Editors’ Note: HistPhil co-editor Benjamin Soskis reviews Tyler O’Neil’s The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government (Bombardier Books, 2025).

            I first heard about Tyler O’Neil’s The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government because of a small online controversy over its cover. It shows the tentacles of a giant octopus engulfing the columns and dome of the US Capitol. There was some concern on social media that the image conjured up classic antisemitic tropes of Jewish domination. It caught my attention, but I had a suspicion that the charge was misplaced: the intentional referent was not Nazi propaganda but progressive alarms: those that had been raised over the “Kochtopus,” the “many tentacled ideological machine” of think tanks and media, research and advocacy organizations built by the libertarian brothers Charles and David Koch (and famously surveyed by journalist Jane Mayer).

            Sure enough, when I dug into the book, I found that O’Neil explicitly frames it as a response to the left’s investigations of Koch philanthropy. The Woketopus explores “a vast network of far-left groups, propped up by a dark money network on a far grander scale than the Kochtopus,” he writes. Raising the specter of the Koch’s was a way of baiting the libs: he considers it “the height of hypocrisy” for progressives who “attack the ‘Kochtopus’” to also “cry foul when the Woketopus receives similar scrutiny.”

            The implicit juxtaposition that O’Neil establishes with Mayer’s masterful Dark Money doesn’t do him any favors. In comparison, The Woketopus seems a shoddy piece of work, lacking in analytic rigor or depth of research. O’Neil, the senior editor at the Daily Signal, a conservative online publication that was until last year a part of the Heritage Foundation, even states with some pride in the Acknowledgements section that he “cranked out this book in just over two months.”

            The pride taken in cranking seems to stem not only from the fact that he “always found deadlines a welcome challenge.” It’s also clear that publishing this book, in January 2025—at the start of either a Harris or Trump administration—was a political act, and in getting it out there so quickly, O’Neil was playing the part of the good soldier in the Right’s cause.

            So, let me state upfront: I do not think this is a good book. But it clearly seems a dutiful one. And it is for that reason that it merits scrutiny from HistPhil readers.

            By that I mean that O’Neil has faithfully absorbed—and amplified, in his role as a reporter—nearly all the grievances and critiques directed at left-wing philanthropy from the right-wing media ecosystem. His book was blurbed by rightwing luminaries like anti-DEI harpy Christopher Rufo and the head of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts. In fact, it’s pretty impressive in its degree of partisan concentration; outside material of direct service to the takedown of progressives, there is not much “fat” in it, few digressions or ruminations or narrative asides. So giving it some attention seems like a particularly effective way to understand the MAGA movement’s attitude toward progressive nonprofits and philanthropy.

            The first thing worth noting is the extent to which this account of left-wing philanthropy represents a break with right-wing fare of the past, in which George Soros featured prominently, and which traded on long-standing conspiratorial tropes of the sinister singular puppet-master. The Woketopus exemplifies a new generation of right-wing conspiratorialism that has moved beyond that paradigm. It’s not merely that the book features a relatively new dramatis personae, including Arabella Advisors, the Proteus and Sixteen Thirty Funds; teachers unions, and Hansjörg Wyss. It’s the broadness of the cast in itself that is revealing.

            The author’s scrutiny is directed not to the single puppeteer but to the multitude of tentacles. There are, in fact, few bogeymen or women in O’Neil’s book. There are individuals who take up more pages than others (Alex Soros, John Podesta, Randi Weingarten, Julie Su) but the biographical details offered rarely go beyond those of the LinkedIn variety. In the same way the Right began to be less focused on Biden than on the administrative “deep state” that (some would say literally) propped him up, O’Neil’s unit of analysis, the object of his animus, is not really any individual but the network that they populate. The existence of this network itself is prima facie evidence for O’Neil not of common purpose but of conspiracy, corruption, and collective malice.

This focus on a network of progressive funding and power has several important corollaries. First is an effort to follow the money and track influence—which is at least an improvement over the vague, conspiratorial aspersions directed at George Soros, but which often came with little effort to track the influence they were maligning. Nearly every chapter begins with some putatively nefarious progressive policy advanced by the Biden Administration and goes on to chart the advocacy organizations that pushed it and the philanthropic funding that fueled those efforts. There are tallies of how often certain advocates visited the White House, as well as lists of the funding received by certain pillars of the Woketopus—the ACLU, the Center for American Progress, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the Human Rights Campaign—from the “the Left’s dark money network.” There are also charts with arrows connecting different groups to each other—a slightly more sober cousin to the sort of thing you’d find on the wall of a bug-eyed recluse with string dangling between thumbtacks. But it is key to note that these are all based on actual reporting. I think it’s fair (and prudent) for progressive nonprofit leader to now assume that if there is data on their organization on a form 990, right-wing activists and researchers will eventually find it.

Another element is a focus on funding intermediaries—on donor-advised funds but especially on fiscal sponsors. This has been mounting for years, especially with efforts from Congressional Republicans to target Arabella Advisers. (It’s also lead to some spectacularly ill-informed gotcha journalism, based on a fundamental misunderstanding about how these intermediaries work). But it is primed to take on even greater import now. The attention on these intermediaries makes sense within the Right’s broader shift toward targeting depersonalized bureaucracies as the prime malevolent force in need of extirpating. And, as I’ve suggested elsewhere, there are legitimate issues involving the transparency of these funding intermediary that are worthy of scrutiny. But it’s not clear that O’Neil is concerned with any of them. He seems much more interested in their function as an agent of progressive policy.

