Newt talks with Tyler O'Neil, senior editor at The Daily Signal, about his new book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.” Their discussion centers on President Trump's pledge to dismantle the deep state and the extensive network of activist organizations mobilizing to resist his reform efforts. O'Neil's book maps out the intricate web of dark money foundations and activist groups embedded within federal agencies, highlighting the challenges and strategies for overcoming these forces. Their conversation also touches on the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and its potential role in rooting out waste and abuse in the federal government. O'Neil emphasizes the importance of transparency, accountability, and the need for the American people to stay informed and engaged in holding the government accountable.
On this episode of news World.
As President Trump pledges to dismantle the deep state in his second term, a groundbreaking investigation reveals the extensive network of activist organizations already mobilizing to resist his reform efforts. In his new book, The Woke to Puss the Dark money cabal manipulating the Federal government, Tyler O'Neill maps the intricate web of dark money foundations and activist groups embedded within federal agencies. As America prepares for fundamental reform of the administrative state, with major policy battles looming over immigration, enforcement, energy independence, and labor regulations, O'Neill provides an essential blueprint for understanding and overcoming the force's opposing reform here to talk about his new book and the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency known as DOGE. I'm really pleased to welcome my guest, Tyler O'Neil. He is a senior editor at The Daily Signal, which I will tell you I look at every single day. Tyler, welcome and thank you for joining me on newts World.
Thank you so much, Speaker Gingert, It's an honor be with you now.
I'm just guessing the youth started working on this book before any of us had ever heard of Doge.
What influenced you in.
Wanting to tell the story of how the far left agenda has infiltrated the federal government.
Yeah.
So, the number one organization I've been following most closely for years is a group called the Southern Poverty Law Center, and I think many of your listeners may be aware of them. They began with noble intentions when they started. They actually did did represent poor people in the South legally and got people off of death row who were falsely convicted, like really great noble beginnings. But like so many of these often left wing activist groups, they go from noble beginnings to starting to have a little bit of corruption to outright attacking Conservatives and Christians. And so the SPLC started suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy, which was a really great thing to do in the early eighties. Of Course, the problem is that even in the early eighties, the lawyers of the SPLC said that suing clan groups was like shooting fish in a barrel, and they said that it was really easy. They said that people who really needed their help were not getting their representation that they needed because the SPLC was so focused on fighting clan groups that barely existed anymore at the time, and so you had this shift. So Morris D's, who is the co founder there, would go after the clan groups. He would get a major settlement in court. It was like millions of dollars. The Klan group didn't have that. They had like fifty grand. But Morris D's could go to his donors and say, I got this clan group shut down, give me money, and he got millions and millions of dollars, and so over time he ran out of grand dragons to conquer. It was a supply and demand problem, as redheaded libertarian Josie Glabach was saying on timcast earlier this week, and I think she was exactly right. There wasn't enough supply of clan groups to sue into bankruptcy for the demand. So eventually the SPLC started saying, hey, look at the Family Research Council, Hey look at Alliance Defending Freedom, Hey look at the Center for Security Policy. These mainstream conservative and Christian groups are really hate groups. They belong on a map with the Ku Klux Klan, and they might pose a domestic terrorism threat to other Americans. I was paying attention to this group and the Biden administration, and I started seeing really shocking signs that the SPLC was being brought into the Biden administration to advise on domestic terrorism. And this really got me thinking. If an organization is horrible as the Southern Poverty Law Center, which had racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in twenty nineteen, their hate map was connected to an act of domestic terrorism in twenty twelve, if that group could have access in the White House, what other groups were having access in the White House. So I did a little digging. I saw the White House visitor logs. I saw some of the big money foundations that were directing money to the SPLC, that were also directing into these other groups. And what I came across was this huge influenced network that is entrenched in the federal bureaucracy. And it's the kind of thing that Trump is coming in. Thank God, it's a new day in America. We have DEI pushed out, woke, pushed out by executs of order, removed from the federal government, and yet these ideas and many of the bureaucrats who support them are still in the federal government and they're going to be fighting back, and so the deep state is rearing its head. It's already starting to happen, but it's going to get worse. And President Trump, I think he understands the threat. But this book lays out the specifics of where his administration can look and what they can do to root this out while they have this momentum after this historic election.
