From the Kitchen Table: The Duffys - FBI Whistleblower On The Agency's Surveillance Of President Trump Supporters

Episode Date: October 12, 2023

This past week, Newsweek released a report alleging the FBI has changed guidelines in order to broaden the scope of domestic terror investigations. Former FBI Agent and Federal Whistleblower Kyle Seraphin joins to discuss the specifics of the new guidelines and shares how he saw a shift toward pursuing political activists while working at the FBI.  Later, Kyle talks about the types of reform that he would like to see across federal agencies to limit political bias, and weighs in on the border crisis, laying out what actions the government needs to take to secure the country from drug cartels.  Follow Sean & Rachel on Twitter: @SeanDuffyWI & @RachelCamposDuffy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Hey, everyone. Welcome to From the Kitchen Table. I'm Sean Duffy, along with my co-host for the podcast, my partner in life, and my wife, Rachel Campos Duffy.

It's so great to be back at the kitchen table, Sean. And today, boy, we have a lot to talk about with our next guest because he is a former FBI agent. He's also a former whistleblower from the FBI. Of course, he's Kyle Serafin. And we've had him on before, Kyle. Welcome back to the kitchen table. Rachel, Sean, good to be back. We have full power this time. We will not have any interruptions in the feed, I hope. Kyle, one quick question. Are you like a Marine? Like once a Marine, always a Marine, once a whistleblower, always a whistleblower. We just said former whistleblower,

but I think once you're- Yeah, maybe you're not- In it for life. Probably in it for life. And you know what's fun is that we keep doing it and people keep coming to me as a route. I've actually kind of got a well-trod path to members of Congress at this point.

And I've got people like George Santos who follow me on Twitter and text me on Twitter and DM me now. I got people like Victoria Sparks, who's on my podcast. They literally, you know, she gave me her cell phone number. So we actually have routes now to get people as whistleblowers. I'm kind of a conduit for whistleblowers as well. So yeah, 100%. That's a great place to be. That's why we want you on the show today, because we were hoping to get some, you know, some of those tidbits of information that keep coming your way, because you really did step out in a big way to blow open the doors on what was happening. And it started, of course, with your expose, if you will, into the fact that the FBI was spying on traditional Catholics. And then later we found out it was actually more extensive than

you even thought initially, correct? Yeah, I mean, it didn't surprise me that it was. But yeah, Jim Jordan's committee went out there and uncovered with some subpoenas that, in fact, it was at least three field offices on both coasts that were involved, that we had some confidential human source recruiting and potentially undercover FBI employees involved in it. So the idea that they were targeting Christians, you know, they start off with Catholics because it's a, they thought it was a fringe group of Catholics and they could say, you know, Latin math Catholics are, are not like everybody else. But at the end of the day, the reasons they were targeting them were everybody that is actually a conservative with a lowercase C in this country. So a hundred percent. Yeah. It's scary stuff.

I love that you pointed that out. Cause I was trying to figure out, cause Sean and I've been to traditional Catholic masses and we often talk about how they're like the most peaceful people, right? They show up and like the women wear these long dresses and they're like eight kids and they use the homestead and homeschool and they've got their traditional veils. I'm like, what is the interest in traditional Catholics?

And thank you for that. So you're saying they go after traditional Catholics because they seem kind of fringy in much the way like maybe Amish people might. And so then they think other Christians will go, well, that's not us. And that's how the creep begins. Is that correct? Yeah.

Let me give you a really good analogy. There's a guy named Cat Williams. He's a comedian. He's a black guy that's kind of funny and he's really small. And he said that the government are gangsters because when we were doing the Iraq war, they said that we were killing a bunch of insurgents. And he's like, people out there that are smoking a joint and sitting in the hood go, you know, I don't even know a single insurgent. You could kill all of them. And that's kind of what they were doing with the traditional Catholics. It's like, how many people do you know that speak Latin and go to Latin mass? Like,

I don't even know any of them. Like get all those people. They're not my problem. But it literally goes down to the point that, uh, you know, the, the pastor made, uh, I think it was, uh, Martin Nemo or during the Holocaust, It's like they came for the communists, they came for the socialists, they came for all these people that weren't me. Suddenly I look around and it's just me left. And that is really what they're doing. They've kind of factionalized and balkanized Christians, Catholics, et cetera. If you focus on small groups of them, then maybe it's not you, but eventually it will be. Well, this is cracking the door open, right? So I'm going to get into the Catholic church. I don't care how I get there. If I have to use Latin Catholics to do that, I will. And eventually

you'll go into all of the Catholic church and all of Christianity, which I think they want to take down for their water plans of the great reset. Did you watch Merrick Garland testify on this very issue? And he became teary-eyed and emotional to think that the Department of Justice and the FBI would target conservatives. And with his historical background, that would never happen. But the fact is, we know that it was a Virginia office, it was an LA office, and I think it was a Portland office or a Seattle office. We had three offices, as you mentioned, on both coasts that were working together to say, no, this is a concerted effort by the FBI to infiltrate the Catholic Church, which, by the way, we know that, and he was

crying about it, but it's contrary to the Constitution. We have a right to practice our religion freely as given to us, not just by God, but also by our founders. Yeah, no, it's pretty obvious that they're marching out like a messaging campaign. He went out and did 60 Minutes as well. And he had the same sort of trotted out lines where it's tearful and it's emotional. And how dare you impugn my honor? Like, he doesn't strike me as a very religious guy, doesn't strike me as a very credible actor. In fact, when you see him do it, you know, under the gun in front of Congress versus when he does it under Scott Pelley's show, it's very different. And, you know, it's not believable, but they are trying to spin it. At least they're aware of how bad the optics look. So that's something. Yeah, it's something not much. I want to talk

I want to talk a little bit about this Newsweek article that came out. So there's a Newsweek article that interviewed people both in Intel right now, but also former FBI agents, other whistleblowers. And basically what came out of the article is that there were some subtle changes in words to documents that they use in their mission statement or whatever on who they are investigating. And they made subtle changes from like ideology to political, for example. And all of these little subtle changes that happen that nobody is aware of has allowed them or opened the window for them to investigate Trump supporters, basically the political opponents of the top dogs at these organizations.

