Terry Zink has spent 57 years building a life in Montana’s backcountry. The 57-year-old third-generation houndsman from Marion—a remote town nestled deep within the Flathead National Forest—runs a small archery target business serving outdoor recreation workers and guides who, until recently, had steady employment managing America’s public lands. Contents
Those workers are disappearing. Their jobs are gone. And Zink, who voted for Trump in 2024, is watching his customer base—and his livelihood—vanish before his eyes.
“You won’t meet anyone more conservative than me, and I didn’t vote for this,” Zink told Politico reporters as he surveyed the damage. “You cannot fire our firefighters. You cannot fire our trail crews. You have to have selective logging, water restoration, and healthy forests” (1).
Yes you did.
You did vote for this & you were also warned.
You’re just a sucker.
'I didn’t vote this." Yes. Yes you did. You didn’t want to hear others tell you what you were voting for. You wanted to believe your own fantasy version. Even now, most MEGA voters want to believe their own fantasy of what Trump will do for America over the truth of what he is actively doing.
thats why they fall for scams quite easily, they trump is just kidding or he suddenly reverses what he does, nope he doesnt. only the 1st term he had people preventing him from doing too much damage, this time no one is going to stop trump and his cronies, conservatives also want to blame democrats, but dems arnt in power anymore.
“You won’t meet anyone more conservative than me, and I didn’t vote for this,”
You consistently voted for this. Every time conservatives are in power they cut services and environmental protections. You voted for it over and over again but this time it actually hurt you and you’re sad.
also cut TAXES for actual rich people, not for poors whom seem to think they will benefit from such tax cuts for the rich somehow.
this time it hurt you in a way that you noticed
Do people just not understand how voting works, or what the word means? Do they maybe think it’s short for Devote?
The workers who lost their jobs weren’t desk-bound administrators. They were firefighters, trail maintenance crews, wildlife biologists, rangers, foresters, and seasonal workers who kept public lands accessible and safe. They were the people who made it possible for outfitters, guides, hunters, ranchers, and tourism operators to do business.
try doing that without desk-bound administrators and see how it goes
The betrayal is particularly acute because these workers weren’t making big government salaries. Forest Service seasonal workers typically earn $15 to $18 per hour. Park rangers make $35,000 to $50,000 annually. These were working-class jobs that supported working-class families in rural communities with few other options.
isn’t this the same group of people who claim that minimum wage is too high?
Of course not. He voted for other people to lose their jobs.
Maybe he should reflect on what it’s like to be “other people”.
If they had empathy, they wouldn’t be conservative.
His situation is a mistake that needs to be rectified, everyone else deserved it.
These are real jobs held by real people in small towns across Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and Arizona—states that overwhelmingly voted for Trump.
Whoa whoa whoa, don’t lump Colorado in with those states. We absolutely did NOT vote for that piece of shit - 3 times in a row.
he said “real” jobs.
Idk how they got Colorado in there
“You won’t meet anyone more conservative than me, and I didn’t vote for this,” Zink told Politico…
Right. You voted for other people to lose their jobs. In reality you voted for and deserve exactly what you’re getting.
Just because you’re too dumb to understand the consequences doesn’t mean you’re shielded from them.
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So his business is built around serving federal government employees and federal spending, he voted to reduce federal spending and is upset that it negatively affected his business.
Whhhhhaaattt???
doge pretty much eliminated most if not all the federal employees and spending.
"I believed we were cutting waste in Washington,” Mitchell said in an interview with local news. “I didn’t think they’d fire the people actually fighting fires and maintaining trails. That’s not waste—that’s the actual work.”
It’s all actual work. The relentless assault on all federal institutions for the last half century had the initial effect of making the vast majority of them the most efficient systems in existence. Both political parties initially agreed they should not be wasteful, and through several rounds of reform they became more efficient than private organizations doing the same job can even theoretically be. But it’s never actually been about “waste,” and they stated cutting bone by the early 2000s. The only federal jobs left do actual work, and better, more important work than the vast majority of private sector jobs.
The waste is in private contracts that don’t fund public sector jobs. But DOGE didn’t go for those.
I would argue they didn’t become more efficient. They just outsourced everything to private contractors. And private contractors have an overhead of needing to compete for contracts, so they’re all spending money on staff that writes up the bids. Additionally, they only hire the workers when they win the contract and those contracts usually expire after 5-10 years. This means there is no long term, institutional capacity building. It might be fine for small projects, but for large complex projects, tearing down an organization only to reassemble it under another contractor every 5-10 years is in fact terribly inefficient and produces worse outcomes. Organizations cannot become good at the work. I’ve seen it first hand. There are many contractors that specialize only in federal procurement regulations, but have almost no in house technical knowledge of how to run the projects they’re bidding on beyond what is they need to say to win. And, most importantly, knowing what to say to win is different than having a mature organization in place to do the work.
That’s what I meant by “private contacts.” They don’t outsource every single possible federal job, otherwise there would be no executive branch left. So the public sector jobs are highly efficient, and the waste has been outsourced to the private contracts where it’s more obfuscated.
