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There are a few voting communities that are as tight-knit and culturally important as hunters and anglers. This cohort, of which my boys and I are a part, contains a high percentage of young men who are distrustful of outsiders and therefore reliant on a small group of trusted influencers, and it's a group that has been successfully targeted by Trump in each of his three elections.
And yet, the first nine months of this GOP government trifecta have been a worst-case disaster for those very same hunters and fishermen. Trump and his Republican majority in Congress have engaged in a nonstop spree of destruction, targeting important federal resource management programs, critical project funding, wildlife science, land management agencies, and senior staff. They intend to remove the roadless rule, have reinstated the Ambler road, have gutted the National Environmental Policy Act, tried to sell hundreds of millions of acres of public land, have removed protections for wildlife permitting processes, have reversed travel management plans for millions of acres across the West, and appointed numerous anti-public land zealots across multiple federal agencies. For Hunters and fishermen, it's almost impossible to imagine it getting any worse.
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For the most part, the Republican onslaught of destruction has met with a mix of faux shock, contrived dismay, or deafening silence from almost all top hunting influencers and associated hunting/conservation groups. That’s making the destruction far worse, because it’s sending the message to the Trump administration that they can destroy without any meaningful political pushback from the constituency that should care the most. It’s as if Trump is lighting their homes on fire with their families inside, and they respond with a submissive “thank you, sir” or maybe a risky, quickly whispered whimper of resistance. Whether they are frightened or just personally resistant to criticising Republicans, this dereliction of duty comes at the worst possible time for America’s wild places.
What is confounding is that these men, who for more than a decade have curated big audiences and made even bigger fortunes promoting hunting and using public lands, don't even pretend to deny the actual disaster; that much is clear even to them. What they refuse to acknowledge is the source, their very personal role in creating it, their ongoing role in fueling it, and their unquestionable and urgent responsibility to stop it.
An illustrative example is Cameron “keep hammering” Hanes, who hosts popular podcasts targeting his nearly 1.8 million Instagram followers. Hanes, who aggressively influenced his followers to go all-in on MAGA by campaigning barn-storming style with Trump in key battleground states, which were selected specifically because they contained high numbers of hunters, now seems surprised that “someone” is destroying the places he loves to hunt. One needs only watch two minutes of this short podcast clip to see his clear admission of the destruction, and then his unconvincing “but I did not vote for this" protestations.
I’ve got news for Cam: while he now refuses even to utter the words “Trump” or “Republican,” not only did he vote for their destruction, but he signed on to sell it in the campaign as an official Trump surrogate. MAGA needed someone like Hanes to dupe his audience into ignoring promises to deploy the highly anti-conservation portions of Project 2025. They needed him to keep hunters in the fold even as they publicly planned to force construction of the Ambler road, which they had done once before in 2020. They needed him to subdue hunters even though they planned to gut the roadless rule, which they also did in Trump’s first term. I’m sorry, but you don’t need Captain Obvious to see that Cam’s current shocked-face pearl-clutching makes him look dumber than a box of hammers.
Steve Rinella and his MeatEater media company, which together boast more than 2.5 million Instagram followers, have also very publicly acknowledged the shocking destruction. Rinella has gone much further than Hanes by urging millions of followers to oppose administration moves such as the push to rescind the roadless rule, gut BLM travel plans, and build the Ambler road. But like Cam, Steve, who is an icon and conservation hero to many, has also, strangely and steadfastly, resisted assigning specific blame.
Frustrated longtime Rinella fans find hollowness in many of his actions, believing that, like Hanes, Steve helped usher in this destruction. They point to Steve’s fawning podcast episodes with Donald Trump Jr, Tucker Carlson, and Ted Nugent, all of whom are ardent supporters of the MAGA agenda, including all the stuff Steve claims to oppose. Rinella also angered his audience earlier this year when he initially dismissed, and even seemed to praise, drastic DOGE cuts to critical federal agencies and revered management programs.
During the Biden administration, MeatEater also seemed to relish painting with broad “all Democrats are anti-hunting” brushes, but never managed to apply similarly broad strokes to the GOP. They even seemed to go out of their way to create controversy where none existed. Such an instance occurred in 2023, when MeatEater made a huge story out of having “obtained a letter asking Biden to ban beaver trapping,” as if the entire Democratic party could be branded with the content of a single constituent’s letter. It was a near-perfect execution of a classic and often-used GOP smear technique. (as an aside here, imagine what could be done with the insane stuff coming into the Trump admin - but Rinella does not seem to be searching for those letters.)
