The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government | Tyler O’Neil

Transcript:

Shane Harris: Hello everyone. Welcome back into the AMAC Better For America podcast. I’ll be your host today. I’m Shane Harris, the editor in chief of AMAC Newsline, and I’m pleased to have with us today Tyler O’Neill. He’s the senior editor at The Daily Signal. He covers a, wide range of topics from media to culture and everything in between.

He’s also the author of two books. The first is Making Hate Pay the Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center. And the second is the Woketopus, the dark money cabal, manipulating the federal government. Tyler, thanks so much for being with us today.

Tyler O’Neil: Thanks for having me, Shane.

Shane Harris: Of course. So just to get started here, I’d love to hear a little bit about your most recent book.

Obviously, this is very relevant with what we’re seeing with Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency and all the corruption, waste, fraud, and abuse that they’re finding in the government. So give us a little bit of background there. What was your thought process and how has Doge played right into exactly what you’re talking about?

Tyler O’Neil: Yeah, I think Doge has confirmed my basic point in spades. my basic point was that what we saw from the Biden administration, we saw the left using the administrative state to force it woke ideology on the American people. And this was often done, President Biden was often out to lunch. He was not always there.

Now we’ve seen how many things he signed using an auto pen. this is, it’s not, a big surprise that he wasn’t the guy making all the decisions. But at the same time, I set out to find who exactly was, and I had been surprised. Because my first book, making Hate Pay, the Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center exposed what I think of as the, the worst organization, the tip of the spear when it comes to demonizing conservatives and Christians for what they believe, for opposing the left’s agenda.

And so the SPLC has this map of. Hate groups across the country where they put you alongside chapters of the clan if you don’t follow their preferred policies on gender ideology, on critical race theory, on a host of issues. And yet the SPLC, which is a very morally bankrupt organization, I mean they have, they’ve had a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal during which they had to.

Fire their co-founder. They’ve long been accused of exaggerating hate to raise money and smear their political opponents. And this is even coming from former SPLC staff who came out and said, we, we always knew that this was a corrupt organization from within. Now that Morris de fired, we have, yet more proof.

And here’s my experience. And then of course, recently they’ve had a union busting scandal. Anyway, this is the last organization. That law enforcement and federal agencies should be relying on for, on expertise to fight the domestic terrorism threat. And that’s exactly what we saw under Biden. So I thought if the SPLC has a tremendous amount of influence.

In the Biden White House and in the administrative state. What other organizations are also working closely calling the shots in this administration? And the more I looked, the more I found, example after example of these leftist groups that demand a specific agenda item and then the administrative state just.

Pulls it, pushes it in, does their bidding, essentially publishes as their own copied and pasted, documents from left-wing activist groups. And I also traced the dark money behind them. So these groups are funded by what I call the Left’s Dark Money Network, where people like George and Alex Soros, through their Open Society foundations are propping up pretty much every leftist cause you’ve ever heard of.

Shane Harris: So if I’m understanding you correctly, what Doge is doing, it’s not just about finding corruption, waste, fraud, and abuse, it’s also a matter of democratic legitimacy because we have these left wing groups that are having undue influence on our elected leaders behind the scenes in the shadows, and most of the American people have no idea that this is going on.

Tyler O’Neil: It’s even worse than that because the people that they’re influencing here are not elected. These people are part of the administrative state, and so what you have is, you have Biden who has been influenced by these groups, but then he nominates people, puts them into positions. In the administrative state to make these rulings.

And then you have these, you, so just, zooming back, the administrative state is 438 executive agencies in the federal government. And these agencies are everything from the A TF, the FBI, the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Department of Justice, the Department of X, Y, Z and whatever.

and so all of these agencies. Are supposed to be, they’re supposed to fall under the president of the United States. we saw during the first Trump administration how limited that truth is, how the President, even though he wants to fire certain activists who are using their. Positions in the administrative state against his agenda and against his promises to the American people, how he can’t fire these people because they’re supposed to be independent agencies.

And right now there are a lot of lawsuits regarding this very issue because it has to be addressed. Either these agencies. Fall under the President and are accountable to the people, or they are not accountable to the people and they’re insulated from the president. And this view of these agencies being insulated has long been status quo in the United States.

And what we saw under Biden, even under Biden, we had a little bit of a deep state effort when it came to Israel because. There were members of his own administration that were willing to stand up and oppose the president of the United States when he promised Israel that we would always have Israel’s back and.

this system that we have, this. So that’s the fundamental corruption, is that you have an administrative state that is not being held accountable to the people’s elected representatives. And so my book focused on how that administrative state have been captured by this woke activist apparatus.

