Hit Dogs Howl

How a two minute and twenty second TikTok video earned me my horns, tail, and pitchfork.

Hi there. It's your favorite internet villain. At least as of the last five days and until the echo chamber moves on to the next one.

How did I get here? A video with blanket statements that ended with a simple question, “You just have to ask yourself, is it real or is it performative?” Here it is, if you want to watch:

@totalhypocrisy6/4/26. In this version of life, question everything. #fyp #independentjournalist #analysis

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As the dog piling continues (and those big dogs know how to bark and teach their little puppies how to do the same), I thought it was time to bring out the receipts.

While I’ve enjoyed learning lots of new things about myself like the idea that I’m paid for by the right, I spend my time doxxing people, I’m bitter because I “got fired” from my corporate marketing job, I hate every creator that attended Trending Up, and I don’t believe anyone should have fun anywhere, anytime, ever again, I’ve also been putting the detailed story together.

This is that story.

What is Trending Up?

Don’t take my word for it, here it is, directly from the website.

The site promises attendees “direct access to policy experts, seasoned advocates, and top-performing creators,” along with hands-on workshops and panels to sharpen their voice.

A great opportunity, no doubt. Especially if you are new to political advocacy, content creation, or just getting involved in general. Something anyone would jump at, myself included, if I were just getting started, with no thought to the fine print.

But fine print matters. And it really matters when your platform advocates for taking down billionaires, educates people about what is wrong with the establishment, and calls out the far right for events like CPAC and the Turning Point USA conferences.

Getting caught in the total hypocrisy of it all would not be good.

Which brings us to the line: creators accepted to attend will have “all flights, hotel rooms, and meals during programming covered.”

This is no register-and-pay-your-way event, like most professional conferences.

So the question is, who is covering it? An event like that is not cheap. Let’s do the math.

About how much(ish) did the event cost?

As someone who has worked in marketing and has budgeted and planned corporate events of this size, let me tell you: this is not cheap. But my credentials do not matter here. Let’s make a conservative estimate, and let’s assume event and group discounts.

Nobody published the budget, but you can estimate it from current market rates. The size of the bill is part of the point. Here is what it takes to fly 200 creators to Washington and cover everything for three nights, from May 31 to June 3.

• Lodging at the Salamander Washington DC, the five-star hotel on the Southwest waterfront. Rooms there average around $641 a night. Figure a negotiated group rate of $450 to $600, three nights, plus Washington’s 14.95 percent hotel tax. That is about $1,550 to $2,070 per person, or roughly $310,000 to $414,000 for 200 people.

• Round-trip airfare. The average domestic round trip right now is about $451, and flying into Washington runs higher. Call it $450 to $600 a head, or about $90,000 to $120,000 for the group.

• Ground transportation. Airport transfers and local rides, roughly $80 to $150 per person, or about $16,000 to $30,000 total.

• Food and drink. Breakfasts, lunches, breaks, and evening receptions with an open bar, at a hotel where catering runs $150 to $350 and up per guest per meal. Across three days, about $1,000 to $1,400 per person, or roughly $200,000 to $280,000 for everyone.

• Space, production, and staff. Ballroom rental, staging, sound, lighting, livestream, security, planners, speakers, and swag. These costs do not rise person by person, but a 200-guest program needs a big room and a real production. Figure $250,000 to $500,000. This is the line nobody outside the organizers can see, and it is the biggest reason the total has a range.

Per person, all in: about $4,300 to $6,700 each.

Total for 200 people: roughly $1.1 million, somewhere between $870,000 and $1.34 million.

A million-dollar weekend, give or take. Every figure above is a public market rate you can check. The one piece of information that does not exist anywhere is the only one that matters. Whose money it was.

What is “dark money?”

Dark money is political money where the public is not allowed to know who gave it. Not automatically bad, not automatically good. Just hidden.

Open the 2026 Trending Up agreement. Anyone can. Read the first line.

It says the event is sponsored by “Trending Up Network LLC.” That is the Sponsor. Yes, Sponsor with a capital S. Very 1984 by George Orwell. That is who covers the travel and the lodging.

Here is the catch. An LLC is a private company. Unlike a charity, it does not file a public report and it does not have to name anyone who funds it. So “Trending Up Network LLC paid for your trip” is not an answer. It is the place the answer is supposed to be. The name on the contract is a door with nothing written behind it.