And so I guess my question is, I want to hear your thoughts on that piece, what you know that in terms of resources that have been directed towards investigating Trump supporters, which is kind of like almost half the country, but also just sort of this bigger question. Are we living in a police state right now? And if you are not a Democrat, if you are an activist in any way on the other side, are you in danger of being, you know, investigated by, by, by our government? What's happening? So I'll give you the short answer first, and then we can maybe look at the longer version of it if you got a little bit of leash for it. The police state answer is yes. I think that's, of course, what's going on. Because right now what you have is an intelligence agency,

which is the FBI. And it is primarily an intelligence agency that is also involved in law enforcement. And that's what a secret police look like. And that's one of the hallmarks of the police state. There's a reason why guys like Dinesh D'Souza and Dan Bongino just made this movie that's coming out. And people can go see that.

I was in it. I was interviewed. But I was also the FBI consultant, along with my buddy Steve Friend, to make sure that we got it right. We got the words right. We got the way that FBI agents move and operate, the way that they take people into custody, the way that handcuffs are slapped on are done. And the stories that are being told are very compelling. the trailer, what you'll hear is that the lead actor named Nick Searcy, what he says is he says these are anti-government, anti-authority, violent extremists. Now, you guys know that movies are not made overnight, right? They're made with a lot of production lead time. And this was filmed months and months ago. Those months ago, we already knew those words of anti-government, anti-authority,

violent extremists were a tag because I saw it in 2021 when I was working for the FBI. And the way that I think it goes is like this. It's called mission creep. It happens in law enforcement. It happens in the military. But essentially, what you had was the United States started looking into international terrorism on September 12th of 2001. At some point, they ran out of international terrorists that were coming into the United States. So the external threat was not there. They started going out of what are called homegrown violent extremists. Those are domestic people, but they have a foreign ideology, but you're already looking inside your house. Then you move on to what are called domestic violent extremists. So now we've gone from HVE to DVE, and those people were white supremacists or whatever else they came up with. And eventually they landed on what are called anti-government,

anti-authority violent extremists. It's this ongoing creep towards filling your budget. Because if you're not growing your government program, you're really failing as a government employee. That's just the nature of government. It's the opposite of the private sector and the private industry. So they've gone out there and they've expanded the definition

and they've gone after a political ideology specifically. And they're saying, some people think that this was a leak to NewsLeak. I would characterize it very differently. I think it was not just a warning, but also a threat because they've already started doing this stuff. And if you're paying attention,

they've gone after pro-life Christians. They've gone after people that were praying in front of abortion clinics. They've gone after Catholic churches. You see a lot of people stopping the bombing or the threats, rather, the so-called threats of praying people in front of abortion clinics. But what you don't see is them going after the 320 plus Catholic churches and other Christian, you know, crisis pregnancy centers that have been vandalized.

Like apparently it was Mayor Garland also said it was too dark to find the bad guys. Apparently you can write crimes in this country in the dark and get away with it, which is actually they held on. Actually, they held on to the so there was surveillance video and they held on to that video. And now the crisis center has to sue the DOJ and the FBI trying to get back their surveillance videos. So, yeah. Of course. So, Kyle, the actual definition, the definition, let's talk about it, is that domestic violent extremists who cite anti-government, anti-authority, which you just

mentioned, motivations for violence or criminal activity not otherwise defined, such as individuals motivated by a desire to commit violence against those with a real or perceived association with a specific political party or faction of a specific political party. And so I look at this and I'm like, you know what? You're going after Donald Trump supporters who you disagree with and you think they're anti-government, anti-authority, which by the way, we have a right to be anti-government. We have a right to be anti-authority, which by the way, we have a right to be anti-government. We have a right to be anti-authority. The government and the authority actually works for us, but they have contorted this to think that, no, no, we all are here to serve the government and the authority. But what gets me is the fact that in this bombshell report is that they're not going

after Antifa, who really are anti-government, anti-authority. They want to throw the whole system out and bring in this Marxist-communist new vision, but they don't seem to go after Antifa. But again, they want to go after conservatives. I guess the question is, it feels like we're in the midst of a revolution, a revolution that is going to completely change the way this country looks, the rules by which we live by, and the relationship that the citizenry has with their government. Yeah, I mean, Kyle, just really quick on what Sean's saying. It doesn't feel, like you're saying, it sounds sort of like this neutral, bureaucratic thing that happens in government, mission creep.

But this does, if you read that Newsweek article, it's only going in one direction politically. Not Black Lives Matter, not Antifa. It's why I say it's a threat. And I think it is a threat. And it's specifically because you saw what happened in 2020. I mean, D.C. was occupied. I was part of the group that went out there and was marching around with body armor on that said FBI. We were out there trying to take back.

We had like a green zone in Washington, D.C. There were anti-scale fences up everywhere. The White House was assaulted. The president was moved into a bunker. You know, St. John's Church was was burned. I was there the day afterwards with the security line for Secret Service in the uniform division. So all those things all happened. And did we see massive, you know, SWAT raids taking down these people and breaking up these cells? But it even goes back further than that. And I think you're correct about the revolution. breaking up these cells. But it even goes back further than that. And I think you're correct about the revolution. Go back further to 2017, Donald Trump's inauguration, which I was walking

around in what I would call a low visibility or people would call it undercover because I didn't have any markings on me. I was walking around there. We made a felony arrest of a guy who was likely affiliated with Antifa, who was attacking a U.S. government helicopter with laser strikes, which are incredibly dangerous over a crowd where they were flying very low. And he was let go with he was charged. Then he was let go and nothing was charged, then he was let go, and nothing happened to him. 20-year-old with a seriously powerful laser pointer. And so, you know, you can have mission creep, and you can have this thing that goes on where we're sort of looking at, you know, it's expanding the mission. But you can also see it only expand in one way because it's still ideologically driven.