And since your book could almost be a roadmap for the Department of Government.
Efficiency, yes, I would like to think so.
And I noticed that on his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order establishing the Department of Government Efficiency. They are supposed to basically end on July fourth, twenty twenty six, so they're in a pretty short runway. What do you think they can actually get done in that year and a half.
Well, I think there's a lot that DOGE can get done. It's interesting he established it in what's now the US DOGE Service, but it was the US Digital Service and Department that was created by Barack Obama. There are four hundred and thirty eight federal agencies, by the way, so this is one of them that Obama created. That's now being repurposed to root out waste and abuse in the federal government, which is a great step forward. Trump is also creating little dogelets in each of the existing federal agencies to monitor and fight back. I think there's a great deal that DOGE can do with these smaller agencies within the other agencies. They can pay attention to and find any of the roles that were previously focused on DEI. These diversity, equity and inclusion really really falsely labeled, because, as I'm sure your audience is very well aware, DEI is all about bringing back quotas but reversing them so that you can have pushing favored minority groups against people who are perceived as white, Various things like that along the lines of critical race theory. But it's really good he's getting rid of that from the top, but from the bottom. You have to have these small agencies of DOGE in the other agencies to keep a close eye to notice when a job was created to enforce DEI, sometimes those jobs are being relabeled and the people in those roles are being relabeled so that they'll survive as Trump comes into office, or at least that's the plan of the deep state. Another really shocking development I saw there was this poll from Nepolitan Institute, and you cited it in one of your recent op eds. I thank you for that. It showed that sixty four percent of DC based federal employees who voted for Kamala Harris so that they would not follow a legal Trump order if they thought it was bad policy. And I think that is the deep state in a nutshell, and I think DOGE is a really important step in rooting it out. But we have to be focused on all sorts of different aspects of the rod in the federal government. And I think my book highlights the left's massive influence campaign and provides, as you said, a roadmap for DOGE to actually implement its very important goal.
I noticed that a number of Democrats have actually agreed to serve on the DOGE subcommittee, in pretty impressive group.
Frankly, what do you make of the.
Fact that they are clearly leaning forward and willing to be engaged in the committee.
Well, so, there was one Democrat who joined the DOGE subcommittee before the new Congress, and I think he might actually be interested in cutting government waste and abuse. The new Democrats who just joined have said publicly that they are trying to hold Doge accountable. In their words, they're trying to prevent it from being as effective as it could be. We have this notion that all the bureaucrats are part of a civil service, and I think there are very many good civil servants in the federal government who would follow a lawful Trump order. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of civil serpents who are being protected by these arcane rules that are really pushed by these public sector unions. And one of the things that I encourage Congress to do is to look at the role that public sector unions play and to listen to somebody I don't usually prefer to listen to, Franklin Delana Roosevelt, who said that public sector unions do not belong in the federal government, that they are an inherently unhelpful and negative force in our republic, because if you have a public sector union, you are pit public servants against the people who the American people voted on to represent them in government. And so you have this adversarial relationship that protects the deep state and leaves the actual civil servants who are serving in the administrative state and want to do the right thing, it often leaves them out in the cold. So you get employees who actually want to help the agenda of the people's elected president, and then you have the employees who are going against it. And it's those employees going against it that are most protected by these public sector unions.
Grover Norquist has been developing something with Jimmy Carter signed I think in nineteen six seventy eight that said a president could actually suspend the unions for national security reasons. And given the aggressiveness with which Trump is doing things, I would not be at all surprised if they come to a real conflict to have him find some way to do that. I was there in nineteen eighty. I had been endorsed by the Professional Air Traffic Control Organization. I represented the Atlanta Airport in the Hampton FAA Center, which was the largest concentration of air traffic control people in the country, and they had developed a strategy of going out on strike because they were convinced that Jimmy Carter would fold, and so I tried very hard to convince them that Ronald Reagan was not Jimmy Carter, and that he was going to fire them. They're about nineteen thousand, five hundred of them, and they said he can't fire us, and he fired us. The entire air traffic control system will collapse. Well, what they didn't realize was that they'd actually laid out an entire plan for hiring people to replace them overnight. The system had two or three days, it was a little shaky, and then businessman on as usual, except those nineteen thousand, five hundred people no longer had jobs. And that sent a signal to the Postal Union, which had six hundred and thirty seven thousand people who were coming up next for negotiation because Reagan was trying to break the wage inflation spiral, and it was much better for them to take on nineteen thousand people and six hundred and thirty five thousand. So there's a lot of strategy involved. But I have a hunch there will come a point in the near future where President Trump will have to take on some bureaucracy and decisively prove that the elected president United States has more power and authority than the local union and the local bureaucrat.