Stranger still, that contract door used to have plenty of information behind it.

Open the 2024 version of the same contract. It is still online and it is almost identical. Same travel deal. Same campaign rule. Same use of your image. One difference, and it is the whole story.

In 2024, the Sponsor had a name. The contract said the event was sponsored by “the Hub Project, a project of the Sixteen Thirty Fund.”

The Sixteen Thirty Fund is the largest dark-money operation on the political left.

Who funds it? By design, you cannot see most of it. The donors are blacked out. But some of the biggest names are knowable anyway, because billionaires who give through their own foundations have to file their side of the paperwork. Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss, through his Berger Action Fund, has moved well over $135 million into the Sixteen Thirty Fund. Pierre Omidyar, the eBay billionaire, and his wife gave $45 million to one of its projects in a single year. George Soros has given through his Open Society network. Those are the kinds of fortunes behind the curtain.

Here is where I want to be fair, because the easy comeback is that I take billionaire money too. I do. So do you. Every creator reading this earns on platforms built by billionaires. Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram and Facebook pay a lot of us. That is billionaire money, and it is fine, because it is open. You can see the deal. The platform takes its cut, you get paid, and the whole thing sits in plain view. Nobody is hiding the hand.

That is the entire distinction. The problem is not that billionaires have money, or that creators take it. The problem is taking money you are not allowed to trace, from a hand you are not allowed to see.

So in 2024, the agreement told you whose money it was. In 2026, the same agreement, with the same rules, only says “Trending Up Network LLC.” Nothing about the deal changed except the single detail that let you see behind it. That is the moment a known thing became an unknown thing. On purpose.

How The Name Disappeared

This did not come out of nowhere. Trending Up started as a registered brand used by another nonprofit, the North Fund. It was built inside the network. Then it was turned into its own private company and walked out the door under that new name, Trending Up Network LLC.

The money did not have to move for the name to vanish. Only your ability to see it had to move. And it did.

Here are the hard numbers, all from filings these groups had to make.

Note: Trending Up Network LLC itself will never have a public filing. An LLC does not file a public Form 990, in 2025, 2026, or any year. So if you are waiting for a "Trending Up filing" to drop, it is not coming. That is not a delay, it is the structure. We will work with the most recent filings available, which cover 2024.

The Sixteen Thirty Fund is the kind of nonprofit that is allowed to hide its donors, and it does. Its 2024 tax filing shows it took in about $282 million and spent about $311 million in a single year. Its four biggest gifts were roughly $58.9 million, $51.4 million, $29.2 million, and $22 million. Every donor name is blacked out. Giant checks, no senders.

The timing matters too. On November 17, 2025, the firm that ran this whole network, Arabella Advisors, announced it was shutting down and handing its work to a brand-new company, Sunflower Services, paid for by the same family of funds. The plumbing got a new name at almost the same moment the contract dropped its backer’s name.

And the link that is still live, in plain writing on the fund’s own tax form: in 2024, the Sixteen Thirty Fund gave $6.8 million to the North Fund, the group that created Trending Up. The fund that built the conference is still feeding the group that started it, in the most recent year we can check.

I’m Sorry

Let me put an apology in writing, because being wrong does matter. I should not have attacked the act of networking, of drinking with friends, of partying it up. This is hard work. This is meaningful work. Every creator deserves to get their bag. To learn from one another. To help each other out. I would know. I am one of them.

A lot of these creators built their name on being the honest voice against hidden money. The promise was that they could not be bought. So the fair question, the only question, is whether the people who pay them are willing to be named. In 2024 they were. In 2026 they are not. It is not the drink that matters. It is the hand that pours it, and that hand is now hidden behind a company that owes you no answers.

What’s with the dog piling?

That is why the hit dogs are howling. Maybe some knew the money goes dark. Maybe they did not. Maybe it has given them something to consider the next time they accept an invite or apply for one. Either way, this corner of the internet has become nothing more than an echo chamber.

The callout of my video was valid, but it missed the point. The chance for legitimate discourse turned into name-calling, belittling, and making fun of my mental health, my interests, my hobbies, and vacations I took on my own dime. The claims that I am a paid psyop do not address the video.

The big dogs who attended, the ones who might feel they have something to hide or to protect, spoke to the puppies. The puppies who wish they were big dogs made the same video over and over and over and over again.

