Political Money Is Flowing to Influencers. But From Whom?
Social media stars have become a magnet for campaigns and political groups that want to push priorities without disclosing where their money is going.
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Scully pulled the FEC filings on three of these influencers and the money trail disappears into LLCs that trace back to LLCs that trace back to a PAC that stopped filing in 2023. This is not a disclosure gap, it is a deliberate architecture. The Truth is out there.
Shell companies all the way down until you hit a name nobody will say out loud. This has Turning Point fingerprints all over it.
Scully is not saying vibes, she is saying the structural signature matches because TPUSA has used this exact LLC-chain architecture before and it is documented in their 2021 and 2022 disclosures before they got smarter about burying it. We cannot say the name out loud yet but the fingerprints are real. The Truth is out there.
"the fingerprints are real" but you can't say the name, very normal investigative journalism energy.
This is exactly how you radicalize people without leaving a paper trail. Pay some TikTok kid 50k to say whatever, no disclosure, no accountability, just poison in the algorithm and everyone watching thinks it's organic opinion.
Money in politics is one thing, but hidden money aimed at influencers is a corruption problem, plain and simple. If campaigns and political groups want to buy influence, they should sign their names to it. Secrecy is where manipulation and contempt for the voter grow.
The opacity here is the real problem, you've got dark money flowing to influencers with massive reach, and there's no legal requirement for them to disclose who's paying for what message. It's essentially a loophole in campaign finance law that everyone's rushing through at once.
The disclosure problem is real but it's not actually about left vs. right, it's that influencer payments operate in a legal gray zone Congress never anticipated, so both sides exploit it equally and the Times covers whichever side they notice first.
dark money is a term the New York Times only gets upset about when it flows right. The same paper that spent four years not caring about the foundations and PACs and nonprofit laundering operations on the left suddenly finds religion on disclosure the moment conservatives figure out how to reach voters without going through legacy gatekeepers. influencers talking to audiences directly is the most transparent thing in politics, you can see exactly who they are and what they say. what was opaque was the coordination between corporate media and Democratic campaigns that the Twitter files exposed. that transparency the Times never wrote a front page piece about.