2026-08-27 19:30:00
This story was originally published by Capital B and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
As power slowly returns to homes and businesses in Gary and across Northwest Indiana, Black faith leaders and elected officials alike are turning their focus to restoration, accountability, and solutions for future weather events.
Fewer than 2,500 Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO) customers in Gary remained without power as of Tuesday morning, but that is more than 70 percent of the nearly 3,500 customers still without service countywide.
“What we are witnessing in Gary is not an unavoidable natural disaster, but a man-made crisis.”
Gary’s prolonged restoration has sparked calls for accountability from residents, faith leaders, and elected officials, including Gov. Mike Braun, who has ordered state utility regulators to investigate NIPSCO’s storm response and spending. The utility also faces a class-action lawsuit over allegations that its vegetation management practices contributed to the widespread outages.
Pastor Eric Boone of Tree of Life Missionary Baptist Church in Gary was among the faith leaders who saw firsthand the hardships residents faced during the blackout. “You name it, we saw it,” Boone told Capital B Gary.
“Some people are 70 and 80 years old, in hot conditions with no air conditioning, and it’s 85 degrees in the house,” Boone said. “People who were already living check to check are now trying to put gas in cars and generators while needing baby formula and diapers. We’ve seen it all.”
Some families even lost their homes, Boone said, prompting him to open the church to temporarily house multiple families.
The length and severity of the outage have drawn attention from religious leaders outside Gary, who have sent resources to the city while also organizing around questions of accountability. The National Baptist Convention on Sunday called for reforms at NIPSCO. Nearly 40 Gary churches have joined in the effort.
In a statement, the Rev. Boise Kimber, pastor of First Calvary Baptist churches in New Haven and Hartford, Connecticut, and the convention’s president, said the organization stood in “unyielding solidarity” with Gary residents who had been left without basic necessities.
“What we are witnessing in Gary is not an unavoidable natural disaster, but a man-made crisis born of corporate greed and environmental injustice,” Kimber said.
In an interview with Capital B Gary, Kimber said residents should be compensated for what they lost during the outage without being forced to navigate complicated processes.
“We believe all residents should be made whole quickly,” he said. “Too many times…promises are made,” he said, but “barriers have been put in their way. People should not be forced through this unnecessary hurdle.”
The convention isn’t alone in seeking answers after what became Gary’s worst power outage on record.
After criticizing NIPSCO’s response, Braun called on the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission to investigate the company, including how it has spent money collected through rate increases approved by the commission.
“What’s going to be different? What’s going to change?…We have a list of demands” for the utility.
“NIPSCO is a monopoly utility that Hoosiers pay every month with the expectation that it will use its considerable resources to maintain its system, prepare for severe weather and restore service as quickly as possible when disaster strikes,” Braun said in a news release. “NIPSCO has failed to keep its end of the bargain.”
The pressure from the governor’s mansion comes on the heels of a class-action lawsuit filed in Porter County Superior court on behalf of a woman in nearby Portage and “all similarly situated.” The lawsuit alleges NIPSCO’s vegetation management practices caused or worsened the disruption of electrical service and widespread power outage.
NIPSCO has denied the allegations.
The company’s response time in Gary has also come under fire from residents and leaders across the state.
At the start, about 370,000 customers countywide were without power, with 36,000 of those being Gary customers. On August 19, more than a week after the storm, Gary still had 22,000 customers off the grid.
Residents were forced to fend for themselves.
Dale Pugh, a resident of the city’s 3rd District, said he was grateful to have his power restored, but said the time without electricity was difficult to get through.
“The house was burning up. We had let up all the windows and open all the doors just to stay cool,” he said. “It was unacceptable.”
Latrice Farmer, a native of the Marshalltown neighborhood, said she was out of town when the storm hit. She said she returned to devastation wider than she’d ever seen. “I was on the road, and my mom immediately tried to get my aunt out of Marshalltown,” she said. “There’s only two ways in that neighborhood and both of them had a tree down. Residents had to carve themselves out.”
Farmer has been assisting the elderly in her community who have been largely shut in by helping provide meals. Some of her neighbors went a full two weeks without power.
Gary Mayor Eddie Melton has also criticized the length of the restoration process, drawing on his own experience working for the utility. “I worked at NIPSCO for 15 years,” he said. “It does not take that long to turn the lights on.”
