Speaker 1: And we are back with another edition of the Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle's senior elections correspondent at The
Federalist and your experienced Shirpa on today's quest for Knowledge.
As always, you can email the show at radio at
the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at FDR LST,
make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and
of course to the premium version of our website as well.
Our guest today is Tyler O'Neill, senior editor at The
Daily Signal, an author of the new book The Woke
top Us The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.
Thank you so much for joining us Tyler on this
edition of the fed Realist Radio Hour.
Speaker 2: Hey, thanks so much for having me, Matt.
Speaker 1: It's an interesting title, and I know what it means
right away. You look at it and you say, hmmm,
this book is filled with tentacles, is it not?
Speaker 2: Yes, very much so. So yeah. The Woke to Pus
is this octopus that's driving the woke ideology. And my
basic contention is that the woke elites that want to
control the way that you and I think and the
way that you and I live have infiltrated the federal government.
So you know, it's funny. There are a lot of
onions to peel back here, a layers of the onion
to peel back. For those of us who are lucky
enough to be told about the Constitution in school, you know,
I almost assume that people have, but unfortunately I can't
assume that anymore. But those of us who do know
about the Constitution and learned about then it's nifty checks
and balances. The way that Congress and the President and
the Supreme Court are supposed to work, well, you can
pretty much forget much of that because the administrative state
has taken over the pretty much the vast majority of
real lawmaking authority in this country. Most of the rules
that you and I have to live by are regulations
passed by bureaucratic agencies. There are four hundred and thirty
eight federal agencies in the federal government. It's too much
for anybody to keep track of all the time, and
all these agencies right far more regulations every year than
Congress passes laws. And many of these agencies are also
insulated in some ways so that they can act as
a deep state, even against the people's elected president, who
is the head of the executive branch. So one of
the main ways that the woke to pus that these
woke elites can force gender ideology, critical race theory, climate alarmism,
and their preference for technocratic government on the rest of
us is by infiltrating this vast federal bureaucracy and essentially
directing it the way they want it to go. And
so my book lays out how these elites did so
on a host of issues, particularly you know, transgender issues,
the weaponization of law enforcement against conservatives, you know, environmental issues, unions, education,
especially during COVID, and the way that we vote even
on Israel. I have a big chapter on how these
woke actors were trying to undermine Biden's at least you know,
his rhetoric saying he stands with Israel. Of course, Biden's
real policy has always been muddled, had always been muddled
on that issue. But they had their tentacles deep in
the Biden administration. Trump is thankfully cutting some of those
tentacles off, but many of the tentacles are able to
pull themselves back, you know, prepare to oppose Trump from
the outside or and in many cases create a deep
state effort inside the federal bureaucracy to oppose the president
from within. So I think the book is still extremely
relevant even though it is you know, it is a
bright new day, a new dawn in America, but these
forces are trying to pull that blackout curtain back down
to bring us back into the Joe Biden nightmare. So
we have to be constantly vigilant. And I think this
book provides a roadmap for Doge and for others to
secure the hopeful successes of the next four years.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're going to get to those next four years.
And actually the first several days of what has been
an energetic and muscular new administration absolutely shocking for those
of us who have been lulled into sleep by the
dementarian who led supposedly led this nation for four years.
First and foremost, though, you know, when I was a
kid growing up one hundred and fifty years ago, they
used to have something on Saturday morning cartoons called Schoolhouse Rock,
And I got this clip where this little cartoon Bill
would walk up the Capitol steps lamenting that he was
just a bill. Oh, yes, he is only a bill,
and I'm sitting here on capit. Oh yeah, I just
triggered a lot of Generation xers, by the way, But
you're telling me that you know what we learned from
Saturday morning cartoons and then hopefully, as you noted, less
and less out there getting an actual civics class. But
none of that stuff is true. It doesn't matter that
we have a constitution. It doesn't matter that we have
three separate branches of government. Adds is the people pulling
the strings behind the puppet who is out front, And
that puppet for four years, of course, was Joe Biden.
