own Me Too moment, where he sexually groped a young female reporter in B.C.? 0.96

00:02:14.160 You've got to read about that in the U.S. or U.K. or even Australian papers.

00:02:18.580 Canadian media, especially Trudeau's CBC, just won't cover it.

00:02:23.420 They all want to keep their jobs either at the CBC state broadcaster,

00:02:26.860 or get a job with the CBC state broadcaster when their private sector job lays them off.

00:02:32.320 Or the real score, of course, is getting a six-figure job with the actual government itself.

00:02:36.900 Here's Post Media's leftist feminist columnist, Paula Simons, full-time advocate for anything Trudeauvian or a New Democrat, 0.73

00:02:45.260 who just took an appointment to the Senate, representing Alberta, actually stabbing Alberta's Senate reform hopes in the back.

00:02:53.420 Funny, when Paula Simons was a columnist, she wrote this.

00:02:57.480 Well, that was other people, you see, because now that she's taken an appointment, it's for holy reasons.

00:03:13.420 She's pure, and her job for life with Trudeau, it's different, you see.

00:03:20.160 Anyways, that's why I like Frank Buckley.

00:03:22.060 Plain-spoken, and he's a Canadian who is now down in Washington, D.C.

00:03:26.140 So he knows Trump world better than anyone at the CBC does, because he also knows Canada, too.

00:03:31.800 It's amazing how integral he's been in the Trump campaign, speechwriting for Trump and others.

00:03:36.900 If he were a Canadian working for Obama, he would be on TV in Canada every day.

00:03:43.680 But he's a conservative working for Trump, so they have him on rarely, and they attack him when he comes on.

00:03:50.100 Oh, well, I find him interesting, and I sat down with him recently to talk about his new book.

00:03:55.280 It's American in its focus, but I think it might apply to Canada, too.

00:03:59.340 What do you think?

00:04:00.100 Here's Frank Buckley talking about his new book, The Republican Workers' Party.

00:04:06.300 That's next, after this short break.

00:04:08.320 Well, I remember when it was the exact moment that I realized Donald Trump could win and would win the 2016 presidential election.

00:04:34.060 I had made the mistake until that moment of following the narrative of the mainstream media that it was about Hollywood celebrities endorsing Hillary Clinton,

00:04:43.380 or maybe it was about the emails and motivating conservatives.

00:04:47.660 No, no.

00:04:48.760 The moment when I understood how Donald Trump would win the Electoral College was from the most unlikely source,

00:04:56.260 namely a left-wing schlep named Michael Moore when he gave this speech in Michigan.

00:05:02.680 Take a look.

00:05:03.320 Whether Trump means it or not is kind of irrelevant because he's saying the things to people who are hurting.

00:05:10.980 And it's why every beaten-down, nameless, forgotten working stiff who used to be part of what was called the middle class loves Trump. 0.56

00:05:20.040 He is the human Molotov cocktail that they've been waiting for, 0.97

00:05:26.080 the human hand grenade that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them.

00:05:31.400 Well, I saw that and I thought, oh my God, that is exactly how it's going to happen.

00:05:37.860 And Hillary Clinton didn't know it. 1.00

00:05:40.540 The only Democrat ad I saw in the whole campaign that gave me a shiver that made me think, oh my God, they might actually win,

00:05:49.380 was this ad by the United States steelworkers that got very little actual play.

00:05:56.760 Remember this one?

00:05:57.480 My name is Jack Tippold, and I've been a steelworker for 24 years.

00:06:03.520 This election is a little bit different, and Donald Trump does talk a good game when it comes to China and Mexico.

00:06:10.060 But let me tell you a little something about Donald Trump.

00:06:13.620 The Chinese have been illegally dumping steel and aluminum into this country.

00:06:19.360 The problem is that Donald Trump is buying this steel and aluminum, and he's using it in his projects.

00:06:26.200 Now, Trump says he's going to rebuild the steel industry.

00:06:28.880 That steel could have been made here in Indiana, Pennsylvania, or Ohio.

00:06:33.320 Another thing, Donald Trump says our wages are too high.

00:06:37.040 Let's see him go into one of our plants with his soft hands and work for a day, and then tell us our wages are too high.

00:06:45.400 Donald Trump says he uses bankruptcy as a tool.

00:06:48.460 I've seen what bankruptcy does to our brothers and sisters.

00:06:52.220 I've seen them losing their houses and their cars, unable to provide food to put on their tables, can't pay their bills.

00:06:58.560 We don't have a father that can give us a million dollars and bail us out.

00:07:01.940 Look, Donald Trump is nothing more than a boss.

00:07:05.060 And when you go to pull that lever on November 8th, think if that's who you want as your boss.

00:07:16.240 Yeah, I bet Jack Tipple's voting for Trump now.

00:07:18.960 Well, what is this new Republican Party that cobbled together previously Democrat-voting blue-collar workers from the Rust Belt?

00:07:29.240 How does a billionaire attract that kind of voter?

