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Feb. 3, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
56:24
FUMIGATION Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1013
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Thank you.
Today I'm going to talk about airline safety, I'm going to talk about tariffs, and the fumigation of the police state.
Former FBI agent and whistleblower Kyle Serafin joins me.
We're going to talk about how to build these police agencies of government from the ground up.
But first you got to bulldoze them before you can rebuild.
Hey, if you're watching on YouTube or Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please hit the subscribe or the follow button.
I'd really appreciate it.
this is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Debbie and I just got back from a little getaway that we did to Mexico.
There's a little quiet place in Mexico.
Not all the usual spots, not Cabo or Cancun, but rather one of these...
Pockets of Mexico that is a little bit of a do-nothing type of place, but very nice and very quiet.
And we made a little escape for a few days.
And while we were gone, all this stuff going on with the airlines, in particular an inexplicable crash of a military Black Hawk with a...
With an airline killing some 67 people, I believe, collectively.
And none of it really makes any sense.
Is this a problem of air traffic control, which didn't adequately direct the aircraft, didn't warn sufficiently the planes?
I mean, I've looked...
We've looked at this because we were flying back and forth.
We were looking at this pretty carefully, and it's true.
Air traffic may say, hey, do you have the CRJ in sight?
Well, to me, that's not exactly the kind of dire warning.
You know, if I see someone who's about to be hit by a car, I don't go, you know, excuse me, do you see the car approaching you?
No, you yell out, don't you?
Hey, the car is about to hit you.
Move to the right or duck or jump.
You get no indication that this was done in the case of the air traffic control.
But the fault could be with the helicopter.
I don't think, at least on what we know so far, that the fault is with the airline.
It looks like, by and large, this was a case where you have this American Eagle flight, and they got into the pattern of descent.
They were cleared to land.
They had descended.
They were moving toward the runway.
The pilots understandably had their eyes on the instruments and on the runway.
So they were doing what they are supposed to do.
The helicopter somehow went, and you can watch the video of this, goes in a straight line into the plane.
Boom!
And of course there are some people here who are blaming DEI. And they've not outed, but they have focused on the fact that there is a woman who happens, I believe, to be a lesbian and a Biden supporter.
And she was one of the three people flying this plane.
I'm not sure if she had the controls.
But nevertheless, we have a lot of talk about DEI. And then, of course, the left jumps in and they go, you know, how can you prove that DEI was responsible for this particular incident?
And I want to make a comment here about...
The way the DEI relates to these things, because let's think of an analogy here.
If you have a football team, and instead of taking the best players, you lower the standards, and you say something like, I want all my players to have gone to a private school, or I want all my players to have come from these three states.
If you set up any criterion other than merit, other than I'm going to try to assemble the best team, You set some other consideration that's driving your hiring.
In other words, you've lowered standards.
And you've lowered standards across the board because you have some objective other than to win games.
Some objective other than to succeed in the task in front of you.
So, in other words, if you lower standards across the airline industry, you're going to have more mishaps.
And when these mishaps occur...
They are the result of the lowered standards across the board.
Because what do lowered standards produce?
They produce, ultimately, greater levels of incompetence, poor decision-making, poor levels of communication.
All of it goes down.
And so, therefore...
You don't have to draw a straight line by saying this particular crash was the result of a one-legged Hispanic lesbian who was sitting...
No, you don't have to trace it to a particular person.
You don't need specific evidence showing that this particular disaster can be directly traced to a specific hiring decision.
All you have to say is, hey...
I noticed that there are a lot of incidents happening in the airlines.
Here's one, by the way, that a lot of people haven't noticed.
I get this from Fox26, Houston.
United plane catches fire at Houston's Bush Airport.
Plane is taken off.
Suddenly, passengers look through the window.
Boom!
There are flames everywhere.
What?
The plane has to stop.
They're obviously taken off the plane.
They're sent off on a new plane.
But this kind of thing is happening more and more.
It's not our imagination.
And it's happening more and more in America.
And so for us to say, hey, we need not just a review of DEI policies, we need to throw DEI out the window.
And I think then we'll start seeing things get better.
It's not a matter of pointing specific fingers of blame.
It's blaming the policy that is contributing to this.
It's not necessarily the sole cause.
Very often when you have airline accidents, there are multiple causes.
But let's say that there are three different causes.
This is one of them.
So this needs to go.
Now, let me say a few words, and I'll say more about this in the days ahead.
There's so much going on in the country, it's almost impossible to keep track.
And I have to sort of decide every day, what am I really going to focus on?
Because Trump is on the rampage, right?
We are seeing a blitzkrieg.
We're seeing an activity on so many different fronts.
And the left, too, is kind of caught in a dizzying inability.
To know what to oppose.
You just sort of try to focus on this.
Let's try to stop Tulsi Gabbard.
And then boom, boom, boom.
Tariffs are going on over here.
FBI people are being locked out over there.
Elon Musk has gotten a hold of the payment systems at the Treasury.
And the left just doesn't know where to go.
And in some ways, they're not even sure how to oppose some of these things.
And that's something I want to talk about as well.