I want to get your thought on this. You had
said in a promotional video I saw of the book,
and this was several months ago, so we're talking about
a different time. You said you asked this question, and
I think it was absolutely an important question that a
lot of Americans were asking several months ago. Who is
really in control in Washington? How can the President of
the United States, someone who wields immense power, be pressured
to step aside. Let's answer that question now. How did
that what I seriously believe was a silent or quiet coup?
How did that happen? In twenty twenty four, in the
United States of America.
Speaker 2: So I don't have any internal knowledge on exactly how
it happened. But what my book reveals is that these
woke activist groups had a tremendous impact on the administration.
And it seems to me that, you know, I think
the cabal that forced Biden out was very broad, and
I think this is this is a topic for like
a whole different book. But what if you and I recall,
I mean, Biden was saying again and again after that
disastrous debate performance with Trump, he said, look, I'm in
it to win it. I'm staying in there. Stop asking
me these questions. He would bring it up all the time,
and even two days before he finally, you know, before
he finally dropped out and endorsed Kamala Harris, he had said, no,
I'm in this race. I'm not dropping out. So to
say that he was forced out kicking and screaming, I
think is almost an understatement. There were a few notable
moments before dropped out that kind of reveal something, and
then there was one right afterward before he dropped out.
It lets it was leaked that former House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi and a certain former president by the name of
Barack Obama had both pressured him to step aside, and
that suggests that they still had more clout among the
people really pulling the strings than Biden did. And then
after he dropped out, one of the first voices to
immediately endorse Kamala Harris was Alex Soros, who you know,
for those most people are familiar with, George Soros. George
Soros is getting up there in years. He's still a force,
don't get me wrong, But he turned over the reins
of his Open Society Foundations, his vast you know, funding apparatus.
He turned them over to Alex Soros, his on and
Alex Soros has said that he's going to be even
more political than his dad. Alex Soros is currently engaged
to whom Abodin, who should remind everyone you know she was.
She was the woman who used to be married to
uh Wiener, so you know.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, oh yes, and she has she has the
photos to prove it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And she was Hillary Clinton's close aid. So you know,
to say that Alex Soros is well connected would also
be an understatement, and his rush to endorse Kamala suggests
to me that he was very much part of this
cabal that forced Biden out, and to have the big
money donor who is kind of, you know, one of
the one of the guys orchestrating from what I understand,
the entire woke to pus enterprise that I write about.
Having him jump in like this really suggests to me
that he was a big player in Biden ultimately deciding
he wasn't going to stay in the race.
Speaker 1: And certainly you have the Hollywood glitterati, the elites who
made it all the more pressing with the George Cloonies
of the world and their mea culpa is, Oh, I
guess he's not the same guy we used to know,
old Joe. And then of course you have the accomplice media,
the prav de press, you know, all in the New
York Times, pushing this old man out, wielding whatever clout
they have. But I want to talk about, you know,
how we got to that point, because this isn't something
that happened overnight. As a matter of fact, if you
look back, I mean, you can see the makings of
this going back a century. I just recently, on this
very podcast, spoke to a former representative, Christopher Cox, who
has written a very interesting book about President Woodrow Wilson,
and you can see the you know, the creation really
the fundamentals of the administrative state going all the way
back to that point in history. You see it, of
course with FDR on steroids, and then Lyndon Baines Johnson
of course in the Great Society. I mean, it just exploded.
So the build up of the federal government has been
building up, these bureaucrats in this administrative state for a
long time. What are they doing these days to control
the reigns of power?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So in the outgoing days of the Biden administration,
there were a lot of things put in place to
try to prevent President Trump's rightful you know, clearing house rightful,
restoring science from some of the ideologies that have hoodwinked
the government for a long time. And some of these
things like the Office of Personnel Management created a rule
that was trying to prevent Trump from doing Schedule F again.