And I think our government, at least the executive agencies, are ideologically captured. They continue to hire people with more and more advanced degrees. And it turns out, if you have advanced degrees in this country, you've probably had more time being indoctrinated by essentially the Marxist sort of liberal, woke, whatever you want to call it, progressive leftism. And if you take on those ideas, then you're going to act in that way. And you believe that more government is the answer and the political right are your enemies. And they're acting in that way. So, Kyle, I think you mentioned earlier that you've been a conduit for those

who are in the agency or in the bureau and members of Congress. You have a trust on both sides. And I think, again, when I was in Congress, it's hard for people who don't know you in the bureau to come and make contact with you. And to see that you'd be the middleman of those contacts is fantastic.

But as you look still back at your old employer, you look at the FBI, are there still a lot of really good people who believe in the basic concepts of America? Or has the FBI done a pretty good job at the top levels of bringing in people who are left-wing leftists who believe in this new mission to go after conservatives or Trump supporters? Or is the Bureau, the guys that wear the boots and wear the shields, are they still really good Americans who believe in the concepts that you and I and Rachel believe in? It's a complicated answer. And I've been wearing this pin, which we created. This is kind of the brand that we've come up with. Our group is called the Suspendables. These are all the FBI whistleblowers, people like Gerardo Boyle and Steve Friend and George Hill. And so when you have the American flag upside down, it means that the, you know, the area or the country is under

duress, right? You're distressed. And it's the same thing for the FBI right now. People have to have a nuanced understanding of the way the FBI works, which is to say that even though the majority of agents are conservative minded, lowercase C libertarian types, you know, and generally probably vote that way or don't vote at all. I don't even know. But they're also the minority of the total employee group inside that government agency. And so they have recruited a lot of people that think leftist ways that are part of the intelligence apparatus. That is sort of the characteristic of it. And so you've got this problem where people who believe a certain way are not allowed to act that way. And they want to be hands off. They want to respect the Bill of Rights, but they're being told otherwise.

And their paycheck and their pension and the ability for them to continue with their health care coverage are all in jeopardy. And then you have to say, well, is it stopping them from going doing the operations that we think might be a problem? And the real answer there is no, because it's not seventh floor Hoover type people. It's not senior executive service type members that are going and executing these raids on the pro-life Catholics. This is something that's happening on the ground level. The GS-13, the frontline agent like I was, the GS-14 who's signing off on the ops order to go do these raids. This is the people that are actually doing the work of the government.

And honestly, you talk about a police state, but we can go and see this is exactly what happened in 1930s Nazi Germany as well. And I'm not saying that we have a one-to-one analogy, but what I'm saying is the warning there was very clear. And it's the reason why FBI agents go to the Holocaust Museum. It's like, you cannot participate in tyranny or you're a part of that apparatus

and you'll be judged accordingly. It's really scary stuff for them. We'll have more of this conversation after this. The world of business moves fast. Stay on top of it with the Fox Business Rundown. Listen to the Fox Business Rundown every Monday and Friday at foxbusinesspodcasts.com or wherever you download your favorite podcasts. So, Kyle, I spent nine years in Congress and we've all watched the funding of the government. The government's funded through the end of September. Every year it's funded through September. That's when the fiscal year ends and the new year begins, October 1st. And Republicans did a 45-day continuing resolution, a CR, instead of having the government shut down. And there's been a lot of conservative conversation about what should conservatives do

in regard to cutting spending. And Rachel and I both, $33 trillion in debt. The Congress couldn't go far enough in cutting the massive amount of fat that we have in the government. But I also think politically, you have to be smart about where you cut and what you can defend about what you cut. And they were trying to cut in a lot of places. I want to get your take on this. My view is you got to pick a couple agencies. You got to go after you got to cut the FBI. You got to cut the DOJ. You nefarious that they're willing to target conservatives, they're willing to go after Catholics, they're willing to go after pro-lifers, but not Black Lives Matter or Antifa. I mean, the rot that's taking place is real.

And the fact that Republicans know that, we're talking about it right now with public information, and that a Republican Congress is not going to cut their funding, the message that that sends to the FBI and the Department of Justice is that, listen, we can work with impunity. Who's going to do anything to us? Yes, we might be called to the Hill. And yes, we can bullshit members because they only have five minutes per question. And I'll have Republicans do a five-minute tough set of questions. But then I get a Democrat for five minutes. I get a break. And I'll have Republicans do a five-minute tough set of questions. But then I get a Democrat for five minutes. I get a break.

And I think that the Republicans in Congress, if they don't get this right, I mean, I think the democracy is the thing. This is the greatest threat to our democracy. And they're not willing to focus their attention on that funding so we can go, you know what? You may do this, but you are going to get slashed and burned. You should have no money to go after Catholics or pro-lifers or parents who protest at a school board. You have way too much money.

If that's how you're using your resources, you should go after actual criminals, after actual crimes. Am I wrong, Kyle? What's your view? And what impact is cutting funding, you know, the FBI? But cutting funding to the FBI. What does that do as a form of a message that conservatives are not going to tolerate the politics that have taken place inside the bureau? I agree with almost everything you said, except

that we have a constitutional republic and not a democracy. I feel like that's actually a win on the Democrat side. They continue to just push this messaging of democracy, which is tyranny of the majority. What we need to show is that this messaging of democracy, which is tyranny of the majority. What we need to show is that we protect the minority, which you could be now and you will be at some point. You will always end up in the minority at some point as the wind shift. There was a reason why our Constitution was framed the way it was. It's the reason why our founding fathers didn't imagine an enormous federal government the way that it is right now. And so, yes, can we get rid of big chunks of the DOJ? A hundred percent.