Shane Harris: And so with that in mind, and obviously this book comes out at a perfect time. With these first few months of the Trump administration, almost out of nowhere, the number one story in the country has been Doge. That has been the predominant narrative on both sides of the aisle thus far in the Trump administration.

And so based on what you’ve seen so far as one of the foremost experts on this unelected deep state bureaucracy. On the Woketopus on the left wing funding apparatus, how confident are you that what the Trump administration is doing will be effective long term on dismantling some of these, the left wing funding apparatus?

Tyler O’Neil: That is an excellent question. as of right now, the effects of the Trump administration are going to be limited. So what I can say is, the Trump administration has been more aggressive in fighting the deep state than we have. Pretty much ever seen before, and this is partially, the administrative stages of relatively new phenomenon in the grand scheme of American history.

We’re talking. Woodrow Wilson is, when it starts, it gets dismantled a little bit under Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. It gets brought back with a vengeance under Herbert Hoover and then expanded tremendously under FDR. And ever since FDR we’ve had a very entrenched administrative. State. Reagan did a decent job in fighting it, but of course, Reagan’s number one priority was fighting the Soviets, and he was successful in that.

But when it came to actually holding the deep state accountable. This is a continuing problem that we’ve seen across American history from FDR Onward, and Trump has been the most aggressive in this second term in actually going at it and exposing it, making the case why we have to undermine this administrative state.

And that’s been the best thing out of Doge, is showing where the corruption is. Showing how much money has been funneled to these leftist causes, your and my tax dollars? I was just going through this the other day and I remember when Ukraine first got invaded and I was all rah. We were all, we all thought Ukraine was gonna fall in five seconds, and it holds out far longer than we expected.

this was phenomenal. We were all praising it. Now, we want this war to end. And yet what I found from one of these, one of these things, there are news outlets in Ukraine that now have to close because the Trump administration was taking my tax dollars and your tax dollars and sending it to our competitors in the news industry in Ukraine.

And now finally, that has been stopped. the level of corruption here, what our dollars were sent to. And that’s not to say, look, I think Ukraine should have a good journalism, I think that’s, it’s good for people to expose the truth, but my tax dollars, I don’t work every day.

I don’t come into work thinking, oh, thank God the US is going to tax me at gunpoint and take that those tax dollars and send them to my competitors in four. In far-flung parts of the world like this should get us a little bit worked up because this is an utter abuse of our taxpayer dollars. And so Doja has been exposing that what’s happening in Congress right now, they’re discussing.

reconciliation Bill, which represents the best chance at getting Trump’s executive orders enshrined into law and at weakening the deep state apparatus. Because one of the aspects that doesn’t get as much attention, I think, is that we have these public sector unions. Even Franklin Delano Roosevelt thought public sector unions shouldn’t exist.

They. Create an adversarial relationship between public servants and the people’s elected representatives. And they give public servants this natural advantage because they can vote people out of office if they don’t do, if they don’t give the public servants raises. So even FDR said, oh, the federal government should never unionize.

Then JFK changed the rules to allow the federal government to unionize. And then we had this. Really perverse system now where federal bureaucrats will do work for unions and get paid by the taxpayer for that time they spend working for the unions. And so you have, and this is one of the reasons why we have an entrenched deep state right now, is because these public sector unions, which shouldn’t even exist, they already have an edge over all other types of unions.

But then they also get. Taxpayer funding for people doing work for those unions. The easiest thing that, and this is something I’ve been talking about for a little while, Congress can, in the reconciliation bill tax, the amount of money that these unions are effectively getting, this thing called official time.

If they tax it at a rate of say 100%, then they can recoup a lot of that money. For the American people that’s right now going essentially to help the deep state effort.

Shane Harris: Yeah. And I wanna shift gears a little bit because you brought up something there that I thought was, very interesting. And not only was the federal government specifically through U-S-A-I-D sending money to outlets in Ukraine, it was sending it to some outlets right here in the United States specifically.

I believe the figure was $8 million or something thereabout that was going to politico. So as somebody who’s researched this, when you find out something like that, and especially as a direct competitor of Politico right here in the United States, what goes through your mind and how does this just reinforce everything you’ve been saying?

Tyler O’Neil: Yeah, so I think this example, and, Politico has an interesting, An interesting value proposition in the market. Politico sells these subscriptions where they get very specific news that is specific for a certain industry and it has a pro subscription. So you have Politico Pro, you have Politico Tech, you have Politico, X, Y, Z, et cetera.

