Jump to ratings and reviews
Rate this book

The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government

Rate this book
The same left-wing dark money foundations that supported the anti-Israel protests are funding a radical cabal, manipulating the administrative state on education, unions, transgender orthodoxy, elections, and the weaponization of law enforcement to silence their critics.

Why did the Biden White House celebrate Transgender Day of Visibility on Easter Sunday? Why is the bureaucracy prioritizing electric vehicles and less reliable forms of energy when Americans struggle to pay the bills amid historic inflation and higher gas prices?

America’s bureaucrats appear to live on a different planet from the working class in this country, and that’s no accident. The Woketopus explains how America’s elites are pulling the strings in Washington to prioritize their pet projects over the needs of the American people. O’Neil’s prose reveals how the left’s NGO apparatus pursues its woke agenda, maneuvering like an octopus by circumventing Congress and entrenching its interests in the federal government.

Discover how the donors who helped prop up the anti-Israel protests on college campuses are impacting policy in Washington; pull back the curtain on how federal agencies became engines of cultural change; and find out how the Left’s dark money influences federal law enforcement to demonize conservatives in an attempt to silence anyone who wants to criticize this agenda.

“Tyler O’Neill, talented when he was a college student, has now immersed himself in the troubled civic affairs of our time. In this insightful analysis, he has compared the contemporary distortions of our Constitution against its text and its proper and hallowed operation. If your eyes are closed, it will open them. At the end, Tyler recommends what to do. I hope we do it.” —Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College

“Tyler O’Neil’s book The Woketopus provides a definitive account of how the Left’s vast patronage network funds the woke pressure groups manipulating the administrative state. O’Neil pulls back the curtain on how America’s elites promote far-left ideologies like Critical Race Theory using the federal government, and how to combat this effort. This book will be a useful guide as the next conservative administration seeks to reign in the sprawling, radical bureaucracy of the federal government.” —Christopher F. Rufo

336 pages, Paperback

Published January 21, 2025

69 people are currently reading
84 people want to read

About the author

Tyler O'Neil

4 books8 followers

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?
Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars
13 (46%)
4 stars
9 (32%)
3 stars
3 (10%)
2 stars
1 (3%)
1 star
2 (7%)
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
Profile Image for Audrey.
1,411 reviews223 followers
March 29, 2026
3.5 stars

The author here attempts to expose the unelected bureaucrats and big money donors who have more influence over the government than elected leaders do. This has been going back decades, so the term “woketopus” is not really comprehensive, but it’s the latest version of it. These big donor elites donate mostly to left-wing causes, but no one is innocent here.

This information is readily available and published by many investigators of all kinds. Still, voters appear extremely apathetic to fraud, waste, and corruption, which is really sad and not good. Free societies collapse when the people stop being involved.

Lots of the book is lists and tables of who gave how much money to what cause. While important, this isn’t exactly readable. Otherwise, the writing uses an engaging tone and is easy to read and comprehend.

The book was written in early 2024 and reminded me of all the micromanaging tyranny of the Biden administration. So here’s a rant I’ve kept bottled up for a few years. I’ve been really ticked off at Big Labor’s push to unionize everyone, which involves eliminating all self-employment, which includes contract work and the gig economy, claiming it’s not fair to not get benefits from these jobs. Most people do these jobs for the flexibility as they deal with disabilities or do it as a hobby or to supplement full-time work. We’re talking musicians, home businesses, Uber and Door Dash drivers, and so on. We know what we’re doing; we’re not morons. The lack of benefits is a tradeoff we’re willing to make, especially when they come from a spouse’s job. Attacking these jobs would put millions out of work, so back off.

Table of Contents:
1. Case Study: Governing for Impact
2. Teachers’ Unions
3. Big Labor’s Funding Racket
4. The Green Revolving Door
5. The Transgender Administrative State
6. The Woke Weaponization of Law Enforcement
7. The Immigration Industrial Complex
8. The Anti-Israel Pressure Campaign
9. The Dark Money Federal Takeover of Elections

Clean content

============================
HIGHLIGHTS

“Forgiving” student loan debt will only lead colleges to increase tuition further. Since the 1991-92 academic year, total federal aid (including student loans and grants) increased 295 percent, and colleges and universities have more than doubled their tuition and fees in inflation-adjusted terms. Ultimately, the forgiveness of student loans amounts to bailout for a select few of those who went to college, that comes at the expense of the entire economy. Forgiving student loans enables colleges and universities to charge more for tuition, due to the prospect of later bailouts. The one-time bailout helps people who have already paid off their loans or those who are about to take out new loans. It encourages recklessly taking out loans that the borrower does not plan to pay back. Ultimately, student loan forgiveness amounts to a bailout helping some borrowers at the expense of others, but fundamentally helping to prop up a system that Americans increasingly distrust.

The Protecting the Right to Organize Act (also referred to as the “PRO Act”)—a piece of Democratic legislation aimed at empowering unions—would not only overturn the gig economy. It would eviscerate the franchising business model, which would impact roughly 750,000 franchise establishments across the country. More than three hundred types of businesses across the U.S. use a franchise model, where investors can run a small business using a format or system developed by a company and employ that company’s name. The model extends far beyond fast-food restaurants to enterprises like car dealerships, gas stations, hotels, and gyms. Franchise businesses employ nearly 8 million workers. … As Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Virginia Statue for Religious Freedom, “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.”

