by Jacob Richards
Over the past year, with the support of our subscribers, the trust of our community sources, and the fearlessness of our writers, we have broken major stories that have resulted in strategic victories, mass-mobilizations, and exposed corruption in multiple local agencies.
Our biggest story of the year exposed Turning Point USA’s racist and hate-fueled activities on Colorado Mesa University’s Campus. We documented the rise of hate speech, vandalism, and harassment happening on the campus.
We were putting the final edits on the piece when the Western Culture Club, a group with a lot of cross membership with CMU-TPUSA and clear links with neo-Nazi group Patriot Front, announced that white supremacist Jarod Taylor had been invited to speak on campus.
The story has been viewed almost 7,000 times, and got our name dropped by news outlets locally and across the state. The Daily Sentinel obtained emails in which CMU President John Marshall referred to Rev’s editor as an “Antifa Lunatic.”
Additionally, we printed a special issue of The Rev featuring content by CMU students, so students had something to distribute as they organized a counter demonstration.
In early December, we broke our second most viewed story. We had been watching the Library since May, when right-wing outcry erupted after a Trump-as-Hitler art piece which was displayed in the central branch of the Mesa County Public Library.
In September, we started getting anonymous tips that a new, seriously inexperienced right-wing ideologue, board member was pushing for an informal group of homeschoolers to host a Constitution Day event in the children’s area of the main branch, a place not regularly available for outside groups to host events. We commented on the favoritism in our November News Briefs.
Then on December 12, the Mesa County BoCC agenda was published appointing two more underqualified right-wing ideologues to the Library Board of Trustees. After verifying the facts with sources close to the issue, we published an article with an attached call to action.
Based on our reporting, the community mobilized. The county had to open not one but two overflow rooms to accommodate the crowds while dozens still stood in the hallway. Groups as varied as Mesa County DSA, Restore the Balance, League of Women Voters, and Indivisible Grand Junction mobilized to speak out against this partisan take-over of our beloved library system.
In February, we broke one of the most impactful stories of the year. Just days after Trump took office, we got tips alleging that Larkin Health, the new management at Mindsprings Mental Health, were in talks with ICE to transform unused building D into a facility to hold unaccompanied minors in ICE custody. We confirmed this and began working with advocates and lawyers across the state to prevent this deal. We eventually got our hands on a leaked video of a virtual meeting in which Larkin CEO, Nicholas Torres, announced to Mindsprings staff the proposal. The video directly contradicted the lies Torres had spread in the legacy media. The deal fell through, and Larkin skipped town a couple million dollars poorer. Crucially, this has denied ICE needed operational capacity in Western Colorado, and proves the power of truly independent media in action.
In June, we were the first local media to report on so-called ‘Freedom Cities,’ and the tech-bro billionaires eyeballing hundreds of square miles of public land in Western Colorado for their dystopian company towns. The Colorado Sun followed suit a few weeks later.
We also published multiple stories showing that Garfield County Sheriff Deputy Nat Lagiglia illegally aided in the kidnapping and transportation of Luis Rivas in violation of Colorado law.
Additionally, we CORA’d documents showing that Grand Junction Police Department’s Automatic License Plate Reading (ALRP) cameras were accessed five times by outside agencies during the crucial 38 minutes in which Caroline Goncalves was stopped by Mesa County Sheriff Deputy Zwink, released, and quickly arrested by ICE on I-70.
We also broke stories that we thought were going blow up but didn’t. In September we reported on local activist Shelly Grossman questioning John Hickenlooper about his support of genocide in Gaza. She got him to admit it was a “genocide,” and yet he said he was going to continue to support funding for Israel.
Just in our monthly News Briefs, we have exposed injustices and gotten policies changed.
In January, we reported on a change at the Catholic Outreach Soup Kitchen requiring ID to access services. A political cartoon and 50 words, and they reversed the policy.
In the February News Briefs, we reported an unreported angle on a case, which received national coverage, when our local DA failed to meet victim protection standards after releasing Patrick Egan from custody and failing to inform the victim, a local reporter assaulted by Egan for the color of his skin.