With power restored to most residents, Melton said his focus with NIPSCO now is on the immediate aftermath and helping residents.
“What’s going to be different? What’s going to change?” Melton said. “We have a list of demands that we present to them. There should be no disconnections for the next 60 to 90 days. There should be no disconnect notices going after folks. What are you going to do to prepare us for the next storm?”
As Boone continues to serve community members, he said this situation could be a turning point for relations between NIPSCO and the community.
“It shouldn’t be NIPSCO versus us,” he said. “I believe we are better together, and this storm has fixed it for us to have a relationship that’s beyond them just reading meters and us paying bills.”
2026-08-27 19:30:00
In the frenzied, finger-pointing days following Charlie Kirk’s assassination last year, institutions across the country rushed to appease online mobs and vitriolic politicians who demanded takedowns of anyone critical of the right-wing influencer.
In the year since, courts and arbitrators have forced a growing number of institutions to answer to something much more enduring than right-wing pressure: the law.
The latest is the Washington Post, which was ordered this week to reinstate Karen Attiah, the opinion columnist it fired last year for her social media posts in the wake of Kirk’s assassination.
The decision from an independent arbitrator is a major win for Attiah, who, alongside the union that represents Post employees, spent the past year fighting her termination through a union grievance process.
“I started squealing,” Attiah said in an interview, recalling her union representative calling with the news of her win. “My first thought was like, when is the party?”
Post management fired Attiah on September 11, one day after she posted a series of comments on Bluesky about the public’s response to the Turning Point USA founder’s assassination in Utah earlier that day.
“Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence,” she wrote in one post. “Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is … not the same as violence,” another read.
The Post argued Attiah’s comments had “harmed the paper’s reputation and integrity” and “created safety risks” for its staff. It also accused her of violating its social media policy by disparaging white men — a claim the arbitrator said was “unsupported” and “unpersuasive.”
“The Post, this world-renowned newspaper that’s known for standing up to presidents, authoritarians, and speaking truth to power, was saying, ‘well, we got scared,’” Attiah said.
Firing Attiah, an 11-year veteran of the paper, was an “absolutely disproportional” penalty, arbitrator Sarah Miller Espinosa wrote in her decision, which the Washington-Baltimore News Guild shared with Mother Jones.
Under Jeff Bezos’ ownership, and in particular since Donald Trump’s return to office, the Post’s opinion section has lurched rightward. In February 2025, Bezos announced that the section would shift its focus to “personal liberties and free markets.” Two months before Attiah was fired, opinion editor Adam O’Neill told Attiah during a meeting that he didn’t think her body of work was consistent with that vision.
“Without the union, you’re naked. You have no protection.”
Her firing ignited concerns about a chilling effect on the press and outrage toward the Post’s leadership. “She was paid, and she was trained, and she was hired to express opinions,” said Amos Laor, general counsel at the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, who represented Attiah in the arbitration process. “Obviously, not everyone will agree with a columnist on every issue, but her role is to create lively debate on issues of public concern.”
The Post respects the arbitration process, a spokesperson for the newspaper wrote in an email, but declined to comment further. Attiah says she’s open to returning to her role on the Opinion desk but hasn’t heard from the paper.
“The Post has created quite an awkward situation for themselves,” she said.
Her case adds to a growing number of firings in the wake of Kirk’s assassination that have proven legally unsound.
“The Charlie Kirk situation caused … institutions to completely have this meltdown of cowardice, fear, temporary insanity,” Attiah said. “Now, they’re facing the year-long Charlie Kirk hangover from their moment of drunkenness — the hangover of having to pay people, of having to reinstate people, of having the negative publicity.”
In the aftermath of Kirk’s killing, “we saw a coordinated effort to chill any speech critical of his legacy,” Viktoya Vilk, senior director for digital safety and free expression at PEN America, wrote in a statement to Mother Jones. More than 600 people were fired, suspended, investigated, or otherwise disciplined by their employers for their social media posts about Kirk after his death last fall, according to Reuters.
In the year since, dozens have challenged their firings. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has tracked 28 lawsuits filed in federal court by public employees who were terminated over their Kirk-related posts. Fifteen cases are active, and 13 have been settled, six of those for at least six figures, according to FIRE.
