How Sideways Can One Hat Get?

The rise and fall of a camo campaign cap

I’ve always wanted to get into The New Yorker. I always figured that’d be with a byline, and never thought it’d be due to a hat. And yet here we are.

I ordered the hat in question the day after watching Kamala Harris introduce Tim Walz as her running mate. I hadn’t heard of the guy before, but enjoyed his speech that first week in August, and especially appreciated his take on Chappell Roan’s headwear.

My thinking basically went: I like Pink Pony Club, I do not like Nazis. I wasn’t entirely sure what a midwest princess was, but if it combined those two things, I was happy wearing it on my head. So I clicked over to KamalaHarris.com and ordered one. But when the confirmation email came, it said something about order fulfillment not happening until late October, just a couple of weeks before voting. That was no good. If my new hat was going to win the fight against fascism, I needed it sooner. I found a knockoff on Etsy, and first put it on my head a few days later.

That month, I wore the hat around town here in Bozeman, where it garnered a few stares, and a handful of compliments. I remember chatting with a checkout lady at the co-op about it, and saying something like it’s important for people who believe in the side of good and look like me to give other men permission to also fight for good by being visible.

The hat’s real debut came during the first weekend in September, at The Bootlegger Inn up in Lincoln, Montana. My hunting buddy had just bought a property nearby. He makes a statement by pairing his camo with a Yale Bulldogs hat. I figured I’d make mine by eventually posting a photo of my hat alongside a dead elk.

“You’re really going to do that, huh?” He asked when he eventually walked into The Bootlegger and saw me wearing it. Lincoln is the home of the Unibomber, something locals are still proud of. Like most places that have more problems than they do opportunity, it’s full of confederate flags and men who cannot get laid signifying that fact by wearing red ball caps.

“I like your hat,” the bartender told us. She explained that everyone called her “bird girl,” and we invited her to come by hunting camp sometime to let her goshawk fly after grouse.

Over the next few weeks commuting between Bozeman and Lincoln, the hat got a few stares, but I never heard one negative word about it. I think that was most of the point in wearing it—demonstrating to everyone that a person like me could exist in what they think of as their own safe space, and they couldn’t do a damned thing about it.

Sorry for wrapping you up in all this Alex.

Then, late one morning in early October, I hiked back into camp after a sunrise sit on a wallow, grabbed a cold beer out of my cooler, and fired up Starlink. I’d planned on checking in with Virginia, but instead my phone rang, and on the other end was someone from Walz’s team inviting me out to Minnesota for a pheasant hunt the next morning. I threw on a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt, smashed the hat down over my sweaty hair, and started driving.

The next morning, I staggered into a little cafe in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota to find a bunch of old men in MAGA hats leaning on the bar. They smirked and asked me where I was from, but got visibly confused when I responded, “Montana.” I walked into the glass door face first on my way back to the truck.

“Nice hat,” said Alex Robinson from Outdoor Life 20 minutes later, when he introduced himself. “You going to wear that for photos?”

I told him something like, “I don’t feel a need to pretend I’m anything I’m not this election cycle.”

When Walz eventually showed up, and we embarked on the hunt, one of his aides asked me to take the hat off for reasons I didn’t quite catch. Something about wearing official campaign gear and news footage. He also asked me where I got it, since he and his colleagues were all still waiting for theirs. I remember him pulling out his phone when I told him Etsy.

The hunt turned into a total joke. Not because there weren’t birds, or Walz and his buddy didn’t know how to shoot, as far-right propaganda mills would suggest in days following. There was just a pile of news cameramen and photographers tagging along, ignoring requests from the Secret Service to stay behind the hunters, and out of the way of the shotguns. Walz had at least three viable shots by my count, which would have been his limit on those wild birds. One of those was right over my head. I dove into a ditch in an effort to give him the shot, but he just stood there and chuckled, never even shouldering his gun. An accident would have been a lot worse result than an unsuccessful hunt.

Alex and I were both surprised by the fact that Walz was going after wild birds during what essentially amounted to a photo op. Every other politician I’ve ever seen try to use bird hunting as a background has used penned pheasants, released right in front of the hunter for that guaranteed shot. But hey, more respect to Tim for at least trying to be authentic.