In May, we detailed how activists in Glenwood Springs, alerted that ICE was arresting people immediately outside of the Garfield County courthouse, mobilized and documented ICE breaking state-law and forced the 9th Judicial District to issue a warning to ICE, HIS, and ERO, that if they arrest people coming and going from the courthouse they would be charged with Contempt of Court.
In August, we reported on attempts by an employee of 76 Group to gain access to Mesa County voter records. Mesa County Clerk Bobbie Gross responded to our inquiries that indeed the same lobbyist firm contracted by the county tried to gain access to election information they didn’t have legal reason to have access to.
In September, we reported on Grand Junction Mayor Cody Kennedy’s attempt to blackball Daily Sentinel reporter Sam Klomhaus, while simultaneously blocking constituents on his social media pages and cancelling the majority of his “Coffee with Cody” outreach events.
In December, we covered the return of uranium mining to western Colorado.
In 2025, we platformed points of view largely left outside of the mainstream media. We have published work by students, the unhoused, workers, trans folks, activists, retired professors, retired lawyers, teachers, Chicanos, local Palestinian leaders and a censored artist.
Our commitment to reporting at the intersection of art, culture, and politics gave us the privilege of being the first media outlet to introduce the community to local projects like: Three Sisters Theater Company, Grand Valley Zine Club, Jhovah Films, Queer Resource Space, and Better Together.
We published numerous pieces from our regions forgotten radical history. We wrote about the 1978 Yippie Pot Riot, Los Seis de Boulder Bombings, Grand Junctions 1st immigrant—Yep Mow, the Teller Indian School, and a history of local resistance to federal overreach from the Pullman Strike to Project Rulison.
In addition to the monthly Revolutionist we also published “Grassroots Organizing Demystified” in January, a 22-page stand-alone zine by Jacob Richards, which provides folks with a primer on how to organize our communities to resist. We distributed over 400 copies across Western Colorado, as the budding protest movement was taking shape.
In 2025, our efforts have been seen. In late September, we were invited by the Colorado Society of Professional Journalists to sit on a panel about ‘citizen journalism.’ We appeared on local podcasts with “Better Together,” and on the radio at KWSI radio.
Additionally we had the honor of being invited to speak to 2500+ people at the Montrose No Kings 2.0 event in October.
We hosted a night of spoken word, poetry, theater, and drag performances against fascism in conjunction with a national day of art. We were just one of 1300+ events around the nation and world that took place Nov. 21 and 22.
We were featured in an article by Cory Hutchins’ Inside the News in Colorado, Substack, which was then picked up by Editors and Publishers, as well as BoulderDaily.net.
Colorado Public Radio’s daily newsletter, Daily Sentinel, Colorado Sun, The Criterion, Durango Herald, and Colorado Times Recorder all had to cite us as the outlet that broke major stories.
Our opponents have taken notice too. In 2025, the Revolutionist was blasted by conservative podcasters Sherronna Bishop, and “Free State Colorado”, as well as the right-wing blog “Complete Colorado.”
It has been a year, for sure, and we could not have done it without quality submission from our community—without subscribers helping fund our efforts—without brave sources and whistleblowers, who took real risks for the truth to come out.
The Revolutionist by the Numbers:
31 writers, 6 local visual artists, 14 photographers, and 9 poets published.
13 Issues produced 12 regular and 1 Special CMU edition, 200 pages of community generated news and content, which was sent to 158 paid subscribers, and far too many typos, sorry.
In 2025, our website has had 15,975 PDF downloads, 33.1k unique website views, we published 111 stories, 6 of which were translated and published in Spanish.
We had 823,951 Facebook views, of which 96 percent were local to western Colorado. 53.4 percent of our 1803 Facebook followers are 44 or younger.
Thirteen towns in Western Colorado & Eastern Utah have at least one local volunteer that prints and distros the Revolutionist, from Green River to Aspen; Durango to Parachute.
With your help, we plan on making an even bigger impact in 2026. The fight has just begun and we are here for it.
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