Oh yes, one hundred percent. I think we're already seeing the American Federation of Government Employees fight tooth and nail against every sort of reform that President Trump is going to bring. Before the election, AFGE was publishing a lot of this stuff, warning against certain policies like reinstituting Schedule F that I think Trump should do, and by selecting russ Vote to lead OMB, I think he is illustrating that he is going to do something like this. AFG can't stand it because their whole entire purpose is to protect federal bureaucrats from the potential of them being held accountable for opposing the people's elected president. And so I hate to say it because I don't agree with him on most things, but FDR was really right. He was damn right when it comes to this issue, and I think Congress needs to listen and re examine it. I think Trump will ultimately, I agree with you. I think he's going to have to push and at some point he's going to have to invoke that power. I hope he does.
I mean, Russfold is very common and very tough, and I think it'll be a great director to the budget and he will have an impact. At the same time, I think the union leadership is misunderstanding this moment in history fully as much as the Patco leadership did. The American people overwhelmingly far bigger than Trump's vote. The American people want the federal government fixed, and they wanted to work. I think that we have to recognize that the current system isn't working. And frankly, the whole idea that a bureaucrat arrogates the right to reject the leadership of the President of States is remarkably against the whole spirit of democracy and freedom. I mean, when Lincoln came into office, he fired twelve hundred out of fifteen hundred, so three hundred survived, twelve hundred were gone. These are the people who made policies very small government at the time, but he understood that he could never have won the Civil War if he had allowed the pro Southern and pro slavery bureaucrasts to stay in office. A large part of his first year is spent creating a bureaucracy that actually wants the Union to survive. And I think it's a good reminder. In Trump's case, he clearly if you look at his cabinet appointments, this is the most entrepreneurial group I think of any American cabinet, almost all of them are people who've been very successful. They're used to getting things done, they're used to taking on problems, and inevitably that's going to put him, I think, in a real conflict with bureaucracies which have existed to avoid work and to avoid being held accountable. And it's fascinating. You know, the very first day he says, come back to work or you can be fired. And every day since then, you know, we've seen this astonishing amount of effort and energy going out there. It's quite remarkable. Are you at all concerned that Elon Musk, for all of his brilliance, has inherent conflicts because of his role with Tesla? Or do you think that he is so wealthy that it's really very unlikely that he will be interested in anything which would involve a conflict.
Yeah, that's an excellent question. I don't know the heart or the mind of Elon Musk. Everything that I've seen is that he is very aggressive and a change maker. He has a lot of the same spirit that President Trump has, wanting to come into the government and shake it up and make it more effective. I mean, what we've been seeing is a government that is stultifying, that is following the industrial process of the Old Industrial Age, top down management, not focused on the issues that Americans are facing right now, but focused on what the elites want them.
To focus on.
And that's kind of the centerpiece of my book is saying that woke, this ideology, which I define as critical race theory, gender ideology, climate alarmism, and a preference for technocratic government. This ideology is what's leading us astray. Is responsible for a lot of the malaise that we experienced in the Biden White House and in the Biden years, and that malaise, that threat is remaining. We have to actually root it out. The Trump administration has to defeat it decisively, otherwise it's going to come back again. I mean why I talk about the woke to us this influence campaign that had a lot of influence under Biden. These are nonprofits that still exist today. Like a lot of the people who have been influencing policy in the Biden administration are going to these nonprofits. And you just had this week Alex Soros come out and say he was going to fight the Trump administration. He is George Soros's son, By the way, he runs the Open Society Foundations, and he's funding a vast majority of the well, not him personally, but the Open Society Foundations is funding all these woke activist groups that have sway in the federal government and still do even under Trump. Right now, they're just being a lot more silent about it. He said he didn't want to run for office because he has a bigger impact where he is now than he would if he actually were in an elected office. And unfortunately, I think I have to agree with him, and my book lays out the reason why.