And Schedule F, for those who don't know, is a
there are all these schedules in the federal government where
every employee fits under a schedule. It's a classification system,
and Schedule F would essentially enable a president to fire
bureaucrats who were engaged in policy making authorities but had
the protections of career civil servants. And so you know,
you have there's all this and you talk about the
administrative state going all the way back. We you know,
Woodrow Wilson with his War Socialism really kind of started it.
You're very right about that. FDR expanded it. But even
FDR realized that public sector unions, the idea that a
union would represent civil servants against the people's elected represent
that this was a noxious idea and a recipe for disaster,
and he opposed public sector unions for you know, throughout
his time. But unfortunately, after FDR was no longer president,
they you know, the federal government changed the rules and
public sector unions were allowed. Public sector unions are one
of the major reasons why the deep state exists, and
one of the major reforms that I recommend is that
Congress get rid of public sector unions in the federal
government because they are essentially the shield behind which the
deep state can act. With these public sector unions, they
essentially claim they make public servants into public serpents and
enable bad actors to keep their jobs despite what they're doing.
Speaker 3: Buster Poindexter is back because inflation is hot, Hot Hot.
Watched Out on Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski. Every
day Chris helps unpack the connection between politics and the
economy and how it affects your wallet. January, inflation numbers
have continued to climb, and the media has already found
a way to pin this on Trump. We've done this
to ourselves for a long period of time because inflation
is not going away. Whether it's happening in DC or
down on Wall Street, it's affecting you financially.
Speaker 1: Be informed.
Speaker 3: Check out the Watch Dot on Wall Street podcast with
Chris Markowski on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and now you have the forty seventh president in
his second non consecutive term, who has learned a lot
about his first term and certainly was taking a lot
of notes during the forty sixth president's term in office.
And so he's trying to do what a lot of
Americans have been screaming about for a long time, shrink
the size of this massive government. This woke to PUS
and now of course he's getting the resistance movement that
is a weakened national corporate media weakened by the fact,
by the very virtue that Donald Trump is president of
the United States. They really thought they had his number,
of course, and what Americans and the press learned ultimately
is they don't have the power that they think they do.
Now they're still making a lot of noise, and then
you have these groups behind it. It's interesting to me
Tyler and I think as we get into the people
behind the power, we're seeing that play out by the
people who are filing the lawsuits. Are we not in
the opening days of the Trump presidency.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, So one of the main things that's happening
so right now, the Woe to PUS is gearing up
to frustrate Trump's agenda from outside. Already seen the American
Civil Liberties Union file a lawsuit to prevent mass deportations.
We're seeing the Human Rights Campaign prepping to file a
lawsuit to stop what they call Trump's trans military ban,
which really is just applying basic common sense about biology
to the to the federal government and to the military
as an extension. And we're seeing other organizations, you know,
Catholic charities, which is part of what I call the
immigration industrial complex. They receive you know, just gobsmacking amounts
of money to essentially to move illegal aliens across the country,
to house them, to move them into other places. And
they're one of the reasons why we have why the
border crisis became a national crisis. So you know, they're
they're gearing up, they're training people, they're trying to tell
illegal aliens how to avoid federal law enforcement. And meanwhile
you even have the National Education Association, America's largest teachers union,
training teachers on how to help illegal aliens avoid federal
law enforcement. As Trump tries to bring sanity to this
utter border crisis that Biden presided over. So it's one
thing after another. You start to see these tentacles that
were inside the government now they're fighting from outside the
government to prevent Trump from restoring, really restoring America.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting to me the different players involved, and
you see them now, you know, being jettisoned obviously on
day one from the White House, from the administration. I
think back about one of Biden's executive orders is illustrative
what we're talking about here, and that was what we
at the Federalist and you at the Daily Signal referred
to and a lot a lot of folks referred to
as biden Bucks. It was Executive Order fourteen zero one nine,
and you were able to get your hands on some
very important documents. I know that the Foundation for Government
Accountability as well, we at the Federalists were able to
get a hold of some very important documents that exposed
these left wing groups that were setting up, in this
case an executive order, a FIAT that turned the federal
government into a get out the vote machine for Democrats.
