The Daily Signal - Pulling the Tentacles of the Wealthy Woke Off Your Government

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

“Follow the money.” It’s one of the age-old principles of investigative journalism because it can lead to the discovery of a “dark money cabal,” as it did for author Tyler O’Neil.  After years of reporting on the organizations and people who funnel money into leftist causes, O’Neil determined that “their nefarious influence” needed to be exposed and wrote "The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.” The Constitution “you learned about in school with its nifty checks and balances, that's not really how it works,” O’Neil says.  “I think our government today is less a republic and more it operates like a classical monarchy, where you have this administration that … is handing down all these rules,” O’Neil says. “And Congress still has the ability to check them, but rarely does so to the degree that it should, as the founders intended.  From green energy policies to gender ideology, and even law enforcement, the tentacles of the wealthy woke have been, and are, at work.  Take energy policy, and consider that “a lot of the bureaucrats who run the [Environmental Protection Agency] and some of these other agencies, they came from woke activist groups,” O’Neil tells "The Daily Signal Podcast." The issue, according to O’Neil, is that “a lot of the laws, a lot of the rules that we have to live by are passed in the administrative state” and not through elected leaders in Congress who are answerable to the American people.  O’Neil join “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the ways the radical left “Woketopus” has infiltrated nearly every aspect of the U.S. government, and how the Trump administration can pull off the tentacle.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We'd love to talk, business. Welcome to a Daily Signal bonus edition. I'm Virginia Allen. Today, I have the unique privilege of sitting down with my colleague, the Daily Signal's managing editor, Tyler O'Neill, who has just published his second book, The Woktipus, the Dark Money Cabal, manipulating the federal government. We discuss how the tentacles of this woktipus have so influenced all of the government, everything from gender ideology to even, our law enforcement. Stay tuned for my conversation with Tyler O'Neill, author of The Woktipus, right after this. Well, I am so pleased to welcome to The Daily Signal podcast, our own Tyler O'Neill. He serves as managing editor here at The Daily Signal, and he is the brand new author of his second book, The Woktipus. Tyler, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. It's so exciting.

Well, it's great to have you on the other side of the mic. You're often the one who's sitting in this chair doing the interview. So we're reversing some roles today. But the full title of your book is the woketipus, the dark money cabal manipulating the federal government. So let's just start with that title. The woke depus. What does that mean? Yes. Well, so woke. Woke is one of those terms that a lot of people, you know, a friend of mine unfortunately got in trouble because she was asked to define Woke and she had trouble with it. But that's because it is kind of hard. It's a comprehensive worldview of a lot of different aspects. And the way that I define it is critical race theory, gender ideology, climate alarmism, and a preference for technocratic government. That means

government by the experts. And oftentimes you have these woke bureaucrats who would prefer, even after we went through COVID, and so many times we saw the establishment lead us astray, deliver these white lies that end up harming people's lives over the long term. And now they're still preferring to trust the experts without this check. And I think there's a natural populist uprising against that preference for technocratic government. And I think all of that is part of woke. And when people describe woke, they're talking about the ideology of the elites that's kind of been pushed on us by the Biden administration. And my book explains exactly why the Biden administration has been doing this. And then the octopus is all those tentacles going out.

Yes, yes, exactly. So woke and then topus. So yeah, like the woke octopus, it's kind of like following off of the coctopus and some of this influence that, you know, they talked about the Koch brothers having this big influence on the government. As it turns out, I mean, And they were involved. They still are involved, Americans for Prosperity. It exists. President Trump is not a big fan of Americans for prosperity these days. Anyway, I won't tell them to that.

That's a whole other rabbit trail. But this is, you know, this is giving the same sort of exposure that, you know, the left focused on the right and talks about all this dark money funding. They suggest that the Supreme Court has been bought and all this nonsense. And in reality, a lot of the groups that are saying that the Supreme Court has been bought and that dark money is controlling things behind the scenes are themselves funded through dark money and are often more representation of what the donors want and the way that they're able to give money and then cloak where that money goes. There was this really great ProPublica article that describes how dark the money of some of these groups are. because they're passed through organizations. So you have like Arabella advisors,

which is a for-profit company. They create a bunch of nonprofit entities like 1630 Fund, New Venture Fund. Those nonprofits then have small projects that are called fiscally sponsored partnerships. And these groups are the ones so like a donor will give to 1630 Fund. Their money will go to a bunch of these fiscal-sponsored