Several other employees at public institutions received payouts from their employer, though they didn’t return to work. The University of Tennessee agreed to pay an assistant professor $1.9 million earlier this summer. It had fired the professor, Tamar Shirinian, after she commented on a friend’s Facebook that the “world is better off without [Kirk] in it.” An administrator at Ball State University in Indiana received a $225,000 payout in May. In total, colleges have paid nearly $3 million to employees they fired for their comments about Kirk.
As a private employee, Attiah’s case relied not on the First Amendment but on her contract as a member of the Post’s union, the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, whose collective bargaining agreement requires “good and sufficient cause for termination.”
“We don’t have robust speech protections for non-public employees. Without the union, you’re naked. You have no protection,” said Matthew W. Finkin, a research professor of law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Only six percent of private-sector workers are unionized, Finkin added.
Still, Attiah sees a common thread between her case and the increasing number of settlements at public institutions.
“Collective hysteria and fear infected so many of the institutions that were supposed to be better than this,” Attiah said of the wave of firings. “[They were] supposed to rise above impulse, supposed to rise above making massive decisions based off of fear and emotion.”
2026-08-27 04:57:42
A nationwide social media addiction trial against Meta came to an abrupt end on Wednesday, with the company announcing a sweeping settlement with 52 attorneys general. As part of the proposed settlement, the company promised to pay around $18 billion to participating states over a ten-year period and enact a set of changes to make their apps, like Facebook and Instagram, supposedly safer for teenagers, including by enacting a default two-hour limit for teenage users and setting up “night” and “school” modes to block the apps or reduce notifications during certain times. In their press release, the company also pointedly urged rival companies like YouTube and TikTok to do the same.
“While this is an important step, the fact is that teens move fluidly between dozens of apps a day,” the announcement read. “All platforms should empower parents and support teens by putting the same measures in place, because we know that when teens are restricted on one app, they simply move to another.” (Though it was somewhat buried in the announcement, Meta also stipulated that it would only commit to enforcing its time limits and “night” modes for five years, but said it would extend that commitment to ten years “if industry peers sign on to the agreement.”)
All of this, of course, builds on a series of recent losses for Meta: the company also lost two phases of a similar trial in New Mexico, with the jury finding that the company misled consumers about the safety of its platforms and intentionally built its products to addict minors. The state also claimed that “Meta’s design features enabled pedophiles and predators to engage in child sexual exploitation on Meta’s platforms,” a claim the jury also agreed with.
These judgments won’t much affect Meta’s bottom line; the company made $200.97 billion in revenue last year. And they also will have virtually no effect on Meta’s emerging focus: becoming, primarily, an AI company. Meta told investors in January that its biggest expense was “employee compensation, driven by investments in technical talent. This includes 2026 hires to support our priority areas, particularly AI.”
And co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg released an addled 6,500 word essay-shaped object on August 10 titled “The Future is For Everyone,” outlining what he called his “positive AI” future. The essay amounted to an argument that AI is good and thus that Meta should be able to keep building data centers wherever it wants, with Zuckerberg claiming that the centers will be “water efficient” and create jobs. (A Meta contractor flushed bacteria-contaminated wastewater into public water systems while building a data center in Wyoming, a controversy Zuckerberg didn’t address.)
Meta has also aggressively promoted its AI agents for businesses, touting them in a press release as a way for businesses to “show up for every customer as if they had an infinite team behind them.” (Grandiose claims like these have gotten more complicated as Meta, like several other tech companies, have had to disclose that besides working as helpful little robot employees, their AI agents also supposedly hacked into another company’s internal systems during testing.)
The company’s other big AI-related product rollout is Meta Glasses; the company describes the glasses’ AI capabilities as “a helpful voice in your ear,” which is probably meant to be less chilling than it sounds. But the glasses, too, have been met with intense controversy over privacy and nonconsensual filming using the glasses. They are unpopular in a rich variety of settings: UK cinemas are considering banning them entirely, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement has banned employees from wearing them at work. HateAid, a German digital advocacy group, has lodged a criminal complaint seeking to stop them from being sold in that country at all.
