Summarized from Chapter 1, "Data Republican," of her book Unelected (with Joshua Lisec; Passage Press, 2026), which debuted in the top 10 of the New York Times bestseller list in late October 2026. This is her own account.

Pounds says she was not always a "red-pilled" researcher. For years she worked in Big Tech and kept her conservative views to herself. She describes it as living a double life in workplaces that pushed DEI and ideals she didn't believe in, because she was afraid of losing her job. That changed in 2019, when she went through a personal transformation and became a Christian. She writes that the Great Commission (Matthew 28:16–20) convinced her that a life of staying silent and comfortable was not compatible with following Christ. Her faith gave her a conviction that truth matters, and it made her less tolerant of the convenient lies of the culture. Soon afterward she began following politics closely, starting with the 2020 election.

With a background in data and analytics, she started analyzing polling data and election models as a hobby. In 2020 she noticed trends in voter registration and early voting that many pundits missed. She called Florida and North Carolina for Trump while mainstream forecasters hedged, and several of her posts went mini-viral. That success drew her to the MAGA movement, because she saw Trump as the only figure openly challenging the globalist consensus. She says Trump's choice of JD Vance as his running mate convinced her to go "all-in." She saw Vance as anti-globalist, grounded in economic realism and backed by investors like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. To her, the movement had built a succession plan meant to last.

In 2024 she poured countless hours into studying every state, demographic trend and new poll. She writes that her forecasts outperformed FiveThirtyEight and every major media polling aggregator, and that on election night people kept her X feed open as a guide.

Her next mission came in January 2025. As wildfires swept Los Angeles, she noticed that much of the relief was being run by nonprofits. She began asking where the government's disaster money goes and what those groups do with it. By President Trump's second inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025, she had turned from elections to the nonprofit world. She argues that much of what gets called "government waste" is really the deliberate diversion of funds through NGO middlemen. She mapped those networks: which NGOs received federal grants, who sat on their boards, and how they connected to politicians and corporate donors. Elon Musk noticed her work and amplified it on X. All through February 2025 she published exposés almost daily, tracing how taxpayer money flowed into supposedly independent groups that then lobbied for more taxpayer money.

The backlash was swift. In late February 2025 she was doxxed, and anonymous attackers posted her personal details and home address online. Her husband's small business, a craft distillery, received threatening phone calls and social-media smears. For their safety, the family relocated to Florida for about six weeks.

Around the same time, she was invited to join DOGE, whose very first target was USAID. By April 2025, she was told that a DOGE job would mean giving up posting on X. She chose to leave DOGE: "I bowed out of DOGE." She concluded she would do more good exposing the truth to the public, outside the limits of the bureaucracy. In Unelected she traces what she calls the "NGO-Admin Complex" back to the Treaty of Westphalia and the post–Cold War "New World Order." She sets out to name the players in what she calls a plot to undo American national sovereignty, and to show citizens what they can do about it.