This is how the idea of the Outposts began: taking the values of climate justice into communities abandoned as ecological or economic sacrifice zones. Staff, money, and volunteers began to flood into places like Flint, Michigan; Kemmerer, Wyoming; and Zanesville, Ohio. Amid decay they’ve built jewels of renewable energy, open green space, concert venues, addiction services, and small farms. Out of thin air, they create a vocal stakeholder, with roots in the community, waging a perpetual influence campaign on the district’s congressperson and the state’s public utility commission—a board of influential decision-makers in each state who have their hands on the levers of enormous amounts of carbon energy. They’ve also fostered a growing mutual aid network that springs to work after disasters. During the Come to Jesus polar storm that killed ninety-three people in seven states last Christmas, FBF used its vast peer-to-peer organizing app to crowdsource food, water, and shelter for those stranded in subzero homes or on highways.
“My thinking is,” said Morris, “even if we don’t win a political race, at least we’re giving people a vision of what’s possible. We teach kids how to grow a tomato. But to grow a tomato, you have to know about the weather, and to know about the weather you have to intimately understand what is happening to our climate. Fossil-fuel capitalism makes us feel atomized and isolated. Growing tomatoes and roots-rock makes us feel together.”
IF THIS WAS ALL MORRIS and FBF were doing it would be remarkable, but it is not what has propelled her into the public eye and earned her the nickname “the Rottweiler of the climate crisis.” She garnered this notoriety by putting an unthinkable head on a pike for all Democrats to see.
Senator Elmer Nolan was a five-term West Virginia legend, who’d long championed coal and gas interests in the hydrocarbon state and survived the state’s lurch toward right-wing politics. Then FBF began its primary challenge.
One source intimate with that contentious campaign said that Morris sat across from Nolan at an early meeting and “told him point-blank that if he didn’t agree to back the GND, her candidate might not win, but Nolan would never make it back to the Senate again. Morris told Elmer to get with her program or she’d take his scalp. And she did.”
The result, some might argue, was catastrophe. In the general election, the precious Democratic Senate seat swung to Republican challenger Russ Mackowski, a neo-Confederate, hard-core climate denialist of the first order. Mackowski is now considered a leader of the hard right wing of the party.
Embattled president Joanna Hogan is apparently furious at the loss of Nolan, her Senate majority, and several key allies in the House. One source, close to the White House and speaking anonymously for reasons that will become obvious, had the following to say:
“You want my opinion of [Morris]? She’s a toxic cunt.”
The source went on. “She ousted Nolan, and now we’re going to have Mackowski, who’s not just a climate denier but practically a Holocaust denier. Not to mention her eco-socialist recruits in our party are all zealots you can’t work with. She’s torching [the Democrats] at a time when demographically we should be ascendant and when the other party has an openly fascist wing.”
Since Morris arrived on the scene, the apostasies of A Fierce Blue Fire have stoked controversy: She allies with pro-life groups; she decries antinuclear activists as “climate denialists in their own right”; and she once called President Hogan’s version of the Green New Deal “a five-trillion-dollar healthcare bill with a green coat of paint.” Yet nothing has stirred more outrage than FBF’s strategy of aggressively recruiting, cultivating, and supporting Republican candidates to run primary challenges. Forget about stances on abortion rights, gun control, LGBTQIAA+ issues. All these Republican challengers have to do to access FBF’s money is run campaigns based on “the scientific consensus of anthropogenic climate change” and pledge to vote affirmatively on FBF’s model legislation.
“People are going ape, sure, and maybe they’re not wrong,” says Morris. “But I’ve come to believe there are limits to activating the hard core, that what we were building was a clubhouse rather than a movement. Self-sorting political behavior is toxic, not just for QAnon dweebs but for the Left as well, because we have to create a durable, sustainable governing consensus. It’s shortsighted to ignore people who vote Republican by habit. We have a moral duty to talk to people we disagree with. We have to build on-ramps to the movement.”
Many viewed entering the Republican civil war in the post-Trump era as a fool’s errand, but Morris has proved them wrong. The House now includes a “Green Tea” caucus, and Republican senator Ryan Doup, widely expected to become Senate majority leader, has promised action on climate. The unambiguous victor of this strategy is, of course, Mary Randall. The thirty-nine-year-old Republican came from the dredges of the statehouse in Albany and will become the first woman of color to occupy the governor’s mansion in New York history. Poised, confident, and a full-throated advocate of action on climate change, Randall is already being championed by Republican moderates as a candidate for 2028 when the field will be anybody’s game. It’s no secret that Randall got a huge bump from FBF’s Super PAC, which enraged some on the left: Randall, a Black woman, is also devoutly Catholic and a pro-life conservative.
“I don’t necessarily endorse every last policy prescription from those folks,” Randall told CBS’s Face the Nation. “But we have a wide array of tools available within our free-market system to cut emissions and arrest the climate crisis. True conservatives have already left denialism in the dustbin of history because they see the enormous economic opportunities presented by the zero-emissions revolution. It’s already begun. Now it’s just a matter of how quickly we move and who is going to capitalize on it.”
Meanwhile, the Left continues its vexed relationship with the current commander-in-chief. While pursuing only meager efforts on climate, Joanna Hogan has had her time in office consumed by global chaos. She’s vastly increased troop levels across the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and North Africa, approved hundreds more drone strikes than Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden combined, ramped up deportations, increased the military presence at the US-Mexico border, and opened people’s data to new heights of exploitation by signing the Freedom of Data and Corporate Accountability Act. She’s also embraced the “eco-terrorist” label for the pipeline saboteurs and applauded the heavy sentence of a college student who planted an explosive in Colorado. Perhaps most importantly, she’s spoken with exasperation and occasional scorn for youth-led movements like A Fierce Blue Fire for their “pie-in-the-sky, gimme-gimme, baby-wanna-bottle attitude” as she infamously told a reporter following the abandonment of climate legislation early in her term.
This is in stark contrast to Governor-elect Randall.
When I ask Morris if she would support Mary Randall as a presidential candidate, Morris responds, “Depends. She’s talked a good game, but if it comes down to it, will she bite the chain saw? Hard to say.”
But can it be a coincidence that FBF’s model legislation bears a striking resemblance to a policy touted by Randall, which she calls “the Green Trident”?
“Oh my god, that name is brutal,” says Morris. “I just don’t want to hear the word ‘green’ attached to anything ever a-fucking-gain. Besides, it’s a total misnomer. During extinction events, the oceans acidify, carbonate-forming species get wiped out, and it’s all replaced by green plankton. ‘Disaster plankton’ scientists call it. The oceans bloom with that shit. After the end-Triassic, the whole planet turned green. And that’s what it’ll look like again—a muddy tennis ball—unless we stop it. That’s why we monkeyed with the Phil Shabecoff phrase for our name, because green, at this point, is a dead fucking brand.”