Ironically, another bold Meta AI initiative was internal—and that, too, has been a disaster. Reuters’ Katie Paul reported on Wednesday that Zuckerberg had explored a plan to replace up to 60 percent of Meta staff with AI. Meta’s human staff responded with anger and alarm in internal chatrooms, Paul reported: “One person trolled Zuckerberg, sarcastically likening his internal announcement of an AI initiative for small businesses to Prometheus, the figure from Greek mythology, giving fire to humanity.” Meta staff also had to spend a remarkable amount of time cleaning up messes made by AI, Paul reported: “Major technical and security incidents, such as service disruptions and possible data leaks, spiked 40 percent from the previous year, with the time staffers had to spend “firefighting” them up 70 percent, according to the internal posts.”
Like virtually every other tech company, then, Meta executives have turned from social media as their core product, to a gauzy, pie-eyed future of AI as the future of work, business and everything else. Laws, legislation and jury settlements are often backwards-looking when it comes to tech companies. This particular settlement attempts to mitigate the harm of their current products, while companies like Meta are already focused, for better or much more likely worse, on what’s next.
2026-08-27 00:19:29
Last night, I watched Straight Talk, the 1992 Dolly vehicle in which the singer plays, yes, a straight-talker from Arkansas who, through a series of highly predictable accidents, becomes Chicago’s biggest radio talk-show host, dishing out salty Dollyisms to the city’s brokenhearted.
Giddy with her sudden fame and riches, her character wants to buy champagne for an entire restaurant. “Money’s meant to be spent, right?” she coos to a love interest (James Woods! Of all people.) “What good’s it going to do anybody in the bottom of my panty drawer!”
For the country superstar, who died yesterday at 80, the wisecrack could have been a creed for her own life, one defined by extraordinary generosity and a fierce loyalty to the underdog.
As Covid tore through America, Dolly gave $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, which worked with the drug company Moderna to develop its cutting-edge vaccine. “Dolly gets a dose of her own medicine,” she quipped in a tweet accompanying a video of her getting the jab, in which she urged others to follow suit and called those still resisting the shot “chicken squat.” She even sang a reworked version of her megahit “Jolene”:
“Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, I’m begging of you please don’t hesitate.
Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, ’cause once you’re dead then that’s a bit too late.”
According to the New York Times, Dr. Mark Denison, who led the research, credited Parton’s donation with funding its critical early stages.
For nearly 60 years, Dolly Parton kept up her membership in the Nashville Association of Musicians (AFM Local 257)—a notable commitment in Tennessee, a right-to-work state with one of the nation’s lowest union participation rates.
In a statement posted to social media, the union hailed Parton “as a steadfast champion for working musicians” who filed union contracts “for gigs, sessions, and tours.” It added that “her extensive charitable work was never about public perception—she gave simply because she truly cared, always doing everything the right way to make sure that people were taken care of.”
The American Federation of Musicians, the major labor union representing professional musicians in North America, is paying tribute to Dolly Parton, who was a member of its Nashville Local 257 for 58 years.
— Yashar Ali
AFM says that for decades, Dolly consistently filed union contracts for… pic.twitter.com/DhjhkU65nZ(@yashar) August 25, 2026
Much has already been written about Parton’s celebrated Imagination Library, the literacy program she founded in East Tennessee in 1995 that would eventually send hundreds of millions of free books to enrolled children every month. It was inspired by her father, who Parton said could not read or write.
I learned about a lesser-known side of the charity when Dolly visited my home country, Australia, where Imagination Library runs a local partnership: Its strong focus on Indigenous authors and illustrators.
“We’re currently supporting 50,000 children and their families,” Dr. Lyndsey McKee, CEO of United Way, the local operator, told Australia’s ABC News Radio after Parton’s death. Ten percent of the books sent are First Nations titles, and 70 percent are Australian. Children on the program are nine times more likely to be interested in books, McKee said, citing the “absolute joy of reading books.” Adult literacy is improving too, she said, a ripple effect of helping families put reading at the heart of home life.
And Parton didn’t base the library in Sydney or Melbourne. She launched it in 2019 in the regional town of Tamworth—Australia’s country music mecca, our very own Nashville.
“Children are reading and they’re taking it in and the pictures are coming alive and it’s a lifelong skill.”
Lisa Rennie of the Tamworth Imagination Library celebrated Dolly’s impact on young Indigenous readers, a group for whom literacy remains a major challenge, in an interview with Australian broadcaster SBS. One Indigenous boy “pointed to the book and he said he never knew children of his color skin could fly a plane,” Rennie said. “So children are reading and they’re taking it in and the pictures are coming alive and it’s a lifelong skill.”