But let me start by just saying a few things about tariffs.
The first thing is that there are many people who have been taught to believe that tariffs are bad.
And me too.
Most of us have been educated in a kind of macroeconomics that holds tariffs to be by themselves bad.
To be honest, there's a part of me that still thinks they are bad.
Trade wars in general are bad, and for reasons that we did learn.
However, I do want to say that a lot of the economics that we learned, even in the best schools and colleges, Is wrong.
It is garbage.
It needs to be re-examined.
I want to give you a few, just a couple of examples of that.
One, GDP. GDP means gross domestic product.
It's kind of like if you take everybody in the country and add up their incomes, you get GDP. Now, what I ask you is the point of this.
What does the GDP tell you?
The answer, absolutely nothing.
It would be like going to a village where people buy and sell stuff and adding up the incomes of all the villagers.
Would that tell you by itself if this is a prosperous village or not?
Of course not.
It doesn't tell you really one good thing.
Now, if you want to manipulate the amount of money in the money supply, then these sorts of things become tools for you to do that.
But I'm talking about...
What does this tell you about economics, about the economic conditions of a country?
And the answer is, it's largely a meaningless number.
We have all been raised to believe that moderate inflation is good for the economy.
Not runaway inflation, not 12% or 13% inflation, but let's say 2% inflation.
And many of us have sort of gone along with this.
Yeah, 2% inflation just seems, you know, better than 12%.
But why do we have inflation at all?
Why is the government printing money so that our money gets devalued?
Why is that a good thing?
What benefits does it grant to the economy?
And the answer is no benefits at all.
So that's another major myth.
Of modern macroeconomics, which is that moderate inflation is fine.
The Phillips Curve, the supposedly inverse correlation between inflation and unemployment, the basic idea here, this comes right out of Keynesian economics, the more you have one, the less you have the other.
It's kind of a seesaw.
So of inflation, you can have low inflation, but if you have low inflation...
Then you're going to have high unemployment.
And if you have high inflation, you have low.
In other words, there's a kind of a reverse reaction between inflation and unemployment.
And this has proved to be empirically bogus, because what it really implies is that you cannot have inflation and unemployment go together.
You cannot have high inflation and high unemployment both.
You're going to have one or the other, and you kind of have to choose.
No.
We have had high inflation and high unemployment multiple times in the last 30 or 40 years at the same time.
So the Phillips curve is empirically...
So, the only point I want to make here is, we need to go back to the drawing board and think about these things at the level of first principle.
And finally, the question we just want to ask ourselves with regard to tariffs is, do they work?
Do they produce the result?
And I want to argue that in Trump's case, the tariffs seem to be working.
Why?
Because Canada is...
It's reconsidering its border policies.
Mexico is reconsidering its border policies.
I'm just going to read from Trump's post of this morning.
I just spoke with President Claudia Scheinbaum of Mexico.
It was a very friendly conversation when she agreed to immediately supply 10,000 Mexican soldiers on the border, specifically designated to stop the flow of fentanyl and illegal migrants into the country.
And Trump says, okay, well, I'll pause the Tariffs for a month, and we're going to try to make a deal with you.
Here's the author of The Art of the Deal doing what he does best.
So I ask you, given this, if the goal of the tariffs on Mexico was to spring those guys into action to seal the border or help seal the border, do the tariffs work?
Yes or no?
Answer, yes.
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The Democratic Party, with the help of Republicans or some Republicans, has been looting.
The Treasury, which is to say looting the taxpayer, which is to say looting you for so long that when someone steps forward to stop it, many people go absolutely berserk.
The guy who stepped forward to stop it is Elon Musk, and he is attacking government abuse and waste at a level that I have...
Never seen before, and probably will never see again.
In the Reagan years, we had something called the Grace Commission, in which a successful businessman named William Grace made an extensive catalog of government waste.
But he ran the Grace Commission, which was external to the government.
He prepared a report, and then pretty much nothing happened.
The report was ignored because the forces...
That sustain the waste and benefit from the waste and live off the waste, the parasites, were too strong.
They had no interest in reading the report, let alone putting its recommendations into effect.
This is what I was worried would happen with Doge, but this is so far not what has happened.
Why?
Because the Elon Musk approach is completely different.
The Elon Musk approach is to start by saying, where does all this government money go?
And then you realize it goes down...
8,000 rat holes, all inhabited by bureaucrats that are feasting off of the money, pretending that they're doing it for the homeless.
So there's always some cause.
I'm trying to fight for social justice in Nepal, but actually what you're doing is you're supporting some gay program in Nepal that's your pet peeve that you're pushing over there.
All of this sick nonsense is going on.
And finally, Elon Musk realizes, you know what?
Instead of going after where the money goes, Why don't I focus on where the money comes from?
And the answer is the Treasury.
The Treasury has a payment system that approves all these funds, and it's essentially the quiet bank roller of the entire bureaucratic racket.
And so Elon Musk goes in there.
He's given access by Scott Besant, the newly confirmed Treasury Secretary, and he is now able to lock people out, change passwords.
He has a whole team in there.