It’s not that Steve doesn’t occasionally talk a pretty good game, but he also seems intent on giving his growing list of naysayers ammunition by sabotaging his own good work. An excellent example is encapsulated in about three minutes of this MeatEater podcast clip, where Steve first admirably states his support for the roadless rule, but then allows Ryan Zinke, a ex cabinent official and existing lawmaker with the actual power to influence critical policy, to spew utter falsehoods, such as “the roadless rule was put in without public comment by Clinton.” This sort of looking away from obvious Republican malfeasance has become a common tactic for Rinella: he takes credit for being virtuously opposed to something like Ambler or roadless rule recission, only to then use the full force of his platform to empower the very Republicans doing what he claims to oppose. That’s just what he did here: deploy the old fawn-over-GOP-bullshittery trick, the same thing he’s done with other partisan Republican cheerleaders. Watch the very painful Zinke clip here:
It’s obvious to all of us that a real proponent of saving the roadless rule would have confronted Zinke’s propaganda. We are not big-name podcast experts, but here is our suggested retort: “No, Mr. Discraced former Secretary of the Interior, that’s bullshit, and you know it. There were actually 1.6 million public comments, which is slightly more than your insane claim of ‘none,’ and more than 95% of them were positive, by the way. Moreover, the administration held 600 public meetings across the West. Why do you have to lie like that, and also why did you take nearly a million dollars from ConocoPhillips and other big extractive companies pushing these Trump policies?”
Of course, that’s not even close to what Steve did and repeated instances of Rinella's anti-dem rants or this bowing to GOP lies have left many longtime Rinella fans who once counted on him to be their conservation champion suspecting that he is really a Trump-friendly turncoat.
To understand why this is such an important topic in this time of all-hands-on-deck conservation crisis, a bit of history is in order.
Steven Rinella, the founder and gravitational center of the Bozeman-based lifestyle/media company MeatEater, is the biggest thing to hit hunting, fishing, and conservation in a generation. He is an engaging, youthful 51-year-old Michigander turned Montanan, a pioneering and wildly successful podcaster, a talented speaker, and a passionate hunter who first captured the imagination of Americans with his writing and “Wild Within” TV show, which debuted on the Travel Channel in January 2011.
Like many people, I was captivated by that show’s unapologetic mainstream promotion of a respectful hunter-gatherer lifestyle, because, like Rinella, I believed in a soulful embrace of hunting as an integral part of being human and of being connected to our food.
Hunters and members of the growing nationwide locavore movement were charmed by Rinella’s message and charisma. Importantly, at least initially, we were also heartened by Steve’s brash embrace of a progressive environmental ethic that had once been at the heart of hunting culture in America during the days of Theordor Roosevelt and Aldo Leopold.
By the early 2000s, that was changing, and Steve came along at the same time that established hunting orgs and influencers were being aggressively weaponized as tools by the Republican Party in an increasingly blatant partisan culture war against conservation and environmental policy. But here was Rinella, refreshingly charging into the arena with disarming conservative cultural hunting language, and also behaving as if he literally had no idea that hunting could be separated from progressive environmental activism. None of this was contrived; Rinella proudly advertised it for all to hear in hunting publications like the Journal of Mountain Hunting.
“So maybe I’m a radical. You know what, I’ll say I’m a radical conservationist. Like a radical environmentalist, but different. I’m a radical environmentalist with lots of good sense,”
And he successfully built a brand using environmental activism that was big enough to be featured in the New York Times.
In these early years, as the MeatEater podcast started catching fire, Steve seemed to channel the voice of thousands of responsible hunters like us who were constantly embarrassed by the vast majority of hunting media that broadly painted us as thoughtless right-wing rednecks who were killing machines devoid of even a shred of environmental consciousness. Many of us resented the resulting caricatures of hunters, and we were grasping for someone like Steve who would serve as a better example and bridge what we knew was a dangerously widening cultural and political gap.
A review of Rinella's first TV show episodes by prominent Wisconsin bowhunter Patrick Durkin captured our excitement.
Rinella makes meat-gathering understandable – even cool and relevant – through his self-confident love and explanations for hunting. He believes hunting is more than just outdoor recreation or wildlife management. It’s part of our species’ identity. Only in recent times have so many people claimed otherwise.
