CPAC Pennsylvania - KT McFarland

I was just joking. I'm going to ask a question. So for those of you who are here and are able to listen, I've got a, it's almost a trick question, but it's an important question. Our National Anthem, Francis Scott Key, I'm sure you're familiar with that. Our National Anthem is unique in the world. Who can tell me what the punctuation mark is at the end of our National Anthem? Law students? No? What's the punctuation mark at the end of the National Anthem? Anybody? It's a question mark. Why does our National Anthem end with a question mark? It's a question that we have to ask ourselves all the time. Does the flag still fly over a free and brave people? Every time you hear the National Anthem being played, if you're watching a football game, a NASCAR race, you're at a school event, and you hear the National Anthem, and you hear those words, oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave over the land of the free and the home of the brave? Amen, brother. Thank you. Our National Anthem is something we have to hold dear to us, and we have to be the answer to it. Are we still a free and brave people? Our next speaker possibly has done more to answer that question than anybody else on the planet. KT McFarland is our next speaker. You've probably seen KT on television a lot. She, of course, headed up the National Security Council for the president, but I don't know if you know this about her. As far as I know, she's the only person in world history who is responsible for drafting not just one major foreign policy doctrine, but two. KT McFarland was instrumental in drafting the Reagan Doctrine and then, of course, the Trump Doctrine. You know, as a conservative, I believe every single person is deserving of equal dignity and respect, men and women. So I don't try to make it too big of a deal about when it's a woman who does something unique, because women are people. KT is unique in the world, whether we're talking about men or women. But for women out there who look to be inspired by somebody, I can't imagine anybody more important and more inspiring than KT McFarland, the kind of work that she has done to preserve freedom and liberty, not just in America, but throughout the world. And as I walk off the stage, I'll just comment, we have guests from Korea who are here, because the Koreans are fighting for their freedom. KT McFarland went to CPAC Korea to be with our friends in Korea who are trying to fight to preserve their own nation. But without any further ado, the one and only KT McFarland. Jesus, with a wind-up like that, I don't even need to talk. I should just take a couple of bows and go home. Thank you, Dan. I can't tell you how honored and humbled and proud I am to be with you, and for the courage that you are showing in your own communities. Because America versus socialism, you know, who thought we'd be having this debate, you know? But it's a real debate. And I think what I think of socialism, it's not just an economic plan. It's big government. It's people who don't think you have the right to decide for yourself. So when we say socialism versus America, to me it's big government versus we the people. And that's why you're here, because you're we the people. You don't want any more rights than you have, but you sure as heck want the rights that you do have. And our founding fathers and the men and women in our military have died to give you. I want to tell you three stories to talk about how I kind of see this and why I ended up supporting Donald Trump and actually betraying a lot of my fellow Republicans. I was in Afghanistan ten or so years ago, and I was in a place called Bamiyan Valley. It's high in the Hindukush Mountains, and it looks like a moonscape. There's nothing there. There's just a lot of rocks and guys with turbines. And I went to this place because I wanted to see for myself what was the American military doing and what were our prospects for success. So I go to the Bamiyan Valley. I have a military escort, and we take a helicopter in. We share the helicopter with some Navy SEALs, who shortly thereafter, unfortunately, they were ambushed and they died. So that was my introduction to that part of Afghanistan. But we get to the Bamiyan Valley, and I'm looking around, and I'm thinking, well, there's nothing here. You know, this airport is basically a little bit bigger than this hangar, but it's mostly just rocks. I mean, a couple of helicopters could land one at a time, but not more than that. So we get into the Jeep, my escort and I, and we're driving around the Bamiyan Valley. And at one point, we see at the bottom of the Bamiyan Valley, there are about four Soviet, Russian-Soviet tanks. They were all rusted. They had been there for the Russian-Afghanistan War, when the Russians left in defeat. There's another part of the Bamiyan Valley where Genghis Khan had been in the 14th century, the Chinese-Mongol leader, and he had killed all the people in the Bamiyan Valley, to make the point of how powerful he was. There was another place where there was an American, and actually it was a New Zealand military base, and so I was at the base, and I'm talking to them, and they said, oh, this is, we're fighting for freedom here in Bamiyan