More generally, it’s difficult to uncover a clear reformist program in the book, beyond partisan antagonism—or even a broader theory or vision of civil society. O’Neil so frequently invokes the Woketopus’s deployment of “dark money” in the book that one would assume that he objects to that opacity and is in favor of greater transparency in political and philanthropy funding. But this does not seem to be the case. “Dark money is not inherently nefarious,” he insists, celebrating the nation’s “proud tradition of anonymous speech.” He does not support efforts to force nonprofits on the right or on the left to reveal the identities of their donors. “The ability to anonymously send money to organizations you agree with is a fundamental aspect of the right to free speech in the First Amendment,” O’Neil writes. So…he thinks “dark money” is a good thing? Similarly, his account of the Woketopus demonstrates the clear left-leaning partisan tilt of many nonprofits, designed to help pass and implement progressive legislation, which skirt the rules limiting the extent of the political activity that nonprofits can engage in. But there is no real indication that he is arguing for restraints on nonprofit politicization as a general principle—just for the disciplining of progressive organizations.

If there is a line of consistency through the book, beyond (though obviously entwined with) partisan allegiance and rancor, it is O’Neil’s belief that progressive policies are deeply unpopular. This is asserted less as an empirical fact than as an article of faith, but, still, it’s a powerful one. And it is linked to a central premise of The Woketopus: that the philanthropic bureaucracy, which serves the administrative bureaucracy—“now operat[ing] more like a classical monarchy, with a king as the figurehead and a massive court of officials determining policy”—is fundamentally undemocratic. In fact, if you squint hard enough, you can even detect in The Woketopus a hyper-partisan version of “The Groups” critique that I’ve written about for HistPhil. (O’Neil even has a penchant for applying the “industrial complex” moniker to modes of political organization he opposes).

            Nearly every chapter centers around a charge that progressive advocacy organizations are pushing policies—closing schools during COVID, promoting “climate alarmism,” endorsing “radical gender ideology,” voting rights or critical race theory—that O’Neil claims are not supported by the vast majority of Americans but which get enacted through the backing of unaccountable progressive donors. Or in his words, “a cabal of far-left donors props up a system of woke nonprofits that help staff bureaucratic government agencies, and essentially write the laws Americans have to live by, all in the name of priorities that have nothing to do with improving your everyday life.” It’s striking that in defining “woke ideology,” he includes not merely the above causes, but also “a preference for technocratic government.” The lack of democratic accountability is the common thread, and it is also at the heart of his critique of progressive philanthropy.

            This is probably the most important “takeaway” from the book from the standpoint of a progressive reader (besides the list of organizations targeted, which can be considered a sort of early warning system for subsequent administration attack). Sometimes the democratic line of argument can lead to some awkward conclusions, given the current moment. “The Constitution gives Congress the ultimate authority to make law, which includes deciding how much money goes to which federal agencies, and even determining whether those agencies should exist,” O’Neil writes, and it’s clear those words came from a pre-DOGE era when there was a chance a Democrat sat in the White House. “Congress needs to reassert its role under the Constitution and take responsibility for actually making law. Otherwise, the lawmaking process will remain bureaucratic and corrupt. If Americans truly want a more democratic form of government, we must insist that our elected representatives—not faceless, unaccountable bureaucrats—write the rules we must live by.”

            Does highlighting that quote given today’s political realities (a craven Congress, a right-wing president with authoritarian proclivities) count as a cheap shot? Perhaps—though it would be great if we heard more calls from the Right for an independent Congress. (I’m not holding my breath). Regardless, what is important for the purpose of this review is to underscore O’Neil’s association of nonprofits with those faceless, unaccountable bureaucrats, as adjuncts and facilitators of—as opposed to alternatives to—the administrative state. That assumed connection and complicity is how O’Neil can write, with a straight face, “Defeating the Woketopus isn’t about taking power, it’s about restoring our ability to be a free people again.” It’s part of the legitimizing rationale for the broad-side attacks on nonprofits we’re seeing from the Trump administration. It can also inform the defense nonprofits mount against those attacks, one grounded on reassertions and recommitments of progressive nonprofits to wide, broad-based constituencies.

            There’s another possible constructive response to the book as well, one based on the tragic-comic divergence between the picture O’Neil paints of a well-oiled, strategically ruthless progressive machine and the current reality of a demoralized progressive nonprofit ecosystem that seems to lack internal cohesion and clear direction—as least according to recent reports from the New York Times. So another reading of the book would be aspirational: buck up progressives, conspire, and become the bogeymen your political adversaries imagine you to be!

-Benjamin Soskis

Benjamin Soskis is a senior research associate at the Urban Institute’s Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy and the co-editor of HistPhil. In 2025, he is a Visiting Scholar at Independent Sector. The contents of this review reflect his own views, and not those of any institution he is associated with.