00:07:33.560 Well, a man who I think has cracked the code is our friend Frank Buckley.

00:07:38.420 He's a professor at George Mason University at the Scalia School of Law,

00:07:41.860 and he's the author of the new book called The Republican Workers' Party.

00:07:48.020 And he joins us now via Skype.

00:07:50.400 Professor Buckley, great to have you back on the show.

00:07:52.440 I should just say before we get started, your appearance discussing NAFTA and Chrystia Freeland irritating Washington, D.C.,

00:07:59.640 that was very prescient because shortly after that, Donald Trump himself remarked on how much he didn't think Chrystia Freeland was a good fit for Canada.

00:08:08.060 Absolutely right.

00:08:08.980 No, she was a disaster. 0.99

00:08:10.620 And, you know, full marks to Jared for pulling it off.

00:08:13.840 You know, I mean, a lot of people were worried about Trump being somebody who was just, you know, totally opposed to any free trade agreement.

00:08:20.460 What he showed is, no, he knows how to work the deal.

00:08:23.520 Yeah.

00:08:24.000 Right?

00:08:24.720 Well, that's very interesting, and I encourage our viewers to go back and see that interview you did with me,

00:08:29.580 which was one of our most popular in the last month because I think you had the straight talk on NAFTA that Canadians just weren't getting from other media sources.

00:08:37.800 But today I want to talk about something related, and you call it the Republican Workers' Party, and that's a phrase that I think a lot of folks on the left would regard as an oxymoron.

00:08:47.540 I wrote a book once called Ethical Oil, and that made the left go crazy because they thought there's no such thing as ethical oil.

00:08:54.580 Is that the same reaction you gave to that phrase, the Republican Workers' Party?

00:08:59.080 Totally.

00:08:59.960 And, you know, it drove the left absolutely nuts.

00:09:02.780 I debated a couple of lefties a couple of weeks back, Michael Kazin from Dissent Magazine and somebody from American Prospect, Robert Kuttner,

00:09:14.260 and they were outraged by the use of the word workers.

00:09:18.980 I mean, it's a label that Trump himself used, but they thought the Democrats had property rights on the word workers.

00:09:26.440 And what I said, well, you know, at one time you did.

00:09:29.560 There was an old honorable, you know, Democratic Party, the party of Tip O'Neill, you know, not worried about that sort of thing.

00:09:38.180 Except that now you've become the party of transgender bathrooms and bicycle lanes. 0.99

00:09:43.080 So you've given up, you know, the old concern of the Democrats for, you know, the average American worker,

00:09:50.600 and you've become the party of an ultra-elite that's distanced itself from ordinary Americans.

00:09:57.280 And you know what?

00:09:58.080 We ate your lunch.

00:09:59.460 Yeah.

00:09:59.780 You know, it's interesting.

00:10:00.940 I've observed that in Canada.

00:10:02.180 We've had a lot of debates up here, Professor, about oil and gas.

00:10:05.800 So that's guys who work outdoors, wear hard hats, gals too, but mainly guys, drive trucks, drill things, mine things.

00:10:14.680 They come home, they're tired, part of their body hurts.

00:10:18.420 That used to be the bedrock of our socialist party up here called the NDP.

00:10:23.000 But there's been a war against industry.

00:10:26.440 And those guys, you know, coal miners, perfect example. 1.00

00:10:29.900 A coal miner would have been in a union and would have had a tough job and would have been, you know, someone,

00:10:36.520 a left-wing politician would have tried to romance. 1.00

00:10:39.500 But under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the modern left, they try and stamp out coal, saying it's anti-environmental.

00:10:47.400 They don't care about the workers.

00:10:48.700 They care about, you know, some frog of some sort or some bee of some sort.

00:10:54.560 You know, the NDP is a good example of what we're talking about.

00:10:57.280 Hey, you know, look, I became an American in 2014.

00:10:59.900 Before then, I was simply a Canadian.

00:11:01.680 I still am.

00:11:03.340 And moreover, I'm a Saskatchewan boy.

00:11:05.700 So, you know, I've met Tommy Douglas.

00:11:08.000 And that was a different NDP.

00:11:09.680 I mean, the same kind of thing has happened to the NDP right now.

00:11:13.460 It's become the prisoner of identity politics.

00:11:17.140 And it's not really on the side of ordinary Canadian workers.

00:11:20.720 Same thing here.

00:11:22.140 You know what?

00:11:22.540 What's so interesting, just reading a little bit about your book,

00:11:25.580 the Republican Party in the States, it certainly wasn't the Republican Workers' Party until Trump made it so.

00:11:32.940 I mean, Mitt Romney, and I give him much more credit than many others do because he's such a,

00:11:38.100 I think he really is a good egg.

00:11:40.180 He's been anti-Trump, but he's lived an exemplary life.

00:11:45.000 I think, though, that a lot of Republicans and the Republican elite and the brain trust,

00:11:51.440 it was sort of think tank, think tankers based in Washington who had academic debates about things

00:11:57.620 and policies in the abstract.