partnerships or programs, and nobody knows what the donor is actually pushing. And I don't think dark money is inherently nefarious, but I think that the way that these are structured, you know, it draws a lot of attention and it rightly does so. Okay. Yeah, because I was going to ask you that to define dark money. So that's helpful. It's sort of this trickle down. You don't always know where the money is coming from and it's going to sources that you don't

always know where it's really going. Well, yes, technically dark money is an umbrella term that covers, you know, pretty much every nonprofit is a dark money organization because you're not forced to disclose your donors. And we don't want donors to be forced to be disclosed. What we want, though, is a system where, you know, you have enough transparency. And these groups that what I love is like the left, they. They claim that the right is doing all this nefarious stuff. And if you look at them, they're doing it like twice over. And so what I'm talking about dark money, it's not that I think all dark money is evil.

It's that I think that when it comes to these groups in particular, their nefarious influence needs to be exposed. And calling it dark money draws attention. it has the benefit of being true, and it's a way to talk about this influence campaign. Interesting. You got to come out swinging right away in the introduction, and you make this statement or question rather of, what if I told you our government is a lie? That's like, wow, the government's a lie. Yeah.

Why do you start there? Because I think that really summarizes a lot of the points in the book. I think the government, to a large degree, is a lie. You know, that constitution you learned about in school with its nifty checks and balances. That's not really how it works. And I mean, you and I know how many regulations are passed by the bureaucracy every year. It dwarfs the amount of laws that Congress passes and that gets signed by the president. Congress still, like, there is this superstructure.

I think our government today is less a republic and more it operates like. a classical monarchy, where you have this administration that like mandarin's is handing down all these rules. And Congress still has the ability to check them, but rarely does so to the degree that it should as the founders intended. And a lot of the laws, a lot of the rules that we have to live by are passed in the administrative state. And we need a more muscular Congress to say no. And that's why part of the book is about why the administrative state opposes the people's elected president who under the constitution is in charge of the administration, but in charge of the executive branch. But it's also about Congress taking back its rightful authority. And I think

both of those things have to be done in order to weaken this influence campaign in the way that our government works enables the woke activist groups to have the impact that they do. Interesting. Well, you very strategically lay out a number of big issues in the book and sort of explain, you know, whether it's in the area of the transgender movement or border and immigration or energy. You really clearly explain, hey, this is how the left, this woketipus has kind of infiltrated and affected and spread this message. I want to start with chapter four, which is green energy and this whole push. You, you title that chapter, the green revolving door. And you give some really helpful history on kind of where this all started,

this green movement push, how far back it goes. This isn't necessarily new. No, no. Well, it's interesting, you know, the climate alarmist movement in the 70s, they were warning us about a coming ice age. And then by the time it was clear that temperatures were rising, they were saying, oh, no, it's global warming. And there was always a little bit of like, you know, we're burning fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. It stands to reason that our climate might warm. But every single prediction they make, and I mean, it's like decade after decade after decade, they get it entirely wrong. Like right now, according to Al Gore's inconvenient truth, which was inconveniently published years ago so that we can see what the

predictions actually ended up being. There shouldn't be snow on Mount Kilimanjaro. You know, we should see the Maldives were supposed to sink beneath the waves by 2018. They're not only still above ground. They're more above ground than they used to be. Wow. And that's not to say, you know, that I think ultimately the global climate is something we can't fully understand. It's also slightly positive if our world warms, just a little bit. I mean, cold is still the bigger killer than warm. And plants tend to do better. I mean, there's this great book by Alex Epstein that I've just finished called The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. And he talks about how, like, if we were really concerned about plants and about human flourishing,

then we would want to burn more fossil fuels because this is the number one engine of growth that we've seen. and it's made our lives tremendously, but how many things in this room were made with oil? Like you see all the climate protesters in there, the world is about to end shirts, and their shirts are made out of oil. There's this wonderful graphic that shows like, shirt made out of using oil,

shoes made using oil, glasses made using oil. And it's just like, if you have an ounce of self-understanding of where we've come from, as a species. Anyway, the book is about how this green movement has influenced the federal government. And one of the reasons I call it the green revolving door is that a lot of the bureaucrats

who run the EPA and some of these other agencies, they came from woke activist groups, the Department of the Interior. They're at a woke activist group. They go to the administrative state. they go back to the woke activist group and vice versa. So some of them were Obama appointees who went and worked at these activist groups almost as a shadow government or government in waiting. Biden enters office and suddenly they're back in the administrative state. And the biggest person on this chapter is John Podesta, who you should know immediately, you know, Hillary Clinton's

former campaign manager, former chief of staff in the White House of Bill. Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, founder of the Center for American Progress, which is the most, like the woktipus, the center of the woktipus is the Center for American Progress, like Center for American Progress and Open Society Foundations and the Arabella Advisors Network are pretty much the driving, like, the internal heart of this massive influence campaign. And is that because they have all the money and all the big names and the power that are pushing this?