People have a deep-seated desire to align with the beliefs and behaviors of the groups they belong to. When users see a surge of negative comments, the bandwagon effect kicks in. The behavior feels socially normalized, and joining the pile-on signals in-group loyalty.

In fact, people I considered friends in this space have dropped into my DMs to apologize for the videos they were about to release, saying they need to “continue the conversation.” My face and my name on full display. A separation in public, while trying to keep the relationship behind closed doors.

I knew posting the video would cost me. I have always had a strong brand: call out the hypocrisy, whether it is on the right or the left.

The Best Argument Against Me

Let me give the other side its strongest shot, in its own words. One critic, a verified creator, laid it out plainly. Even if Trump himself had sponsored the event, they said, they would still support it, because who cares who paid for something this public. Free advocacy training from your peers is a good thing, not a bad one. And the money, in their words, “was spent on very transparent and identifiable things.”

Screenshot: Comment from @limeaccordion/Instagram

Here is what they get right. Free training is good. The event was public. And yes, the spending was transparent. You could see the hotel, the panels, the receptions, the whole weekend.

Now read that line again. The money “was spent on very transparent and identifiable things.” True. And it is the entire point, turned exactly backwards. Where the money went is transparent. Where it came from is not. One is a conference. The other is a blacked-out name behind an LLC. I never asked what the money bought. I asked who bought it. Treating the first question as the answer to the second is the whole trick.

The Trump line actually makes my case for me. They say it would not matter if Trump had paid. That is the honest core of the disagreement. They believe the source never matters. I believe that for people whose entire brand is that they cannot be bought, the source is the only thing that matters. If Trump had sponsored this and then buried his name in a shell company, it would be the same story I am telling right now. The scandal was never the name. It is the hiding.

So no, wanting to know who paid does not make me a net negative. It is the most basic question in journalism. And the fact that asking it bought me five days of this is the clearest sign yet that the question landed somewhere real.

Here Is The Part I Did Not Expect

I asked if it was real or performative. A simple question. And a lot of people who attended did not answer it. They aimed at me instead, the person who asked.

Sit with what that means. If the funding were clean and the name were public, the easiest thing on earth would be to post the Sponsor’s name, take your fair shot at me, and move on. That did not happen. The energy went into making the question itself shameful to ask. People do not do that when there is nothing behind the door. They do it when the answer is the problem.

Orwell had a word for this part too. When asking the wrong question becomes the violation, when noticing is the crime rather than any act, that is thoughtcrime. I did not accuse anyone of anything. I asked who paid. The response was to treat the asking itself as the offense. Sit with how backward that is. In this story, taking the secret money is fine. Noticing the secret money is the sin.

I am not after anyone’s job. I want one thing, the same thing I wanted from the start. Put the Sponsor’s name back on the contract. Prove you are not performing. I know most creators are not. Tell the audience who paid. Let people who built a brand on transparency show a little of it.

Until then, the document says it all. The Sponsor paid for everything. The Sponsor will not tell you its name. And the people most upset that I noticed are the ones who signed.

A nameless power that pays the bill and punishes the question. We were handed that book in school as a warning. Some people seem to have read it as a manual.

A Debt You Cannot See Is The Most Dangerous Kind

Here is why any of this matters, past the principle of the thing.

Disclosure rules do not exist because a donation is automatically a bribe. They exist because money creates a relationship, a relationship creates a debt, and a debt can be called in. Sunlight is how the public watches for the moment it gets called.

Hidden money hides the debt. When you take money from someone whose name you will not say, you have accepted a claim on yourself that no one outside the room can see. And a favor almost never arrives looking like a favor. It is not a phone call asking for a vote. It is the criticism you suddenly soften. The story you quietly decide not to tell. The cause you amplify a little louder. The post that never gets made. The debt gets paid in small, deniable ways, and because the funder is hidden, no one can ever lay the payment down next to the bill.

For a creator, that is the whole game. The entire value of an independent voice is that no one owns it. Your audience cannot judge whether you are still independent if they are not allowed to see who holds a claim on you.

I am not telling you a favor has been called in. I am telling you the structure is built so that if one ever were, you would never see it happen. That is the danger, and that is the reason the name belongs on the contract. The Sponsor paid for everything. One day, in some form, the Sponsor may want something back. And the whole arrangement has been built, very carefully, so that you never notice when it asks.

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