John Podesta may be one of the most influential people you’ve never heard of. He has held high positions in three presidential administrations and created a nonprofit that influences legislation and policy. He also oversees the spending of hundreds of billions of your tax dollars.
Podesta is one of the major tentacles of the Left’s massive influence campaign in Washington, D.C., a behemoth I call the Woketopus. It’s the subject of my new book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.”
The book explains how the Left’s dark money network props up a system of woke nonprofits — groups advocating climate alarmism, transgender orthodoxy, critical race theory and technocratic government — that staff and advise the federal government, especially in the Biden-Harris administration.
John Podesta’s brainchild, the Center for American Progress, upholds all four major issues and has been particularly active in pushing subsidies for wind and solar, even though fossil fuels and nuclear energy are far more reliable. While many on the Left claim that man-made climate change threatens to destroy our civilization, climate doom predictions have stubbornly refused to come true since the 1970s, and the Left’s purported solutions to this overexaggerated crisis make life harder for Americans and others around the world.
So, who exactly is John Podesta?
1: Background
Podesta grew up in Chicago and attended Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. He met a young William Jefferson Clinton in 1970 when they both worked in Connecticut for Joseph Duffy, a U.S. Senate candidate. He received his J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center in 1976.
Podesta worked as a Justice Department lawyer and then brought his legal expertise to Democratic offices in Congress.
2: The Clintons
Podesta worked in the Clinton White House, rising to be deputy chief of staff in 1997. Podesta coordinated the White House’s responses to the Whitewater probe (which investigated Bill and Hillary Clinton’s real estate investments) and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The House of Representatives impeached Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice in the scandal, though the Senate acquitted him.
Hillary Clinton tapped Podesta to chair her 2016 presidential campaign.
Amid that campaign, WikiLeaks released a 2012 email in which a progressive activist suggested to Podesta that “there needs to be a Catholic Spring [like the Arab Spring], in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a Middle Ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic Church.”
Podesta responded, “We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a movement like this. Likewise Catholics United.” Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good received funding from left-wing foundations like George Soros’ Open Society Institutes and the Tides Foundation, groups that also fund Podesta’s left-wing nonprofit, the Center for American Progress.
3: The Podesta Group
John Podesta and his brother Tony co-founded The Podesta Group in 1988, and its fortunes rose with John Podesta’s prominence. The firm developed close ties to the Democratic Party, raking in $29.3 million in 2010 and earning Tony Podesta the rank of third most influential lobbyist in 2007.
Amid then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into ties between then-President Donald Trump and Russia, Tony Podesta dissolved The Podesta Group. The Justice Department investigated Tony Podesta for potential violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act connected to work he had done on behalf of a Ukrainian political party that supported Russian President Vladimir Putin. Prosecutors closed the investigation without bringing charges.
4: The Center for American Progress
John Podesta combined his connections, his lobbying experience, and his legal and policy background to create a left-wing juggernaut. He founded the Center for American Progress in 2003, which he envisioned as a Democratic alternative to conservative think tanks such as The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute.
Politico has described CAP as “the most influential think tank of the Biden era.” CAP has fed more than sixty officials into the Biden administration and helped shape Biden’s legislative initiatives and executive actions. Neera Tanden, CAP’s president and CEO from 2011 to 2021, currently serves as director of the White House Domestic Policy Council.
While leading CAP, Podesta also joined corporate boards and consulted for left-leaning nonprofits. Between 2010 and 2014, he served on the board of the green energy company Joule Unlimited, which later collapsed.
CAP has long supported electric vehicles and urged the Biden administration to spend more on green technologies. It describes climate change as “the greatest challenge facing the United States — and the world — over the next decade and beyond.” It celebrated the so-called Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, two bills that directed billions of dollars to fund electric vehicle charging infrastructure. (Automakers have been moving away from EVs due to low consumer demand, and they have warned that the Biden-Harris administration’s vision for a quicker transition to EVs is not possible.)
CAP also condemned the increase in U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG), a curious move because American LNG exports had helped European countries that would otherwise rely on Russian LNG. Billionaire donors pressured John Podesta on the issue, and President Biden announced a temporary pause of pending approvals of LNG exports in January. A judge struck down the pause in July, but the administration appealed that ruling.
5: Directing Billions of Dollars
In August 2022, President Biden signed a law the Democrats titled the “Inflation Reduction Act.” The Inflation Reduction Act arguably worsened inflation, cleared the way for the IRS to hire 87,000 agents, and earmarked $369 billion in climate spending.
Biden touted the law as “the largest climate investment in history.”
Who did Biden pick to determine where all this “climate investment” goes? None other than John Podesta.
This puts the radical activist with close ties to the infrastructure of the Left at the center of a massive federal enterprise where he can advance his agenda in the name of saving the Earth.
Tyler O’Neil is managing editor of The Daily Signal and the author of two books: “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” and “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
The Citigroup — Podesta Letter (email dated Oct. 6, 2008, from Citigroup to Podesta dictating the choices for Obama’s cabinet — all choices by Citigroup were the same cabinet post appointments later made by President Obama. So Citigroup chose Obama’s Cabinet!)
CAP received major funding from George Soros.