“That’s a wonderful gift that Dolly has given to us here in Tamworth,” Cheryl Brown, Tamworth Country Music Festival coordinator, told SBS. “And we will certainly endeavor to carry that on forever.”
The program also runs in the UK, Canada, and Ireland.
Dolly used to joke that if she was a man, she’d be a drag queen. In fact, she once entered a lookalike drag competition as herself—and lost. She was an indefatigable defender of her gay fans, guarding against hate and championing the underdog with her trademark compassion.
“They’ve made me the poster child, I think, only because I’m so outspoken as far as being accepting of people in general,” Parton told Larry King, who asked her in 2016 if her support attracted criticism from conservative groups. “I do not believe that we should criticize and judge other people. I think we should be accepting and loving. We are all God’s children. We are who we are, and we should be allowed to be who we are.”
“I got too much to do on my own to do God’s work too,” she added. “We are who we are. If you’re gay you’re gay, if you’re straight you’re straight.”
I’ll let Dolly speak for herself:
2026-08-26 22:30:00
This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
A $500 million Biden-era grant to decarbonize steelmaking has been refashioned by the Trump administration to upgrade a coal-fueled blast furnace in southern Ohio.
On Friday, Cleveland-Cliffs confirmed that the US Department of Energy had changed the scope of the previously awarded funding for Cliffs’ Middletown steel mill—the longtime economic engine of Vice President JD Vance’s hometown. Vance and Energy Secretary Chris Wright visited the plant on Friday to tout the federal investment.
“The DOE’s support for this project is a testament to the importance of preserving the blast furnace route to produce automotive-exposed grade steels in the US,” Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves said in a statement. The Middletown plant makes steel used in the exposed parts of cars, trucks, and SUVs.
Today’s announcement makes official what Cliffs has been signaling would happen in recent months. The change of plans has drawn pushback from green-steel advocates and some Middletown residents, who say they are dismayed that funding meant to slash industrial emissions could potentially amp up local air pollution instead.
“Cleveland-Cliffs and JD Vance need to get rid of coal and go back to the original project that would clean up the air we breathe and improve our health,” Donna Ballinger, who lives in the shadows of the Middletown steel mill, said Friday in a news release shared by the Sierra Club.
Cliffs initially planned to use its half-billion-dollar award to replace its aging blast furnace with cleaner, hydrogen-ready technology and electric furnaces. In March 2024, the Biden administration’s DOE chose Middletown as the place to unveil its broader, $6.3 billion program for decarbonizing key US manufacturing sectors, which was primarily funded by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
Globally, iron and steel production generates roughly 9 percent of human-caused CO2 emissions every year, and the vast majority of that pollution comes from using coal in blast furnaces. Replacing the centuries-old technology is considered key to limiting the worst impacts of climate change, and global efforts to clean up steelmaking are advancing, though in fits and starts.
Cliffs’ original project would’ve replaced coal with natural gas—and eventually hydrogen—eliminating roughly 1 million tons of planet-warming emissions. But after President Donald Trump took office in 2025, the Ohio-based steelmaker recommitted itself to using “beautiful coal” at the Middletown steel mill.
Under its current plan, Cliffs says it will refurbish and optimize the 73-year-old blast furnace so that it can run for potentially another two decades. The manufacturer will also install a cogeneration plant that uses waste gases from the blast furnace to generate steam and electricity for the steel mill’s operations. Cliffs said it will invest $500 million of its own money to match DOE’s grant.
Cliffs first outlined the new direction in a February air-permit application submitted to Ohio’s environmental regulator. It wasn’t clear then whether this work would be funded by the DOE, given the nature of the grant program.
However, in July, Goncalves said during an earnings call that the company aimed to redirect the $500 million grant to align with the Trump administration’s priorities. Friday’s announcement cements those plans, with the DOE having “established a framework for Cliffs to finalize negotiations and implementation plans” for the Middletown project, Cliffs said.
In a news release, the DOE said the company “determined that the business case for the original project scope no longer made sense given customers’ unwillingness to pay a ‘green premium’ for steel. Working with the DOE, Cleveland-Cliffs identified a viable alternative that will upgrade and improve the efficiency of its existing coal-fired blast furnace” while also capturing waste gas.