00:11:59.600 I think they were, in a way, disconnected from the regular cut and thrust of ordinary Americans' lives.

00:12:06.720 It was sort of what Charles Murray wrote about in his book, Coming Apart.

00:12:10.180 It was elite Republicans in elite postal codes rubbing shoulders with other intellectual elites,

00:12:17.340 and they forgot about flyover country.

00:12:19.920 You know, they became sort of like the snobs of the Democrats, too.

00:12:23.400 Yeah, absolutely right.

00:12:24.260 I mean, they're inside the Beltway group of people.

00:12:27.300 They like to pretend that they're the brains of the outfit, but they're more like the stomach. 0.70

00:12:31.420 They just eat up all of the donor money from conservative donors.

00:12:36.100 And, you know, the classic gap by Romney was a distinction between makers and takers,

00:12:41.700 but that came from, you know, the American Enterprise Institute.

00:12:44.560 So they're around.

00:12:45.580 They're still, you know, getting all the money,

00:12:47.420 but they're pretty much irrelevant in terms of the policies of the Republican Workers' Party.

00:12:54.600 I mean, they really don't get it, nor does the Republican Party quite yet.

00:12:59.260 Right. It's a party in shambles.

00:13:02.300 Well, you know, one of the things that I, I mean, I, when I was a student,

00:13:06.040 I would go to the Fraser Institute events, and they're very free market oriented,

00:13:10.360 and I really admired Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winning economist.

00:13:14.900 And I still believe in those things, but I don't think the world is as simple as,

00:13:20.520 well, if you bring in migrant workers, you pay five cents less for a tomato.

00:13:24.580 That is absolutely true, but you have five dollars in cost,

00:13:29.740 whether it's crime or your health care and schools are overcrowded,

00:13:34.300 or you have cultural changes that you didn't sign up for.

00:13:37.720 So, you know, I think that a purely economic analysis,

00:13:41.700 like free trade, a unilateral declaration of free trade,

00:13:44.940 which some libertarians would call for,

00:13:47.180 or open borders of all sorts,

00:13:50.240 those may make sense if you're only doing math.

00:13:53.480 But if you're looking at other things,

00:13:55.740 they're a real problem,

00:13:56.600 especially in the age of mass migration and terrorism.

00:13:59.060 That's my view.

00:13:59.720 What do you think, Professor?

00:14:00.840 That's absolutely right.

00:14:02.040 You know, the problem with the old Republican Party

00:14:05.900 is it managed to convey a perfect adherence to libertarian principles,

00:14:10.940 but at the same time, an indifference to people.

00:14:14.340 And, you know, look, frankly,

00:14:15.680 people are not going to vote on the basis of philosophy, right?

00:14:19.400 I mean, they're going to ask themselves,

00:14:21.220 you know, is this guy going to make things better for us?

00:14:23.660 And Trump communicated that wonderfully.

00:14:27.300 Nobody inside the Beltway got it.

00:14:29.520 But you drove outside the Beltway for 20 miles,

00:14:32.880 and all of a sudden, in 2016, that summer,

00:14:35.420 all the signs said Trump,

00:14:36.600 and many of them were hand-painted signs.

00:14:39.560 Some of them were on the sides of barns, right?

00:14:42.260 Those were the only things you saw.

00:14:44.020 So if you lived outside the Beltway, you got it, right?

00:14:48.140 But even now, you know, people still have not quite figured it out.

00:14:53.500 You know, I remember watching Al Gore embarrass Ross Perot on tariffs

00:14:59.540 because Ross Perot was worried about libertarian free trade

00:15:04.500 that had a corrosive effect on communities.

00:15:06.620 And there was a meanness there,

00:15:08.260 and Ross Perot was a little quirky, and he lost that fight.

00:15:11.440 And I've been following Donald Trump long enough to know

00:15:16.140 that he was always against free trade,

00:15:17.880 first with Japan and then with China and other places.

00:15:21.320 And I always thought, that's not good.

00:15:24.640 And even in his trade war that he threatened with Canada,

00:15:28.240 it would make cars in America more expensive.

00:15:31.980 It would.

00:15:32.440 It would have tacked on a 20% tariff on our cars.

00:15:34.820 And I thought, well, that's going to hurt Americans.

00:15:37.020 Well, it's true.

00:15:39.020 It would make Americans pay more for fruit, more for cars. 0.81

00:15:42.540 But the benefit that we weren't thinking of just as libertarians was

00:15:48.000 when you also have men with jobs

00:15:50.980 and you also have communities that aren't hollowed out.

00:15:55.160 Maybe you're paying people a little bit more at the Tim Hortons restaurant

00:16:01.180 because you're not bringing in temporary foreign workers.

00:16:03.820 So maybe you're paying an extra nickel for your coffee,

00:16:05.880 but you've got a working wage for some.

00:16:08.700 These are lefty thoughts.

00:16:11.020 But a capitalist billionaire like Trump was articulating them.

00:16:14.820 It's hard to grok if you're an old-school conservative.