Valley. And I met the woman who was chairman of the local government. She was, two weeks later, she was ambushed, captured and beheaded. So here we are in the Bamiyan Valley, and I'm thinking, well, what's the whole story? And I see that there's a farmer plowing his field. So I go over to the farmer, Bamiyan Valley, he's got the turban, he's got the long pants, the long tunic, and he's got two oxen and a wooden plow. He is plowing his field, and I'm looking at him thinking, wait a minute, you know, the British were here 200 years ago, we're here, the Soviets were here, Genghis Khan was here. Somebody's probably offered you something more than a wooden plow to plow your field, but you didn't want it. So why are you still plowing? Well, anyway, that was that. Got back in the Jeep with my escort. I was starting to notice how there was a great road that we were on. It was called the Laura Bush Memorial Highway. The Laura Bush Memorial Highway links the airport that's really just a moonscape to the town of Bamiyan, which is really just some huts, I mean shacks. And so the highway was like the fanciest highway I'd ever seen, but there were no other cars on it, just the Jeep that I was in. On the side of the road was a donkey and a young man, and he was sort of plodding the donkey on. The donkey didn't want to get on the road because that was really hard on donkey's hooves. So we had the road to ourself. I come back to America, and I'm thinking, you know, this is a war we're not going to win. I come back to America, I fly into LaGuardia Airport, I'm from New York, and I'm going on the highway that connects the airport in New York to Manhattan, and I'm fancying a lie. I'm in a taxi, we're hitting potholes, it's crowded, and I'm thinking there's something very wrong with this picture. We have just built a superhighway in a place where there are no cars, and nobody even wants us, and here we are in a place where we could actually use a good highway. The next part, though, is when I talked to one of my friends, you know, someone who's I'm a professional associate of, and he was a big advocate of the Middle East wars, and I said, well, John, my daughter's going to the Naval Academy. We have a strong military tradition in our family. What about your daughter? I know she's the same age, and they know each other, and he looked horrified, and he said, oh, no, my daughter? No, she's going to Yale. She's a really good student. She's going to go to graduate school. She would never go into the military, and I'm thinking, wait a minute, there's something really wrong here. We have fought wars that we knew we couldn't win. We spent money that should have been spent at home, and the people who made those decisions wanted somebody else's children to go fight those wars. God bless you. The second story I want to tell you is what happened in 2016. So Donald Trump, who I know, well, I was his first Deputy National Security Advisor for a long time, so when Donald Trump decided to run for president, he did it as a businessman. He's not a politician. He knows how to make money, and he knows how to say, well, America, you know, you're not in a great place right now. You have great opportunities, great prospects, but you've shipped all the jobs to China, and you haven't done what you could do, which is have an energy revolution and change the world. So Donald Trump set off with like a balance sheet mentality, and then I've talked to people who were on the campaign trail with him. I'm good friends of his kids, and Eric Trump said to me, well, you know what started happening? We would go to these cities. We'd touch down, and there would be 10,000 people there. We didn't tell them to come. We didn't send out email. We didn't have a campaign. The campaign was like the immediate family and 12 friends, and he said, so we got there, and then all of a sudden, there were faces. There were faces of the people whose jobs had been lost because we had sent them to China. There were the faces of the people who were unemployed and who had been left behind by the American dream and who had been made to feel guilty for being angry about it, and that's when it became a crusade for Donald Trump, and that's when it made a difference. So here again, it was Washington who had decided, well, we want a global economy. We want a global world. We're going to really help China develop economically, even if it's at our expense, but guess what? They weren't their jobs that they were sending abroad. It was somebody else. It didn't matter to them. Donald Trump saw those people, and he knew who it was, and that's why he made a difference. I want to tell you a third story, though. In 2016, the American people, the nice, average, we the people Americans, we said we had enough. We're not going to waste our blood and treasure on foreign wars and to prop up leaders who don't like us in places that don't matter. Number two, we want to fix our economy, and we want jobs for Americans, and we know how to do it, and Donald Trump was the only guy who did it. I broke. I'm a lifelong Republican. I had been in the Nixon, Ford, Reagan administrations. I belonged to all those little organizations where people sit around and talk about foreign policy, and I broke with