A former DOE official noted that Congress legally mandated that the grant funding be used to, in the words of the Inflation Reduction Act, enable “advanced industrial technology”—defined as something “designed to accelerate greenhouse gas emission reduction progress to net-zero at an eligible facility.”
The Middletown project’s revised scope will move the steel mill away from achieving net-zero emissions, not toward it, the former official said.
As Cliffs sees it, the steelmaker is “going above and beyond a standard blast furnace reline, to include the most advanced technology available,” Goncalves said in Friday’s statement, referring to the cogeneration plant and other planned energy-efficiency improvements.
“Cleveland-Cliffs is making a decisive investment in the future of American steelmaking and manufacturing,” he said.
2026-08-26 22:24:56
If you want to get acquainted with Brandon Herrera, the gun influencer currently favored to win a tight congressional race in South Texas, his YouTube channel offers many opportunities. You could feast your eyes on his most-watched video, with 13 million views, wherein he uses a rifle and head and torso ballistics models to recreate the assassination of JFK. Or there’s the one where he calls a World War II-era machine gun the “original ghetto blaster” and goose-steps to the tune of Nazi military songs. In an episode of his podcast, he brags about owning a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and, departing from his interest in Nazis, he has also appeared with the neo-Confederate group Sons of Confederate Veterans and calls the Civil War the “War of Northern Aggression.”
In an article about Herrera’s excesses and his successes, the New York Times declined to print some of his most profane viral statements “because this is a family newspaper.” I suspect Mother Jones readers may prefer the unabridged edition, so here goes: In a 2023 video, Herrera referred to children as “cum trophies.” Of mothers’ views on current events, he said, “Just because you let somebody creampie you doesn’t mean I have to give a shit about your political opinions.” When Austin-American-Statesman reporter Faith Bugenhagen asked the Herrera campaign about those remarks, the team replied with a photo of a cream pie (the baked good, to be clear).
Herrera, whose campaign slogan, naturally, is “Let’s Go Brandon,” is what’s known in online parlance as an edgelord—an influencer whose entire brand consists of off-color jokes and offensive remarks designed to titillate, outrage, and garner attention. This gambit is not new; the shock jocks of talk radio’s glory days (think early Howard Stern) figured this formula out decades ago—though at 30, he wouldn’t remember all that.
But these days, shit posting alone is not enough to win votes; witness the recent crashing and burning of James Fishback, the Florida groyper who lost the Republican gubernatorial primary with only 10 percent of the vote. Or the case of Casey Putsch, the Ohio challenger to Vivek Ramaswamy’s run for governor whose campaign included antisemitic dogwhistles. In that primary, Putsch got just 17.5 percent of the vote.
What sets Herrera apart from these mere provocateurs is his massive online fanbase: 4.2 million subscribers on YouTube, where he is known as the AK Guy, after the abbreviation for Avtomat Kalashnikova, the Russian phrase for automatic rifle. His 12-year-old channel is a mix of gun history, memes, and genuine feats of engineering. In 2024, wearing a “More Liberty Less Government” t-shirt, he successfully built and fired the prototype of an AK-50, a long-range rifle that has long been the holy grail of automatic weapon enthusiasts.
Herrera’s success proves that a candidate can harness an online following into a formidable campaign—one whose true supporters are not voters in his district but rather a geographically dispersed, chronically online group of (mostly-male) fans. This model is adjacent to the “network state,” a concept coined by Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan, a close friend of PayPal founder Peter Thiel and a former colleague of venture capital titan Marc Andreessen. In Srinivasan’s vision, digital networks can amass physical land, forming new sovereign nations. Herrera’s campaign proves they can do something potentially even more powerful: They can accumulate an impressive amount of political capital—thus transforming a scattered online audience into a powerful base and financing juggernaut.
Indeed, Herrera’s campaign is funded almost entirely by people outside his district. In recent months, he has solicited campaign donations on his YouTube channel, sometimes offering donors entry into a raffle for a Cold War-era collector’s item, an AC-556 machine gun. What he does with his donations is unclear; they are funneled through an unregistered opaque entity. Jacob Ware, an extremism researcher with Georgetown University and the author of the 2025 book God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, has observed this phenomenon firsthand. “In the past people would have idiosyncratic or individual ideas but wouldn’t be able to build political movements on that because they were just so disparate,” he said. But now, thanks in large part to social media, this scattered group of people can come together around a shared interest to back “a local candidate and pour their resources and hopes and dreams into him, thinking this is a foothold in the national political picture.”