00:16:19.840 Well, here's the thing that made all the difference in the world,

00:16:23.060 and most people didn't notice it, but I did.

00:16:24.800 It was this.

00:16:26.420 Back around 2012, for the first time,

00:16:28.700 Americans reported that they no longer thought

00:16:30.720 their kids would have it better off than they did.

00:16:33.800 And Barack Obama got it and said,

00:16:37.180 I'm going to make things better.

00:16:39.480 And, you know, the Republicans really simply didn't answer that.

00:16:43.520 I mean, Mitt Romney came up with a, what, I think a 57-point plan of action,

00:16:49.980 which really had nothing to do with the mobility I'm describing.

00:16:55.300 And what I'm describing is the American dream.

00:16:57.240 I mean, the American dream was dead,

00:16:59.060 and Obama promised to get it back,

00:17:01.360 and he completely failed, right?

00:17:03.700 We were told to get used to the new normal.

00:17:05.900 In his last year of office, the growth was about 1.7%,

00:17:09.500 and we had thrown every little tool in the Keynesian toolbox at this.

00:17:16.620 We had increased our debt from $10 trillion to $19 trillion a year,

00:17:20.620 and it didn't do a darn thing in terms of bringing back jobs. 0.68

00:17:23.640 So, you know, we had, on the one hand, a tone-deaf Republican Party.

00:17:28.300 On the other hand, we had a Democratic Party that got it

00:17:32.340 but failed to produce anything, and there was Donald.

00:17:35.820 And he was the one guy who said, firstly, who communicated

00:17:39.420 he was tough enough to take on the Dems.

00:17:42.480 And you see right now in the Kavanaugh hearings

00:17:44.360 just the kind of toughness you need.

00:17:46.820 And secondly, I mean, as opposed to all of the other Republicans,

00:17:50.740 basically, he said, look, I'm on the side of the ordinary Joe in all of this.

00:17:54.160 Yeah.

00:17:54.900 Well, let me ask you about another Republican leader.

00:17:58.980 I'm referring to Scott Walker, the governor,

00:18:01.600 who has had big battles with unions in his state.

00:18:05.920 He's the governor of Wisconsin, if I'm not mistaken.

00:18:08.360 And they've had a recall vote.

00:18:10.700 I mean, he has been battling the unions, and one of his things was to end mandatory union dues.

00:18:16.820 And you can imagine how hard the unions fought against that

00:18:19.980 because he basically collected their revenue for them.

00:18:22.980 And when it was no longer mandatory, a lot of workers said,

00:18:27.840 yeah, I don't want to pay money for that.

00:18:29.520 I think that defunding or ending the mandatory powers of unions

00:18:37.580 is absolutely important, if any conservative's ever going to have a chance.

00:18:43.440 How do you take away the unfair political tools of unions, like Scott Walker did,

00:18:49.800 but also friendly enough to unions to get the grassroots members to support you as a conservative?

00:18:55.140 Well, okay, firstly, I worked on a campaign.

00:18:59.140 I wrote speeches for the candidate and for his family.

00:19:01.800 I advised on transition.

00:19:03.820 So my book, The Republican Workers' Party, does give an inside view of what happened.

00:19:07.920 And we discovered, you know, or we decided early on,

00:19:10.420 we're not going to beat up on private sector unions because these are our people.

00:19:14.840 These guys are going to vote for our candidate.

00:19:17.280 Public sector, totally different.

00:19:19.220 And in terms of Scott Walker, mostly we're talking about opposition from public sector unions.

00:19:25.320 But, you know, we're, you know, we were on the side of private sector union members.

00:19:30.000 And part of our message was, you know,

00:19:32.400 the best thing you can do for a union worker is make sure that he's got a job, right?

00:19:37.040 So we wanted to provide the economic conditions where that would happen.

00:19:40.120 And, you know what, guess what?

00:19:41.520 The last two quarters, we've had growth at 4%, 4.2% and 4%.

00:19:46.540 Third quarter is going to be about the same.

00:19:49.400 I mean, nobody thought anything like this was possible.

00:19:52.940 I mean, you know, Obama said it's going to be magic.

00:19:55.620 That's the secret to it all.

00:19:57.420 And the secret involved taking back all the things that the left dearly loves,

00:20:01.860 the regulatory state, which is the, you know, the pig pen in which they live, right?

00:20:07.680 And, you know, we gave tax reform, which basically matches or betters Canada's treatment of capital gains tax.

00:20:16.920 In other words, America right now is a tax haven, right?

00:20:20.940 In the past, we shipped jobs to other countries.

00:20:24.700 Now we're shipping jobs to America from other countries.

00:20:27.380 Yeah, and that is something.

00:20:29.380 I mean, I'm a Trump fan.

00:20:31.480 I honestly thought his promise of bringing factories back and heavy industry back,

00:20:38.540 I thought that was just a pipe dream.

00:20:41.580 When Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, announced that he was repatriating, what, a quarter of a trillion dollars

00:20:49.200 and paying an 11-figure tax for the pleasure of doing so,

00:20:54.860 I thought, well, maybe it's true.