And by the way, this is a team of geeks that is working 120 hours a week.
Elon Musk's motto is, let me just outwork the bureaucrats.
They're lazy.
They work maybe, you know, 20 to 40 hours a week, 40 being kind of the max.
We'll put in like 100 to 120 hours a week.
We'll just outwork them.
And we will defeat them this way.
Plus, we're smarter.
Plus, we, by and large, these are top software engineers who are now inside the bureaucracy.
And what are they doing?
They understand these bureaucratic systems.
They're demanding accountability from the bureaucrats.
And, of course, the left is freaking out to no end.
Now, it's important to keep Elon Musk's big picture insight here.
And I'm just going to quote him, because you can see the nobility of the task that he is undertaking here.
I think we can take a trillion dollars out of the deficit next year.
We have a two trillion dollar deficit, which is far in excess of economic growth.
If we can cut the deficit in half, from two to one trillion, and we can get economic growth to match the one trillion growth, then that means there will be no inflation.
I mean, what a...
This would seem to be an unattainable goal, but not from us, for whom the unattainable becomes nothing more than an objective, a hill to be climbed, an obstacle to be surmounted.
And there are some people, I see this from Jasmine Crockett, the left-wing congresswoman, and others, where does he get the authority to do this?
Nobody elected Elon Musk.
All right, well, let me ask you this question.
If Elon Musk took over the Treasury payment system, whom did he take it over from?
Who was running the system before?
The answer?
You don't know.
No one knows.
We now know the name of that guy because he resigned in protest.
But he was an unelected bureaucrat.
Who elected him?
Well, I guess the answer would be he was doing the bidding of the Biden administration.
And if Biden is the duly elected president, itself a very big question.
But if Biden was duly elected, then sure, Biden represents the people.
And so here's my answer to the question of who authorized Elon Musk to do this?
And my answer is the American people did.
You say, well, how?
Well, here's how.
The American people, through electoral majorities, as...
Defined in the Constitution, choose the president.
The president is actually in a different position than congressmen or senators because congressmen and senators represent a part of the people.
John Cornyn represents the state of Texas.
Brandon Gill represents Texas District 26. But only the president of the country represents the people as a whole.
So the president, in this sense, is authorized as a duly elected representative of the people to act in the executive branch, in the executive capacity.
Now, the people that Trump selects to do that are going to be his cabinet officials, but he can also deputize others.
In this case, the cabinet official in question, Scott Pessant, has been confirmed by the Senate, so he has gone through the process of Senate approval.
Elon Musk is deputized by Trump and Besant to carry out their wishes.
So in this sense, remember, we don't have direct democracy in this country.
We have representative government in which, rather than ruling directly, we authorize others to rule in our stead.
Trump has every authority to have a whole team of people to say, listen, I have this goal, I have that goal, I'm going to entrust you to do this, I'm going to entrust you to do that.
So Elon Musk is acting with full Presidential and indeed, constitutional authority.
And the genius of what he's doing is to focus on where the money comes from.
In other words, cut it off at the source.
If you've got water coming down a mountain and it's flooding all the neighboring communities, you can start running around trying to basically drain the water in all these different villages, or you can say, hey, listen, where is all this water coming from?
If I can cut it off or reduce it at the source, then it will do less damage in all these different places that it is flowing promiscuously.
And really, what you have is the kind of mass abuse of government authority.
You've got bureaucrats on payroll who do absolutely nothing.
They give money to their favorite political entities.
Everybody is looting the poor taxpayer who is not present on the scene, is not able to sort of, like, you can defend your own wallet.
But who's defending the national wallet?
Answer, nobody.
Republicans are, to some degree, trying to put a lid on overall spending.
But even Republicans are part of the ripoff scheme.
So this is where Elon Musk is taking on, I would have to say, a Herculean task.
And so far, doing it incredibly well.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
Guys, I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast my friend Kyle Serafin.
He's also subbed for me at times when I'm out.
He does his own podcast, The Kyle Serafin Show.
He's an FBI whistleblower, a recovering FBI agent, as he has it on his bio.
His website is kileserafin.com, and you can follow him on x at Kyle Serafin.
Kyle, great to have you.
Hey, listen, Debbie's been showing me some pictures of the kids.
They are getting cuter by the day, and you keep adding to the bunch.
So it looks like you're very productive in all domains.
Yeah, just trying to outbreed the evil out there in the world, I guess.
That's totally not a bad thing.
Kyle, we had you in police state, and as you know, in the Biden years, we saw a...
Just a terrible escalation and abuse on the part of the FBI. And now suddenly we have seen a massive change, or at least the beginnings of a massive change.
Let me start by asking you, did you expect Trump to come out guns blazing in the way that he has?
Or has this taken even a hardened FBI vet like you by surprise?
I'm a pretty pragmatic guy, and so I think that past performance tends to indicate future performance.
You just kind of look at it, and that's the metric we evaluate.
I didn't expect it.
I expected to maybe get 20% or 30% of some of the promises we've seen from Donald Trump, and that would have been a win.
That would have been great.
I voted for it.
But what we've seen in the last probably two weeks, the speed and the swiftness, I've been trying to reflect on what would make that the case.
And men act differently when they face death, and they act differently when their families have been threatened and attacked.
And I think that's what we're witnessing right now with the Donald Trump and the speed and the swiftness and the decisiveness of the actions against a lot of the evil that's out there.
And it really is evil.
I mean, it's a really evil thing to take what should be an apolitical, nonpartisan law enforcement entity and turn it into a secret police force that is doing intelligence operations and trying to...
Root out political enemies in America, of all places.
So I'm heartened, honestly.
I think that the funniest thing is, and I haven't shared this with you or with Debbie, but at the end of the day, my friends in the FBI are thrilled.
The people that actually do casework, that wake up every day and put bad guys in jail, they're psyched.
They can't help it because none of them are fearful for their jobs because the things they've been doing are honorable all along.
And the people that are worried, they probably have a reason to be worried.
You know, Kyle, it kind of reminds me a little bit of Mel Gibson in The Patriot, where if you just look at the theme of the movie, you might think, oh, well, Mel Gibson is going to be fired up by the promises of the Declaration of Independence, and he's going to want to sign up with this great immortal cause.
But no, Mel Gibson is an ordinary guy looking after his family.
And when the British come after his family, it's too much.
He essentially goes crazy.
And he signs up and he takes them on.
And it seems like something like this has happened to Trump.
When you have your own home invaded by the FBI, when you have all this stuff going on, they're trying to put you in jail and lock you up for life.
I mean, that prospect is going to concentrate the mind, isn't it?
I think that people should always be really weary, or wary, I guess, of the man that doesn't want to get involved but feels compelled to because of circumstances that are outside of his control.
I know that that's the way that I felt.
I have to imagine in a much more steroidal, heightened sense, Donald Trump has to feel the same thing.
I've said the same thing.
A lot of people reach out and they say, hey, do you want to go back and work for the FBI? And that word back really bothers me because it was a betrayal.
I know Donald Trump must have felt the same thing.
I've talked to Don Jr. about it.
And it's a betrayal when your government that you sort of trust and the institutions that you respected and you grew up thinking were maybe not always doing the thing that you want them to do, but they certainly weren't doing the opposite of the honorable thing on purpose.
And then he's out there and experiencing that.
Yeah, nobody wants to get involved in it because it means killing off a piece of yourself.
And it means that you're not going to be able to live at peace again.
We didn't choose this war in a lot of ways.
And it is a war.
It's an information war in the most part.
It's not a hot war in the sense that we are not fighting in the streets, thank God.
But it is a war for, you know, how funny, Joe Biden kept saying that we were fighting for the soul of America.
He's correct.
He just fought for the wrong side.
And so you got the guys that really did care about this country stepping into the space, and reluctantly so, I think, which is the right way to do it.
I want to see servant leadership that is reluctant, but that's decisive and just says, There is a right and a wrong.
There is a truth and a lie.
And a lot of the things that are true are now being pursued.
And we're seeing it being corrected in policy against DEI. We're seeing it corrected in federal law enforcement.
We're seeing people kind of expose themselves that if they wanted to be partisan actors, they're very unhappy right now.
Good.
You know, so be it.
You chose that path.
And these are the natural consequences that Americans who just wanted to be sensible.
That's what the big tent was, too, Dinesh.
I mean, if you think about it, we got a bunch of people that we probably don't agree with everything that they have to say.
But they've all kind of agreed that they've been lied to.
And so they say, let's try something different.
Let's try something the opposite of what we've seen for the last 16 years or so with that little brief hiatus of Donald Trump for 2017 to 2021. One thing I find really not just impressive, but short of just about astonishing is the fact that you have these reluctant warriors, if you will, but they're not fighting a traditional war.
They're fighting a bureaucratic war.
You have to fight it with bureaucratic weapons.
You have to burrow your way into the bureaucracy.
As you know with the FBI, it's not enough to sort of swap out the director and then the problems are all solved because there's a corrupt set of incentives that percolates all the way down.
And yet, it seems like the Trump gang of 2025...
Completely different than the gang of 2016-2017.
These are people who are going into these payment systems and into these software programs, and they understand that this is the way the game has to be played, and it seems like the left is a little...
Shocked by the fact that they're being beaten with their own weapons.
They usually function through passwords and locking people out and setting up bureaucratic structures where you can't really catch the tentacles of the octopus.
Nobody knows where it really goes.
Nobody knows where the payment systems really are.
People are just collecting money off of the government.
And suddenly, boom, it looks like there is a...
Concerted effort here.
And I see that the FBI reform as part of this just sort of stopped this bureaucratic leviathan dead in its tracks.
We're seeing two things happen at one time, I think.
And to make it very...
Accessible to people.
Let's talk about war on terror because that's something we're familiar with.
That was a counterinsurgency, right?
They were people that were trying to stop a certain thing and we were going in and working against that.
The second thing is we're seeing a hostile takeover because that's kind of the business end of it.
That's the Donald Trump, I'm a businessman and I know how to run businesses.