I mean, it was just absolutely amazing. And it was
called biden Bucks because it played off of zucker Bucks,
the success that we saw with Zuckerbucks in the two
thousand and twenty elections. But what about all of those
groups that add not only the ear of the president,
they were inside the Oval office.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, Well, so when I was going through the book,
and biden Bucks forms a big part of chapter nine
of my book. And thankfully, you know, I owe a
lot to the federal or to the to the FGA,
the Foundation for Government Accountability as you were saying, and
to our own reporter Fred Lucas, and thank you to
the Federalist the Federalists for covering this so well. I
kind of take a bird's eye view of many of
these issues. So on that one, that one's particularly revealing.
Most of the groups that I describe as being part
of the Woke to pus had multiple White House meetings,
sometimes directly with President Biden, occasionally one on one. But
you know, I go through a list, it's like, it
has to have funding from the left stark money network,
it has to have White House meetings, and it has
to have some clear connection to federal policy somehow that
the organization has, and whether that's staffing the executive agencies,
which many of these groups have, you know, their staffers
have gone into the administration and then made rules or
in the case of Demos, which is the group you're
talking about there, they're at the center of the Biden
Bucks scandal. You know, the story really is gobsmacking. You know,
you have the Democrats win this extremely tight majority in
the House and Senate, and they win the presidency, right,
and so Biden. The first early days of Biden's administration,
the House votes on HR one. They made it HR one.
It was the FORO the People Act. It was big
pro democracy, like we are restoring democracy after January sixth,
and it passes the House, but goes nowhere in the Senate.
One of the provisions of HR one was to turn
federal agencies into voter registration arms, which you know, as
you and I probably know, and as anybody who's ever
tried to volunteer with a political campaign knows, voter registration
is the first step in any successful political campaign. You
identify the people who are likely to vote for your candidate,
you go out and make sure they're registered, and then
you go out and make sure that they vote. That's
basic on the ground campaign one oh one. So by
turning federal agencies into voter registration arms, that would effectively,
you know, you effectively have this pipeline where people who
are receiving federal benefits ostensibly want those federal benefits to
continue and are more likely to vote for the part
that focuses on handouts and federal benefits, which is maybe
the Democrats. So you can see the potential for abuse here.
That was just a provision in HR one. So demost
this group where President where a certain Illinois state senator
by the name of Barack Obama was on the founding board.
Demos writes an executive order saying, you know, implementing this
portion of HR one. Biden sees that HR one is
going nowhere in the Senate, so he decides, in lieu
of actually, you know, doing what the constitution says you're
supposed to do to change the law, he writes an
executive order implementing part of HR one anyway, and that
particular part of HR one. His executive order is essentially
copy and paste from the demost executive order. So, you know,
Biden signs this order and then.
Speaker 1: That though, wasn't it one stop shopping? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Oh, it gets worse though, of course, as you well
know because you know the story. But the Biden administration
then goes to demos and brings demos in to advise
each federal agency about how to implement this order. And
so it's just a gobsmacking amount of influence this organization has.
And one of the big points in the Biden Bucks
scandal that stands out to me and that you know,
really tipped me off that I was really onto something
with the idea of the woke to us is that
they had a listening session about this policy, and it
was the White House, it was a few federal agencies
like the DJ and then it was most of the
groups in my book, Like if you look at the
list of those who are attending, it's like, uh, interesting overlap. Here.
You have the Southern Poverty Law Center, you have the
Open Society Policy Center, which is part of the Open
Society Foundations that Alex Soros, George Soros's son now runs.
You have you know, I think it was like the
ACLU and probably the Center for American Progress. I have
to check, but it was it was almost like checklist
of all the groups that I had seen other evidences
for them being involved. And of course the Heritage Foundation's
oversight project went through all the affiliations of every person
who attended this meeting and guess what they were. There
was not a single Republican. They were all Democratic except
for one person, and that one person was a Green
Party member.
