Frank Buckley’s The Republican Workers’ Party reveals how Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign exploited blue-collar workers’ economic despair, bypassing traditional GOP elitism with promises of job security and anti-establishment defiance—like Kentucky’s Harlan County, where 85% voted for him. Buckley contrasts the Democratic shift toward identity politics (e.g., opposing coal) with Trump’s populist framing, noting his strategic embrace of Canada’s immigration system despite media hostility, such as Rosemary Barton’s CBC skepticism. His book argues Trump’s appeal stems from perceived elite hypocrisy—tech giants like Zuckerberg and Bezos accused of censorship while claiming populist support—suggesting a potential clash could redefine American politics. Buckley’s insights, ignored by Canadian media favoring Obama-era figures like Bruce Heyman, offer a sharp counterpoint to conventional narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, on this Thanksgiving holiday, we have a special feature interview with Frank Buckley, the Canadian who wrote campaign speeches for Donald Trump.
It's October 8th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
You come here once a year with a sign, and you feel morally superior.
The only thing I have to say to the government for why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Well, you'll remember Frank Buckley.
He's the law professor from Washington, D.C., who shocked the CBC by telling them something they had never heard before, namely that not everyone thinks Christia Freeland is the diplomat of the year.
And they sent down Christia Freeland to negotiate, and she went out of her way to convey her contempt for Trump.
And that just struck me as about the stupidest thing you could do.
Unless, of course, you would be just as happy to see the whole thing fail.
Convey her...
Sorry, can you give that to me again?
What example do you have of the minister expressing her views on Donald Trump?
That was gorgeous.
And wouldn't you know it, Professor Buckley was right.
He knew something that not a single one of the CBC's thousands of employees had ever heard before.
They were shocked to hear it until Donald Trump himself said it.
We're very unhappy with the negotiations and the negotiating style of Canada.
We don't like their representative very much.
So maybe he's a bit more plugged into Canada-U.S. affairs than the usual Ottawa suspects all running errands for Justin Trudeau's liberals.
I've said it before, and I'm sure I'll say it again.
Other than a handful of alternative online news sites like ours and the Toronto Sun on its good days, if you want to know the problems with Justin Trudeau's government, you have to rely on foreign media, whether it's serious things like Trudeau bringing that terrorist with him on his trip to India, or silly things like Trudeau saying the word people kind, remember that?
Or Trudeau's own Me Too moment, where he sexually groped a young female reporter in BC.
You've got to read about that in the U.S. or UK or even Australian papers.
Canadian media, especially Trudeau's CBC, just won't cover it.
They all want to keep their jobs either at the CBC state broadcaster or get a job with the CBC state broadcaster when their private sector job lays them off.
Or the real score, of course, is getting a six-figure job with the actual government itself.
Here's Post Media's leftist feminist columnist, Paula Simons, full-time advocate for anything Trudeau-Vian or a New Democrat, who just took an appointment to the Senate representing Alberta, actually stabbing Alberta's Senate reform hopes in the back.
Funny, when Paula Simons was a columnist, she wrote this.
The Senate has been tainted, corrupted by decades of hack patronage appointments, liberal and Tory.
It's a mess.
Well, that was other people, you see, because now that she's taken an appointment, it's for holy reasons.
She's pure.
And her job for life with Trudeau, it's different, you see.
Anyways, that's why I like Frank Buckley.
Plain spoken, and he's a Canadian who's now down in Washington, D.C.
So he knows Trump world better than anyone at the CBC does because he also knows Canada, too.
It's amazing how integral he's been in the Trump campaign, speechwriting for Trump and others.
If he were a Canadian working for Obama, he would be on TV in Canada every day.
But he's a conservative working for Trump, so they have him on rarely and they attack him when he comes on.
Oh, well, I find him interesting.
And I sat down with him recently to talk about his new book.
It's American in its focus, but I think it might apply to Canada too.
What do you think?
Here's Frank Buckley talking about his new book, The Republican Workers' Party.
That's next, after this short break.
The Republican Workers' Party00:03:28
Well, I remember when it was the exact moment that I realized Donald Trump could win and would win the 2016 presidential election.
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, or maybe it was about the emails and motivating conservatives.
No, no.
The moment when I understood how Donald Trump would win the Electoral College was from the most unlikely source, namely a left-wing schlepp named Michael Moore when he gave this speech in Michigan.
Take a look.
Whether Trump means it or not is kind of irrelevant because he's saying the things to people who are hurting.
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.
He is the human Molotov cocktail that they've been waiting for.
The human hand grenade that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them.
Well, I saw that and I thought, oh my God, that is exactly how it's going to happen.
And Hillary Clinton didn't know it.
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, was this ad by the United States steel workers that got very little actual play.
Remember this one?
My name's Jack Tippold, and I've been a steel worker for 24 years.
This election is a little bit different, and Donald Trump does talk a good game when it comes to China and Mexico.
But let me tell you a little something about Donald Trump.
The Chinese have been illegally dumping steel and aluminum into this country.
The problem is that Donald Trump is buying this steel and aluminum, and he's using it in his projects.
Now, Trump says he's going to rebuild the steel industry.
That steel could have been made here in Indiana, Pennsylvania, or Ohio.
Another thing, Donald Trump says our wages are too high.
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.
Donald Trump says he uses bankruptcy as a tool.
I've seen what bankruptcy does to our brothers and sisters.
I've seen them losing their houses and their cars, unable to provide food to put on their tables, can't pay their bills.
We don't have a father that can give us a million dollars and bail us out.
Look, Donald Trump is nothing more than a boss.
And when you go to pull that lever on November 8th, think of that's who you want as your boss.
Yeah, I bet Jack Tipple's voting for Trump now.
Well, what is this new Republican party that cobbled together previously Democrat voting blue-collar workers from the Rust Belt?
How does a billionaire attract that kind of voter?
Well, a man who I think has cracked the code is our friend Frank Buckley.
He's a professor at George Mason University at the Scalia School of Law, and he's the author of the new book called The Republican Workers Party.
And he joins us now via Skype.
Professor Buckley, great to have you back on the show.
Free Trade's Hidden Costs00:08:32
I should just say before we get started, your appearance discussing NAFTA and Christia Freeland irritating Washington, D.C., that was very prescient because shortly after that, Donald Trump himself remarked on how much he didn't think Christy Freeland was a good fit for Canada.
Absolutely right.
No, she was a disaster.
And, you know, full marks to Jared for pulling it off.
You know, I mean, a lot of people were worried about Trump being somebody who was just totally opposed to any free trade agreement.
What he showed is, no, he knows how to work the deal.
Yeah.
Right.
Well, that's very interesting, and I encourage our viewers to go back and see that interview you did with me, which was one of our most popular in the last month, because I think you have the straight talk on NAFTA that Canadians just weren't getting from other media sources.
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.
And 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.
Is that the same reaction you get to that phrase Republican Workers' Party?
Totally.
And, you know, it drove the left absolutely nuts.
I debated a couple of lefties a couple of weeks back, Michael Kazan from Dissent Magazine and somebody from American Prospect Robert Kuttner.
And they were outraged by the use of the word workers.
I mean, it's a label that Trump himself used, but they thought the Democrats had property rights on the word workers.
And what I said, well, you know, at one time you did.
There was an old honorable, you know, Democratic Party, the party of Tip O'Neill.
You know, that worried about that sort of thing.
Except that now you've become the party of transgender bathrooms and bicycle lanes.
So you've given up the old concern of the Democrats for the average American worker, and you've become the party of an ultra-elite that's distanced itself from ordinary Americans.
And you know what?
We ate your lunch.
Yeah.
You know, it's interesting.
I've observed that in Canada.
We've had a lot of debates up here, Professor, about oil and gas.
So that's guys who work outdoors, wear hard hats, gals too, but mainly guys, drive trucks, drill things, mine things.
They come home, they're tired, part of their body hurts.
That used to be the bedrock of our socialist party up here called the NDP.
But there's been a war against industry, and those guys, you know, coal miners, perfect example.