00:20:56.920 If Apple's bringing a quarter trillion back to America and talking about high-tech manufacturing,

00:21:03.000 my God, maybe it's true.

00:21:05.160 Yeah.

00:21:05.560 Let me say one thing else about the Republican Workers' Party.

00:21:08.820 I mean, you might appreciate this, but it, you know,

00:21:12.200 it's not all that far different from a Stephen Harper Tory party, right?

00:21:17.120 In the sense that, you know, really early on in the campaign,

00:21:21.040 people asked, oh, this is fine, you know, Trump's all right.

00:21:24.440 I had dinner with a guy from VP at the Charles Fokin Institute.

00:21:28.060 He said, yeah, but what about entitlements? 1.00

00:21:30.060 And I thought, you idiot, you really don't get it. 1.00

00:21:32.580 We're not going to go after entitlements. 1.00

00:21:34.060 We're not going to touch Social Security.

00:21:35.780 In the past, Republicans had all of these wonderful ideas about privatizing Social Security.

00:21:40.960 And guess what?

00:21:41.620 That was just nuts in terms of, you know, the electoral process.

00:21:45.560 America has one of the most generous social safety nets in the world.

00:21:50.440 And, you know, on a per capita basis, we're more generous than Canada.

00:21:54.760 OK.

00:21:55.320 So, yeah.

00:21:56.340 So, you know, we don't spend it wisely.

00:21:58.680 OK.

00:21:59.200 But we spend it, you know, in 100-odd federal programs as well as state and local.

00:22:04.120 Right.

00:22:04.600 And, yeah, there are things you can do about that.

00:22:06.880 But what you don't do is give up on ordinary Americans.

00:22:09.700 So, you know, on one hand, the promise is we're going to give jobs to people who can work.

00:22:15.440 And on the other hand, if somehow you're not able to work, we're going to look after you.

00:22:18.820 We're not going to take things away.

00:22:20.100 You know, we are not one of those green eye shade Republicans of the kind you saw in the past who basically love to give money to, you know, to the rich people.

00:22:29.020 You know, one thing that I would have liked to have seen, in fact, would have been in the tax reform package would have been getting rid of some of the perks for the uber wealthy people in America.

00:22:40.280 So, I mean, Steve Bannon wanted a, you know, I think a 40 percent tax on people making more than 500 million, $500,000 a year.

00:22:48.160 That's a sort of kind of radical idea that the Trump people were supporting.

00:22:54.420 And, you know, we're coming from a very, you know, Stephen Harper Tory place here.

00:23:02.020 But the Trump effect, the Trump factor cannot be understated.

00:23:06.740 I mean, the fact that a, not just wretch, not just billionaire, but an extravagant, over-the-top, conspicuous consumption fellow.

00:23:19.320 And who was in all the rap videos until about three years ago.

00:23:23.400 Who was in, who was all gold and ornate.

00:23:26.840 That he would have a rapport with working men and women.

00:23:30.680 And that's what is so hard to figure out.

00:23:34.100 No, it's not hard at all.

00:23:35.400 Because, look, you know, if you're just a regular Joe, you kind of resent it when a politician comes around and talks about how he likes pork rinds.

00:23:45.200 You know, you kind of dislike it when, you know, a guy who is an asset fund manager wears blue jeans and a flannel shirt.

00:23:54.280 So, you know, he's putting you on.

00:23:56.100 Trump, on the other hand, he didn't stoop.

00:23:59.380 He didn't condescend.

00:24:00.560 He said, this is who I am.

00:24:01.440 And people loved it.

00:24:02.480 You know, if you're a, you know, a regular Joe, you appreciate people who just live their regular lives.

00:24:08.920 They're not going to condescend to you.

00:24:10.180 And I'll say one other thing about Trump, and that is, you know, the people he loved hanging out with were construction people.

00:24:16.200 I mean, this is a construction guy.

00:24:17.800 Right.

00:24:18.400 And on any project, he loved just going around talking to people working, you know, building his hotels.

00:24:25.660 These were more his kind of people.

00:24:27.420 I mean, he is not a Park Avenue liberal.

00:24:29.860 He's not even close to that.

00:24:32.080 And this is something regular, ordinary Americans from West Virginia, whatever, loved.

00:24:37.600 You know, it's funny, I think of the old joke, the rich are not like us, they have more money.

00:24:43.660 Or the rich are just like us, but they have more money.

00:24:46.060 As in, Trump is a regular guy who happens to be a billionaire and has a lot of chutzpah.

00:24:51.360 I remember when early in his camp, I think it was 2015, when he was asked, how much money do you have?

00:24:57.900 And someone put a number to him.

00:24:59.800 And I knew that any other politician would try and round it down.

00:25:04.040 Oh, no, no, no, I'm not rich.

00:25:05.420 Trump did the opposite.

00:25:06.260 He said, I'm worth way more than that.

00:25:09.280 Way more.