all those people, and I supported President Donald Trump, and I said to him, you're the only guy who gets it. You're the only guy who understands a threat that China is proposing to take to us. You're the only guy who knows how to get Americans back to work, so I supported him. He gave me a job, and when we arrived in Washington, I thought, hallelujah, you know, finally we're gonna have a change of the failed economic and foreign policies of Republicans and Democrats for the last 20 years. Well, we were treated like an alien invasion, okay, skunk at a picnic, and the people in Washington hated us, and they set out to undo and sabotage Donald Trump from the very beginning. The media worked it from the outside, and inside, the permanent bureaucracy ruled it. I tried to get, you know, the so-called whistleblower who was testifying in the impeachment. Well, he worked for me. I tried to get him fired. I sat in meetings with him, and I said, well, here's our policy. President Trump wants to have a different direction here, and the guy interrupted and said, well, that's not our policy. I said, well, it is now, and so their attitude was, well, who does Donald Trump think he is? We have the approved interagency policy for Ukraine, or for China, and for, you know, you name it, and Donald Trump can't come in here and change that. We know, and so that's when I realized the arrogance of Washington. They think you're too stupid to govern yourselves. They think they're the only ones with the experience, and the education, and the moral turpitude, and all of the things that they think are important for government, and I looked at those people, and I said, gosh, I probably was one of you at one point, but if you're so darn smart, well, how have you screwed it up so much? But they set out, they set out to destroy Donald Trump, and they did it with impeachment, they did it with the Mueller investigation, they knew there was nothing there, but they did it anyway. So that's my third story, that the swamp, Donald Trump was elected to drain the swamp, and they were the swamp, and they're fighting back like you cannot possibly believe. So let's, let's, oh, you bet, throw those bums out. So here we are in 2020, this is the most, I always thought 2016 was the election. This is the election of your lifetime, because if Donald Trump, who is the meanest, toughest guy you can imagine, if he can't drain the swamp, nobody's going to drain the swamp, and it's over for the rest of us. They will govern us as they see fit forever. Now, I want to say, I know Joe Biden, and he's a, I've known him for 40 years. Joe Biden is a nice man, but he's not a strong man, and I've, and I think right now America needs a strong man, and the other thing is, you know, Joe Biden today is not Joe Biden of 10 or 20 years ago, but I'm not gonna make fun of him, because it could be any of us someday, okay? But you don't know who you're getting with Joe Biden. You're probably not getting Joe Biden. You're getting a lot of other people with a lot of other ideas that may not be what you and I think America should be all about. So when I think about the election, I think, okay, Donald Trump, I know Donald Trump, boy, everybody knows what you're getting with Donald Trump. There's no mistake here, right? There's no subtlety, there's no ambiguity. He says a lot of stuff. He tweets a lot of stuff. I've even actually had him admit to me, well, maybe I shouldn't have said, maybe I went a little too far. Okay, I totally get that. I'm over that, but you do it. You know, most people in Washington, they talk great stuff, but they never do it. Trump actually says a lot of stuff, but he doesn't. It's the best economy we have ever had. He is the first American president to stand up to the Chinese and call it like it was. He is the first president to figure out that energy independence, that American fracking would not only lead to an economic revival in the United States, but it would bankrupt the Middle East, it would force the Chinese to our doors, and it would bankrupt the Russians. So I'm all for that guy, and he rebuilt the economy once, he will do it again. He continues to stand up to China, and oh, by the way, if you're watching CNN, you probably missed the fact that a week ago, we had a historic peace agreement between Arabs and Jews that hasn't happened in 2,000 years. And why did that happen? It happened because of American energy independence. And I don't know if any of you in this room or anything connected to the energy industry, but American fracking made that possible. So I'm not going to be like those guys in Washington and tell you who to vote for. I think you're plenty smart. You can vote for the person you want to vote for. Tell you one thing, though, I'm voting for Donald Trump. Thank you very much for your time. And if you haven't had enough of me already, I have a book, like a lot of people, that might talk about why Donald Trump won, why he's going to win again, and why actually this is the greatness of America. It's because when we have bombs in Washington, finally we get sick of them, we throw them out, we have a political revolution. You are revolutionaries. So I will be at the back of the tent selling my book. I'll see you all later. Bye.