Speaker 1: Well that's close to conservative. Is that's the Democrat Party
is going to get these days? As you well know.
I mean, at least you have Jill Stein warring against
the Democrat Party to get on the ballot. But no,
it is fascinating to be in demos. Man. That's just
so close to Demons. It's hard to believe. Our guest
today is Tyler O'Neil, senior editor at The Daily Signal
and author of the new book The Woke to Pus
the dark money cabal manipulating the Federal Government. You had
mentioned earlier in our conversation about just the vast numbers
of agencies that are never held to account. Not only
are they never held to account, not only do they
have this vast power that is unseen until it affects
the average American, and it does every day you have,
you have no real accounting of it. I wrote a
piece recently, and it was really about the Dirty Dozen.
I noted a dozen of these most egregious grants that
the left, the Democrats, the accomplice media are fighting against
the Trump administration because the Trump administration wants to stop
you know, these these insane DEI and you know, and
other grants by the people that you know we're talking
about that you're talking about in your book, but open
the books. Tracks in a new report, seventy five total
of four hundred and forty one federal agencies listed in
the Federal Register are defunct, many for decades. They don't
even really exist. Yet they exist, they're perpetuated, and they
go on and on and on. I mean, this is
the essence of government dysfunction. But there is some reason
to this particular rhyme, is there not?
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh, there's definitely. So I have to look at
that report that is. That is unfortunately news to me,
but I will go through it because that's a really
great finding, I think, and I think DOJE is a
good example of using some of these now mostly defunct.
I'm not sure if the US Digital Service is on
their list. Yes, I had never heard the US Digital Service.
Speaker 1: Oh it is, yes.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 1: And in fact, they make the argument that that gets
around you know, the sort of the legal the lawfair
that's going on to try by the left to try
to shut down DOGE, which is, you know, the Elon
Musk entity in the federal government, if you will, that's
going to try to bring some accountability and common sense
to government and make serious cuts to the federal government.
But yeah, that's they note here that that was that
that operation was created by none other than Barack Obama,
and it was to deal with the mess that was
And I think a lot of people would argue is
Obama care? And so there's precedent for what the Trump
administry is doing with DOGE of course.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, no. And I think it is funny that
I was. I was right on the money there because
I immediately thought, oh, well, you talk about these defunct agencies.
The way that Trump Trump's Executive Order takes the US
Digital Service and replaces it with the US DOGE Service
is a very clear step in the right direction. And
I figured that he would only be doing that if
the US Digital Service essentially had very little role anymore.
But that's the problem is you get you get Congress
writing these bills. And this was the brilliance of FDR
and to some degree Woodrow Wilson when he had War Socialism.
It was brilliant, but it was also really horrible for
the country. They would write these laws that say, oh, Congress,
the American people want to have clean air. Therefore, we're
going to establish an agency whose job it is to
give the American people clean air, and Congress is going
to shift its responsibility to the agency, so the agency
gets all the credit and all the blame, and then
Congress is off scot free. Well, what happens if Congress
creates an agency and then that agency essentially doesn't need
to exist anymore. Rarely does Congress ever actually destroy an agency.
Rarely does Congress return to the board and say, look,
we don't need these agencies, let's get rid of them.
And you can have interesting separation of powers arguments. But
I think at the end of the day, so long
as the president, who is the head of the executive branch,
has good reason to put these agencies together, to sunset
some of these agencies, to really restructure things, he should
be able to do so because he is the head
of the executive branch, and unless he is clearly violating
written laws from Congress, then it should be allowed for
for him to restructure things. Because right now we have
a byzantine arcane system where so many agencies have make
so many rules that are duplicative, they're unnecessary, they're also
ideologically driven, and we need to just trim government. And
this is it's funny. There's a big debate among conservatives now,
especially among the MAGA movement, how much do we trim
government or how much do we use government to push
conservative priorities. And I think in the main the answer
to both of those questions is yes, but only in
terms of pushing conservative priorities that will actually restore sanity
to the American people, like the way that Trump is
bringing back the basic biological fact that they're two sexist
and I guess that would be considered pushing a conservative idea,
but in reality, that's an idea that most Americans agree
with and that it is grounded in common sense. And
even you know, even many liberals have to be like, oh, yeah,
well that's true.