00:25:10.000 And I thought, that's the opposite of what every handler would try and do.

00:25:14.420 They would try and take the plutocrat out of him.

00:25:16.520 That's what they tried with Mitt Romney.

00:25:17.980 Trump went the other direction.

00:25:19.880 And I think people said, right on.

00:25:22.040 Not only is that honest, it's entertaining.

00:25:24.860 And maybe he's turning something that the rest of us thought was embarrassing.

00:25:29.640 I'm successful.

00:25:30.320 He's saying, I'm not embarrassed to be successful.

00:25:31.700 And the guy who would say, I'm not embarrassed to be a billionaire would also say, I'm not embarrassed to support coal, which had been made uncool.

00:25:40.660 I'm not embarrassed to support industrial things to get out of the Paris global warming scheme.

00:25:46.600 All these fashionable TED talk circuit things.

00:25:50.420 The stuff that Chrystia Freeland is so expert at that they think is so uncool.

00:25:55.300 Trump loves that stuff.

00:25:56.720 I think you're right.

00:25:57.500 I think he loves dirt and wood and stones and digging and stuff like that.

00:26:02.120 And hard hats.

00:26:02.780 I've seen pictures of him in a hard hat, and it doesn't look fake.

00:26:06.460 Yeah, you know, he got started rebuilding the skating rink at Rockefeller Center, right?

00:26:11.380 And, you know, it was going to take 10 years, and he did it in a couple of months.

00:26:15.000 I mean, yeah, he likes getting his hands dirty that way.

00:26:18.140 I'll say something else about the kind of people that supported him.

00:26:22.100 There's this one county in America which is sacred ground for the left.

00:26:25.860 It's Harlan County, Kentucky.

00:26:27.640 It's where the series Justified is set.

00:26:30.560 But it's also the site of the union war in the 1930s, unions against bosses, united mine workers.

00:26:38.060 And Pete Seeger wrote a song about this called Which Side Are You On?

00:26:41.220 Oh, yeah.

00:26:41.480 Well, Harlan, I mean, it's heavy-duty left-wing stuff.

00:26:46.760 Harlan County voted 85% for Trump in 2016.

00:26:49.760 Wow.

00:26:50.380 I didn't know that.

00:26:51.580 It's very, and I know that song.

00:26:53.400 I've heard Billy Bragg sing it.

00:26:54.900 It's a chilling song.

00:26:56.200 Which Side Are You On, Boys?

00:26:57.680 It's a hell of a song.

00:26:59.280 You know something?

00:27:00.860 It's our song.

00:27:01.960 Yeah, I didn't know that.

00:27:02.640 I thought that was Billy Bragg's song.

00:27:04.080 He's a communist.

00:27:04.900 Well, no, it has all those left-wing associations, but it is a song for the Trump campaign.

00:27:10.220 Isn't that interesting?

00:27:10.920 Which Side Are You On, Boys?

00:27:12.000 We are on the side of the workers, and we're not on the side of people inside the beltway here.

00:27:16.400 Yeah.

00:27:17.300 You've been very generous with your time, and I thank you for that.

00:27:19.660 I really enjoyed our last conversation, so thank you for letting me stretch this one out.

00:27:23.520 The book is The Republican Workers' Party.

00:27:25.820 We'll have a link to the Amazon page below this video, so folks can buy it.

00:27:32.040 I have two more questions for you, Professor.

00:27:34.860 One is, I believe that the promise of the wall was the most meaningful thing Trump did.

00:27:43.580 And I used to say, and I haven't said it recently, but I just haven't thought about it.

00:27:46.680 I used to say, if Trump doesn't build the wall, no matter what else he does, he loses.

00:27:52.440 If Trump does build the wall, no matter what else he does, he wins.

00:27:56.080 Now, I'm not sure if I believe that math anymore, but I did say that quite a bit last year.

00:28:00.920 I think the wall is a bunch of things.

00:28:02.860 I think it is stopping illegal immigration, so it's a crime statement.

00:28:07.300 It's a statement about protecting jobs for American workers from being undercut by cheap,

00:28:11.860 illegal labor.

00:28:12.340 I think it's worries about demographic change and cultural change and lawbreaking.

00:28:16.640 But I think it's also proof, tangible proof, that the guy's a builder, not just a talker.

00:28:21.960 So to me, it's all those things.

00:28:23.840 It's a symbol, and you can test it.

00:28:25.800 Is the wall built, yes or no?

00:28:27.300 It's not some vague, abstract paper thing.

00:28:30.520 What's up?

00:28:31.220 Because Trump is coming up on his second year since his election, and there's no wall.

00:28:37.120 And don't tell me those little test sites of a few meters is a wall.

00:28:41.620 There's no wall.

00:28:43.120 There's no wall, but you know something?

00:28:44.920 The wall, you're right, was a symbol for a whole bunch of things.

00:28:48.660 And mostly, it was a symbol for a completely broken immigration system, which involves 0.52

00:28:54.220 not just illegal, but also legal immigration.