I think the ATF is garbage. I think almost everything they do is garbage i don't like them i'm a gun owner and i'm like a second amendment totalitarian when it comes to that extremist so it's like get rid of those guys they suck uh the fbi didn't do anything in 2020 when the covid shutdowns happened in the national security space and nothing happened so we should ask how effective a force is it or is it really what we would call make work are they out there just justifying a budget by doing things that turn out to be tyrannical simply by accident because they're ideologically inclined to do so? People can go look and look how many terrorist attacks

happened in 2020. I mean, they just didn't materialize in the way you'd expect if the federal agents in Washington, D.C. started showing up for one hour a week on a 50 hour a week job, and they're pulling six figures doing that. So if you can imagine making 150 or $175,000 a year, and your job is to show up 30 minutes on Tuesday and 30 minutes on Friday to check your emails, pretty good gig. I mean, nobody wouldn't want that. At the same time, are you really serving the American people? And the answer should be like, well, probably not. There are some things the FBI could do well, but they're not. And so if they aren't reprioritized, then they don't see any serious budget cuts. And some of these like sort of, I call them politically appointed princes. These guys are flying around in private jets, whether Merrick Garland or whether

it be Chris Wray, and they don't think they have any impunity. You're exactly right. They get five minutes of hard questions. They look bad. They got a little egg on their face and they go home and a bunch of sycophants who drive them say, sir, you did a really good job. We really respect you and well done. And you've really defended us. And thanks for working hard for it. And he's out there, you know, insulated from the working men and women, like guys like me who are horrified when they see them go out and speak. And you're like, you're a liar. You're a fraud. The things you're saying are false. You have no idea what the FBI actually does on the ground level, what we're being kept from doing and what we're being tasked

with otherwise. So there's a bunch of that. We also got to be careful with Homeland Security as a idea, Homeland Security, the entire department, it was created post 9-11. So it's garbage, but the Coast Guard is pretty good. I think they're useful. They do a lot of good work. The Border Patrol is really good. CBP is actually pretty decent if they're allowed to do their jobs. So some of those entities are actually great. But Homeland Security investigations, really scary. But then there's ERO, Enforcement and Removal Operations that used to be like under ice and stuff. So those guys are actually pretty great too, if they're let off the chain. And they've got a ton of agents that can go out there and do that.

So there are elements of these things. It's not just that they exist and they're wasting money. It's that they're not allowed to do the mission set that they're actually said to do. Same with the FBI. If the FBI was going after complex financial crimes, political corruption at the local level, and maybe only handling armed crime

that is like what we would call like a talk, the transnational organized crime organizations, it'd be great. It'd be a great organization. It'd be a dream job to go work, go get bad guys. But that's not what they do. The bad guys are now organized MAGA people and militias, you know, and they're setting up people like the in the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping. And they're also like pushing political ideology. So it's a bastardized version of what it ought to be. It's like we always laugh about it. They took a job that was so good and it could be a really, a real passion for people. And they turned it into just a paycheck and waiting out until you get retirement. And that's how you get a bunch of patriots that just feel absolutely without hope because how do you even take back an agency that big?

Yeah. I think about all the things that we're not taking care of in terms of national security because we're focused, as you call them, mega grandmothers. And I mean, honestly, it's it's a big opportunity. Yeah, there's huge opportunity because, first of all, I do want to say my heart just breaks for so many people who got, you know, geofenced and had the FBI at their, you know, for doing what they were constitutionally allowed to do, and had the FBI at their, you know, for doing what they were constitutionally allowed to do, which was go to a rally and protest, you know, what they thought was funny business in an election, which now we know is true if you just look at the Hunter Biden laptop alone. But let's talk about what's not being taken care of. So we have this open forest border.

We know now over 100 known terrorists have come over just in the last year. That's not counting the year before. Oh, yeah, it's bigger than that. It's probably much bigger than that. I know those are the official numbers, but you know. And they're from many, many, many countries. We just had this incident happen in Israel, this terrible, awful, you know, terrorist attack. terrible, awful, you know, terrorist attack. And we now are seeing riots in our own country,

or not riots, but protests showing that we actually have a lot of sympathizers, you know, for the cause on the Hamas side and the Palestinians. What do you know about the people that are the terrorists that are coming over? Are there cells? How much should we be worried about something happening here because of what's happened at the border? So there's two parts of that. I think, number one, there's definitely not a one to one comparison about what happened on the the Gaza and Israel border and what would happen in New Mexico or Arizona or California or Texas. It's just not going to happen in the same way. That's not the kind of border we have. That's not the kind of threat that's coming over in that way. But we did let a lot of people in this country that we did not vet. We had a lot of people that showed up in the refugee program

or what they called the parolee program from Afghanistan that were completely unvetted. Many of them were foreign combatants. So that's very scary. And they're off the chain. They're doing whatever they did. They were not required to stay on the military bases. And I had eyes on at Fort Bliss and at Holloman Air Force Base. We saw people literally walk off into the desert in West Texas and New Mexico, and they just got on an Uber and they disappeared off into the ether. They didn't have any paperwork. They don't have any parolee status from the State Department. They're here unlawfully now. They're just in there. They're in the ether. They're gone. And we don't know what they'll do. And so the possibility of those threats exists. But the bigger question is, is how do we have these people that are rallying for what we call a foreign terrorist organization by the State

Department, Hamas, and they're out there yelling free Palestine and all this kind of stuff. And I'm sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians, not Hamas per se. And I'm sympathetic to the Israelis. We're not really in either one of those things. But what I said, I think it makes a bigger point about how many listless and rudderless vessels we have in America that have no God, they have no religion, they have no beliefs, they're either agnostic or they're atheists. And they are so looking for one person to come and give simple answers to very, very complex questions. And they just think, is there a way that we can solve all this? Oh, yes, you just have to support free Palestine. That would solve all your problems. It's Zionists or whatever else. I hear a lot of Zionists right now, you know, buzzing on social media and they hate

that. And I'm like, hatred everywhere is an enemy of mine. That's that's what being a pro-life Christian and being a Catholic is about. So, yes, honestly, the solution to a lot of this stuff is the thing that's always been in hard times. You turn to God, you turn to faith, you turn to community, you turn to your neighbors, whether they agree with you hard times. You turn to God, you turn to faith, you turn to community, you turn to your neighbors, whether they agree with you or not, you knock on doors, you make a plate of cookies. And we can actually head off a lot of these things at the local level because America is so detached.