The government is not a business, at least not in a traditional sense because it doesn't produce anything.
It just sucks things in.
We've seen a hostile takeover in the economic sense, in the sense of coming in and grabbing all the systems, grabbing all the passwords, grabbing access to the email listservs and so on.
And then we are seeing this other, this counterinsurgency, which is kind of a hearts and minds campaign, where you have to get people that are ideologically aligned with, you know, the simple things like the Constitution and their oath to it, the American people's interest.
Those people have to be...
They have to be strengthened.
They have to be fortified.
And they have to be empowered to be able to step forward and say, by the way, they're over here.
This is the other problem that you're looking for.
And we're getting all of that all at once.
So yeah, it's a little bit surprising.
but this is what happens when you take good men and you push them to the edge where they don't have any other choice but to come in aggressively and to take on the meat like nobody wanted to fight this war nobody wanted to get involved in the takeover of the united states government and root out the corruption that if we're being totally honest has been brewing for 110 120 years this is not a new problem it's just taken on a metastasization that it's grown so aggressively in the last decade and a half or so that there was no other choice
and i think i think what we're seeing is just Just rationality and reason, common sense sort of returning to this sort of thing.
Again, nobody wanted to get involved in fighting this.
But what other choice do you have when they put you to a decision for your chips?
And I'll also say this, and this is something that has been very interesting in my life.
Someone told me that God draws straight with crooked lines.
And so you look back at the plan of your life and you're like, oh, there were some really terrible moments and I really wish I didn't have to go through them.
But if I didn't go through them, then fill in the blank great thing would not have happened.
And the last four years gave all of us Who are sensible.
And I'm not like a Republican.
You know, I don't belong to any political party, but I'm a conservative.
And I sit on the right, and I can talk to people that are in the middle, center, left, because I don't have a partisan agenda.
I think that we all got to see a moment where that pause between Donald Trump 1.0 and 2.0 that we're about to see, you know, we're two weeks into, it gave us a really strong understanding of what the stakes were, and it gave us an opportunity for...
For people who needed to do the work to really learn what the mechanism was to push back.
I don't know if we had Trump for eight years straight that we would have seen something like this in the second Trump turn.
I think that the Biden era actually set us up for a success that Americans will look back and actually appreciate.
I think that history will be very fond of the fact that there was that little break because it's allowed him to come back in just guns blazing in two weeks.
And I'm pretty excited about what's coming up in the next month or so.
I mean, it reminds me a little bit, Kyla, I mean, I'm older than you, but it reminds me a little of Reagan circa 1980, because in the period from 1974 to 1980, 10 countries fell into the Soviet orbit, starting with Afghanistan in 74. And so I think that the Cold War had taken such a dark turn that it set up Reagan's determination not simply to do, you know, detente, which was a handshake.
But rather, roll back.
Let's roll back the Soviet regime.
And I think in some ways we've learned in the last 50 years that our system, although not Soviet per se, does resemble Soviet bureaucracy in a lot of respects.
It's encrusted.
It's got a sort of political class sitting on top of it, feasting off of the American people.
And I think you're right.
We reached a point of no return.
Where a lot of people basically said, and I think this is true of some of the tech classes, they go, it doesn't really matter if we invent new products and make new things and maybe even make more money, because if the country goes down the tubes, we're going to go down the tubes with it.
And so we need to sort of change strategy and basically get rid of the outlaws who have encircled the ranch.
And then we can resume business as usual.
And that seems to be what's going on.
Let's focus in on the FBI a little bit.
What are your expectations?
You think Kash Patel is going to make it?
It seems to me like he's looking fine right now.
But do you think that there's going to be the kind of overhaul that needs to be done?
And what really does need to be done?
How would you go about it?
Yeah, you alluded to it earlier.
Obviously, there's plans in place.
I don't want to tip.
If they choose any of the things that I've suggested, I don't want to give anybody that's on the wrong end of it much heads up or warning.
But this is a cultural problem.
The problem exists from the top-level director, which we saw removed.
We saw the deputy director move.
People don't realize this, but I'll just share this with you and your audience.
The deputy director, Paula Bate, who was the number two in the FBI, was the acting director when Chris Wray basically planned to step away.
He did something so nefarious and insidious that the American people should be absolutely shocked and outraged, including people on the left.
He retired from the FBI, okay?
He did that a couple of weeks ago.
And then he had himself reinstated as the deputy director under a program called RSP that allows a reserve filling with a retired agent because of the critical manning nature of that job.
That's to act like there was nobody else who could do it.
So Paul Abate actually solidified his retirement, walked out, and then came back in to take his old job again and was reappointed into it with the idea that he was going to be able to subvert and to keep all the Kash Patel, all of the new, you know, Pamela Bondi regime over at DOJ from taking effect and doing anything that they wanted to do.
That's how insidious...
This animal is.
And it goes all the way down to at least the GS-15, but probably the GS-14 layer, which is the first-level supervisors.
Like when I was a line agent working on the bricks, you've got one guy above you.
That's your GS-14.
And between that and the director, it was all corrupt because they've only been promoting people who agreed to do the things that they wanted to do.