Speaker 1: So it's science at the end of the day, which
should absolutely delight the left. It's following the science, which
is what they told us over and over again during
the pandemic. Yes, what a concept, indeed, And this is
interesting to me too, because you know, the pushback that
is going on to preserve the administrative state and the
deep state, which is a connected but different topic altogether.
But Congress, as you noted, is culpable for this. Republicans
and Democrats alike. They have abdicated, absolutely abdicated the authority
the powers that were given to them as the first
branch of government in the name of well, quite frankly
politics in so many cases because they don't want to
be held accountable and so just make some nameless bureaucrat
accountable for it.
Speaker 2: Yes, well, and it's very difficult because the incentive structure
in Congress these agencies, they really were a brilliant dodge.
Because now it's hard for Congress to reassert its authority.
There are things like the Rains Act, which would essentially
do it. This is a long standing bill that would
say in order for a federal agency to issue a
regulation that has a certain huge impact on the economy,
it would have to pass both houses of Congress and
be signed by the President as if it were a law.
This would be a huge step in the right direction
to restoring Congress and the President's authority over the administrative agency.
But it requires Congress to work together to achieve something
like that, And of course Congress is riven by divisions
because the American people are riven by divisions, and Trump
has a very clear mandate on a lot of important issues.
But Congress is really tight Republican majority right now, and
it's going to be hard to get the legislation that
Trump really needs to combat the deep state. I mean,
it's definitely an uphill battle. But yeah, I don't know,
like I want to see the Rains Act past yesterday,
past ten years ago, because this is a huge step
toward restoring the constitutional separation of powers and just sanity
in our government. If the people's elected representatives were held
accountable for all the rules that we have to live by,
would be a different country. And I think a lot
of these these Kakammi schemes, a lot of the climate initiatives,
a lot of the you know, most of the things
I wrote about in my book, would not exist because
the American people would be more muscularly involved in the
actual operations of their government.
Speaker 1: Well, the laboratories of the States have done exactly that,
the Rains Act. I remember the battle over that and
Wisconsin for instance, and elsewhere that has People just don't
realize how significant that legislation, that law to pass it
was and what it has meant, you know, in freedom
from Regulation, the tyranny of regulation for small business owners
and individuals alike. You layout, and you've talked a little
bit about some solutions to you know, battling this eight
tentacled mul iitenticled monster. What needs to occur, because as
we've seen, we have a president of the United States
now who is not afraid to take on this monster.
But I guess this is a two part question. What
does this administration need to do? You mentioned what Congress
needs to do, can't. Will the American people sustain the
President of the United States in doing what has needed
to be done for a very long time?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that that is the million dollar question. I think.
Speaker 1: I think that the trillion dollar question, as we've noted.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, that's true. I think the American people will
sustain it. Luckily Trump. You know, the fact that Trump
does not have to run for office again, free him up.
He has been very muscular. You know, we've seen polling
that shows that Americans support what Trump has been doing
these past two weeks. And I think so long as
you know, he ran specifically on these issues, and he
is working to fulfill his promises, so he has a
very strong mandate here. I think we have to constantly
remind the American people, you know, we lived through COVID,
and we want to blot the memory of COVID out
of our minds. But I think that's a really bad
mistake because COVID is one of the like there are
two scandals to me that just underline the abuses of
the elites, particularly the health elites. One of them is
COVID and the other one is the transgender insanity, because
the idea that your public health officials would blatantly lie
to you and then say, oh, yeah, it's fine, like
like they said, they said, don't buy masks, right and
then because they said masks aren't effective in fighting the
spread of COVID, and then suddenly they said, oh, buy
masks because they're effective in order to just fight the
spread of COVID. And you realize they later say the
reason why they lied to you about the effectiveness of masks,
and they say, oh, it was because we used a
white lie to make sure that doctors could still get masks.