And they often get the very first news. Before other people and they try to get that to these industries. So there, there are situations where it does make sense for someone to pay Politico a lot of money for a subscription. And what we’re talking about here was a subscription was Politico Pro subscriptions that U-S-A-I-D had been spending a boatload of money for now.

I can understand one or two political pro subscriptions like this is a thing that I don’t think is necessarily a scandal, but when you get to that sort of money proposition, you’re suddenly talking a very large amount of money. For a lot of people who, I don’t know if all of them really need a political pro subscription, and That, that’s where it becomes a scandal in my mind. I think it’s important to note when it comes to the funding for, news outlets in Ukraine, also for transgender, surgery operations in India, which, those had to shut down because Trump paused it. But when it comes to those things, they’re done in the name of helping someone in need in a foreign country, and they’re not even, they’re not a fee for service thing like they’re A oh U-S-A-I-D and the State Department think it is an American taxpayer’s interest to give money in the form of charity to a news outlet in Ukraine.

That angers me. More than the political pro subscriptions because I understand what they’re paying for in that sense. But in the Ukrainian sense, they’re literally just paying to get some Ukrainian guy a job. I. When I have to get my job and I don’t get, tax incentives, I don’t get money funneled to me in the name of charity I get, I have to work for my pay, and then I get my tax, I get my pay docked for taxes, some of which goes to a competitor.

That’s very different from, oh, we want Politico service and we’re gonna pay. A, but a but load for it. I’m like, alright guys, that’s a scandal. Yes. And I think we should be frustrated about that and there should be accountability for it, but that is ultimately a contractual relationship, whereas the other one is in the name of charity.

It’s more egregious in my mind.

Shane Harris: Sure. and staying on the, this topic of media, because I think. We’re at a very interesting moment right now in the broader media landscape, both with what the, Daily Signal is trying to do, what we’re trying to do at AMAC Newsline and providing an alternative news source.

And something caught my eye the other day, on your ex Feeded, Elizabeth Mitchell, who’s a reporter with the Daily Signal. she recently the opportunity to travel with President Trump on the out of town pool to a, on a trip to Mar-a-Lago. Which, yeah. For those who aren’t familiar, the out of town pool is like a, special select group of reporters who are able to travel with the president on Air Force One, often get privileged access to ask him questions that other outlets may not get to ask.

And historically, traditionally, this has been reserved for the more legacy outlets like the Associated Press, Reuters, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, outlets like that. But what we’re seeing now with the Trump administration’s commitment to new media voices is that more and more outlets like the Daily Signal are getting this opportunity to travel with the president to get that type of access.

And so I was just hoping you could share with us a little bit what that meant for the Daily Signal and what it means for newer, not necessarily even just conservative, but alternative media outlets that are getting that kind of access.

Tyler O’Neil: Yeah, this is monumental, and it’s hard to overstate the degree to which this changes the game, in media and in journalism in general.

I would like to see, even the balance. I. Because while you’re talking about the pool, is still mostly made up of legacy media, out legacy media sources. I would like that balance to be a little bit more, even. But I really applaud President Trump for everything his White House has been doing on this because they have realized that, conservative media, alternative media has been kicked to the curb for too long.

And when you actually look at. The way that journalism works. Having access, like this is a fundamental part of being able to do the job, of being able to report the news. And we had, un under the first Trump administration and under, George W. Bush in particular, we just had this consistent oh yeah, the legacy press is there.

Yes, the legacy media is going to demonize whatever the Republican administration does, but we have to walk with them because they’re the ones with all the power. And what Trump is doing is he’s sending a really powerful message saying, no, we can give conservative outlets a seat at the table. And because.

The legacy media has repeatedly shown a bias and a hostility, not just to the sitting president, but also to the millions of Americans who voted for him, who actually believe what he says. thi this is one of the aspects, like the Associated Press also got kicked out of the White House recently, and this is something that I can’t help but celebrate, even though the specific.

The specific issue was the Gulf of America and the name, and I’m like, okay, that’s a small issue. But the Associated Press is among the worst offenders when it comes to, trying to make conservative ideas, literally unthinkable in the newsroom. Like the Associated Press has an AP style guide.

I’m sure you’re familiar with it, where most journalists use the style guide for basic things. it’s a very useful tool if you want to all agree that we spell advisor with an E instead of an O, for instance. Like those, sorts of, there are good things that the AP style guy does. But the AP style guide also says, oh, you can’t refer to somebody who supports abortion as pro-abortion.