So you've got a culture of yes-men.
The joke used to be that a GS-15 in the FBI is someone who's never said no to a bad idea.
And that includes things that are illegal, immoral, unethical, the January 6th prosecutions, the FACE Act violations that have gone after, all the things that were highlighted in police state.
Those are all problems that have been there and growing and metastasizing for the last two decades.
It's a different animal after 9-11.
And I think everybody who's been part of it realizes that anybody who's interacted with the FBI realizes they've lost credibility in that space.
So how do you go about doing that?
You really have to change the management culture.
You have to do something as violent and radical as what you're seeing right now, which is to say, hey, if you want to be part of this, Take the fork.
OPM.gov slash fork for all of you people in the FBI that might hear this.
If you're not doing casework, if you get to sit home when they have a sequester or a federal lockdown or a CR doesn't get approved, you're not necessary.
So go find a private sector job.
You got eight months to do it.
That's a great deal.
You should totally take that.
You'd be foolish not to.
You know, you got to trim back a lot of the kind of the...
The rotted meat.
And you might even have to get some of the good meat in there, too.
This is what happens when you go through and you start resecting cancerous material.
You're going to get some of the healthier tissue as well, just to make sure you got everything.
So we're probably going to have some casualties of decent agents and decent employees that otherwise wanted to work.
That's the cost of doing business.
None of my friends, by the way, are worried about that.
They said if they lose the job at the FBI, they're still great investigators.
They'll go find a job somewhere else.
So competence is never going to be scared of this kind of a change.
But incompetence is.
And all of the people that have just been kind of in a federal jobs program, you know, they should be worried.
I do agree with you with that Reagan energy.
I do agree with you that it had to get bad enough, as Dan Bongino likes to say.
It has to get bad enough for people to want to change.
And I think a lot of regular Americans have realized, like, we are paying for things that make absolutely no sense.
They're not in the best interest of this country.
They're not in the best interest of people who just live their lives and never interact with the federal government.
If the federal government shut down, which it does every once in a while, they don't notice a difference.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration undercut us by letting in tens of thousands of really dangerous people, millions of actually unvetted, but tens of thousands of them are dangerous and have nefarious intent in this country.
So we're going to be living in a very dangerous time right now and grabbing it back as quickly as possible and getting our national security apparatus back up to speed.
It's a critical need.
So kudos to Donald Trump's administration for coming in and putting in the right people for transition.
And if there's a little bit of blood on the floor or the walls, or maybe even a lot.
It's what needs to be done.
There's no other choice because the other guys painted him into a corner.
The Biden administration painted him into something that they have no other choice but to come back very aggressively if we want to have safety in this country the way that we used to have it.
I mean, I think this is critical, Kyle, because the reason we have a government at all, more than any other, it's not to redistribute your income, although governments can do that.
It's to protect you, right?
It's to protect you from foreign and domestic thugs.
That's the main objective of government.
I think the importance of both the border and the FBI as two critical issues is that, you know, in the border you've got bad people coming across the border that can kill you.
And similarly, with the FBI, you're not talking about the fact that a percentage of your taxes may go to fund some bureaucrat who's staying at home with a second job and not doing anything.
That's bad enough.
I mean, that is nothing more than reaching into your wallet and taking $100 bills out of it.
So it is theft, for sure.
But it's not the same as the FBI showing up with loaded guns.
I mean, the fact that the FBI has been doing that to American citizens without legitimate cause, and that this has been happening in America.
I mean, one of the things we had with police state was the difficulty of convincing people to whom this has not happened, that it not only can happen, and not only does it happen, but it is happening as we speak in the country that we call America.
And I think many people just found that dumbfounding, but more and more people now are realizing that this is actually what's been going on.
I mean, my own little role to play in this has been very strange because I'm just a regular guy and I live in the suburbs and I've got four kids and a wife and I didn't go out to have people know my name and I never aspired to have a social media or a Twitter account or anything else.
I didn't want to be in a movie with you as much as I like you.
That was never my goal.
And I'm working for an agency.
In good faith, I showed up and I enlisted to serve when I was 27 years old in the Air Force because I thought America meant something and I wanted to do that thing.
I wanted to go out and do America, which is to say you invest in it and you spend your time and your treasure and your talents.
When I found out that the FBI was doing things like investigating parents at school board meetings, which is the thing that I brought forward, a lot of people don't know that's what my first whistleblower disclosure was, when I realized in my first year that we were abusing processes called FISA-702 and spying on Americans, and the whole goal was just to get information that had nothing to do with criminality at all.
You know, and I reported that right away.
My whistleblower activity goes back to 2017, my first year in the FBI. And when we find out that they're going after parents at school board meetings or they're, you know, investigating Catholic priests and people in the clergy or people that are in the choir, when you find out that they're arresting people for FACE Act violations.
In fact, one of my whistleblower disclosures in 2021, in October of 21, I told members of Jim Jordan's committee or the staffers thereof.
I said that they have prioritized what they called anti-abortion violent extremists as the number three national security threat in the state of New Mexico, which is primarily a border state.