It's like the level of contempt that these people have
for the American people. They don't trust us with our
own lives. And that has to be underlined again and
again and again. And that's why you know, I described
myself as an unlikely populist because I like to trust institutions.
I want to trust authority. I want our medical system
to be reliable. I want our scientists to be grounded
in science. And nothing infuriates me more than to hear
somebody say that it is the best science that a
male who thinks of himself as a woman is really
a woman and needs to be granted access to everything,
and surprise, surprise, when you have policies based on that,
you end up with male rapists in women's prisons raping
the women.
Speaker 1: Indeed. Yeah, and not only do you have those kinds
of policies, you have the people living that madness directing
those policies, as the case in the Health and Human
Services Department. So, I mean, you raise a good point.
The final question for you, I appreciate your time today,
but the trust issue, I mean, that's one of the
deep seated problems of what you're writing about, is that, sure,
the left is all you know, you make it simple.
It's all for the power control, that's what it is.
But ultimately, as you noted with the COVID situation, it
was a matter of and it's just part and parcel
to a larger theme that the leftist who control the
levers of power, and they still do greatly in America today,
they don't trust Americans. And what we've been able to discover,
thanks to some excellent investigative reporting from conservative news outlets
in this country, is that Americans have no reason to
trust their government. And that's a sad place to be
in America, isn't it.
Speaker 2: It's a very no I mean, And that's it's funny
because it's one of the reasons why we see Trump succeeding.
It's one of the reasons why the American people are
willing to really shake things up. It's because they the
institutions have lost the trust of the American people. But
they need to gain it back, and we have to
get it back. That's that's the main goal of this administration.
I think the American people have a lot of hope
and trust that Trump is going to do good things,
but he has to. You know, it's almost like the
worst thing Trump can do is not shake things up enough,
because he won this mandate on the promise of shaking
things up, on the promise of correcting all the corruption
that we saw over the past four years, the corruption
that we saw against Trump himself in his first administration.
And you know, this is peeling back the onion and
setting things to rights, and it's a hard process. It's
a long slog, and the worst thing he could do
is do nothing. And what we're seeing here is him
acting as fast as he can and really working. It
is been astonishing, Like I can barely believe what has
been coming out of this White House because I've been
I've trained myself to be cynical, to know that, you know,
the elites are pulling the strings, to assume that things
are just going to keep getting worse, that the Supreme
Court won't be returning power to the States on things
like abortion, you know, like, there are so many there's
so many things where I'm too cynical. And this past
week and a half has been so good I can
barely trust it. And of course there's a gearing up
opposition against it, so you know, to some degree, I'm
right to still be a little cynical. But Trump has
been so aggressive in championing common sense that I am
you know, it has it has been one of the
most inspiring weeks in my life. And he just needs
to keep going. He has to keep you know. And
the good news is Trump is not a Mitt Romney.
Trump is not a George W. Bush. He doesn't waffle,
he doesn't hold back. He actually fights. And to see
a president with the muscular intensity, the you know, with
with the strength that he has, I'm I'm very confident.
I mean, I don't know if he'll achieve everything he
needs to do, but he's already exceeded my expectations, and
I just have to hope.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of Americans agree with that that,
you know, they they expected some big things, but Trump
is definitely delivering on big things. The left has accused
Donald Trump of all manner of things for many years now,
but they cannot accuse him of not shaking things up.
And that is exactly what it is going to take
to take on the Woke Topus. A fascinating book, a
fascinating look back and look forward as well. I appreciate
your time today.
Speaker 2: Hey, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Absolutely thanks to my guest today, Tyler O'Neill, senior editor
at The Daily Signal and author of the new book
The Woke Topus, The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.
You've been listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour.
I'm Matt Kittle, Senior elections correspondent at The Federalist. We'll
be back soon with more. Until then, stay lovers of
freedom and anxious for the fray