We have more technology to connect to each other than ever before. And we are far more disconnected from our neighbors than even when I was a kid and I'm only 41 years old. So I look out there and think, how many times do you know everybody that lives on all sides of your block? There are certain communities where you do. There's a lot of

communities where you don't. And you can fix that. It costs you nothing. It might cost you like some Toll House cookies. So go do that sort of thing. And you change the dynamic of whether or not you're going to see your neighbor's influence and look at you as a MAGA, maggot, othered, sort of non-human because you have a different political ideology. It's like, no, no, no, no. We have kids. You have kids. We care about the same things. We all love America. You don't even know what America is about, but I want to help you. And we'll talk about it sometime over a beer. You can change the dynamic there and we're not doing that stuff, but we can, it costs us almost nothing. Yeah. And I've said this often is I tried to change the world,

change the country. I was a member of Congress, pretty good, powerful position. And I realized I couldn't do it there. I have the most influence on America with my own family, raising a good family with good morals, good values. They go to church. And you're right, in your own community, that's where you have the biggest impact on your country. And if every conservative, every Christian did just that, did the work of their home, you change the course and trajectory of the country. I want to go back, Kyle, to what Rachel originally asked on the border. And here's what gets me. A lot of us look at these Democrat, Marxist ideas, we're like, these guys are stupid. I mean, who would open up their border and let how many, 5 million people into the country, many of them,

to your point, Kyle, we don't know who they are. And some of them just walked in the ones who, what are they called? The ones that get in. The gotaways. The gotaways. Yeah. So we have the gotaways. No ideas. And we think that's stupid. And I think none of these people are stupid. They're really, stupid. And I think none of these people are stupid. They're really, really smart. And there's a purpose and intent behind everything they do. And if, as you mentioned, Rachel, in your question, we have all these terrorists who have come into the country and you then have a terrorist attack, Democrats see that as opportunity. And you'll see more of your liberty and more of your freedom seized by the government because we have to keep you safe. They think through all different corners of how to create situations that give them more

opportunity to reduce your freedom and consolidate power in the government. And that's why, never say they're stupid. They're very smart with a very different agenda and viewpoint that we have as freedom-loving, constitution-loving Christian Americans. So my buddy Dan Bongino talks about what he calls the stupid smart people. That means you're educated, but you have no common sense. And I very much like that construct, but I've kind of taken the flip of it. And there's a lot of smart, stupid people. They don't have any knowledge. They don't know anything about history. They have no concept of what's going on, but they're very manipulative and they're capable of moving public sentiment around. They don't have any knowledge. They don't know anything about history. They have no concept of what's going on,

but they're very manipulative and they're capable of moving public sentiment around. And so for me, that's like an AOC. She's not a smart person from what I can tell, but she is very sophisticated in the way that she manipulates public opinion. And so she is a smart, stupid person. And so when you think about that, there actually needs to be some,

we need to meet people where they are to have the argument that needs to be had about the border. That's a really easy one for me because I worked in MS-13 areas. I've seen people that were victims of this kind of stuff. I've seen sex trafficking, so on. So let me make this appeal that conservative people do the following. You can't go out there and say, oh, they're invading us and they're doing this. They're doing all this and make an economic argument. You make a national security argument. Nobody cares. That's not what these people are talking about. They're emotional. They're thinking about an emotional thing. That poor lady who was raped in El Salvador, she's looking for a better life. And how dare

you take that from her? So let me make the appeal that we can all do. And this comes from, you know, I appeal to the people where they're willing to hear it. And this is it. You take 100 people over the border. Let's just use a round number because it's really easy to do of that 100 people. Nin, 99% of them are seeking either economic freedom or they're trying to escape some horrible situation back home, whether it's real asylum or fake asylum. We don't even have to argue that. I'll just give it to you. Let's say they're all here for the right reasons and they're all being targeted by government or gangs or whatever. And we're going to call that asylum even though it's not. Fine. I'll cede all

that territory. One of those guys is a predator. He works for LAMA. He works for Mexi-Mafia. He works for MS-13. He's a Latin Kings, A-string seat, whatever. Take your pick, organized crime. That one predator now has 99 people to feed him, to clothe him, to offer him all the things that he wants without having to work other than showing violence and organizing a lawlessness around that population.

And that 99 people have no recourse to federal law enforcement. They oftentimes have different language problems that are either barriers in the communities they go to, or maybe they don't even speak Spanish and they're even more isolated. They have a Guatemalan dialect or they have one of these like ancient Aztec type dialects that don't even make sense to anybody. And I've talked to people in DHS. They can't even communicate with the kids because the kids have never heard a language that we even know how to speak. It takes a while to get a translator for them. So you take those people

and they're all captive victims. Now, all those people are going to come in the United States and work illegally. They're going to do something and they're going to get by. They're going to, there's these things they used to call them like mobile bodegas.

They would go to Costco, they'd buy water and beer and chips and snacks and stuff. And they drive around in a minivan that he paid $5,000 cash for. And they'll just sell these items. That person's going to get extorted. This is real numbers, real cases, real things things that i've seen they'll get extorted for

twenty dollars a week in perpetuity that person is one of let's say 99 that gets that done and they're going to take twenty dollars a week times almost a hundred people and they're going to take all that cash and they're going to fund the gang to just do violence and extortion forever and if you go in and you stand up against them, you don't pay your $20, every once in a while, once a year, they'll kill one or two people and let you know that they can get away with it.

