When Manny Rutinel, a Democrat running in a swing district in Colorado, was a University of Florida student, he stripped his shirt and donned a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sign to promote veganism.
“In order to go green, you have to eat green,” he told the Independent Florida Alligator in 2016. At another college protest, he stood before a group of cows while holding a sign that read, “Animal liberation is human liberation,” and told a local reporter he hoped “some people will change their lifestyle and hopefully go vegan.” On National Hug a Vegan Day one year earlier, he dressed as a pig.
That was just the beginning of Rutinel’s anti-meat crusade. While attending Yale Law School as a Law, Ethics & Animals Program fellow, he called animal agriculture “a horrific, exploitive [sic] industry” and proposed a plan to push farmers away from the meat industry. More recently, he founded and led Climate Refarm, an organization that helped schools and hospitals transition to plant-based meals. It also pushed for tax increases on meat, dairy, and eggs.
Now, Rutinel, a state representative since 2023, is leading a crowded field of Democrats aiming to flip Colorado’s Eighth Congressional District in a race that’s expected to be one of the closest in the nation and could determine which party leads the House.
The district is also an agricultural hub, with JBS, an international meatpacking giant, serving as one of the district’s biggest employers. Part of the district sits in Weld County, which is home to roughly 4,000 farms and ranches, with commodity sales hitting $2.4 billion in 2022.
Rutinel’s long-running campaign against meat could put him at odds with a district that relies heavily on the agriculture industry. By contrast, the Republican incumbent, Rep. Gabe Evans, owns a small cattle herd and is a beef producer.
After the Colorado Sun first exposed Rutinel’s history of condemning animal agriculture, the Democrat walked back his past statements. He said he was only criticizing the industry’s “bad apples.” Colorado ranchers, he added, are “the envy of the globe” and “good stewards of the land.”
A spokesman for the Rutinel campaign told the Washington Free Beacon, “Manny is proud to stand with Colorado’s family farmers and ranchers, who are his friends and the backbone of our economy. In Congress, he will always fight to support family farmers and ranchers, starting with reversing the disastrous and chaotic tariff policies of Donald Trump and Gabe Evans that threaten their livelihoods.”
But Rutinel, a former McDonald’s employee, spent the last six years pushing initiatives meant to decimate the livelihoods of his “friends.”
As a Yale Law student, Rutinel joined the Ivy League school’s Climate, Animal, Food, and Environmental Law & Policy Lab, where he coauthored a 2020 proposal to pay farmers through carbon-offset credits to incentivize farmers to transition from animal agriculture to plant agriculture.
“As of now, farmers are polluting a lot in animal agriculture, and if they switched to plant agriculture, they would emit much less while still producing great products that provide people with nutritious, delicious, and sustainable foods,” Rutinel said in an interview about the project.
Around the same time, he started a petition pushing Popeyes, the fried chicken food chain, to offer a plant-based option. He told a legislative committee in Connecticut that “the globe must dramatically shift away from animal products and toward fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, and nuts.”
After law school, Rutinel served as an attorney for Earthjustice, a far-left environmental group. As part of its Sustainable Food & Farming Program, he helped force the Environmental Protection Agency to issue tighter regulations on slaughterhouses.
From there, Rutinel went on to launch and head Climate Refarm, which used its own “verified carbon credit system” to bankroll its efforts to help institutions transition away from meat-based food. It would also support initiatives that would discourage meat products.
Climate Refarm, which has since dissolved, signed onto a 2022 letter to an international group of mayors urging cities to “consider taxing meat, dairy and eggs.” The letter cited Greta Thunberg’s 2022 book and said the 2015 Paris Agreement didn’t “go far enough.” It also complained that the menu at the C40 World Mayors Summit that year featured meat and dairy and offered several suggestions on how cities could transition away from meat.
“Serve only plant-based foods at all council events,” the letter read. “Start phasing out animal products from all city food purchases by swapping in more plant-based foods. Ban public advertising and sponsorship for all animal products from the city.”
Rutinel told the Colorado Sun that he doesn’t “agree with every single sentence within those letters” signed by Climate Refarm, including increasing taxes on meat.
Regardless, he apparently believes his mission has been accomplished. He said he’s now most concerned about caged chickens and deforestation abroad and told the Colorado Sun that no other issue with the ranching industry “is coming to mind at the moment.”
While Rutinel hasn’t pushed legislation that would incentivize transitions away from animal-based products since becoming a state representative, he has made environmental justice a central topic. Legislation he successfully championed in 2024 created the Office of Environmental Justice, which was tasked with analyzing communities “disproportionately impacted” by pollution.
He also backed measures on Denver’s 2024 ballot that would have banned fur sales and slaughterhouses in the city. Indigenous opponents of the fur ban argued that preventing them from selling their “traditional crafts and goods would be a significant loss.” The slaughterhouse ban, which was opposed by farmers and ranchers, would have eliminated roughly 160 jobs held primarily by Spanish-speaking immigrants. Rutinel is running to represent a district that’s about 40-percent Latino.
The Democratic Party of Denver Central Committee opposed both bans, which were ultimately rejected at the ballot box.
Veganism is also apparently important to Rutinel’s love life.
“Okay, turns out there are two places to fall in love as an adult aside from the apps,” he said in a 2022 TikTok video. “The first is, of course, Trader Joe’s. If we’re both about to grab the vegan chorizo and our hands touch, that is romance of the highest form.”
“The second place to fall in love: airports,” he continued. “I don’t know why, but if you are within my age range at an airport, I will be fantasizing about a long, beautiful life with you. I’ll never approach you—I don’t have that kind of courage—but I will fantasize about you, no doubt.”
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