A Question for Every Politician in The Room

Every elected official and candidate has the right to take a position on fisheries policy. That’s democracy. But you also get to choose your coalition, and your coalition reflects you.

So, here’s the question: Do you know what’s being said in the name of the movement you’re amplifying and drafting legislation for? Have you read the comments? Have you called any of it out?

Because if a pro-trawling group had a Facebook page calling for people to shoot regulators and dox activists, it would be the lead story on every outlet in the state – and rightfully so.

Meet the Anti-Trawling Movement.

Even if you hate trawl, you should be uncomfortable with the following.

There’s a Facebook page called “Stop Alaska Trawl Bycatch (SATB).” It has nearly sixty thousand followers, posts ten to twenty times a day, and has become one of the loudest voices in Alaska’s fisheries debate. Politicians are listening to it. Candidates are citing it. Some are practically auditioning for their approval.

Before they go any further, they should scroll the comments. Here’s a few:

“F*ck it, just start shooting at them.”

“Trawlers would be better used as artificial reef’s. (sic)”

“Sink em.”

“Just start sinking the boats.”

“Alaska might need pirates to help.”

And my favorite from Alex Andrew, “Normalize shooting fish and game agents in Alaska.”

These aren’t fringe comments buried under thousands of thoughtful responses. They are the culture of this page – a daily drumbeat of rage, threats, and incitement aimed at an Alaskan industry, Alaskan workers, and the state and federal employees who manage it.

This is what some Alaska elected officials and candidates are aligning themselves with.

This Isn’t a Grassroots Movement. Follow the Money.

SATB presents itself as everyday Alaskans standing up for their fisheries. That’s a compelling story. It’s also not the whole truth.

The anti-trawling campaign in Alaska is substantially funded and amplified by Outside NGOs – national and international environmental organizations that have made Alaska fisheries a target. These groups have deep pockets, professional staff, and a strategic interest in restricting Alaska resource development. They’re not showing up to fish. They’re showing up to influence. Biodiversity Funders Group member foundations such as the Moore Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, Wilburforce Foundation and Oak Foundation to name a few have spent $30+ million from 2021-2024 to stop development across Alaska, with fisheries – and trawl in particular – in its crosshairs presently.

When Outside money floods into Alaska to shape how Alaskans think about their own resources, that’s worth naming. The volume is not organic. The reach is not accidental. Posting fifteen times a day with coordinated messaging is a campaign, not a community.

What the Movement Has Replaced

Pollock is the hidden foundation of Alaska’s fishing economy. Thousands of jobs. Hundreds of millions in wages. Communities up and down Alaska’s west coast depend on a well-managed, sustainable harvest.

There are legitimate debates to be had about trawling, bycatch, and fisheries management. Serious people on all sides of this issue have been having those conversations for decades – through the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, through rigorous science, through hard data, and through the kind of deliberate, transparent process that has made Alaska’s fisheries a global model of sustainability and stewardship.

What SATB has done instead is abandon that process entirely in favor of mob rage. It has substituted policy discussion with vitriolic attacks, replaced data with ignorance and cherry-picked outrage, and traded genuine advocacy for raw incitement. This isn’t activism – it’s the deliberate manufacture of division and hostility.

When your movement’s comment sections read like a threat board which warrants a restraining order, when harassment and inflammatory rhetoric go unchecked, and when your leaders refuse to condemn the worst behavior of their followers, you forfeit any claim to the moral high ground on fisheries management. You cannot demonize the very people and institutions that have delivered world-class conservation outcomes while pretending to care about the resource.

And what’s pathetic; people running for office are actually listening to the mob.

What Alaska unquestionably has is a growing problem with political intimidation, online radicalization, and activists who refuse to police their own movement.

Alaska has a mob-rage problem, an Outside-money problem, and an incitement problem – all wrapped in a sixty-thousand-follower Facebook page that politicians are treating as a credible voice.

It is not. And the people who work in this industry – the captains, the processors, the dock workers, the crews – deserve better than to have their livelihoods debated by a mob.

If we’re going to talk seriously about the future of Alaska fisheries, let’s talk seriously. Bring your data. Bring your science. Bring your communities.

Stop the threats. You’re creating permission structures for actual violence.

Adam Trombley is a lifelong Alaskan who has worked in resource development and government sectors. A former Anchorage Assembly member, he currently serves as the Strategic Director for The Truth.