They throw the bodies out in the woods and the FBI finds them two, three years later. We didn't even know they were there. I've been sitting in parking lots, working with confidential informants who are gonna go pay $20 that the US government was gonna give so we could track the money

and bring down the low-level enforcers. And while we're sitting there, miking up a source, we hear one, two, 10, 15, 28 gunshots going on in the neighborhood that we were about to go drive into. And we go, we got to go do something. So we drive into it and it's like business as usual. Somebody got executed in a stairwell, thrown in the gutter and will never be heard from again. And we couldn't find out. And nobody acted like anything happened because they're victims.

They're a captive victim population. And they left a hellhole, maybe in El Salvador or Guatemala or Panama or wherever it was. They came to the United States. They're in a worse prison because they don't speak the language. They have no family and they are captured by people that know that they've got them. And the government is like sort of complicit in it by bringing them in. So we have to argue on their terms that this is bad on the human side, because they don't want to hear the intellectual argument. That's the emotional appeal. You just made a bunch of women put into a sex trafficking ring. Well, yeah, first, I was going to tell you that a lot of we talk, we're talking about what we're not doing, because we're going after

political opponents versus a national security threats or really bad guys. You know, I think I had your friend see friend, see friend on. He said he was taken off of a sex trafficking, you know, investigation to go after January six people. I mean, it's just it's a child sex trafficking investigation. Right. The one thing we can all agree on. The one thing that supposedly we can all agree on.

But to your point about, you know, the extortion that's going on we did a story on fox and friends um where a a vice principal at a east coast public school basically wrote an email to all the staff at her school saying hey listen we have a child here who's an illegal and you, shouldn't use the word illegal, but essentially he was. And he needs money because he has to pay back two thousand dollars to the and basically she was trying to coyotes, trying to crowdsource among the staff at the school. And we're like going, whoa, like this is crazy. Like we can't have kids in our school who are being extorted by the cartels. And their answer from these liberals was let's just crowdsource and help them pay that that that that, you know, what we call a more data off, you know, pay off is his extort extorters. I mean, it was just crazy, the reaction. So, yeah, you can tell these stories, but in their mind, they're like, oh, they don't get to the source of what the real problem is. I guess, you know, before we let you go, I'm seeing a list a lot on the internet, people saying, if you live in a big city right now, you should be worried because of all the terrorists who have come over the southern border,

that something could happen, given all the tensions that are going on in the Middle East. Is that something that worries you? I don't do big cities. So I guess, yes, as a general rule, I'm a small cities. I live in a town that has less than 7,000 people at this point on purpose. I think that that's where America really is, is getting out. I think a lot of people in my generation are starting to stray away from that urban environment. It's a young person's game. If you don't have kids, it makes sense. It doesn't make any sense to me. Do I think that there's any articulable, credible threats? It's possible, but I'm hearing all the same things from kind of people that are kind of

talking heads and they're mouthing the same words. And I just don't think that our intel leaks are like that. So that actually makes me very suspicious. I'm skeptical of all information that comes in, regardless of the source, including things that I think I want to believe. You know, it generally aligns with my beliefs that you shouldn't be in urban areas and you should be armed at all times and be smart and have your head on a swivel. But that doesn't mean that I think that there's necessarily like this huge leak of credible threats coming down. So that does actually

get my kind of my my skepticism pricked up. But that being said, good situational awareness is just good opsec in general. You should always be looking out for your family in a way that if you assume that everybody is a threat. My wife always laughs at me because we got in public and I'm always like she's like, what are you thinking about? And I'm like, same as I always do, threat, no threat. That's all I do.

I look at people and I decide whether you're a threat right there. Am I going to have to take this person down? That seems like an interesting way to go through life. It's so pessimistic, but you know what? It's really, really easy.

I look at you and I decide whether you're a problem to me or not. And then if you're really mean and you're unpleasant, but I've already decided you're not a threat, then I don't really care. It's like, you can say anything you want to me. It's like, you're not going to take my babies.

Your wife feels really safe. Are you a Taekwondo kind of guy? I'm not. I did some jujitsu. I did some combatives, but I carry a gun and I carry a knife everywhere I go. And I have trainings for both of those. And my theory is, is I don't go places where I'm going to have to do any of those things. So I actually self-select. I don't go to concerts. I don't go to political rallies if I can avoid it. I'm not taking, I got a six-year-old, I got a four-year-old, I got a two-year-old, I got a newborn that's six weeks old. We don't go look for trouble in the seraphim household. We avoid trouble at all costs. I live in a city that's called Liberty Hill, if that tells you anything, in the middle of Texas, where we just,

that's what we're about. Like we're trying to not be involved in that. But that being said, if you do live in those areas, you just got to be aware that, you know, my dad said a long time ago, it probably resonates. You'll be telling your kids the same thing. Nothing good happens after midnight. You can avoid bad situations by selecting where you're physically going to be. So people should be doing that anyway.

You know, whether or not there's a threat coming over, whether it's Middle Eastern terrorism or whether it's domestic violent extremism or not, like, you know, nobody's coming to save you except you. You're responsible. That's what American life is about. Take some personal responsibility. I'm pro-life. I'm Catholic.

My biggest fear is not Islamic terrorism. It's my own government. That's right. Welcome to the watch list, as I like to say. I'm sure I'm on the list. Hey, Conk, before we go, tell us about your show. I do a podcast five days a week. People can find it at 0 9 30 we stream live

on rumble we uh we put it out on audio we just crossed a million downloads for the year so that kind of tells you what the appetite looks like for a guy who started out of nowhere i thought i was going to be uh you know running down bad guys for my life and instead i'm talking in front of a microphone doing a very different kind of war than i thought i was fighting but um i bring on experts that are uh you know know about government service they have worked behind the curtain as far as the administrative state i bring on uh every once in while, we'll get a congressperson or someone that's kind of an elected representative. We talk about subject matter experts and we try to not be emotional about what the problems look like. And we look towards what is the solution. And a lot of it

comes down to the same three things. It's faith, family, and freedom. As long as you defend those three things with your actions and the way that you operate locally. So that's kind of the mindset and it's called the Kyle Serafin Show. You can find it on all the audio platforms. Apple, Spotify, iHeartRadio. And then video pretty much anywhere too. YouTube and Rumble. Do you feel. After you listed all these different people.