I was also really surprised to see those far-right propaganda mills cut some of the news footage backwards, to make it look like Walz was having trouble loading his Beretta. I’d been standing right next to him when that was shot, and it was at the very end of the hunt, as he tried to eject three unspent shells.

If you’re not familiar with shotguns or bird hunting, the story there is that semi-autos can be a real bitch to unload. The guns themselves have become the preferred choice in the field because you get a third shot compared to the two you get from a double-barrel, plus reduced recoil from the semi-automatic’s buffer (something Tim explained to us he’d really begun to prefer as he ages), but the tradeoff is that ejecting unfired shells involves cycling them out of a loading gate, and the lip on the shell’s brass base is prone to catching on that that gate as they come out.

Walz got one stuck, as all of us sometimes do, kept the gun pointed in a safe direction, and manually cycled the action to clear the jam. It was textbook. So it was odd to see supposed gun enthusiasts treating that obviously-reversed video as some sort of evidence that a man who grew up hunting, and served 24 years in the National Guard, didn’t know how to use a firearm.

Anyways, I did my interview, asked one his aids to snap a couple photos, and texted one to my editor at Outside. I’d hit them up the night before, on the drive out, but that was a Friday, and Outside staff take their work/life balance seriously. I don’t remember the exact response, but it wasn’t exactly one of unbridled enthusiasm. I’ll let The New Yorker take it from here:

“…last fall, after a writer on assignment was photographed standing with Tim Walz, the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate, while wearing a Harris/Walz cap, higher-ups pushed for extra layers of oversight for political content in advance of the election. This contributed to a ‘chilling’ effect, former staffers said. Thurston said that there was never any kind of ban on political content, and pointed to Outside’s coverage of staff cuts in national parks as an example, among others. But former staffers told the Columbia Journalism Review that stories perceived as political were ‘defanged’ or significantly delayed.”

I write about politics on this Substack now, and limit my contributions to Outside to topics like gear and outdoor skills.

But the hat didn’t stop there. The day after the election, the editors of Field Ethos—a hunting magazine part-owned by Donald Trump Jr—ran a series of stories on their official Instagram page referencing my hat, accusing me of threatening conservative families, and pointing readers towards my social media accounts. My inbox started to fill up with hateful messages, over 20 of which contained some sort of explicit or implicit threat against me and my family.

I’ve still never met anyone who works for that magazine, but knew that one of my best friends was friends with them. A PR guy beat him to the punch with the editor’s phone number, but when I asked the dude to knock off the attack due to the threats, he refused. Eventually said friend called me back, obviously having already talked to the other party, and told me he felt it was inappropriate for me to be threatening conservative families. I still don’t fully understand the reasons why anyone believed I was doing that. I put the phone down in frustration. Eventually Field Ethos did delete the stories, and the threats stopped coming in.

I haven’t really been able to talk to that friend about what I felt was a real failure to have my back during that situation. Let downs like that just don’t feel like they return the kind of loyalty I try to put into my friendships.

While all that was going on, a creepy ex-con also wrote a work of homoerotic fan-fiction about the hat. To quote Tim, these people are “weird.”

The day after the election, I set the hat on my nightstand, where it’s stayed since. I want to note that every conflict the hat created existed only online or over the phone, and never in person.

Six or so months later, acknowledging that those of us working to try and defeat Trump during the election were working to fight fascism isn’t so controversial. I think it must also be acknowledged that most of the objection around the hat was simply an attempt to protect the feelings of those who couldn’t handle an alternative point of view existing in worlds they think they dominate.

And combining those two things, I think we get close to some sort of takeaway around all this: The right is made up of incredibly fragile man children who can’t handle the presence of people modeling strength and empathy, or standing up against them to fight for the causes of good. While those fragile man children might appear tough when viewed through a screen, they are not tough in the real world. With the right message and messengers, we can still win. America has fight left in it yet.

All photos: David Lienemann

Wes Siler is your guide to leading a more exciting life outdoors. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports independent journalism and gives you personal access to his expertise and network, which he’ll use to help you plan trips, purchase gear, and solve problems. You can read more about what he’s doing on Substack through this link.