They have to be pro-choice. You can’t refer to somebody who defends life in the womb as pro-life. You have to say anti-abortion. And there are all these ways that they twist the narrative and they make it so that the. There isn’t a level playing field on issues and these issues that we really care about, that the American people care about because they’ve been forced to care about them by the left, forcing its ideology on them, on gender issues.

The AP says you have to use the preferred pronouns of whoever you’re writing about, and you have to K out a gender ID or to a climate alarmism. You can’t ever suggest that there’s any debate among the scientific community that the world is gonna end in five years if we don’t stop driving cars and if we don’t smash our Teslas in, this, Teslas are a, totally different issue, if we don’t get rid of carbon emissions by.

next week, suddenly the world’s gonna end. And this narrative is not only false, but also forced upon us ideologically by people like the ap and Trump is saying, no, I’m not having this.

Shane Harris: Yeah. and I think that gets at another point, which has always struck me about the legacy press and their deference to, liberal or democratic leaders and their hostility towards Republican leaders.

Is that the power to ask questions to those in power? It’s a very underrated, authority or power that can shape the national conversation and shape the way that Americans look at things. If everybody in the White House press briefing room is on Joe Biden’s side and nobody asks him or his press secretary a critical question that essentially gives the administration leeway to cover up whatever they want.

Because even if outlets like yours and mine are reporting on what’s going on, if nobody is directly asking them those questions, that’s a scary thought for our democracy. It’s essentially almost like you’re letting Biden staffers asking questions about how great he is versus now there’s, they’re setting a precedent that you can have alternative.

And potentially even hostile, media voices in that room. Caroline Levitt, the press secretary? Yes. A lot of the new media voices that have been in there have been from conservative outlets, but she’s had some liberal outlets in there as well. And so I’d just love to get your thoughts on the precedent that this sets moving forward for potentially when we don’t have President Trump in the White House.

Maybe there’s a Democrat back in the White House. What is your optimism for. What we’re seeing right now, setting a new standard that will continue beyond the Trump presidency. I.

Tyler O’Neil: I, I really hope that is the case. I think, I think cons, the onus right now, unfortunately, and I don’t really mean unfortunately because I think Elizabeth Mitchell, I think, my former colleague, Mary Margaret Han, who’s, the daily wires.

White House Press Secretary. And then also there’s another, there’s a Hillsdale College. I’m a Hillsdale College graduate, and one of my fellow alumna is also one of the White House, correspondents. And so it’s really awesome to see, these people who I think are going to do a great job.

The onus is on the conservative outlets right now and on the alternative outlets to ask important questions to show that they. Belong at the table and to make the case through that for this policy to continue. Because you’re exactly right. As soon as a Democrat takes over in the Oval Office, they’re going to try to undermine this, to reverse this.

That’s one of the things like I think Trump is off to a really powerful start here, but he has to. The ball has to keep going. And I’m, I’m very, confident that my colleague Elizabeth Mitchell is going to do an excellent job. I just really hope that we don’t end up, squandering the opportunity.

I don’t think we will. I do think though, that the Trump administration should, as time goes on and as conservative outlets prove themselves, expand this new. Pool seat, maybe into another seat, maybe into, make it so that, and I would love, like you said, there have been alternative media sources that are left-leaning, that have also gotten this seat.

I think the Daily Beast has, I would love to see Elizabeth Mitchell and the Daily Beast. Part of the same pool, covering the president and the idea that it always has to be Reuters, a FP, CNN Fox, that it always has to be one of these establishment media sources, that needs to go out the window because the journalism industry has not been like that for a long time.

And this is, it’s really refreshing to see the Trump administration acknowledging reality and finally giving that seat at the table to new outlets.

Shane Harris: Yeah. And, just to, wrap up here, it, feels like with what the Trump administration is doing, but also with the broader trends that we’re seeing in media where trust in the legacy outlets is not just declining, but it’s collapsing.

Their viewership is not just declining, it’s falling off a cliff. And it feels like we’re at an inflection point in the national media landscape across our entire country. And there are so many people out there who they’ve watched CNN or Fox News, or M-S-N-B-C their entire lives, or they’ve read the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, or the Washington Post their entire lives, and now they’re suddenly waking up to the fact that they’re being lied to.

And they’re looking for that alternative. And that’s why we’re seeing massive growth for outlets like The Daily Signal, the Daily Wire, AMAC, newsline. And so my question to you, and I’m curious about your response here on a personal level as well, is what do we do to make sure that we don’t betray that trust that people are placing in us, like CNN betrayed it like M-S-N-B-C betrayed it.