A coal miner would have been in a union and would have had a tough job and would have been, you know, someone a left-wing politician would have tried to romance.
But under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the modern left, they try and stamp out coal, saying it's anti-environmental.
They don't care about the workers.
They care about, you know, some frog of some sort or some bee of some sort.
You know, the NDP is a good example of what we're talking about.
Hey, you know, look, I became an American in 2014.
Before then, I was simply a Canadian and still am.
And moreover, I'm a Saskatchewan boy, so I've met Tommy Douglas, and that was a different NDP.
I mean, the same kind of thing has happened to the NDP right now.
It's become the prisoner of identity politics, and it's not really on the side of ordinary Canadian workers.
Same thing here.
You know what?
What's so interesting, I was just reading a little bit about your book.
The Republican Party in the States, it certainly wasn't the Republican Workers' Party until Trump made it so.
I mean, Mitt Romney, and I give him much more credit than many others do because he's such a, I think he really is a good egg.
He's been anti-Trump, but he's lived an exemplary life.
I think though that a lot of Republicans and the Republican elite in the Brain Trust, it was sort of think tank, think tankers based in Washington who had academic debates about things and policies in the abstract.
I think they were in a way disconnected from the regular cut and thrust of ordinary Americans' lives.
It was sort of what Charles Murray wrote about in his book Coming Apart.
It was elite Republicans in elite postal codes rubbing shoulders with other intellectual elites, and they forgot about flyover country.
You know, they became sort of like the snobs of the Democrats, too.
Yeah, absolutely right.
I mean, they're an inside the Beltway group of people.
They like to pretend that they're the brains of the outfit, but they're more like the stomach.
They just eat up all of the donor money from conservative donors.
And, you know, the classic gap by Romney was a distinction between makers and takers, but that came from the American Enterprise Institute.
So they're around.
They're still getting all the money, but they're pretty much irrelevant in terms of the policies of the Republican Workers' Party.
I mean, they really don't get it, nor does the Republican Party quite yet.
It's a party in shambles.
Well, you know, one of the things that I, I mean, when I was a student, I would go to the Fraser Institute events, and they're very free market-oriented, and I really admired Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist.
And I still believe in those things, but I don't think the world is as simple as, well, if you bring in migrant workers, you pay five cents less for a tomato.
That is absolutely true.
But you have $5 in cost, whether it's crime or your health care and schools are overcrowded or you have cultural changes that you didn't sign up for.
So, you know, I think that a purely economic analysis, like free trade, a unilateral declaration of free trade, which some libertarians would call for, or open borders of all sorts, those may make sense if you're only doing math, but if you're looking at other things, they're a real problem, especially in the age of mass migration and terrorism.
That's my view.
What do you think, Professor?
Absolutely right.
You know, the problem with the old Republican Party is it managed to convey a perfect adherence to libertarian principles, but at the same time, an indifference to people.
And, you know, look, frankly, people are not going to vote on the basis of philosophy, right?
I mean, they're going to ask themselves, you know, is this guy going to make things better for us?
And Trump communicated that wonderfully.
Nobody inside the Beltway got it.
But you drove outside the Beltway for 20 miles, and all of a sudden in 2016 that summer, all the signs said Trump, and many of them were hand-painted signs.
Some of them were on the sides of barns, right?
Those were the only things you saw.
So if you lived outside the Beltway, you got it.
But even now, people still have not quite figured it out.
You know, I remember watching Al Gore embarrass Ross Perot on tariffs, because Ross Perot was worried about libertarian free trade that had a corrosive effect on communities.
And there was a meanness there, and Ross Perot was a little quirky, and he lost that fight.
And I've been following Donald Trump long enough to know that he was always against free trade, first with Japan and then with China and other places.
And I always thought that's not good.
And even in his trade war that he threatened with Canada, it would make cars in America more expensive.
It would.
It would have tacked on a 20% tariff on our cars.
And I thought, well, that's going to hurt Americans.
Well, it's true.
It would make Americans pay more for fruit, more for cars.
But the benefit that we weren't thinking of just as libertarians was, when you also have men with jobs and you also have communities that aren't hollowed out, maybe you're paying people a little bit more at the Tim Hortons restaurant because you're not bringing in temporary foreign workers.
So maybe you're paying an extra nickel for your coffee, but you've got a working wage for some.
These are lefty thoughts, but a capitalist billionaire like Trump was articulating them.
It's hard to grok if you're an old school conservative.
Well, here's the thing that made all the difference in the world, and most people didn't notice it, but I did.
The Wall's Many Meanings00:15:37
And it was this.
Back around 2012, for the first time, Americans reported that they no longer thought their kids would have it better off than they did.
And Barack Obama got it and said, I'm going to make things better.
And the Republicans really simply didn't answer that.
I mean, Mitt Romney came out with a, what, I think, a 57-point plan of action, which really had nothing to do with the mobility I'm describing.
And what I'm describing is the American dream.
I mean, the American dream was dead.
And Obama promised to get it back.
And he completely failed.
We were told to get used to the new normal.
In his last year of office, the growth was about 1.7%.
And we had thrown every little tool in the Keynesian toolbox at this.
We had increased our debt from $10 to $19 trillion a year.
And it didn't do a darn thing in terms of bringing back jobs.
So, you know, we had, on the one hand, a tone-deaf Republican Party.
On the other hand, we had a Democratic Party that got it, but failed to produce anything.
And there was Donald.
And he was the one guy who said, firstly, you communicated he was tough enough to take on the Dems.
And you see right now in the Kavanaugh hearings, just the kind of toughness you need.
And secondly, I mean, as opposed to all of the other Republicans, basically he said, look, I'm on the side of the ordinary Joe and all of this.
Yeah.
Well, let me ask you about another Republican leader.
I'm referring to Scott Walker, the governor, who has had big battles with unions in his state.
He's governor of Wisconsin, if I'm not mistaken.
And they've had a recall vote.
I mean, he has been battling the unions.
And one of his things was to end mandatory union dues.
And you can imagine how hard the unions fought against that because he basically collected their revenue for them.
And when it was no longer mandatory, a lot of workers said, yeah, I don't want to pay money for that.
I think that defunding or ending the mandatory powers of unions is absolutely important if any conservative's ever going to have a chance.
How do you take away the unfair political tools of unions like Scott Walker did, but also be friendly enough to unions to get the grassroots members to support you as a conservative?
Well, okay, firstly, I worked on a campaign.
I wrote speeches for the candidate and for his family.
I advised on transition.
So my book, The Republican Workers' Party, does give an inside view of what happened.
And we discovered, you know, or we decided early on, we're not going to beat up on private sector unions because these are our people.
These guys are going to vote for our candidate.
Public sector, totally different.
And in terms of Scott Walker, mostly we're talking about opposition from public sector unions.
But, you know, we were on the side of private sector union members.
And part of our message was, you know, the best thing you can do for a union worker is make sure that he's got a job.
So we wanted to provide the economic conditions where that would happen.
And, you know what, guess what?
Last two quarters, we've had growth at 4%, 4.2 and 4%.
Third quarter, it's going to be about the same.
I mean, nobody thought anything like this was possible.
I mean, you know, Obama said it's going to be magic.
That's the secret to it all.
And the secret involved taking back all the things that the left dearly loves, the regulatory state, which is the, you know, the pigpen in which they live, right?
And, you know, we gave tax reform, which basically matches or betters Canada's treatment of capital gains tax.
In other words, America right now is a tax haven, right?
In the past, we shipped jobs to other countries.
Now we're shipping jobs to America from other countries.
Yeah, and that is something.
I mean, I'm a Trump fan.
I honestly thought his promise of bringing factories back and heavy industry back, I thought that was just a pipe dream when Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, announced that he was repatriating, what, a quarter of a trillion dollars and paying an 11-figure tax for the pleasure of doing so.
I thought, well, maybe it's true.
If Apple's bringing a quarter trillion back to America and talking about high-tech manufacturing, my God, maybe it's true.
Yeah.
Let me say one thing else about the Republican Workers' Party.
I mean, you might appreciate this, but it's not all that far different from a Stephen Harper Tory party, right?
In the sense that, you know, really early on in the campaign, people asked, oh, this is fine.
You know, Trump's all right.
I had dinner with a guy from VP at the Charles Coke Institute.
He said, yeah, but what about entitlements?
And I thought, you idiot, you really don't get it.
We're not going to go after entitlements.
We're not going to touch Social Security.
In the past, Republicans had all of these wonderful ideas about privatizing Social Security.
And guess what?
That was just nuts in terms of the electoral process.
America has one of the most generous social safety nets in the world.
And on a per capita basis, we're more generous than Canada.
So, yeah.
So we don't spend it wisely, but we spend it in 100-odd federal programs as well as state and local.
And yeah, there are things you can do about that.
But what you don't do is give up on ordinary Americans.
So on one hand, the promise is we're going to give jobs to people who can work.
And on the other hand, if somehow you're not able to work, we're going to look after you.
We're not going to take things away.
We are not one of those green eyeshade Republicans of the kind you saw in the past who basically love to give money to the rich people.
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.
So, I mean, Steve Bannon wanted a, you know, I think a 40% tax on people making more than $500,000 a year.
That's a sort of kind of radical idea that the Trump people were supporting.
And, you know, we're coming from a very, you know, Stephen Harper Tory place here.
But the Trump effect, the Trump factor, cannot be understated.
I mean, the fact that a not just rich, not just billionaire, but an extravagant, over-the-top, conspicuous consumption and who was in all the rap videos until about three years ago, who was all gold and ornate, that he would have a rapport with working men and women.
That's what is so hard to figure out.
No, it's not hard at all 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.
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.
So you know he's putting you on.
Right.
Trump, on the other hand, he didn't stoop.
He didn't condescend.
He said, this is who I am.
And people loved it.
You know, if you're a regular Joe, you appreciate people who just live their regular lives.
They're not going to condescend to you.
And I'll say one other thing about Trump, and that is, you know, the people he loved hanging out with were construction people.
I mean, this is a construction guy.
And on any project, he loved just going around talking to people working, you know, building his hotels.
These were more his kind of people.
I mean, he is not a Park Avenue liberal.
He's not even close to that.
And this is something the regular ordinary Americans from West Virginia, whatever, love.
You know, it's funny.
I think of the old joke, the rich are not like us.
They have more money.
Or the rich are just like us, but they have more money.
As in, Trump is a regular guy who happens to be a billionaire and has a lot of chutzpah.
I remember when early in his campaign, I think it was 2015, when he was asked, how much money do you have?
And someone put a number to him.
And I knew that any other politician would try and round it down.
Oh, no, no, no, I'm not rich.
Trump did the opposite.
He said, I'm worth way more than that.
Way more.
And I thought, that's the opposite of what every handler would try and do.
They would try and take the plutocrat out of him.
That's what they tried with Mitt Romney.
Trump went the other direction.
And I think people said, right on, not only is that honest, it's entertaining.
And maybe he's turning something that the rest of us thought was embarrassing.
I'm successful.
He's saying, I'm not embarrassed to be successful.
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.
I'm not embarrassed to support industrial things to get out of the Paris global warming scheme.
All these fashionable TED talk circuit things, the stuff that Christia Freeland is so expert at, that they think is so uncool.
Trump loves that stuff.
I think you're right.
I think he loves dirt and wood and stones and digging and stuff like that, and hard hats.
I've seen pictures of him in hard hat, and it doesn't look fake.
Yeah, you know, he got started rebuilding the skating rink at Rockefeller Center right now.
You know, it was going to take 10 years, and he did it in a couple of months.
I mean, yeah, he likes getting his hands dirty that way.
I'll say something else about the kind of people that supported him.
There's this one county in America which is sacred ground for the left.
It's Harlan County, Kentucky.
It's where the series Justified is set.
But it's also the site of a union war in the 1930s, Unions Against Bosses, United Mine Workers.
And Pete Seeger wrote a song about this called Which Side Are You On?
Oh, yeah.
Well, you know, Harlan, I mean, it's heavy-duty left-wing stuff.
Harlan County voted 85% for Trump in 2016.
Wow.
I didn't know that.
It's very, I know that song.
I've heard Billy Bragg sing it.
It's a chilling song.
Which Side Are You On, Boys?
It's a hell of a song.
You know, some?
It's our song.
Yeah, I didn't know.
I thought that was Billy Bragg's song.
He's a communist.
Well, no, no, it has all those left-wing associations, but it is a song for the Trump campaign.
Which side are you on, boys?
We are on the side of the workers, and we're not on the side of people inside the belt right here.
Yeah.
You've been very generous with your time, and I thank you for that.
I really enjoyed our last conversation, so thank you for letting me stretch this one out.
The book is The Republican Workers' Party.
We'll have a link to the Amazon page below this video so folks can buy it.
I have two more questions for you, Professor.
One is, I believe that the promise of the wall was the most meaningful thing Trump did.
And I used to say, and I haven't said it recently, but I just haven't thought about it.
I used to say, if Trump doesn't build the wall, no matter what else he does, he loses.
If Trump does build the wall, no matter what else he does, he wins.
Now, I'm not sure if I believe that math anymore, but I did say that quite a bit last year.
I think the wall is a bunch of things.
I think it is stopping illegal immigration, so it's a crime statement.
It's a statement about protecting jobs for American workers from being undercut by cheap illegal labor.
I think it's worries about demographic change and cultural change and law breaking.
But I think it's also proof, tangible proof, that the guy's a builder, not just a talker.
So to me, it's all those things.
It's a symbol, and you can test it.
Is the wall built yes or no?
It's not some vague, abstract paper thing.
What's up?
Because Trump is coming up on his second year since his election, and there's no wall.
And don't tell me those little test sites of a few meters is a wall.
There's no wall.
There's no wall, but you know something?
The wall, you're right, was a symbol for a whole bunch of things.
And mostly it was a symbol for a completely broken immigration system, which involves not just illegal, but also legal immigration.
Very early on in the campaign, I had written a previous book.
I had a whole chapter on how crazy our immigration system is and how the way to do it is to adopt the Canadian system.
And Trump publicly praised the book for specifically immigration.
The immigration plan that he came up with proposed by Senator Cotton and Purdue is the Canadian system, right?
And it was great because people would say, racist, racist, racist.
The answer was, this is Canadian.
Now, how can you say this, right?
I mean, it is, you know, the key is in this, as in all things, will this make the American people better off?
Yeah.
It's interesting.
Real simple.
I think most can, by far, I would say, I would bet you that fewer than, I bet you 1% of Canadians know that Trump has remarked with admiration on our immigration system.
I don't think any Canadian, I've never heard it discussed in Canada.
I've seen that from time to time in America.
No Canadian says that because that's contrary to all our preconceptions about Trump.
I'll make two points.
Number one, Tom Cotton was liaising with Harper's immigration people and drafting it.
And number two, you may be right about Canadians not knowing it because when I kind of made that point in a CVC interview, I had to walk off the set basically because the interviewer was so obnoxious.
Yeah, I remember that.
That CBC.
Yeah.
Let me just take 30 seconds and show our viewers.
You're talking about Rosemary Barton.
You've had a couple appearances.
I enjoyed your one with Reshmi Mair, when she was just stunned that anyone could think that Christia Freeland was less than a warrior princess.
But this is the one I think you're referring to.
It's you with Rosemarie Barton.
And she gave you a little bit of a lecture here, just a reminder for our viewers.
Well, we also have social liberalism, though, that allows people to be given things.
And a government that is trying to get away from the USA.
United States has a welfare system more generous than Canada.
I know you don't believe it.
It's true.
America has 72 different federal welfare schemes.
It has a host of state ones.
In terms of welfare per GDP, it is, I think, the second most generous country in the world.
When was the last time you lived in Canada, Mr. Buckley?
Last time I lived in Canada was about 25 years ago.
Right.
So forgive me if I know more about the country than you.