And you take this sort of non-emotional way of looking at all the facts. You participated in the Police State movie that's coming out by Dinesh D'Souza and Dan Boncino. Are you optimistic about, you know, you say you can focus on faith, family, and freedom. We all love that. We're down with you on that. We're also Catholic. We share a lot of the same values and we're looking at things a lot of the same way, but you have a lot more sort of insight into what's going on on the inside in some ways. Are you optimistic that we can do this, that we can overcome these forces that are beginning to take over? Every night I go to bed exhausted and feeling defeated like we're losing. And every morning,

I still get up and put my feet on the floor and I go and hug my kids. So you have to be optimistic if you're raising children. And that's actually one of the great things about having them is that you look forward to a future. You need to make it better. You have a responsibility to do so. So that's part of it. I wake up feeling optimistic every morning. I wake up, you know, go to bed feeling destroyed, like maybe there's no hope. And then I still do it again. So that tells me that there's a lot going on that is more positive than not, because every day starts again and we have another opportunity to do it. They haven't taken us yet. And, you know, I think that we may have some very, very uncomfortable times coming in this country

in the military sense. We would call it like low intensity, you know, diverse conflict that happens in rolling across major urban areas is very realistic as we look at the next 12 months. So if people are not prepared to go for a couple of days without food and water, you know, if they're not prepared to be able to defend their home in a realistic way for a short engagement, then I think you're failing your family. I think you should be able to do that. But that doesn't mean that your neighbors are your enemy. And so there's a nuanced approach to all these things. I'm overall hopeful, but I'm still probably thinking about moving even to a smaller town and moving a little bit further away and getting some goats and some chickens and some cows. So I have, I think that the initial- We're thinking the same thing. You know, Kyle, we're thinking the same thing. We're thinking the same thing. Self-reliance. It's that the government is not here to save you. It's supposed to serve you when it does. But you're the one who's responsible for your own safety.

So if you take responsibility for that, it's actually more empowering. And I think it's a lot more hopeful than it could be. If you're living in an urban area and food just comes from a grocery store and you don't know anything else, man, it's a scary time to be alive. But if you're looking out and going like, man, maybe I should start doing some shovel work. That would be really good for my soul. It is. And moreover, I think it's actually a good thing for this country to get a little bit more back to our roots, maybe a little bit more agrarian,

sort of spread out those means of production a little bit is going to be really good for us. Totally. Kyle Serafin, a dose of reality, common sense, family, faith, and freedom. Thank you for joining us at the Kitchen Table. We appreciate it. Appreciate all the good work you do. Again, you're kind of like the Bongino coming from law enforcement, coming to the podcast land, and both of you crushing it. So again, thank you for joining us. And again, thanks for all of your service, not only in the FBI, but also whistleblowing and being a conduit to make sure your former colleagues feel safe, you know, touching base

with members of Congress, whether they're going to be a whistleblower themselves or just. Yeah, it's not easy. Your former colleagues feel safe, you know, touching base with members of Congress, whether they're going to be a whistleblower themselves or just providing information, which is so key. Being a leak, being a source of what's actually happening

so members know it and they can act on it. We appreciate all that you do. Thank you. Thank you, Sean, Rachel. Thanks for having me on. Of course. God bless you.

Take care. We'll have more of this conversation after this. The concepts and the themes are what you and I talk about a lot. Faith, family, your community. I want to go back to the border, though. How edifying is it to have somebody who was on the inside of the FBI whistleblower who really, I mean, exposed some of the most important things for us to know about the police state that we're creating in our country right now. And without us kind of knowing like all that inside sausage making that's going on, we all have had this

sense about where things are going. And it's very edifying and very reassuring to have your intuition, your gut instinct about your need to be concerned, your need to have firearms, your need to have food sources outside of your grocery store. All of these things, to have that edified and to have someone on the inside go, yeah, you know, you're on the right track here. Wow. That was important. I think what's interesting is we, Rachel and I have a lot of conversations about how do you prepare? How do you think about your family? How do you think about these things? We've done some podcasts on the topic. But there is this unconscious kind of thing that's happening where people are just making different decisions because they look at $33 trillion in debt.

They look at inflation. They look at the police state. They're like, I need to take some different steps to make sure that I feel like my family is safe in this changing and probably trying times. And we'll talk to people and they're like, we're thinking about doing this. We're like, so are we. Yeah. Which is which is fascinating. There's this like there was a homestead.

Homestead conferences are popping up all over America. Homestead conferences are popping up all over America. I mean, this was not happening on this scale, you know, where they have, you know, hundreds and hundreds of people show up because they want to learn how to can or they want to learn how to raise a lamb. You're trying to promote the bottom line of Fox Business right now because I'm... Because we are doing that. But this, yeah, go ahead. I'm going to a homestead conference in Virginia where they talk about, again, how do you garden? How do you can? How do you have a cow with milk and preserving milk? And they talk about sheeps and goats.

Like, I've never been to one of these things. But we're going to go on Saturday and do a tour and then put a package together on Monday about what we saw at the Homestead conference, which again, these are popping up to your point, Rachel, because more people are doing it. And what's interesting is most Americans knew how to do all the things that we're going to go to the conference and learn. We could have just asked Grandma. Talked on that, right? And because we're so, we lost those skills. I don't know how to can anything. What the hell do you do with, you know, milk you get from a cow? And besides, you know, drink it raw. How do you do chickens?

Like no one knows anymore. And so people are learning. You do. We had, I remember you had to kill a bunch of chickens. I did have to kill some chickens. That was crazy. And then I didn't feel bad and they tasted very good. I'm going to go.