What do we do as outlets? Because, I don’t think that you are pretending to be completely objective or unbiased all the time. No. And, we’re not. We openly say we are a conservative outlet. We present the news and our analysis through a conservative lens, a conservative perspective. and I think that honesty and transparency really resonates with people.

But just curious to hear your thoughts now that so many more people are placing their trust in outlets like ours. What do we do to continue to earn that trust and to keep it?

Tyler O’Neil: Yeah, that’s an excellent question. I think we have to report the news. and we have to, we have to do, there’s this wonderful, Wonderful example. This is actually usually a defense in any sort of defamation case, but you have the, the sentence where you acknowledge the point of your opposition. You say sure. This is the case, but however, and you have this little acknowledgement where you say, look, I know where they’re coming from and one of the reasons why I’m conser, why I’m very optimistic that conservative media is not going to end up in the situation you described is because it is impossible almost for us.

To cover the news without having seen the left slant already. And so what we have to do, we have to make sure that we’re acknowledging that there are some points on the other side, but we also have to say, look. This is our principle. This is why we believe what we believe. We’re not leaving that if you level with the American people, the thing that the American people hate the most about the legacy media is the same thing that they grew to hate about Anthony Fauci.

It’s the same thing they’re going to hate about the administrative state right now under Doge. Is this mentality that people can lie with abandon if their principle is to help the American people live better than the American people would live on their own. And so what we’ve seen, this bureaucratic mindset where I just, I always have to bring this up because I think it encapsulates it so perfectly when the health establishment.

Early in the pandemic said we’re, you should not wear masks. Masks don’t protect you against the spread of COVID-19. And they set this very loud and clear, obviously. And then later, I think it was like two weeks later, they said, oh, you do need masks. Masks protect you against the spread of COVID-19.

And when they were called on it, the public health authorities didn’t say, oh, we later learned the truth. Because that would’ve been leveling with the American people. That would’ve been something that the American people maybe could forgive. No, they said, we know better than you. And we were afraid that if we said that masks harm the transmission of COVID-19, you would buy all the masks yourselves and not let.

The public health authorities, the doctors, the nurses, these people get enough masks that they would need, and that was the public statement. This is their defense for what they said was, we lied to you because we know better. And then there’s the whole other issue of were they investing in these mass companies before they then told the public that they needed to buy masks?

there’s a whole nother level of corruption here we can get into. But the thing that I, that stuck with me was the brazenness of the lie. And this automatic assumption, which we saw in the parental rights debate in 2021, where you had a candidate for Governor of Virginia getting up on that stage saying, I don’t think parents should have the right to decide what their students learn in school.

And they reveal how out of touch they are and how top down they are in bureaucratic. And they say We don’t trust. We don’t trust ordinary Americans with their freedom. We don’t trust you to make the decision of whether you need to wear a mask. We don’t trust you with any sort of input on what your kids learn in school, and that is the poison pill.

That the left has not been able to get rid of, and the left needs to get rid of it yesterday because I want us to have a political system where we have two sane political parties where it is a legitimate matter of debate, which one I think you should vote for, because they both make really good cases.

Unfortunately, right now we have one party that is. Often conservative. And then we have one party that is off a cliff on all these leftist ideologies. And there are people on the Democratic Party that I like and respect, but I’m just like, if you really think I. That cutting off kids’ healthy body parts and putting them on drugs that are gonna impact them for the rest of their lives is a positive thing.

And the only way to prevent them from committing suicide, this is it. They don’t trust the children not to commit suicide. If they aren’t affirmed in their ideology, this is how far they have gone. And so anyway, I don’t need to go on and on, but this is why I get so animated, because I see this ideology.

That is dividing people. that is really corrupting our hearts and minds and it’s being forced on us. And that’s why I wrote the book to expose it. That’s why I wrote the book, about the Southern Poverty Law Center, because I think the left thinks that anybody who disagrees with them needs to be silenced and.

What we need to have is a free speech culture in this country where we can debate issues where if you disagree with LGBTQ plus gobbledygook, you don’t get canceled. You don’t lose your job, you don’t get hounded out of existence. And by the way, if you support it, I don’t think you should be. You should lose your job either.

I think there should be a real debate about these things. but anyway.

Shane Harris: Yeah. No, said. will Tyler, I wanna thank you for your time today, for The Better For America Podcast. make sure go out, check out his new book, the Woketopus. the Dark Money Keal manipulating the federal government.

And, make sure you check out Tyler’s content on the Daily Signal, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, really changing the conversation. And, again, Tyler, I wanna thank you for your time today.

Tyler O’Neil: Thanks again for having me, Shane.