William F. Buckley MAGA Roots | Steve Bannon & Sam Tanenhaus

WATCH THE CLIP BELOW:

This clip aired on WarRoom’s evening show on December 15, 2025. Transcript begins below (lightly edited for clarity; may contain minor errors).

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Okay, welcome. Monday, 15 December, year of our Lord 2025. Thank you for sticking around for the second hour of the late afternoon, early evening edition of the WarRoom. I want to thank you, and I really thank the guys in Denver, the team there, for that great kind of mashup highlight reel for the first two hours of Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America, with Sam Tanenhaus, the author.

Sam, welcome back.

Look, just because the WarRoom Posse gets a lot of feedback that, hey, you guys buy a lot of books, your readers. And they just love the book, but they really loved you just kind of hanging out telling stories.

SAM TANENHAUS: Well, thanks so much, Steve. I got an email the day after you put up the first show, the conversation we had. It was forwarded. It was my editor forwarding an internal memo from Random House that said, rush reorder 3,000 copies.

For a book like mine, you know, it’s a big book, a lot of history, a lot of stories, but a lot of history. It’s a book that tries to show you what America was like for many, many years, and the great guy who was at the center of it is almost unheard of.

And early on, I’ll tell you, when we heard, when the publisher heard that you were interested in talking to me, the publicist, who’s a top publicist at Random House, big publisher, you know, said, this will move books. And everybody says, okay, we kind of think that.

And then you and I have the conversation, that great conversation down in Washington. You put it up, and then the reprint order came. And I’ve been doing this for a long time, Steve. I’ve been writing books for 40 years. I just have not seen this before.

So now I know it’s like the space launch, like the shuttle launch. They’re all gathered around. They’re going to listen to us talk and have a good conversation, and then they’re going to look at the numbers.

And I see on Amazon, for listeners out there, good place to order, and they have the stock. They did get it reordered in time. So you can go on Amazon and get the book.

I was in Little Rock doing a thing at the Clinton Center the other day, and we went to a bookstore. They had one copy left, and they had back orders for the rest. And it’s because of what you’re doing.

And listen, no one is more grateful than me.

STEVE BANNON (HOST): So before we start this, I want everybody to know it is a great Christmas gift, particularly if there’s a young person in your life that doesn’t really understand what happened to the country after the war, after World War II, and really the turmoil behind the placid kind of surface, the turmoil the country was in.

It’s a great gift because it’s building. It’s not just about Buckley’s life. That’s important enough in itself. But Sam really goes and tells the political history of the country and builds the revolution that brought not just Ronald Reagan, but also Donald Trump after that.

So you’re an active part of this. You’re a Posse member. This is your history. Also for yourself, if you’re going to get a little time, everybody should take a little time off over the holidays, although we’re not here. We’re going to be on every day, as we always are. You can curl up with this, and you’ll learn a lot, and you’ll kind of think it through, particularly post World War II, about where we are today.

In fact, we left off last time, Sam, with Alger Hiss. We did a good little cover at the beginning. Alger Hiss had just been found guilty of perjury, and Buckley was still a very young person at the time. We still have to get to Yale and everything that happened at Yale.

The Ivy League schools really ran the country more than they run it today. Talk to me about Buckley’s experience, particularly coming at this tumultuous time, when you’ve got guys like Richard Nixon coming on the scene. There’s part of the Republican Party that almost feels like MAGA.

You had Eisenhower, Taft, conservative inc., kind of the Republican establishment. I don’t say Eisenhower was a globalist, but more of the Republican establishment. And you had firebrands like Nixon coming up, McCarthy, that were pointing out there was something deeply wrong with the country. You had more than just globalists. You actually had infiltration of communism.

I think people today just forget, because they just look at it through a Robert Redford movie, The Way We Were. They don’t realize how this whole issue of communism really gripped the nation.

And Buckley, when he went to Yale, kind of wrote this book that put him on the national scene right away, sir.

SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): Yes. Well, what happened was, as you said, they exposed the communist spy rings. Of course, there was a lot of resistance. And that sort of dumpy, frumpy accuser, Whittaker Chambers, who was no joke, by the way, he was a big editor at Time magazine, a brilliant writer and journalist, it turned out that it was Chambers who was telling the truth.

Buckley was following this really closely. Why? He was at Yale University. He goes there in 1946. It was part of that first group after World War II, the GI Bill. Buckley didn’t need the GI Bill, but he’s surrounded by a lot of guys who would not have been at a place like Yale if they didn’t have that opportunity. Why? Because Yale was strictly blue blood before them.

Buckley looked like he was blue blood, but he wasn’t really. That’s really important to understand.

Buckley grew up on a huge estate in what’s called the northwest corner of Connecticut. It’s New England. Beautiful area. The house is still there. Forty seven acres. A magnificent estate. Looks like the White House. Looks like the north portico of the White House.

He was raised with servants and groomsmen in the 1930s and 40s. But the Buckleys were Catholic. They were super devout Catholics.

So when they worshiped in their little town of Sharon, Connecticut, they did not go to the beautiful historic Episcopal Church or the Congregational Church. They went around the corner, almost into an alleyway, where there was a little Catholic church called Saint Bernard’s that had been thrown up overnight because suddenly there were more Catholics living in the area.

This is really important. People don’t believe me when I tell them this, Steve. Buckley and his siblings and parents didn’t go alone to worship on Sunday. They took the household servants with them, white and black and Hispanic.

Because Buckley spoke all these languages, they lived all over the world. That’s who got in the Buckleys’ big Buicks and drove around the green in Sharon and went to church.

Buckley was an altar boy. He and his three brothers were all altar boys in this very modest little Catholic church.

I realized when I was writing this book that this is the beginning of Buckley’s connection with what later was called the silent majority, middle Americans. Today we call them MAGA. We call them the people who are excluded by the elites.

Buckley was raised with wealth. His father made a fortune and lost it in oil. His father was super conservative because he saw the Mexican Revolution up front.

People should know, even historians forget this. The first great revolution in the modern world was not the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. It was the Mexican Revolution.

The first great revolution in the modern world was not the Soviet Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. It was the Mexican Revolution, from 1910 to 1920. Buckley’s father was a casualty of it, but not a passive one.

He actually organized guerrilla resistance. I found this in the research. He had the weapons of the time, guys with mercenaries, Winchester rifles, crossing the border to try to stop the Mexican Revolution. It didn’t work. So he went north and took his family.

STEVE BANNON (HOST): But hang on, hang on. I want to make sure people understand this, because it’s very important to Buckley’s development. One of the main reasons he did this was Catholicism.

Remember, the Mexican Revolution was as bitter as the French Revolution. This is really the start of the revolutions of the twentieth century. It always traces back to the French Revolution, to the Freemasons, the secularists, and quite frankly, the early communist influence. It went after the Church.

Buckley’s father, it wasn’t just about oil or material goods. He was an ardent Catholic. There were a lot of serious Catholic businessmen who tried to finance stopping how radical this Mexican Revolution was, because it was anti clerical and killed so many priests, correct?

SAM TANENHAUS (GUEST): Correct. Buckley’s father was a financier of the Cristero counterrevolution. That was a Catholic counterrevolution in the 1920s, right around the time Bill Buckley was born, in 1925, almost exactly 100 years ago.

This is the atmosphere Buckley was raised in. Very unusual. It’s not Kennedy style Irish Catholic. It’s almost Spanish Mexican Counter Reformation Catholicism.

They really believed, and today we hear a lot about post liberal Catholics, super educated Catholics who think America and the Western democracies should have a closer association with the Church. Buckley grew up in a family that believed that.

His brother in law, Brent Bozell, became the first, I would argue, one of the first post liberals before the word even existed. He lived in Spain for much of his life, very traditional Catholicism.

Buckley comes out of that and goes off to Yale University. He’s taking his first classes and getting instruction from professors who tell him, religion, Catholicism, the Bible, it’s another superstition. It’s like people in the deepest jungles in Philippines who follow rituals.

Buckley couldn’t believe he was hearing this.

Now, I’ll tell you something. This is why it’s important to do podcasts like yours and others. One of the first podcasts I did was with the very famous journalist of our moment, Andrew Sullivan. He’s Catholic. He’s kind of a centrist liberal, raised in England in an Irish family.

He told me he had read my book and was fascinated by Buckley’s history. He said that when he went to Harvard in the 1980s as a scholarship student, he could not believe his professors never discussed the Bible as possibly being revealed truth. It was treated like an artifact from an ancient time.

Buckley sees this. He’s sitting in the classroom and he can’t believe what he’s hearing.

Buckley then competes to become what was then called the chairman, what we would today call the editor, of the Yale Daily News. Emphasis on Daily. It was also called the OCD, the Oldest College Daily in America.

How important was it? Henry Luce, the founder of Time magazine, got his start at the Yale Daily News. A guy named Kingman Brewster, who was a hero to Buckley and a leader of the America First Committee, also got his start at the Yale Daily News.

Buckley sets his sights early. When he gets to Yale, and I talked to his classmates, they said they had never seen anything like him. The brilliance, the dynamism, the ambition. Buckley would meet you and he didn’t care if you were rich or poor. He didn’t care about your background. He wanted to know, what do you think? What do you believe? What do you think about communism?

Communism was blowing up in Central and Eastern Europe. And Steve, you know this very well, who was bearing the brunt of that. But Buckley also saw something else happening around him. There was a war on religion and a war on free enterprise economics, the things he was raised with.

So Buckley becomes, in the old term you and I remember, the big man on campus. He’s the best known, most popular guy in his entire Yale class. And by the way, that class was two or three times larger than any previous class because of the end of World War II and the beginning of the GI Bill.

Buckley is becoming famous while he’s still a college student. Today we can understand that because we have prominent young figures who make their names very early. Buckley invented that by using the college newspaper to wage war against Yale University.

In one of the first editorials he wrote after winning the competition to become chairman, which meant he could write a daily editorial, I talked to classmates who said that before Buckley came along, the newspaper would land on your desk and you’d scan it to see how the Yale Bulldogs did against Cornell or Harvard.

When Buckley arrived, you went straight to the editorial. He was the first student journalist to call out his professors by name. He named one and said this professor was treating the classroom as a pulpit to persuade Christians like Bill Buckley that their religion counted for nothing. He couldn’t believe it.

So he writes his very famous book, God and Man at Yale. It’s great just from the title alone. And as you’ve said, Steve, the subtitle is fantastic and, in my view, genius: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom.

He takes the professors’ attack on religion and turns it around, saying that their supposedly progressive worldview is its own kind of fake religion. And it just blows up. It became one of the biggest nonfiction bestsellers and one of the most argued about books of its time.

Read: Origins of the Modern Conservative Movement: Sam Tanenhaus Explains the Foundations of the American Right

Buy Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America: Tanenhaus, Sam

Follow: WarRoom — Home of ultraMAGA on GETTR – Profile and Posts on GETTR

Follow: Bannon’s WarRoom (@Bannons_WarRoom) on X