And so how is that possible?
And by the way, cartels were not the number one or the number two.
It was, you know, sort of radical Islam.
So you just start asking yourself, how is it possible that these people have gotten so far afield from what the mission was set up to do?
And like you said, they're not just taking money out of your pocket.
More and more Americans have realized, like, whoa.
I may not be really excited about the pro-life movement, but I don't think that a Holocaust survivor should be arrested and thrown in federal prison.
That seems like a waste of time.
Look, there are some people that were on January 6th that were there that were fighting with cops, and maybe that's a reasonable investigation, but not grandmothers who were walking around on essentially a guided tour.
And so when that sort of reality started hitting regular Americans, I think they realized that there's a massive opportunity cost.
We have this huge organization that used to be very prestigious, and even though it's had problems for its whole existence, they started seeing examples that could be their neighbor, that could be their parent, that could be themselves, in the people that were going and facing the criminal justice system in a really awful way.
And you can't have that if you want America to exist, and you still want red-blooded patriots to go out there and serve in the military, and want them to go out and serve in law enforcement, state, federal, or local.
You just cannot have an America that functions in a way that fundamentally despises the people that theoretically it's supposed to serve.
It's supposed to protect the American people from force and fraud.
The FBI is a big piece of that.
All of federal law enforcement is supposed to be that shield.
And then the offensive end of it is supposed to be our military.
And if they're not doing that, they're too busy trying to have drag queens on aircraft carriers, then what the heck are we doing?
And I think so many people just woke up and went, look, we used to be pretty sensible in the 90s even.
Even under Bill Clinton, we could agree that illegal aliens shouldn't be coming in and taking jobs because they're actually displacing Americans.
Like, you know, listen to Barack Obama in 2008 and 2014. There's plenty of speeches that have been popping back up of late where they were talking about being the deporter in chief.
This was not even crazy 10 years ago.
And so this reset that we're having in this last two weeks has been an aggressive attempt, I think, to claw back just sanity.
And I think most people welcome it.
And the people that are screeching the loudest, it tells me a lot about what they do and don't care about.
It seems like they don't care about their neighbors.
It's not particularly Christian.
It's not particularly American.
It's also not sustainable.
So, you know, cry a little louder, I suppose.
Kyla, you're doing very well.
And I don't know if you would be open to this, but it would really be fun to see you not only back at the FBI, but in a managerial role.
Looking over some of the people who tried to torment you for being a whistleblower.
I like to see that kind of reversal of fortune where you get to set the terms of the way that they operate, at least for a little while.
So, guys, I've been talking to Kyle Serafin, a recovering FBI agent in his own words.
His website is kyleserafin.com.
His podcast is The Kyle Serafin Show.
Follow him on X at Kyle Serafin.
Kyle, as always, thank you for joining me.
Thanks for having me, Dinesh.
Nash.
It was fun.
I want to continue my discussion of the big lie.
We're now in the second half of the book.
And one of the consistent themes of this book is the way in which after World War II, or starting right around the end of World War II, the left has undertaken a massive effort to conceal the left has undertaken a massive effort to conceal the connections between itself and the Democratic Party on the one hand, and fascist and Nazi policies on the other.
And we're going to watch this operation in process, watch it in miniature and see how this takes place.
So in 1944, a political scientist named Richard Hofstadter Published a book called Social Darwinism in America.
Very influential book.
Hofstadter's name is known by and large in intellectual circles even until today.
And this book established the public understanding of social Darwinism after the war.
It was published, as I mentioned, in 1944 at the end of the war.
And what we'll see here is that Hofstadter is in a very sneaky way going to redefine social Darwinism.
Because social Darwinism, in reality, was connected very closely to progressive eugenics.
Social Darwinism, in fact, was the basis of progressive eugenics.
The idea was that this whole concept of survival of the fittest can not just be left to nature, but human beings can ensure the survival of the fittest by...
Making the fittest, the people they thought were fittest, reproduce and breed and have more kids and discourage, if not force, people who are unfit.
This is like the Margaret Sanger philosophy, the human weeds.
Let's prevent the weeds from spreading.
So this was the way in which social Darwinism was understood in America.
It was on the left in this sense.
Richard Hofstadter, who knows all this, is going to undertake a kind of intellectual cleanup operation to dissociate social Darwinism from the left and try to reconnect it or to connect it to the right.
Let's see how he goes about doing that.
Now, by way of background, Hofstadter is a leftist.
I'm now quoting him, I hate capitalism.
And everything that goes with it.
And so what he wants to do, Hofstadter, is connect social Darwinism, which has now fallen into disrepute because of its association with the Nazis.
He wants to connect it with capitalism.
How does he do that?
Well, he starts off with the idea of survival of the fittest, which, by the way, was not a Darwin phrase.
It came from an English sociologist named Herbert Spencer.
Herbert Spencer interpreted Darwin, not incorrectly, To have outlined a theory of evolution that involves survival of the fittest.
So survival of the fittest was part of Darwin's philosophy or part of Darwin's demonstration, but Darwin himself didn't use the term, so Spencer does.