We could do those jobs much more cheaply and efficiently by nationalizing them, but then that would be “big government,” even though it would be saving tax payer dollars when all the accounting was said and done. So 🤷.
Have you thought about getting consultants in to get their institutional knowledge? They hote lots of recent grads who theoretically know what to do…they work them hard and then churn through more, overcharging for their time and underpaying them. Some progress to become senior consultants. Not many.
It’s more than just “getting consultants.” Organizations need to have systems in place to manage their work. Consultants might know some things, but they are not systems. Systems usually are born out of experience and become more mature over time. They are complex and interlinked and adapt to nuances in the understanding of their work.
The prevailing metaphor for organizational capacity is that they are comprised of interchangeable parts that can be rebuilt or replaced any time. However, the actual reality is they are more like plants that grow. Privatizing the public sector is akin to planting a tree with the aim of having it give you shade, except every 5-10 years you cut it down and replant a new one. In the end, you never really get what you’re supposed to, but a bunch of people are making money off it.
Yes. I was making a joke. Consultants often are inexperienced and just make cuts, not improvements. Most of the work is done by cheap grads, who compete for few roles in the hope they make it. Most don’t. The customers get overcharged for poor advice.
Usually, they are just a way for management to have someone to point to for the decisions they make that negatively impact people or the business.
Yes, you did. Fucking idiot. Enjoy being homeless.
Especially in a country where criminalizing homelessness is literally a bipartisan issue.
We tried to fucking tell you chucklefucks what was going to happen if Trump was elected. Project 2025 laid it all out plain as day but you still fucking gargled his shit covered balls so fuck you fuck you fuck you.
OBAMA broke the minds of moderate republicans, and liberterians. cant have a black man as a president, this ensure also no woman will be a president ever in america too.
We should ban all of the dumb fucking apes who voted for Trump from voting again
They’ve made it incredibly obvious they’re completely fucking incompetent, and don’t actually care about society, but instead just want to hurt others. That level of stupidity shouldn’t be tolerated
all the tourism in those conservative states mustve dried up, but fox will never report on such a thing to scare the voters.
Folks from rural areas prioritize cultural signaling for conservativism over economic growth. I’d hazard that Mr. Zink would probably vote Trump again, given the opportunity, if the opposite candidate publicly supported trans rights or was just a Democratic black woman.
Edit:
Goosechase.jpg “You won’t meet anyone more conservative than me, and I didn’t vote for this”
“WHAT DID YOU VOTE FOR THEN”
“WHAT DID YOU VOTE FOR THEN”
Conservatives: “We voted for the child rapist.”
they love vice signalling as well as virtue signalling.
“WHAT DID YOU VOTE FOR THEN”
for white unarmed mother of 3 to be murdered and called a terrorist because she was murdered
God people in rural communities are so stupid when they vote. I live in a very lopsided state. Just for ease of understanding, about 80% of the state is rural, but also 80% of the people live in the cities. Rural folks often forget just how many more people live in cities.
So they get resentful and say “why are MAH tax dollars going to all them city folks”! I’ve had this talk so many times with them, why should they pay (like pennies or their salary) to my city improvements just because they’re state taxes?
Well, rural guy, because in actuality “us city folk” subsidize all of the rural state. They think they’re paying for our stuff but turns out density is way cheaper and way more economically viable than rural. So we subsidize them all the time. I always remind them who do they think pays for the roads, the infrastructure, their state parks? It’s not them and their low tax income. Their life depends on the city people
And then they vote to hurt us by cutting programs… And forget that we were paying for them to be on those programs.
“I love the poorly educated”- TRUMP and ever GOP ever.
As LBJ famously stated back in the 60’s to his then-press secretary Bill Moyers: “If you can convince the lowest white man, that he’s better than the best black man, he won’t notice that your picking his pocket. Hell, give him someone to look down on and he’ll open his pocket for you…”
This is exactly the classism couched in racism that took our erstwile Mr. Rural for a ride. All them “blacks” on welfare taking their tax dollars… (because the unspoken bit is, ONLY blacks and minorities and uppity unwed women that breed like rabbits - the welfare “queens” don’tcha know… are on welfare…)
Every goddamn decade these poorly educated idiots fall for it.
There is a grain of truth in that rural areas get worse government service. Power outages last for longer, often they don’t even have sewer hookups and have to maintain septic systems, roads are maintained at a lower level, etc. They really do get less benefit (in outcome terms) than city folk.
I think @Greddan@feddit.org hit on the information environment as the reason they can’t see that that lower service level comes at a way, way higher monetary cost. Our information aggregators are in the business of making money from engagement, and telling people things they want to hear that sound true is the most effective engagement tool. I don’t see the problem getting any better unless we figure out a better information model.
It is true, and I counter that with if you choose to live far away from people then you will be prioritized less. Things get fixed faster when there are more people affected, so when you choose to live miles away from anyone, when your power goes out it’s not a high priority. I argue that that’s their choice, and that it’s deserved when it also costs much more for that one person to have power compared to thousands of people getting power for relatively the same cost in an urban area. Harsh I know, but that’s how the money flows. They can always move to an urban area if they choose that services are more important than living rurally. More or less I agree with you, but I would tell them “you chose that”.
