Rocky Mountain Voice

Menu

Tag: DataRepublican

How one volunteer connected the dots at RMV’s Freedom Fest
No Comments
Rocky Mountain Voice, State, Top Stories

How one volunteer connected the dots at RMV’s Freedom Fest

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice After Freedom Fest ended, Pueblo resident Randy Thurston was still talking his way through the weekend. Not in order. One speaker reminded him of another, and a story from Saturday connected to something he had heard Friday. He was not replaying the event. He was still putting it together. "I still don't know how she pulled it off," he said, meaning Rocky Mountain Voice founder Heidi Ganahl. "I don't know how she even had that vision and then the ability to manifest it. Do you know what it took to get everybody there on the weekend before the Fourth of July? That in itself was impossible." A little later, after talking through several of the presentations, he came back to it again. "Any one of these speakers, I would've driven a thousa...
Read More
How USAID funding helped build political influence networks around the world
No Comments
DataRepublican, Approved, Commentary, National

How USAID funding helped build political influence networks around the world

By DataRepublican | DataRepublican’s Substack Everyone is arguing about whether USAID was wasteful. Nobody is explaining what it was actually for. Yesterday the Daily Caller ran a piece noting that since Trump gutted USAID, right-wing candidates have swept Bolivia, Chile, Honduras, Costa Rica, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. The left hasn’t won a single Latin American presidential election since the funding stopped. Meanwhile, Ro Khanna went on a podcast and said Elon Musk “possibly sentenced to death” 4.5 million children by dismantling USAID. Musk threatened to sue him. The right points to USAID grants for transgender operas in Colombia and DEI workshops in Serbia and asks why American taxpayers were funding them. The left points to children...
Read More
How one Signal message appeared to halt Newark’s anti-ICE protests
No Comments
DataRepublican, Approved, Commentary, National

How one Signal message appeared to halt Newark’s anti-ICE protests

By DataRepublican | DataRepublican's Substack On the night of June 1, 2026, journalist @NickSortor drove to Delaney Hall expecting what he’d seen for ten straight days: hundreds of protesters surrounding Newark’s 1,000-bed ICE detention facility, human chains blocking federal vehicles, pepper balls and tear gas, helmets and gas masks distributed from organized supply stations, catered meals arriving on schedule. He found silence. The crowd — 200-plus the night before — was gone, with tens of thousands of dollars in pre-staged gear abandoned in place. What happened between Sunday morning and Sunday night was a single message in an encrypted Signal group, as discovered by @bitchuneedsoap. A Cosecha NJ communicator posted a six-line announcement: “Co...
Read More
DataRepublican never spoke in a meeting. A million people are listening now.
No Comments
Rocky Mountain Voice, State, Top Stories

DataRepublican never spoke in a meeting. A million people are listening now.

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice Jennica Pounds was in the corner, as usual. It was a meeting at Snap, and the way it worked was simple: her communication partner, Brent Mills, typed notes to her on a laptop. She typed back. Mills translated her shorthand for the room. Most meetings, nobody looked at her screen. That was fine. It had worked for years. Then Evan Spiegel stopped mid-sentence. “Wait,” the CEO said. “I want to know what Jennica is saying.” Forty years. That was the first time anyone in a meeting had done that. Jennica Pounds—known online as DataRepublican, small r—is deaf and nonspeaking. She spent more than fifteen years inside some of the biggest technology companies in the world: Amazon, eBay, Snap, Upstart, where she was a senior distinguished m...
Read More