00:28:57.760 Very early on in the campaign, I had written a previous book.

00:29:01.420 I had a whole chapter on how crazy our immigration system is and how the way to do it is to adopt 1.00

00:29:06.880 the Canadian system.

00:29:08.680 And Trump publicly praised the book for specifically immigration.

00:29:14.820 The immigration plan that he came up with, proposed by Senator Cotton and Perdue, is the Canadian

00:29:24.080 system, right?

00:29:25.120 And it was great because people would say, racist, racist, racist.

00:29:29.660 And the answer was, wait, this is Canadian.

00:29:31.620 Now, how can you say this, right?

00:29:33.000 I mean, it is, you know, the key is in this, as in all things, will this make the American

00:29:39.760 people better off?

00:29:41.200 Yeah.

00:29:41.880 It's interesting.

00:29:42.900 Real simple.

00:29:43.560 I think most, by far, I would say, I would bet you that fewer than, I bet you 1% of Canadians

00:29:50.000 know that Trump has remarked with admiration on our immigration system.

00:29:56.440 I don't think any Canadian, I've never heard it discussed in Canada.

00:29:58.700 I've seen that from time to time in America, no Canadian says that, because that's contrary

00:30:02.620 to all our preconceptions about Trump.

00:30:05.620 I'll make two points.

00:30:06.600 Number one, Tom Cotton was liaising with Harper's Immigration People and drafting it.

00:30:11.680 And number two, you may be right about Canadians not knowing it, because when I kind of made

00:30:18.700 that point in a CBC interview, I had to walk off the set, basically, because the interviewer

00:30:25.140 was so obnoxious.

00:30:26.060 Yeah, I remember that.

00:30:26.840 That's CBC.

00:30:28.140 Yeah.

00:30:28.300 Let me just take 30 seconds and show our viewers, you're talking about Rosemary Barton.

00:30:33.420 You've had a couple appearances.

00:30:34.680 I enjoyed your one with Reshmi Nair, when she was just stunned that anyone could think

00:30:40.180 that Chrystia Freeland was less than a warrior princess. 0.98

00:30:42.560 But this is the one I think you're referring to.

00:30:44.260 It's you with Rosemary Barton.

00:30:46.820 And she gave you a little bit of a lecture here, just a reminder for our viewers.

00:30:50.300 Well, we also have social liberalism, though, that allows people to be given things, and

00:30:54.120 a government that is trying to connect social and follow.

00:30:56.600 America is just astounding.

00:30:59.280 United States has a welfare system more generous than Canada.

00:31:02.800 I know you don't believe it's true.

00:31:04.320 America has 72 different federal welfare schemes.

00:31:07.900 It has a host of state ones.

00:31:09.140 In terms of welfare per GDP, it is, I think, the second most generous country in the world.

00:31:15.880 Okay.

00:31:16.280 So it does a lot.

00:31:17.220 When was the last time you lived in Canada, Mr. Buckley?

00:31:19.400 Last time I lived in Canada was about 25 years ago.

00:31:22.120 Right.

00:31:22.780 So forgive me if I know more about the country than you.

00:31:25.420 Thank you for your time.

00:31:26.120 I appreciate it.

00:31:26.660 That's Frank Buckley.

00:31:27.400 Hope you learned something.

00:31:28.900 Thank you.

00:31:29.860 Coming up.

00:31:31.020 Well, Professor, you've been with us for almost half an hour, and I know you've got to go,

00:31:33.700 but please let me squeeze out one more question.

00:31:35.720 Sure.

00:31:36.140 Just thank you for indulging me.

00:31:38.960 I'm so glad you told me the story about Harlan County, Kentucky.

00:31:42.940 And I'm going to research that and try and learn about it, because it's very interesting.

00:31:45.860 And that song, Which Side Are You On?, is a very powerful song for many reasons.

00:31:50.860 And I've often resented songs that prey on jealousy or envy, and sometimes socialist songs,

00:32:00.720 Which Side Are You On?, and the whole Occupy Wall Street movement.

00:32:04.100 There was a very definite strain of envy and jealousy in tearing down others.

00:32:09.180 But some...

00:32:09.500 Well, you know what we did? 0.99

00:32:11.500 We called them out for their hypocrisy. 0.96

00:32:13.480 They said they were on the side of ordinary people. 1.00

00:32:16.400 We said, you are cruel hypocrites. 0.99

00:32:20.080 Well, here's where I was going with that. 0.99

00:32:23.060 There are some forms of elitism that either are not earned or are abused.

00:32:30.380 And so when I say, Which Side Are You On?, I don't think of a billionaire who earned his

00:32:36.220 way through genius and hard work.

00:32:38.900 I think, when I think of Which Side Are You On?, boys, Which Side Are You On?, I think of

00:32:42.760 the abusive liberties taken by Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Jack Dorsey of Twitter,

00:32:54.460 the people who use our information technology that has us all hooked and has us all dependent

00:33:00.520 on them and who are now, once we're in, using them abusively to censor and shame and scold and put their

00:33:09.300 finger on the scale of elections and shut down voices they disagree.