So-called green interests oppose U.S. drilling for oil—even though America drills for oil in a far less emissions-intensive way than other countries—and support less reliable wind and solar energy, even though these methods rely on rare earth minerals—a market dominated by America’s top adversary, China. … Most Americans support conserving the natural environment, and respect organizations that teach wildfire prevention, oppose littering, and preserve the outdoors.

Acting on this apparently unshakable faith, alarmists oppose U.S. drilling of fossils fuels in the name of fighting “climate change,” even though American oil extraction involves far fewer emissions that oil producer competitors such as Russia, China, Brazil, Iran, Iraq, and Nigeria. Restricting American oil extraction involves far fewer emissions that other countries will extract more oil to meet demand, yielding more global emissions.

James Lindsay, podcaster best known for exposing the bias of academic journals …, told The New York Post that the [Human Rights Campaign] uses the index ranking “like an extortion racket, like the Mafia.” “HRC sends representatives to corporations every year telling them what kind of stuff they have to make visible at the company,” Lindsay explained. “They give them a list of demands and if they don’t follow through there’s a threat that you won’t get to keep your CEI [Corporate Equality Index] score.” The HRC index factors into some investors’ preferences for investing in companies with environmental, social, and corporate (ESG) standards. ESG standards weaponize leftist causes such as climate change, unionization, and Critical Race Theory, applying an ideological test to investing.

Therapists who provide mainstream patient-directed talk therapy distinguish between therapy that addresses underlying issues that may affect a person’s unwanted same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria, from older practices that aimed to change sexual orientation through often extreme measures like shock therapy. LGBTQ activists like HRC intentionally conflate the extreme old practices with the modern mainstream efforts by branding the latter “conversion therapy.” l … While activist groups like HRC claim that “conversion therapy” makes LGBTQ people more likely to consider committing suicide, a new analysis of the data shows that when LGBTQ people undergo mainstream patient-directed talk therapy which aims to resolve issues underlying unwanted same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria, they are less likely to consider suicide after the therapy. This does not prove that such therapies are correct or effective, but it does suggest that efforts to ban any therapy that doesn’t back over backwards to “affirm” LGBTQ identities are wrongheaded.

As the SPLC succeeded in taking down the remnants of true evil, ir ran out of “grand dragons” to conquer. The program it developed for monitoring the Klan, Klanwatch, morphed into The Intelligence Project, and started including broader categories of “hate.”

Under Biden, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has charged about 130 pro-life protesters for violating the FACE Act outside abortion clinics, while it has leveled only five charges against pro-abortion activists who targeted pregnancy centers. l … “The Biden administration has weaponized the FACE Act against peaceful pro-life sidewalk counselors and activists who want to save lives and change hearts and minds,” Paul Teller, executive director at Advancing American Freedom, told The Daily Signal. “Justice should be blind. But pro-abortion activists who have scaled bridges shutting down main roads, posted the home addresses of Supreme Court justices, and vandalized and fire-bombed pro-life pregnancy centers have not faced the FBI showing up on their doorstep.”

“SPLC not only fails to identify radical Islam as a source of antisemitic hatred, but targets allies of the Jewish community as ‘hate groups,’” Rabbi Yaakov Menken, the coalition’s managing director, told The Daily Signal. “CAIR, for its part, issued a report at the end of 2021 identifying mainstream Jewish charities as investors in ‘anti-Muslim hate,” “How are they expected to become partners in fighting antisemitism after years of inciting it?” he asked. The [Coalition for Jewish Values] has long slammed CAIR, citing the fact that its founders previously worked at the Islamic Association for Palestine, or IAP, which the FBI’s counterterrorism chief described as a “front organization for Hamas that engages in propaganda for Islamic militants.” When a jury convicted the Holy Land Foundation of funneling millions to Hamas (a State Department-identified terrorist group), the FBI listed CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator in the case.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act made voter intimidation illegal, and “voter denial”—any attempt to prevent a legally eligible voter from casting a ballot—is also illegal under federal law. The law also prevents vote dilution—an intentional effort to dilute the votes of one group of people. Yet federal law is completely silent on “voter suppression.” J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department attorney, explains that the term “seeks to blur the line between the legal and illegal in order to taint and smear constitutionally protected activity, or perfectly legal state laws.” According to Lucas, under the cover of fighting “voter suppression,” Democrats are pushing legislation “to establish a legal structure for making fraud easier and installing long-term majorities.”
Profile Image for Erika Eshleman.
129 reviews6 followers
May 5, 2025
I appreciate that there were graphs added to show where the cash flow and resources went.
Profile Image for David Campbell.
4 reviews12 followers
November 16, 2025
ridiculous conservative slop. this shit must go so hard if you're stupid
133 reviews1 follower
May 27, 2025
Do the MATH

Yet another book on the State of the State, but with vivid, well-known, and research facts. The author names the names of those responsible for our WOKE DEI society we have been blessed with.
Profile Image for Moby Richard.
83 reviews1 follower
May 12, 2025
Lots of important information but poorly presented and written. The details of who, what and when are very thorough and the diagrams complete but the compelling tale of why this book is so important is not there. Take a clue from The Creature from Jekyll Island and focus on the critical links and how and why they are the driving force behind the Woketapus.

It is hard to read, like Liberal Fascism, but is a valuable expose on the dark money that drives the evil agenda in our country.
Profile Image for John McGrath.
7 reviews1 follower
May 6, 2025
Very poorly organized, with footnotes inserted inline.
Profile Image for Aisling.
Author 2 books117 followers
July 5, 2025
Not worth reading. Very poorly written and repeats some known falsehoods thereby weakening any other points he tries to make. Ridiculously repetitive.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews