Terry Zink has spent 57 years building a life in Montanaās backcountry. The 57-year-old third-generation houndsman from Marionāa remote town nestled deep within the Flathead National Forestāruns a small archery target business serving outdoor recreation workers and guides who, until recently, had steady employment managing Americaās public lands. Contents
Those workers are disappearing. Their jobs are gone. And Zink, who voted for Trump in 2024, is watching his customer baseāand his livelihoodāvanish before his eyes.
āYou wonāt meet anyone more conservative than me, and I didnāt vote for this,ā Zink told Politico reporters as he surveyed the damage. āYou cannot fire our firefighters. You cannot fire our trail crews. You have to have selective logging, water restoration, and healthy forestsā (1).
If the failure and stupidity of DOGE isnāt hammered into people for generations to come then a gross failure will have taken place.
They claimed to want to cut waste but they have destroyed so much revenue it isnāt funny.
āYou wonāt meet anyone more conservative than me, and I didnāt vote for this,ā Zink told Politicoā¦
Right. You voted for other people to lose their jobs. In reality you voted for and deserve exactly what youāre getting.
āYou wonāt meet anyone more conservative than me, and I didnāt vote for this,ā
Ha, I grabbed that quote too.
Narrator Voice: But He did. He actually did vote for this.
honestly, what I hear when these nitwits say this is āI spent all my time being told what to think by people on TV (famous celebrities! Ooooo!) in the media that I was easily impressed byā¦ā
Itās the full flower of the Southern Strategy that Lee Atwater leveraged in 1980 to help Reagan take the election. The early 80ās was also when Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Lee Atwater - broke into politics in the biggest way and cemented lying and couched racism as right wing political toolsā¦
https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/75/creatures-of-the-swamp/
Itās been all downhill for the US since then.
Itās been all downhill for the US since
then16421492.1642?
Charles the First Attacked Parliament?
Ugh, I was going from memory and was pretty sure I got it wrong.
Oh, Columbus.
Rats!
I was hoping it was some cool hithero unknown historical fact regarding the English Civil War you knew of.
Well yeah. That.
LOL!
Naw he voted to hurt black and brown people. But didnāt realize he was voting for classist as much as a racist.
especially a classists, that has been constantly calling the voters, dumb and stupid, and low class.
Just because youāre too dumb to understand the consequences doesnāt mean youāre shielded from them.
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āwhat did you vote for then?ā name a Trump policy that influenced your vote, please!
āi voted for that abstract thing, that will hurt the people i dont like, but if it hurts me i think trump will come around or say just kiddingā-the voter probably.
I also voted against the other guy because harmful stereotypes reinforced by my echo chamber, and without learning any actual facts
The one where we kill all the brown people and that magically makes my gas cheaper.
I bet he loves the burning cities and innocent people getting shot in the face because those things donāt affect him personally
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.
Yes you did.
Of course not. He voted for other people to lose their jobs.
Maybe he should reflect on what itās like to be āother peopleā.
If they had empathy, they wouldnāt be conservative.
His situation is a mistake that needs to be rectified, everyone else deserved it.
āYou wonāt meet anyone more conservative than me, and I didnāt vote for this,ā
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 youāre sad.
this time it hurt you in a way that you noticed
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.
According to the american exceptionalism, you are not poor, you are a temporarily inconvenienced billionaire.
"I believed we were cutting waste in Washington,ā Mitchell said in an interview with local news. āI didnāt think theyād fire the people actually fighting fires and maintaining trails. Thatās not wasteāthatās the actual work.ā
Itās 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 itās never actually been about āwaste,ā 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 donāt fund public sector jobs. But DOGE didnāt go for those.
I would argue they didnāt become more efficient. They just outsourced everything to private contractors. And private contractors have an overhead of needing to compete for contracts, so theyāre 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. Iāve 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 theyāre 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.
Thatās what I meant by āprivate contacts.ā They donāt 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 itās more obfuscated.
We could do those jobs much more cheaply and efficiently by nationalizing them, but then that would be ābig government,ā even though it would be saving tax payer dollars when all the accounting was said and done. So š¤·.
Have you thought about getting consultants in to get their institutional knowledge? They hote lots of recent grads who theoretically know what to doā¦they work them hard and then churn through more, overcharging for their time and underpaying them. Some progress to become senior consultants. Not many.
Itās more than just āgetting consultants.ā 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 youāre 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 donāt. 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.
Folks from rural areas prioritize cultural signaling for conservativism over economic growth. Iād 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 āYou wonāt meet anyone more conservative than me, and I didnāt vote for thisā
āWHAT DID YOU VOTE FOR THENā
āWHAT DID YOU VOTE FOR THENā
Conservatives: āWe voted for the child rapist.ā
āWHAT DID YOU VOTE FOR THENā
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 āwhy are MAH tax dollars going to all them city folksā! Iāve had this talk so many times with them, why should they pay (like pennies or their salary) to my city improvements just because theyāre state taxes?
Well, rural guy, because in actuality āus city folkā subsidize all of the rural state. They think theyāre 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? Itās not them and their low tax income. Their life depends on the city people
And then they vote to hurt us by cutting programsā¦ And forget that we were paying for them to be on those programs.
Their only connection to the outside world used to be newspapers, then radio and television, now itās the internet. This makes them extremely vulnerable to disinformation.
I canāt count the number of times Iāve been lectured by some yokel on how the city Iāve lived my entire life in is actually a warzone with shaira law.
Same! Theyāre absolutely terrified of my city and to me itās like, what the place where I walked to get my bagel this morning?
its a hellhole and fire, says fox pundits. in hindsight, the homeless problems, drug addicts are brought on by the gop truncating these 2 groups to liberal cities, its not by accident you see an increase every few years, they are being bussed or given a ticket here. MSM/fox will never report on it, because it just makes the gop states look bad.
Itās nothing new that we are forced to deal with their problems
mostly fox news for conservative milleneals and older, and now with NEWSMAX/OAN right wing grifters, and consistent convincing them into the manosphere.
We were always vulnerable, just to a very selective group of content creators. Now itās open to anyone with the flashiest bullshit.
We should have learned about media in the 80s when everyone was telling us this would happen. But we didnāt. Heil Trump.
We were always vulnerable, just to a very selective group of content creators. Now itās open to anyone with the flashiest bullshit.
We should have learned about media in the 80s when everyone was telling us this would happen. But we didnāt. Heil Trump.
As LBJ famously stated back in the 60ās to his then-press secretary Bill Moyers: āIf you can convince the lowest white man, that heās better than the best black man, he wonāt notice that your picking his pocket. Hell, give him someone to look down on and heāll open his pocket for youā¦ā
This is exactly the classism couched in racism that took our erstwile Mr. Rural for a ride. All them āblacksā on welfare taking their tax dollarsā¦ (because the unspoken bit is, ONLY blacks and minorities and uppity unwed women that breed like rabbits - the welfare āqueensā donātcha knowā¦ are on welfareā¦)
Every goddamn decade these poorly educated idiots fall for it.
āI love the poorly educatedā- TRUMP and ever GOP ever.
āSmart people donāt like meā ā Donald J Trump
also after the 1/6 attack, i only āsee low class peopleā-trump
There is a grain of truth in that rural areas get worse government service. Power outages last for longer, often they donāt 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 canāt 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 donāt 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 itās not a high priority. I argue that thatās their choice, and that itās 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 thatās 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 āyou chose thatā.
they love vice signalling as well as virtue signalling.
Awww is someone having a hard time finding his bootstraps? š
Dear Terry: youāre starting to come a looooooooooong long way. Seriously!
You did vote for this & you were also warned.
Youāre just a sucker.
'I didnāt vote this." Yes. Yes you did. You didnāt 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.
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Trump has shown who he is. Year after year, after year. We canāt blame it on folks not being educated anymore. They liked what he did when he did it to people they hated. Thatās itā¦
They can get fucked. You wanted this. You got it.