00:33:14.200 And they're almost all left-wing.

00:33:15.960 They're almost all Democrats.

00:33:17.140 They're almost all in San Francisco area.

00:33:19.000 And they have more power than the Rockefeller, Carnegie's of their day.

00:33:25.640 And you had Reagan bust the trust with the phone companies.

00:33:28.480 You had Teddy Roosevelt bust the trust with some of the oil companies.

00:33:32.960 Is this something Donald Trump would say, I'm going to help the little guy.

00:33:37.480 I'm going to help 350 million little guys in North America.

00:33:41.140 And I'm going to take on those privileged elites that are abusing their privileges. 0.75

00:33:47.560 Well, you know, Americans are pretty good at sniffing out hypocrisy, for the most part.

00:33:52.820 And, you know, we really smell it from the left, from the elite left, because they're Bourbons

00:34:00.660 who pretend that they're Jacobins.

00:34:03.020 And it doesn't fit.

00:34:03.700 Now, tell me what you mean by that.

00:34:05.120 I saw that note.

00:34:07.060 And I know a little bit about the Bourbons, the Jacobins, but not enough to be smart about it. 0.99

00:34:11.980 Well, these are the guys who are basically in the position of the French aristocracy circa

00:34:16.580 1780.

00:34:18.100 And they pretend that they're the guy running the guillotine.

00:34:20.740 And they're not.

00:34:21.360 They're the guys who are being executed, right?

00:34:23.860 Or should be.

00:34:24.980 So, you know, like I say, you know, it all smells.

00:34:29.200 And we can figure out the hypocrisy behind it.

00:34:32.100 And we know they're not on our side.

00:34:33.700 Yeah.

00:34:34.640 Well, it'll be interesting to see what he does, because as I've said, if Trump doesn't

00:34:38.780 bust them, they'll bust him.

00:34:41.140 I really believe that.

00:34:42.760 Well, Professor, I can't keep you any longer, although I would enjoy it.

00:34:46.540 And maybe one day we'll have to sit down over a beer and I'll steal you for an hour.

00:34:51.000 And but I know our viewers really enjoyed your last visit with us.

00:34:53.960 So thank you for being back here.

00:34:55.280 And congratulations on the book.

00:34:56.780 We'll just put it up on the screen here for one more moment.

00:34:58.860 It's called The Republican Workers Party.

00:35:01.460 And folks can get it on Amazon on the link below.

00:35:05.440 Great to see you again.

00:35:06.300 Thank you.

00:35:07.300 It's always great to be with you, Ezra.

00:35:08.760 Thanks so much.

00:35:09.540 Well, my pleasure.

00:35:10.740 There you have it.

00:35:11.600 Professor Frank Buckley of George Mason University Scalia School of Law.

00:35:17.180 The book, The Republican Workers Party.

00:35:19.720 I think it is a form of a Rosetta Stone to understand Trump and his victory.

00:35:26.800 What do you think?

00:35:27.600 Let me know.

00:35:28.200 Send me an email.

00:35:29.140 Stay with us.

00:35:29.860 More ahead on The Rebel.

00:35:42.740 Well, that's Frank Buckley.

00:35:44.260 I like his style.

00:35:45.880 And, you know, he's been Canadian for most of his life.

00:35:49.160 But he's down in Washington.

00:35:51.120 You would think he would be a resource for all sorts of Canadians.

00:35:54.700 For our government, maybe, certainly for the media.

00:35:58.120 He's a professor, so other scholars.

00:36:01.540 But because he's a conservative, he's anathema.

00:36:04.320 The only Canadians, the only Americans that Canadians want to talk to are Obama leftovers.

00:36:09.520 I see the former Obama ambassador, Bruce Heyman, who was appointed to be the ambassador to Canada under Obama because he was a fundraising bundler at Goldman Sachs.

00:36:21.540 So he put together millions of dollars for Obama, and his reward was a patronage gig up here in Canada.

00:36:27.860 He somehow remains the go-to guy for Canada-U.S. relations, a fundraising Obama hack.

00:36:34.960 You know, I'm sure he has an opinion, and I'm sure he has a lot to say, but could it be less plugged in to the realities of 2019 in Donald Trump?

00:36:43.780 I mean, why not just call him your Democrat teddy bear you like to hug?

00:36:48.340 Don't pretend that Bruce Heyman is plugged in, but they love him at the CBC.

00:36:54.140 Well, here at The Rebel, we try and talk to people who actually know a little bit, and I felt like I learned something from Frank Buckley.

00:37:00.440 What do you think? Send me a note with your views, Ezra, at TheRebel.media.

00:37:03.700 We'll be back tomorrow with a whole new show.

00:37:06.140 Thanks for watching this Thanksgiving Monday.

00:37:07.880 Until then, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night.

00:37:13.780 And keep fighting for free.

Rebel News Podcast - October 08, 2018

SPECIAL： Frank Buckley on his new book, “The Republican Workers Party”

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript