McArdle FreedomFest Remarks: LP Is “Kingmaker”, No Mention Made Of Oliver/ter Maat Campaign

Las Vegas, Nevada — On 10 July 2024, LNC Chair, Angela McArdle, served as a moderator of a panel titled, “Defeat the Deep State” on the main state of FreedomFest, an annual gathering of approximately 2,000 liberty-oriented attendees and activists. The panelists were: Kash Patel, former Deputy Director of National Intelligence during the Trump Administration; Clint Russell, founder and host of the Liberty Lockdown podcast; and Dr. Bret Weinstein, host of the On The Dark Horse podcast.

While the panel, which lasted for about 20 minutes, included mentions of both former president Donald Trump, and current independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., no mention was made, neither by the LNC Chair, nor by any of the three panelists, of the LP’s 2024 presidential ticket of Chase Oliver and Mike ter Maat.

Likewise no campaign materials for the LP’s POTUS candidates were available on the tables at the booths of either the national Libertarian Party, nor the Libertarian Party of Nevada at the time of the panel presentation.

A trifold brochure available on the national LP table asks readers to, “Urge (other) candidates to follow the lead of our Presidential Nominee Chase Oliver, and commit to freeing Ross Ulbricht and pardoning Julian Assange”. The brochure also praises former President Trump’s efforts to end the deep state and proposes that: “Together (the LP and the next US president) can defeat the deep state.”

LP booth, FreedomFest, Wednesday, 10 July 2024

LP Nevada booth, FreedomFest, Wednesday, 10 July 2024

Trifold brochure distributed by the LP at FreedomFest 2024.

Lisa “Kennedy” Montgomery of the FOX Business Network introduced the panel; a partial transcript follows:

KENNEDY: We are going to hear a fascinating panel from Angela McArdle who happens to be the chairman (sic) of the National Libertarian Party. Her co-panelists will be Clint Russell, Kash Patel, and Bret Weinstein. . . . So if you’ve always been curious about the Libertarian Party, and what it could possibly hold for you, then let’s hear it for Angela and her “man crew.”

McARDLE: It is very bright up here, so I hope I am smiling at all of you. One thing that really makes me smile is talking about defeating or abolishing the unelected bureaucracy that currently governs us.

(APPLAUSE)

As we dive into our characters of the deep state, I wanted to bring this great group of guys up to really talk about what it is, how we can get rid of it, what’s the Libertarian position on it. Let me give them a chance to introduce themselves.

First, let’s start on this end with Bret Weinstein.

WEINSTEIN: I’m Bret Weinstein. I am a evolutionary biologist. I was a professor for 14 years. I’m a host of the Dark Horse podcast, co-author of A Hunter Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century.

RUSSELL: Clint Russell. I was a mortgage broker and entrepreneur for a little over a decade. Brokered hundreds of millions of dollars worth of loans, and then the lockdowns came. I was in California. I fled. I started to scream into a microphone as therapy, and then it became my career. So I am the host of Liberty Lockdown. I also ran for the vice-presidency under the Libertarian Party. Came up slightly short, but I’m a Ron Paul acolyte, second-generation libertarian, and all-around fan of the Bill of Rights.

(APPLAUSE)

PATEL: My name is Kash Patel. I’m the standing DEI rep for this panel.

(LAUGHTER)

I was Deputy Director of National Intelligence, long in time in government. Got really sick and tired of the inability for inward accountability. Ended up writing a book called Government Gangsters, which Trump called the wrecking ball of the deep state, and we partnered with Steve Bannon, and the film Government Gangsters is coming out next week. So check it out.

(APPLAUSE)

McARDLE: Awesome. So I want to tackle definitions, define your terms. I’d like to hear from a couple of you. What is the deep state? Let’s start with you, Kash.

PATEL: The deep state is basically your unelected bureaucrats, and it’s not a Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Green Party thing. It’s a swamp monster thing. They don’t care about labels. They care about the revolving door. What they do is they establish leadership positions, and the revolving door assists them outside of government to get their golden parachutes for $10 million, guys like Mark Esper, Gina Aspel, Chris Ray, and Rob Rosenstein all partner to go to the work together after their time in government. What they do is they just continue that spin of the door and make sure that only their friends get in at the expense of the department agencies they’re supposed to be running for the American people. But basically they run it to service their egos and their bank accounts.

McARDLE: Yikes. Bret, do you have a different definition of deep state? What does it mean to you?

WEINSTEIN: Yes, and I think it’s very important. There are two definitions that circulate, and unfortunately they blend together, and I think I heard them blended there. When I say deep state, I’m talking about something that cannot be defined because we don’t know terribly much about it. We know that it involves elements in the intelligence services, that it doesn’t turn over with administrations. We know that it extends between nations, the Five Eyes being a particularly important piece of the deep state. That’s what I mean when I say deep state.

This other phenomenon of a vast bureaucracy that exerts a great deal of bureaucratic power that also does not turn over with administrations is very real, but I would advocate using a different term for it. I’ve started calling it the Shallow State. It’s a real problem, but it’s a different problem, it’s something that actually fundamentally opposes democracy, finds democracy frightening. The consent of the governed is a problem to be solved by the deep state, and it needs to be ushered out, which is a difficult job because it doesn’t have an address. You can’t FOIA its records. You can’t look at its email correspondence. It’s mysterious.

RUSSELL: Both of these gentlemen did a great job of defining it, so I would just add that in that Shallow State description that he put out there, I think that the ESG and the DEI framework that kind of came as a brainchild from the United Nations in the mid-2000s, implemented under Barack Obama’s administration, and has been basically now spread across all of the Fortune 500 and most of corporate America, I think that is kind of the implementation or the tool by which they push their ideas into reality, and oftentimes people don’t even know that they’re cooperating with it. So I would just add that as another aspect of the unelected bureaucracy that we deal with.

McArdle: Is it related to Marxism?

RUSSELL: This is a debate that I have often. I think that there is – there’s enough similarities for me to think so, but I don’t know that they actually understand that that’s the ideology that they’re operating under. But I do think that in many ways the class struggle has now been replaced with kind of a racial struggle, and I think that that’s part of the reason that the DEI and the ESG framework has been so successful is because that is the operating worldview by which those ideas make sense.

MCARDLE: Got it.

RUSSELL: It’s complicated. I’d love their opinions though.

PATEL: I just think it’s like a hybrid of all the worst stuff you can put together, whether you want to call it Marxism, socialism, communism, what have you. They were smart enough in the deep state to not label themselves or associate themselves with that while actually falsely advancing democracy or our constitutional republic. The key thing about the deep state is it cannot exist, and does not exist without their conspirators in the mainstream media pushing their lies and pushing their agenda and thinking the world is going to come to an end if you don’t advance the deep state members, the government gangsters, that have been running Washington for decades. One thing I was telling you backstage is, look, the deep state didn’t happen overnight. Eisenhower probably was one of the first to identify it in terms of the defense (sic) industrial complex, but it’s not going to be defeated overnight either. We’re talking about decades of degradation and layers and layers of bureaucracy. We need a starting point, and hopefully that starting point is coming, but you have to start somewhere with some pretty forceful moves.

McARDLE: One of my frustrations with libertarians, particularly big L libertarians, is the insistence that we must abolish it all overnight, and if you’re not willing to do that and come out and virtue signal that you can and will achieve that, you are not a real libertarian. It seems really unrealistic. Donald Trump said at our national convention that he would abolish the Department of Education. I don’t know exactly what it would look like if we got rid of 85 percent of it, like if he put me or someone else in there and just said, go ahead and fire everyone. We would fire literally everyone, that it would take outside of an act of Congress. But you’re one of the only people I know who’s had any experience actually doing this. Maybe you could share some about it.

PATEL: So the biggest myth is that you can’t fire government employees. You can. You literally can. If you fail to do your job, violate your oath of office, break the rules of ethics, break the law, you can be fired. If you can’t be fired, then you have to go to Congress and be like, why are you funding these endless expenditures and go out and zero out billets? If you want to shutter agencies and departments, you don’t necessarily need to identify the deep state characters within them. You literally just have to tell them, stop using our taxpayer dollars to add billets year over year. This is what I’m talking about. If an agency or department is adding 100 or 1,000 billets a year for 10, 20, 30 years, just imagine how many billets you can get rid of overnight if Congress just said, we’re not going to pay you. We’re not going to fund you. They control the purse.

WEINSTEIN: I want to try to link up a number of concepts here. One, the deep state is very difficult to deal with because a lot of what it’s obsessed with is making itself impervious to challenge. Building structures that make it very hard to root out. There is the potential to do it. It had a freak out when Donald Trump was elected because that was definitely not on the script. So many of the powers that it had given the presidency that were not envisioned in our Constitution were now in the hands of somebody who wasn’t under anyone’s control. So that was very frightening, clearly, to the deep state. I believe now it has realized that if Trump were to be reelected, he only gets four years. It can run him in circles for that long. It’s still disliked.

(NOTE: There is a brief gap here in IPR’s recording of the presentation.)

What you need to do is you need to drag Goliath to a territory he doesn’t understand. That’s where we win.