It's so the two others, you know, Arabella advisors and the Open Society, which is George Soros and now Alex Soros's organization, they fund all these groups. And then of course, the groups also get money from the union dues of many teachers and other workers who are in major unions, which is another story. But the Center for American Progress was described as the most influential think tank of the Biden era. they've set something like 100 staff into the Biden administration, and they are very deeply connected. They're very woke on pretty much every issue. And they're really pushing the carbon, you know, the anti-fossil fuel agenda. And John Podesta is the guy who was tasked under the Inflation Reduction Act, are the thing that Biden claimed would fight inflation. And then once it was passed, he said,

This is the biggest investment in green energy in history. It's like, huh, I wonder where your real priorities are, Mr. President. But John Podesta is directing $1.9 billion from that particular bill. Wow. So it's interesting to me that, and we've seen this, it's no surprise, but it doesn't just kind of stop with those big policy issues, the things that are talked about in why. Washington, D.C., we've seen for a while now that there's also been this push on social issues.

And you touch on, you have a whole chapter dedicated to really this effort around transgenderism and this agenda. How did that come about? Because I think you can kind of see with something like climate and energy. It's like, all right, those are already topics that the government's been talking about for decades. But then why start going after kids? Yeah, that's a great question. It's mainly because there's a really powerful organization called the Human Rights Campaign. And I think that some of this was in late Obama. You know, after Oburgafel, the LGBT movement decided, oh, well, we just achieved the biggest success we have always been fighting for for decades.

What's next? And they moved immediately to transgender issues. You had Caitlin Jenner. You had Obama. suddenly trying to make Title IX into this transgender push. And thankfully, President Trump put a stop to that. And then when Biden comes in, when he won the election, so there's the human rights campaign.

I call them the LGBTQ mafia because they act that way. If you look at, they have indexes. They call it the corporate equality index. They have the health care equality index. They have a lot of different equality indexes where they say, if you're a company, if you're a hospital, if you're whatever, we're going to rank you based on how pro-LGB you are. So some things, not everybody is going to necessarily disagree with.

Like, you know, we don't want you discriminating against people who say that they're gay or trans or whatever. And it's like you can see to some degree like we don't want to make things hostile for people just because of what they think, how they identify. But at the same time, transgender regulations, like when you are saying, I'm not going to discriminate on you based on transgender status, you are bringing, you're opening a whole new can of worms. Not only are you, you know, you're denying tradition, you're denying biology, you're denying fairness in a lot of basic cases. And you're your weakening safety. Yeah. So when you have, you know, and my heart breaks for people who really do struggle with gender dysphoria.

Like, I think it is a serious, difficult condition. I think it's a mental condition that should be solved through therapy. But I do think that we need to recognize that they're suffering. Yeah. But the way to solve that is not to have these blanket policies that say, look, if you're a man and you claim to identify as a woman, you can go into women's restrooms and lock a room. rooms. You should be allowed into women's, what are they called, when you have someone recovering from like domestic assault and shelters. Yes, exactly. Like women's shelters have to be open to biological men who claim to identify as women. And like it's, that was a rule in the Obama

administration. That was a rule they brought up again in the Biden administration, pushed by a lot of the woke activist groups here. Wow. But the human rights campaign had this wish list they published right after Biden won. And according to my research, the administration essentially said, you know, the human rights campaign says jump. They say how high. Wow. It was like 75% of the recommendations from the human rights campaign were implemented. Some of these things were like telling Border Patrol not to refer to illegal aliens as he or she unless you tell them that.

Like honoring preferred pronouns. These are people who are breaking our laws coming into our country, abetting and exacerbating a crisis. And instead of helping Border Patrol do its job, you're telling them to be woke and not offend these people. That's how far off the reservation our government was in these past four years. And the human rights campaign also, I think you remember the, oh, come on, 2020 decision with Gorset. Boston, Bostock, the Clayton County. The human rights campaign says, you need to apply Bostock to things that Bostock, in particular,

Neil Gorsuch writing the majority opinion, said don't apply. So he's like, look, this means you can't fire someone if they identify as gay or transgender. But he explicitly said, we're not dealing with pronouns. We're not dealing with locker rooms, bathrooms. Like, all of that is not at issue here. This ruling doesn't apply. human rights campaign immediately in this document says, you need to apply Bostock to every single

federal civil rights law. And that means that means bathrooms. That means changing rooms. That means everything. And so when the Biden administration has the Title IX ruling, when the Biden administration takes this, you know, scalpel that gorse a chat. And, you know, I tended to agree with Alito that I think that the whole ruling was really wrongly decided. But like taking Gorsuch at his word, the Biden administration is completely, you know, take they, he gave them an inch. Yeah. They're taking a mile. Yeah.

Yeah. What I'm consistently hearing you say is the rabbit hole goes much, much deeper than many of us have known. And I think, you know, one of the institutions that for a long times, so many Americans thought was kind of immune from this was that of law enforcement, you know, that it's this strong, very pro-American group of individuals. that are there to serve everybody, they're not political, and yet even law enforcement, as you cover in the book, has been affected by the woktipus. This is one of the worst, yeah, because I have tremendous respect for law enforcement. I mean, it's not law enforcement, but my father was a volunteer fireman. And, you know, seeing the sort of situations that people in law enforcement and fire,

I think they're similar, even though you're not enforcing the law. when you're in fire, you're going and trying to save people's lives. But you're still, you have this constantly on call mentality and you're engaging with the public and you have to be careful about what you do and how you do it. And I feel like police officers and law enforcement in general are stuck in that same situation. But at the same time, when the rot comes down, and it usually trickles from the top. So you get like the Southern Poverty Law Center is brought in in this past administration. You had, and there, I should say a little bit, I need to keep it a little short because I could

go on forever about that. You maybe wrote a book. Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, they demonized conservatives. They have a map of the Ku Klux Klan chapters along with good conservative groups like Family Research Council and Alliance Defending Freedom, led to a terrorist attack. They've had sexual harassment, racial discrimination scandal, fired their country. co-founder. Just this summer, they had a, they've been accused of union busting. They have,

you know, they're facing a defamation lawsuit that could blow them entirely open. Like all of these things, if there was one organization that you don't trust to help law enforcement, it's the Southern Poverty Law Center. And yet the Southern Poverty Law Center was brought in. Biden nominated one of their judge, one of their lawyers as a top attorney, a U.S. attorney in the federal system. Yeah. And he brought them in to advise 18 White House meetings. Wow.

You had the Department of Justice, the Department of Education. And then, of course, you had the notorious FBI Richmond memo, which just lifted immediately from the Southern Poverty Law Center. These are Roman radical traditional Catholic hate groups. And of course, that list is so outdated. Anyway, as I said, I could go on. But what we saw in this past administration was the Southern Poverty Law Center being welcomed in, which sends the message that federal law enforcement considers this group that exists to demonize conservatives to be a reliable source on domestic terrorism. And Margaret Wong bragged about being brought into the administration to advise on domestic terrorism.

At the same time, you had the Department of Justice bring cases against pro-life protesters outside of abortion clinics using the FACE Act, putting them in prison. And then, of course, you had all of the stuff after the leaking of the Dobbs decision where, and you and our former colleague Mary Margaret O'Lohan covered this very well, all of the just the fire bombings, the, the attacks, the spray paint, you know, the terror. It was like a reign of terror against pro-life pregnancy centers and Catholic churches. And Catholic vote to this day has a tracker. And it's hundreds. And yet the Justice Department can barely summon, you know, summon the courage to bring more than a handful of charges.

Meanwhile, they're bringing so many against pro-life protesters. That sort of imbalance, you know, I found evident. that many of the same left-wing groups that were pushing other policies like the ACLU, the Center for American Progress, advocated for aggressively enforcing the FACE Act, and then at the same time are pushing this narrative that pro-lifers represent a threat and that pro-life pregnancy centers are not even centers. Like they're, I don't remember, I think it was the National Abortion Federation. They have a report saying these organizations are trying to take away women's rights.

And it's like, this is a pregnancy center where, yes, they're trying to convince women not to get abortions, right? But how are they convincing them? They're giving away free diapers, free wipes, free rides to help mothers who are in crisis, helping them find jobs, helping them find what they need so that they don't have to be forced or feel like they're forced to make the decision to abort their child. And these are the people who are being demonized by these groups and then attack. and then not having the Justice Department prosecute their attackers. Tyler, I'm thinking as you're speaking about the fact that we have a new administration with Trump. But the roots of this go deep, as you very articulately have explained here and in the book.