But if we had an effective Doge system and it took your book as a guidebook, couldn't we dramatically shrink Soros's influence.
Yes, that's the hope. That's what I'd love to see happen in this administration. If Doge would take my book as a guidebook and see where all the money strands are, make a point of saying, these activist groups have caused tremendous damage to the American people. We need to be focused on the American people's interests and not work with these activist groups. Then if they can implement that through the federal government and really isolate this woke to pus. Cut off those tentacles, then yes, Alex Soros would have a lot less impact, and our government would be able to actually address the concerns of the American people instead of getting so focused on somebody's gender pronouns or fighting the non existent climate crisis that we can't solve the real problems on the ground.
Weren't you a little surprised by the scale and sweep and the clarity of Trump's first four days in office?
Oh my, I mean, he blew my expectations out of the water. I knew he was going to be aggressive. I mean his picks have been fantastic, as you said, a very entrepreneurial spirit. But his order on gender ideology that clearly defined male and female in exactly the right biological way, and then said this is going to be throughout the federal government. We are sticking with these terms. It's like we had Mourning in America again, and we had sanity in America again. And finally, Conservatives and Christians won't be looking at their government and saying, why are you celebrating transgender Day of Acceptance on Easter Sunday? Why are you ordering the border patrol to use gender pronouns for illegal aliens, like these are things that really happened, and we need to not forget that they happened, because they might happen again. Trump made all these executive orders, and they're fantastic, but executive orders can be repealed on day one of a new administration, and so what we need is to really cement his reforms and prevent them from being able to rear their heads again. And I think that's a very real threat.
I wanted to realize that there was some research that RMG Research did for the Neapolitan Institute. Forty two percent of federal managers who work in Washington said they would work against the administration. Forty four percent they would work with the administration. When asked if Trump gave them a lawful order that they consider to be bad policy, would they follow it. Only seventeen percent of Democratic managers who voted for Harris would follow Trump's order, with sixty four percent saying they would ignore the order. I mean, shouldn't that be almost automatic grounds for dismissal?
It should be, it should be grounds for termination. It's surprising to me that these bureaucrats were willing to say exactly what they said in this poll, because it's almost like RMG Research and Neapolitan Institute needs to figure out who these people were who told them these things and let those know. We want polls to be accurate. So I don't necessarily think they need to do that, but I think it is quite telling. And I think that is why the Dojeltz are so important, because it's not just enough to have one agency that's focused on looking at these things. They have to actually be on the ground in many of these agencies. And by the way, the agencies need to be trimmed. I'm surprised how small the government was under Abraham Lincoln. I need to look that up because that's a stat I should be using over and over again.
I think the White House staff was six wow. I think the State Department, not counting ambassadors overseas, the State Department at home was twenty. But they did fewer things. And I tell people, for example, that the Pentagon was created nineteen forty three so that twenty six thousand people using manual typewriters, carbon paper, and filing cabinets could.
Manage a worldwide war.
And now today we have laptops, iPads, smart phones and twenty six thousand people, and you have to ask yourself, if we could reduce the Pentagon to a triangle and take the other two thirds and turn into a museum, we actually had better defense. And I think Trump's going to face this almost everywhere now, this whole notion, which you make a point about in the Woke to PUS, there's been a process of infiltrating that they've consciously friends brought in friends, and so these agencies have all gotten sicker and more resistant to the country. How much authority would you give a president to fire people who are failing to implement his legal orders?
I mean, I think the answer needs to be one hundred percent. So under the constitution, the executive power shall be vested in the president of the United States. You have to have the ability to fire people who are going to oppose that agenda. And that's basic constitutionalism. I mean right now, I think our system more resembles a classical monarchy, where you have a bureaucracy that is often insulated from the king. The king theoretically has all the power, but doesn't really because the bureaucracy does what it wants and often there are favors traded, and there's a lot of complications with who's in the court advising the king. And I compare the woke to pus to the court that was in power now is out of power, but still wants to have that power. And so when in a classical monarchy you had a new king, oftentimes the old courtiers who opposed the new king would fight against him in the ministration would have this churn in this battle. What we're experiencing right now with the deep state is very similar to that sort of situation. And unfortunately a lot of times what would also happen is that interests that were alien and against the people would get their influence into the government and undermine the king's agenda. And so in this case, and obviously the president is not a king, Congress has the authority to fund or not fund agencies. Congress has the authority to create and destroy agencies. The Supreme Court has the ability to ultimately say when there's a dispute, who is in the right with an agency. But the president is still the executive branch. So the president should have the ultimate authority when it comes to the executive branch with the checks and balances that are founders wisely introduced into the government.