“The Wild Within” celebrates hunting and its significance, something I never thought I’d see on television.
Steve even represented a potential revival of the image of hunting among big-city cultural elites. Bill Scheft’s 2012 New York Times review of Rinella's first book, also entitled Meat Eater, opens with a sentence that was music to the ears of hunters like us who were eager to improve our public perception.
Truth be told, I have lived a life plenty comfortable with my disdain toward hunters and hunting. And then along comes Steven Rinella and his revelatory memoir, “Meat Eater,” to ruin everything.
I first met Steve in March of 2012 in Missoula, where he gave the keynote address to the Backcountry Hunters and Anglers national rendezvous. Within a few years, I would be the North American Board chair for BHA and a guest on Steve’s podcast, but I was there that night as a sponsoring gun company VP, auctioning a donated Kimber rifle for a fundraiser. This was one of the many ways I tried to use the tools at my disposal to counter the politics of powerful Republican organizations active in the outdoor industry, which were successfully turning conservation into a very partisan political game.
I took a lot of pleasure in helping build environmental and conservation organizations that I thought would support policies and politicians that my industry and the Republican Party were destroying. I was trying to do good work from the inside. I wanted Steve to find a way to do the same, but on a much larger, more effective scale, and he seemed to be already on his way.
After his compelling presentation that night, he and I spoke privately for a few minutes in the back of the hall, and I made a sincere request of him that he seemed to take very seriously. “You are going to do big things. Please don’t ever shy from speaking the truth and making a difference for wild places, even if it means bucking the right-wing power brokers, because they are going to come after truth speakers.”
Over the next few years, Rinella went on to build what would become the MeatEater empire by using public lands and the environment as important fuel sources. His podcast is a monster that's been downloaded millions of times. Like Cam Hanes, he’s a regular on Rogan’s podcast. MeatEater also hosts a suite of successful complementary shows with other engaging hosts. Meateater owns decoy, game call, and clothing companies, sells books, hosts sold-out live events, and is so large that in 2018 it was purchased by a private equity company, TCG, the same company that, until recently, owned Barstool Sports, another successful “bro culture” media behemoth.
As the influence of Steve and his company grew, he sucked up a lot of daylight in the environmental world, and he elevated conservation in many important ways. He had enough followers that he could provide cover fire for organizations to activate if he decided to engage. And for the most critical years of MeatEater’s growth, he mostly maintained his “radical centrist” and unapologetic environmentalist approach. But during the first Trump administration and then after TCG purchased his company, something changed, and the now-obvious dangerous rightward shift became apparent.
That shift became clear for me in the fall of 2020. I was serving on a national committee of hunting and fishing leaders who were working on the election and ardently opposed to Trump. I was doing it not out of any affinity for Biden, but because I was fully aware of the existential threat MAGA would pose to wild places.
Our group of more than 50 was shocked when we heard that Steve had opted to give Trump Jr. an hour of adoring national airtime just weeks before the election, I reached out to him and his team on behalf of our committee, which included Senator Martin Heinrich and many other elected national leaders, and officially requested equal airtime for one of us to rebut all of Trump Jr.’s lies and overt MAGA propoganda. We were very disappointed when Steve refused to allow us to make the case against Trump on his podcast, given the stakes.
For so many of us who are hunters and anglers who care enough about wild places to elevate them in our personal politics, the disappointment with Rinella, Hanes, and other influencers has only grown as the attacks on wild places have increased. We ask ourselves how it is that we care more about this than the people who have made fortunes from it? Our frustration also extends to the organizations that should be leading but are also weirdly silent or even supportive of the MAGA destruction. How is it that we care more than organizations purporting to have employees and mission statements dedicated to stopping what is happening? Frankly, it’s becoming obvious that their inaction is unforgivable.
All of this has left politically active hunters and anglers feeling a strange mix of anger and betrayal, but we also feel hope. We know that much damage has been done, and that our influencers have enabled much of it, but we also know that there is an election in 2026. We know that anyone who really cares about hunting, wildlife, and wild places has no choice but to advocate and vote to defeat every single MAGA republican in 2026, especially people like Ryan Zinke. We are hopeful that people like Rinella, Hanes, and all the other influencers will simply stop looking for reasons not to embrace the obvious.
It’s a simple ask, just recognize the gravity of our current situation and help us win in 2026; the alternative for the places we love is too dire to consider.

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