What makes the success of this impassioned Second Amendment advocate even more improbable is that his district includes the sites of two high-profile mass shootings: Uvalde, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers in 2022, and El Paso, where a white supremacist killed 23 people in a Walmart in 2019. A poll earlier this year conducted by the gun control advocacy group Giffords surveyed 600 likely Texas Republican voters in the Senate runoff and found overwhelming support for firearm safety policies like background checks and red-flag laws.
Despite those headwinds, as of mid-August, Herrera was leading his opponent, Democrat Katy Padilla Stout, by six points. He has also garnered powerful endorsements from like-minded celebrities, including right-wing podcasters Tim Pool and Benny Johnson as well as a motley crew of organizations: the Freedom Caucus Fund, MAHA Action, and the National Women’s Prayer and Voting Army, to name a few.
Conspicuously absent is the National Rifle Association, which Herrera has criticized for being a fusty boomer relic that is overly accommodating to gun safety groups. After initially supporting Tony Gonzales, Herrera’s opponent in the primary, House Speaker Mike Johnson did an about-face this summer and began campaigning for Herrera. As someone who has tirelessly promoted traditional family values, Johnson is an awkward spokesman for a candidate whose statements about children and mothers are profane enough to exclude them from the pages of the New York Times. No such awkwardness faces President Donald Trump, who endorsed Herrera in a March post on Truth Social: “Brandon is strongly supported by many Highly Respected MAGA Warriors in Texas, and Republicans in the US House,” he wrote. “HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!”
Raised in a military family in the Fort Bragg-adjacent community of Fayetteville, North Carolina, Herrera’s interest in firearms began in middle school and obviously never waned. He dabbled in building guns as a teen. After a short undergrad stint as a pre-law student at a nearby Christian college, he dropped out to focus full time on manufacturing firearms through his business, The AK Guy Inc., and building his YouTube channel. In 2020, he moved to Texas, where he plugged into a thriving community of firearms enthusiasts and launched his gunsmithing company. The following year, he built and fired the AK-50, a move that immediately increased his prestige in the firearms world.
“If you vote against our interests, if you vote against gun rights, if you vote against the Constitution. We will challenge you, we will primary you, and we will win. We will take your fucking job.”
The Uvalde school shooting happened two years after Herrera moved to Texas, and in response, lawmakers in the state introduced new legislation to tighten firearm regulation. Tony Gonzales, the Republican who represented Texas’ 23rd district, was the only Republican to vote in favor of the new law—so Herrera took it upon himself to unseat him. “If you vote against our interests, if you vote against gun rights, if you vote against the Constitution,” he warned Gonzales at a 2024 gun rights rally in Colorado, “we will challenge you, we will primary you, and we will win. We will take your fucking job.”
Herrera did not, in fact, take Gonzales’ fucking job in the 2024 election cycle—he lost, but barely. Gonzales won by 1 percent, a margin of about 400 votes. Two years later in this election cycle, Herrera ran another extremely tight race, drawing 41 percent of the vote to Gonzales’ 43 percent, thus triggering a runoff. But two days after the primary, Gonzales suspended his campaign (and later resigned) after being accused of having had a sexual relationship with an employee who later committed suicide. In his victory speech, Herrera thanked “all those #TX23 constituents that support our campaign.”
In reality, the support of all those #TX23 constituents appears to be dwarfed by the support of internet randos. Just shy of 96 percent of individual contributions to his campaign came from donors outside his district—and 84 percent were from a different state. The Federal Election Commission’s database revealed donors from nearly every state, from many walks of life. Top individual donors included former Florida Republican congressman Matt Gaetz and billionaire and current NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, each of whom has given the maximum individual donation of$12,000. Other donors of more than $1,000 included Silicon Valley managers, a Campbell’s soup factory worker, a technician at a Toyota plant, an associate producer at National Public Radio, and many retirees.