Thank you for your time.
I appreciate it.
That's Frank Buckley.
Hope you learned something.
Thank you.
Coming up.
Well, Professor, you've been with us for almost half an hour, and I know you've got to go, but please let me squeeze out one more question.
Just thank you for indulging me.
I'm so glad you told me the story about Harlan County, Kentucky, and I'm going to research that and try and learn about it because it's very interesting.
And that song, Which Side Are You On, is a very powerful song for many reasons.
And I've often resented songs that prey on jealousy or envy.
And sometimes socialist songs, Which Side Are You On?
Which Side Are You On?00:02:54
And the whole Occupy Wall Street movement, there was a very definite strain of envy and jealousy in tearing down others.
You know what we did?
We called them out for their hypocrisy.
They said they were on the side of ordinary people.
We said, you are cruel hypocrites.
Well, here's where I was going with that.
There are some forms of elitism that either are not earned or are abused.
And so when I say which side are you on, I don't think of a billionaire who earned his way through genius and hard work.
I think, when I think of which side are you on boys, which side are you on, I think of the abusive liberties taken by Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Jack Dorsey of Twitter,
the people who use our information technology that has us all hooked and has us all dependent on them, and who are now, once we're in, using them abusively to censor and shame and scold and put their finger on the scale of elections and shut down voices they disagree.
And they're almost all left-wing.
They're almost all Democrats.
They're almost all in San Francisco area.
And they have more power than the Rockefeller Carnegies of their day.
And you had Reagan bust the trust with the phone companies.
You had Teddy Roosevelt bust the trust with some of the oil companies.
Is this something Donald Trump would say, I'm going to help the little guy.
I'm going to help 350 million little guys in North America.
And I'm going to take on those privileged elites that are abusing their privileges.
Well, you know, Americans are pretty good at snipping out hypocrisy for the most part.
And, you know, we really smell it from the left, from the elite left, because they're bourbons who pretend that they're Jacobins.
And it doesn't.
Tell me what you mean by that.
I saw that note, and I know a little bit about the bourbons and the Jacobins, but not enough to be smart about it.
Yeah, well, these are the guys who are basically in the position of the French aristocracy, circa 1780, and they pretend that they're the guy running the guillotine, and they're not.
They're the guys who are being executed, or should be.
So, you know, like I say, it all smells, and we can figure out the hypocrisy behind it.
And we know they're not on our side.
Yeah.
Well, it'll be interesting to see what he does, because as I've said, if Trump doesn't bust them, they'll bust him.
I really believe that.
Well, Professor, I can't keep you any longer, although I would enjoy it.
And maybe one day we'll have to sit down over a beer and I'll steal you for an hour.
But I know our viewers really enjoyed your last visit with us, so thank you for being back here.
And congratulations on the book.
Thanks for Being Back00:02:11
We'll just put it up on the screen here for one more moment.
It's called the Republican Workers' Party.
And folks can get it on Amazon on the link below.
Great to see you again.
Thank you.
It's always great to be with you, Ezra.
Thanks so much.
Well, my pleasure.
There you have it.
Professor Frank Buckley of George Mason University Scalia School of Law, the book, The Republican Workers' Party.
I think it is a form of a Rosetta Stone to understand Trump and his victory.
What do you think?
Let me know.
Send me an email.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Well, that's Frank Buckley.
I like his style.
And, you know, he's been Canadian for most of his life, but he's down in Washington.
You would think he would be a resource for all sorts of Canadians, for our government, maybe, certainly for the media.
He's a professor, so other scholars.
But because he's a conservative, he's anathema.
The only Canadians, the only Americans that Canadians want to talk to are Obama leftovers.
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.
So he put together millions of dollars for Obama, and his reward was a patronage gig up here in Canada.
He somehow remains the go-to guy for Canada-U.S. relations, a fundraising Obama hack.
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?
I mean, why not just call him your Democrat teddy bear you like to hug?
Don't pretend that Bruce Heyman is plugged in, but they love him at the CBC.
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.
What do you think?
Send me a note with your views at the rebel.media.