And Hofstadter picks up this phrase, survival of the fittest, and he basically says, this is really how American business operates in America.
This is the meaning of capitalism.
Capitalism is a dog-eat-dog.
To see which individual, which corporation, which entity will outcompete and therefore outlast and therefore survive while the unfit individuals and corporations kind of fall by the wayside.
And to make his case, a good deal of this book, Social Darwinism in America, focuses on Herbert Spencer.
Whom, as I mentioned, was a Brit, an English sociologist, and also his American counterpart, an American sociologist named William Sumner, who did, in fact, talk about survival of the fittest in terms of markets and in terms of businesses.
So Hofstadter had some material to work with.
But the material was extremely, in a sense, misleading because if you walked up to ordinary American entrepreneurs, not just small business guys, but even American tycoons, Andrew Carnegie, Rockefeller, and you talk to them about, what are your thoughts about Herbert Spencer or William Graham Sumner?
They would go, who?
Who's that?
What are your thoughts about Darwin's theory of evolution?
What?
What does that have to do with what I'm doing?
In other words, in the actual functioning of American commerce, No one really thought of developing a Darwinian framework per se.
Nobody spoke in the language of survival of the fittest.
And Hofstetter knows this.
He doesn't really have any data showing that American businesses are motivated by any of this.
No, if you were actually to pin down even the more thoughtful or intellectually oriented entrepreneurs, they would say, well, yeah, you know, I read Adam Smith, or I read Ricardo, or I read Hayek.
Or I read, so these are the people that they admired and invoked, not Darwin, not Sumner, not Spencer.
Now, Hofstadter, if you read the book, you get the idea that this is really what social Darwinism is all about.
The real sleight of hand of Hofstadter is to devote 80% of his book to American business and pretend like this is what social Darwinism is and essentially he doesn't even have to when he comes to what social Darwinism in fact meant in the first half of the 20th century namely progressive eugenics essentially Hofstadter becomes extremely brief extremely laconic extremely euphemistic extremely parsimonious
Hardly touches on it at all.
He does refer to it.
At one point he says, well, you know, there was this kind of eugenics fad running around.
It was here.
It's gone.
And so not a word about how this progressive eugenics was connected with eugenics in Europe.
Not a word about how it inspired the Nazi eugenics program.
All of this is sidelined, which is to say ignored.
For Hofstadter, it doesn't exist.
And in some ways you can see this is kind of what historians can do.
They can look at the past.
They can forge the material.
They can pick the elements that they want to sustain.
And if their book becomes, quote, the landmark work on the subject, then that's your later generations that don't know better, who weren't there in the teens or 20s or 30s.
They come along and read Hofstadter.
They go, well, yeah, I guess that social Darwinism is really about American capitalism.
Well, this is what he wants you to believe.
This is part of the big lie that Hofstadter is selling.
And he's been quite successful at it, and not him alone.
I refer to him as the kind of leader of a revisionist movement to detach, in this case, social Darwinism from the left and connect it to the right, to such a point that you have later writers coming along in the 80s, the 90s, in fact, the 21st century, people like Stefan Kuhl, whom I interviewed in one of my earlier films, Death of a Nation.
And Stefan Kuhl, who's a very good scholar, recognizes the abuses of social Darwinism, knows, in fact, its links to eugenics.
But at times, he too refers to social Darwinism as right-wing.
Why?
Because he too is a product of the scholarship that came before him that painted this right-wing label onto social Darwinism.
Now, if the left was trying to get away...
From the link with eugenics, the link that produced ultimately the Nazi eugenics program and other horrors, the left realized we don't want to stop doing eugenics.
We want to continue, but we realize now that we can't continue under the same name.
In fact, what we've done is we've spent a lot of work trying to pin eugenics now on the right and pin social Darwinism more generally on the right.
So we need to rename...
The eugenics movement.
And so the eugenics movement underwent a renaming process in two stages.
First, it was called population control.
So notice, pretty much the same thing.
But in this case, you don't say who you're trying to control.
You just act as if the countries of the world as a whole have way too many people.
You just want to reduce the number of people.
You have no kind of preference as to which people should be reduced.
And this way, people's focus is on the issue of controlling the population and not the segments of the population that you actually want to control.
So population control.
And Margaret Sanger was big.
She made a kind of shift herself toward population control.
And the second shift was toward the idea of choice.
I'll talk more about this tomorrow.
But Sanger, I'll just start by noting, as I close for today, that Sanger was completely against choice.
Everything that she stood for was aimed at, let's make these people do this.
Let's identify the bad people, the human weeds, and let's make sure that they cannot reproduce.
It's not a matter of asking, would you like to reproduce?
Would you like to have some choice in the matter?
No.
The idea was to twist their arm, to apply incentives and disincentives, to segregate them and lock them up if you have to, force them to be sterilized if you need to.
This was this anger.
And so nothing could be more opposed to it than the idea of choice.
And yet the organization founded by Sanger Planned Parenthood realized that it needed to use, again, an acceptable slogan that seemed to be consistent with freedom itself.
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