So what's the roadmap for President Trump to get this really woke agenda out of our government because these are things that you don't flip the page overnight, the folks that have been a part of implementing these policies, many of them are government bureaucrats that are hard to remove. What's the roadmap? Yeah, it's a tough map ahead. I mean, so some of the top ones are immediately going to be replaced because they were political appointees. A few of them have already announced which of the woke activist groups they're going back to lead.

So it's interesting they're creating a government and exit. But at the same time, there are a lot of bureaucrats who are entrenching. And the Washington Post had this really revealing story where a lot of the bureaucrats who are hired with job titles like diversity, equity, and inclusion, they're working to take that off of their job title so that they don't get removed in the next administration. And I think some of them will be fairly easy to identify, but a lot of them are retrenching. And then, of course, there's all the Trump proofing that the Biden administration had been doing previously. And then you get to the fact that, you know, one of the main points of this book is that the deep state is real.

And I think there was even a deep state phenomenon in Biden's administration when it came to Israel, where bureaucrats decided that they didn't care what the people's elected president said about Israel. They wanted the United States not to stand with Israel. And of course, Biden had his own weaknesses about Israel. He's not the biggest friend of Israel. His record is a little tarnished on that. But at least on October 7th, he came out and gave a clear statement. People in the bureaucracy didn't like that. And they wrote dissent cables.

They fought to pressure him, both within and without, to not support Israel. And there's evidence that that pressure, you know, really had an effect in his administration. You remember the Listen to Michigan campaign trying to get him to lose the Michigan primary or at least lose a lot of votes. All of that is covered in the book. But I think what we see is the deep state is real. President Trump has his work cut out for him. And I'm really excited to see what Doge, what Vivek Romiswamy and Elon Musk are going to do. I'm really excited.

But, and I think most of his cabinet picks are going to be pretty aggressive. Russ vote at OMB. is ideal. But there are laws that need to be considered. And it is a little bit, you know, I really want Congress if, you know, if I could say this to seriously consider, you know, including the Raines Act potentially in their reconciliation push, including the Raines Act would pare back the administrative state and return some of that power to Congress.

shrink the government. Yes, exactly, right? And also to look at public sector unions, because this is a thing that even FDR, who is essentially the architect of our modern bureaucratic state, said, you shouldn't have a system where public servants are being put into this adversarial relationship with their employer, which is the people. Yeah. So when you have a public sector union, it's not just. management and labor, you know, bargaining back and forth. It's labor going up against the people's elected representatives. And even FDR realized there was something not good about that. And I think it's fascinating to see the strongest growth that labor has had in the past few decades has been in public sector unions, largely because they are kind of insulated from some of the natural market pushback that normal unions get. Interesting.

Tyler, tell us how do we get the book, how do we pick up our coffee, and follow your work as well. Yeah, thank you. Thanks, Virginia. So yeah, you can go to there. We will have a website, woketipus.com. It's also available on Amazon. I have recorded the audiobook, which will be coming out probably around March.

But yeah, I think this book is essential for equipping the new. administration, Congress, and Americans who don't want to see us return to the woke policies of the last four years to equip themselves to know where it really came from. You know, we remember when Biden was forced out, you know, kicked out of the race, kicking and screaming. And I think the real power in Washington, I don't have, I don't claim to have all the answers. But I think this shines a key light on how that was possible. Why the man behind the Oval Office was not the most powerful person in Washington, at least for that time. And this influence campaign, it's not going away in the Trump administration.

But yeah, you can follow my work and your excellent work at the Daily Signal. DailySignal.com. We're on all platforms. We are, you know, TikTok, which seems to have its days numbered, is the one place we are not emphatically. Yeah, so, you know, to social, Instagram. I personally am biggest on X with Tyler to O'Neill. Excellent. Tyler O'Neill, author of the Woktipus.

Tyler, thank you for your time. And thank you for kind of pulling back the curtain on what is and continues to be really a major issue in our government, in our society, and certainly demonstrates that President Trump has his work cut out for him. Thank you for your time. Thanks, Virginia. Thanks for having me. Again, you can pick up your copy of the woketipus wherever books are sold. Of course, you can order it on Amazon if it's live and available for order right now.

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