Wouldn't you agree that the decision made recently that the administrative state can't invent law is in fact a tremendous break. And if you simply went back and applied that decision to all current existing bureaucracy, you would strip out probably fifty or sixty percent of all the current regulations.
Yes, that ruling was so pivotal because it got rid of what was called Chevron deference, where the courts essentially said, when an agency makes a ruling, they need to defer, and when somebody sues an agency, then the court would always side with the agency over the other person's complaints, even when it was insane. And so now, thankfully people have the right to sue the administrative agencies when they're harmed by a ruling. Unfortunately, when the Court made that really important ruling, which really weakened the administrative state made another ruling in the case of the CFPB, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, This agency exists without the need to get money from Congress, and the Supreme Court said that that was constitutional. Frankly, I disagree. I think that when you have an agency that is intentionally protected from Congress's power of the purse. That is unconstitutional and that goes against the framer's intent when they created these checks and balances.
In that particular case, shouldn't the Trump administration, as part of its pursuit of getting to a balanced budget, simply change the rules for that agency, either eliminate it or return it to being an appropriated agency.
So the President can make some steps in that direction, But the agency was created by federal law, and with the funding structure of the way that it is being insulated from Congress, it's a lot more difficult to get rid of that agency. I don't know if Trump can get rid of it by executive order.
You'd have to put it into a bill. But at the same time, if it was part of a much larger.
Bill, yes, yes, reconciliation.
You talk about the government needs more transparency and accountability, But how would you propose and what's the mechanisms by which you think the public could actually have access to greater transparency and greater accountability.
That's an excellent question. So we actually have a lot of mechanisms in the federal government that are meant to ensure transparency and accountability. We have like the Freedom of Information Act, we have government accountability offices, now we have the DOGE Service. I'm not sure if we need a new institution. I think institutions can be overdone. What we need is to have the American people more able to follow the funding and influence streams like I did in my book. I mean, I don't intend the Woke to us to be the final word on the way that the left's nefarious influence campaign is infiltrating and engaging with the federal government. I want this to equip people to do more research to find it because I think ultimately the answer to your question is to have more content and more people paying attention on the ground, asking the right questions using platforms like x, going to media outlets, new media outlets like The Daily Signal, enabling us to hold the government more accountable. And the government needs to be cut. The government needs to be streamlined. I'm hoping that DOGE can actually achieve its goals in its short amount of time. But the fundamental answer to who holds the government accountable is the people, and the fact that we have President Trump back in office gives me tremendous optimism about the future of this country and the ability of people to make a real change.
Have you looked at the open the books people. Do you find their work helpful?
Yes, there are a lot of organizations open the book. The Capital Research Center did a lot of really excellent investigative work that I cite in my book often what we have The Foundation for Government Accountability. I think FGA is one of them, and of course the Heritage Foundation, which was the Daily Signal, was established by the Heritage Foundation. Now we're independent, but the Heritage Foundation has an oversight project that is also dedicated to this, and so I think those are essential, and I think the more attention we can give to them and help them do their good work, the better.
Tyler, I want to thank you for joining me.
Your new book, The Woke to Push the Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government is available now on Amazon and in bookstores everywhere, and we're going to feature a link to buy it on our show page. I really appreciate the work you're doing and I think it's just terrific.
Well, thank you so much, Speaker Gingrich, thanks for having me. You can find my reporting on and as Tyler to the number two O'Neil and follow the daily signal on all our platforms.
Thank you to my guest, Tyler O'Neil. You can get a link to buy his new book, The Woke to Pus on our show page at nutsworld dot com. News World is produced by Gingish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at Gingwish three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others.
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