The federal government’s connection between a Missouri gun YouTuber and the Bourbon Street terrorist comes down, according to AmmoLand’s reporting on the case, to one folder on the dead terrorist’s phone — labeled “party time” — holding a text list of YouTube links.
Not messages. Not a meeting. Not a dime changing hands. A list of links to videos anyone on the planet could watch for free. That’s not a co-conspirator. That’s a subscriber.
First, the Part Nobody Jokes About
On New Year’s Day 2025, an ISIS-inspired killer named Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove a truck through a Bourbon Street crowd and murdered 14 people. He planted two IEDs along the route — neither detonated — before police shot him dead.
Fourteen families buried people that month. Nothing in the rest of this story shrinks that, and we won’t write a word that pretends it does.
But a tragedy that heavy will flatten whatever the government stacks underneath it. So it’s worth looking hard at what the Justice Department stacked underneath this one.
The Defendant
Jordan Derrick, 40, of Sweet Springs, Missouri, is an Army veteran better known as Dugan Ashley of CarniK Con — one of the original GunTube channels, from the era when gun YouTube was still allowed to be funny. Years later he came back with very different content: chemistry-heavy videos on energetic materials, posted free on YouTube.
In May, a federal grand jury in the Western District of Missouri indicted him on four counts: engaging in the business of manufacturing explosive materials without a license, possessing unregistered destructive devices, possessing components readily convertible into destructive devices, and distributing information relating to making explosives. He has been in federal custody since his arrest; per AmmoLand’s reporting, he was denied bond.
Say it plainly and up front: Derrick is a defendant, not a convict. Every charge is an allegation, he is presumed innocent, and nobody outside the case knows what was in his shop. The two possession counts will rise or fall on physical evidence — that’s a jury’s job, not ours.
The precedent problem lives in the other two counts.
A Tip Jar Is Not a Factory
Count one says Derrick was “engaged in the business” of manufacturing explosives without a license. His videos were free. The business theory, as AmmoLand’s John Crump reports it, is that he had a Patreon — the same tip jar used by every podcaster, painter, and lawnmower reviewer on the internet.
Crump’s answer is the whole argument in seven words: a tip jar is not a factory.
The distribution count is the one that should make every creator in America sit up straight. Federal law doesn’t flatly ban publishing information about explosives — The Anarchist Cookbook has been sold openly for fifty years, and Amazon has never needed an explosives license to ship it. The statute requires proof the speaker knew or intended the information would be used in a federal crime of violence.
The reported intent evidence? The folder. A terrorist saved the links, so the government reasons backward from the audience to the speaker.
And here’s the detail that should embarrass somebody. According to AmmoLand’s reporting, Jabbar went looking for information on RDX — and the proportions in Derrick’s video on the subject were wrong. The recipe, as posted, would not have worked.
The government’s theory of intent reportedly runs through a video that couldn’t do the one thing the theory needs it to do.
We’ve Been Down This Road — Sort Of
The closest thing America has to a precedent here is the Hit Man case from the 1990s. Paladin Press published an actual murder manual, a contract killer followed it step by step, and the victims’ families sued. A federal appeals court let the lawsuit through, the publisher’s insurers paid up, and the book disappeared.
Notice everything that case had that this one, per the reporting, doesn’t. A working manual. A killer who demonstrably used it. And even then it was a civil lawsuit — money — not a man sitting in a federal cell.
The distribution statute itself was written in the late ’90s for the same fear: bomb recipes plus proven intent. For nearly three decades it stayed a narrow tool, because everyone understood the alternative. The alternative is what this case reportedly tests.
Where This Theory Goes If It Works
Here’s the second-order effect nobody’s pricing in. If a stranger’s saved-links folder can supply criminal intent, prosecutors don’t even need to win very often — because YouTube’s lawyers will finish the job for free.
Platforms don’t wait for verdicts. The day “hosting it” becomes a litigation risk, entire categories of content disappear in a compliance memo. Reloading data. Tannerite reviews. Gunsmithing walkthroughs. NFA explainers. All of it is “information relating to” something dangerous, and all of it has, somewhere out there, exactly the kind of viewer no creator gets to screen for.
You — the guy with the reloading bench and the watch history to match — have a hundred saved videos a prosecutor could describe the way this indictment describes Derrick’s. You saved them because you’re a hobbyist. Under this theory, the difference between your library and evidence is entirely about who else hit save.
Maybe the government has more than the reporting shows. Trials exist to answer exactly that, and this one deserves watching, not prejudging — in either direction.
But if the whole hand is a tip jar, a recipe that reportedly didn’t work, and a dead terrorist’s bookmarks, then the verdict that matters won’t be about one man from Sweet Springs, Missouri. It’ll be about whether the government can hold a speaker responsible for the worst person who ever hit download — Crump’s phrase, and a standard no publisher in this country has ever been asked to meet.
The trial will tell us about Jordan Derrick. The theory will tell us about the Justice Department. Watch both.