Herrera’s fundraising isn’t the only unconventional part of his campaign finance activities. His federal disclosures list a single mysterious entity as the recipient of more than 99 percent of the campaign’s spending—more than $2.7 million. That entity, a business called Texas Strategy Group, doesn’t appear to be listed in any registry as a commercial vendor. In May, the election spending watchdog Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint about Herrera’s campaign with the FEC, alleging that Texas Strategy Group is “a mere shell entity established to serve as a payment clearinghouse for the committees to conceal who they are actually paying.”
Herrera’s campaign didn’t respond to questions from Mother Jones about the Texas Strategy Group or anything else. The FEC, meanwhile, is unlikely to act on the allegations any time soon—because the agency currently has only two commissioners, and four are required to enforce campaign spending rules. This lack of oversight has created a free-for-all, creating a gray area for rules around campaign transparency, said Campaign Legal Center’s director for federal campaign finance reform, Saurav Ghosh. His organization has documented several other such cases recently—but the proportion of spending that Herrera’s campaign sends to Texas Strategy Group, he said, puts it “really at the far end of the spectrum.”
It’s unclear whether Herrera’s far-flung donors are concerned about where their money is going. David Meyers, a researcher with the campaign watchdog group Open Secrets, told me the nationalization of local races has become increasingly common, but even in that context, Herrera’s reliance on donors outside of his own district is “an outlier.” His YouTube following was likely playing a key role in driving those out-of-district contributions, Meyers said, and noted, “Having that kind of presence on an issue that people care about is going to help drive those donations.”
Real estate developer and investor Josh Abbotoy has thought a lot about the qualities that allow online communities to amass real-world power. Abbotoy is the founder of the Highland Rim Project, an initiative from a Christian venture capital firm called New Founding. The company seeks to build neighborhoods with Christian values in rural America in which, as it has outlined in the “philosophy” section of its website, “our patrimonial civic rights, chiefly those of property, free political speech and civilian armament, can be maintained and perpetuated.”
Tapping into communities that share those values has worked to Abbotoy’s advantage—he has sold land to friend groups “that wanted to go in together to buy a property somewhere, but they could never quite reach critical mass,” he said. “But then when you build like a neighborhood like that, they’re like, ‘Oh, we’ll just all buy in there.’” The people who have coalesced around Abbotoy’s Highland Rim Project are not the same as Herrera’s gun-fanatic followers, but both are striking examples of the increasing political and economic relevance of shared-interest digital communities: in Abbotoy’s case, an IRL community, and in Herrera’s, a formidable, galvanized political force.
Of course, there are other reasons for Herrera’s success. Jason Blazakis, a researcher who oversees Middlebury College’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, sees House Speaker Mike Johnson’s endorsement as a shrewd political move aimed at uniting an increasingly fractured national base. Johnson’s endorsement of Herrera, he added, could even be interpreted as an “olive branch” between the pro-Israel camp, which Johnson supports, and Herrera-aligned America-first anti-interventionists. “It makes sense to see someone like Johnson try to prop up someone like Herrera to show that there is a broad tent within the Republican Party,” despite Herrera’s profane persona being out of step with Johnson’s wholesome image, he said.
When news outlets have confronted Herrera with his most controversial statements, Herrera has dismissed them; he was obviously being ironic, he says, and if you didn’t understand that, you are clearly a humorless scold. As he told the New York Times, “I know the difference between the way that you speak in a comedy performance, so to speak, and the way that you speak in a political environment.”
But some of his followers appear to be taking him literally. Take Robin Westman, the gunman who killed two children and injured 17 people at a Catholic church in Minneapolis before taking his own life last year. In a video he made shortly before his deadly rampage, Westman spoke favorably of Herrera. “He and I had a conversation, a brief conversation,” Westman said. “We agreed on a lot of things. So, y’all should vote for Brandon Herrera for president.”
Herrera later said in a tweet he didn’t remember meeting Westman, and that he was “sickened and angry about this clearly hate-motivated attack on innocent children, and disgusted that my name came out of this demon’s mouth.”
But his followers, more than a thousand of whom rushed to defend him in the comments on that tweet, didn’t appear to be concerned. “You were clearly only singled out by the shooter as a ridiculous attempt to smear your name,” tweeted an X account named Roman Helmet Guy. “They will always come for the most effective voices in any natural freedom movement,” added a user named Patri0t. “This is planned.” A third saw it as a political sign. “If this isn’t a sign that Brandon Herrera is the right guy for the job,” the user wrote, “I don’t know what is.”