(APPLAUSE)

PATEL: Just a quick addition, explanation as to why I think that works is that because of the nature of the bureaucracy, they move very slowly. Like, we are truly the rebel faction that can move much more nimbly and they can’t keep up with us and stay under their watchful eyes. So, I completely agree. I think that, I mean, Rogan ass obviously was very successful prior, but that era in particular really distinguished him as the Johnny Carson of our era (with an) audience that surpassed every major network. It was amazing. It was the only thing that gave us any semblance of truth or access to truth during that period on a large scale. It was amazing.

McARDLE: I think coalition work is really important in this. I think one of the things that the deep state really enjoys doing is breaking people apart and having us dehumanize each other. It’s one of the reasons that I thought we would get some diversity of thought up on the panel. You know, Bret and Cash have different backgrounds. Bret is an academic and he’s had his hand slapped rebuking that little bureaucratic state. Cash has dealt with this deep state, I think, in a really, like, intense, profound way and bringing people together and working to dismantle it together, I think is one of the best ways forward.

RUSSELL: I think that, I mean, that’s why I’ve given such favorable coverage, both to Donald Trump and RFK, because I perceive both of them to be outsiders of a different variety. Really all I care about at this junction, particularly as a diehard libertarian that has very little chance of electability, is that I am most interested in throwing sand in the gears of the regime. I perceive both of those candidates to be variants of that.

McARDLE: Yes. From my perspective, the Libertarian Party this year, we are going to be the kingmakers, and we decide how the election goes. I am trying to wield that power very carefully and maximally, so that whatever we do, whoever gets in office, it’s someone who’s going to absolutely crush the bureaucratic state and dismantle as much of it as possible. I want us to be not spoilers, but fixers, and improving the direction of anybody’s campaign. If they’re courting our votes, and they’re saying the right things, we’re praising them and we’re telling them, keep going.

RUSSELL: Exactly.

(APPLAUSE)

McARDLE: Which is a little bit of a change in tone, you know, but I think it’s a welcome, much-needed change.

WEINSTEIN: I know we don’t have much time left. I have a question for Kash, because I’m very interested in this. I watched Trump’s first term. Even though I wasn’t a supporter of his, I was very hopeful that he would be more successful in implementing his ideas. It seemed to me that the establishment, particularly even at the military level, you know, trying to remove troops from Syria, being lied to about the troop counts, just being told, yeah, boss, it’s done. It’s not. No one goes to jail. Apparently that’s not treason. I don’t know how any of this works anymore. So what gives you hope that in a second term, given that they now have basically spent the past four years probably trying to reinforce against a second Trump term, why will he be successful?

PATEL: The good news is all of those deep state government operatives, government gangsters, are basically out of themselves. They think it’s a cool, popular, hip thing to do. They get access to the media. They write books. So now we don’t have to go hunt them down. We know who you are. You’ve been very vocal. I think that’s a reflective action of Trump’s first term because they were like first very quiet and were not going to argue with each other. The biggest battles I fought, whether it was at DNI or later at chief of staff at Department of Defense where we actually successfully drew out of three forever wars, was we were fighting half the people inside Donald Trump’s own White House because half of those people were all installed deep state operatives. You just have to think of it. This guy comes in as a businessman and he says, OK, who can I rely on? Normally you can rely on some pretty smart people who’ve been there for 30 years. But it’s very hard to convince the electorate and it’s very hard to convince the public that these people are fraudsters, that these people have an alternate agenda. What we did was, year after year, was we layered it out and we said, look, this is a gross atmosphere that permeates through Washington and the media is culpable and part of it. I think the good news is that not only was there a lesson learned there, but there is a big bench waiting to come in across party lines because, as you said, we need to unify on something we can share. For me, the accountability in government has been lacking for half a century and we need to restore that accountability for Americans.

(APPLAUSE)

McARDLE: Closing thoughts, Bret?

WEINSTEIN: Yes, that is a good story. I will accept anybody who can deal with the deep state, but it’s not as good a story as Bobby Kennedy, who lost a father and an uncle to the deep state, and spent a lifetime learning how corruption works. To me, that story reads like Odysseus returning to the manor at the end of the Odyssey and stringing the bow. So I want you to think carefully. We all need the deep state dealt with, Donald Trump included. The question is, what is most likely to be able to make that happen? In my opinion, not only is Bobby Kennedy the guy with the temperament and the insight to do it, but he’s also, narratively, the right person to heal that wound that goes back in the U.S. to 1963.

(APPLAUSE)

McARDLE: Well, whoever you’re supporting in the upcoming election, I hope that you’re doing it for the sake of your children and future generations. We’ve got to abolish this thing, we’ve got to crush it, and we’ve got to return to sound governance, sound money, consent of the governed, and liberty and prosperity for everyone in the country.

(APPLAUSE)

Thank you guys so much for coming.