He raised chickens with some friends of ours, but the deal was we'll help you raise the chickens we did on their property. And we all went in on him, but they were like, you got to help kill them. And so. I announced for Congress on like a Wednesday and we killed chickens on Thursday. Then I was on the campaign trail on Friday. Those chicken days were over. We might be going back to them, so.

Can I go back to the border? Yeah, I'm sorry. We kind of missed the last Star Trek, sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's do it. Just very quickly, again, you talked about terrorists coming across the border, and I do think there is an intention behind what they're doing.

They're not just going, wouldn't it be fun to open up the border and let millions of people who we don't vet come into the country? There's this idea that they want open borders. And if America leads, they can have this one world government where there's no borders, the George Soros model of, we let people just travel wherever they want. And there's no countries. We're all just ruled by an elite group of politicians and businessmen. But I think the question, and again,

Kyle brought this up, how do you talk about it matters? And they think the question, and again, Kyle brought this up, how do you talk about it matters? And they're like this, you know, these people are poor and they're victims of global warming in Central America, and we've got to let them come up, and or they're raped or abused by the cartel or the gangs in their community. And they pull at your heartstrings. And it goes back to Republicans do really well with charts and graphs, but Democrats talk about people really well. And we're drawn to human stories. Of course. But I think the real question is for Joe Biden, how many people on this open border do you think should die so you can have an open border?

How many young women or all women should be raped to have an open border? How many girls are, is it okay to be sold into sex slavery so you can have an open border? How many drugs do you think is appropriate to let into the country so you can have an open border? All these questions, because that's what he's doing. He's making a calculation. I'm going to let people die, be raped, be sex trafficked, drugs into the country.

Put into child labor. We have child labor now coming from across the border. They've made the calculation that we're willing to let people die and be raped and be sold into sex trafficking and Americans die because of drugs, all so we can have an open border. We should go, well, how many is not too much? When you hit the threshold limit where we got to go, no, we should probably close it down now. Because I think that then puts it into real terms.

Yeah, by the way, also another last thought here on what Kyle had to say. Really good for me. I was trying to understand. I was trying to grapple with, for so long we've had this conversation. Why are they going after traditional Catholics? Why are they going after traditional Catholics? Why are they doing it? Why did they pick traditional Catholics to infiltrate? And it was just so, you know, it was so interesting to have them go, of course, they seem different in that, you know, the number of kids they have. The clothes they wear. The Latin right, right? They seem like extreme, especially people who are non-truths going. But even people who just go to, you know, sort of mainstream, big churches, you know, those who go to Latin mass seem like others.

I'm Catholic, but I'm not like them. So it is okay for the FBI to go after this group of Catholics, which, by the way, the intent is, as I mentioned, to open the door and start here, but they don't end there because, listen, these Catholics are the furthest thing from extremists or anti, they're about their faith. I've always told Pete Tengus that, but we've had this conversation. I'm like, the Baptists are next, you know, because he grew up Baptist. And he was like, no, he has no doubt, like, that this was sort of the, you know, And he was like, no, he has no doubt like that. This was sort of the, you know, you're going to start here. It's going to be a slow boil until, you know, all opposition has, you know, investigations. And this is just so un-American. And again, really great to have someone like Kyle come on, explain that, but also explain how the bureaucracy works. Like some things are like you said, you know, they're very smart and these are very intentional policies. And some part of it is just, you know, the way bureaucracies, you know, grow and sort of create purpose for themselves, this mission creep that he talked about. You know, Republicans or conservatives, there was a time where, you know, you could give a little bit of money or go to a parade or just vote. And that was enough. And right now, I think conservatives have been trained to, they're frustrated, so they yell at their TV and throw popcorn at the TV. Those times are gone. If you want to change your country, you do have to take steps. You do have to be active.

you do have to be active. And again, the activity of protecting your family, of making sure you're raising good kids and keeping them out of the hands of the commie camps. And that's, I mean, that's a real thought process. That's what Sean calls school and universities. Right. Commie camps. Keep them away from that.

That's job number one. But you made it sound like this was a little bit, I'm glad you brought that up because earlier, it sounded to me like you were saying, just take care of your family and your kids and that's it. You do have to be on the school board. You do have to do these other things. So I want to bring it up. And the primary goal, the primary mission is that if you get one thing right, get your family right. But I think, but that's not it.

Can you get involved in a school board race in your city council? Or work for Congress? In your county board. Can you help someone who's a good member of Congress to run? By the way, if you have a member of Congress, you should write them. Tell them what you want them to do with this budget. Tell them how you feel about the speaker's race. A lot of people think they write letters and no one cares. Untrue. I didn't read every single letter, but I got a compilation of who is writing me about what and what they care about. That's important to me because I serve you as your member. So write in a letter, send it in an email. That stuff matters. You and get your coffee clutch in the morning or

get the family that lives in the same district, write, right in once a week. Tell them what you think. All of that can make a difference. And again, you can't be passive. We have to be active Americans if we're going to win this battle against the revolutionaries who are trying to take our country over. Yeah. Well, great conversation. Again, thanks to Kyle. All right. Listen, everyone, thank you for joining us at the Kitchen Table. We appreciate it. We're on every Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts, but also at foxnewspodcast.com. We're always there. And listen, we appreciate you stepping in and joining us to have a great conversation. We appreciate, again, Kyle Serafin doing great work when he was in the FBI, doing great work now exposing the rot of government. We appreciate his time today. And until next time, have a good one. Bye, everybody.

Bye. Listen ad-free with a Fox News Podcast Plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to the show ad-free on the Amazon Music app. This is Jimmy Fallon inviting you to join me for Fox Across America, where we'll discuss every single one of the Democrats' dumb ideas. Just kidding. It's only a three-hour show. Listen live at noon Eastern or get the podcast at foxacrossamerica.com.