The Old Man Versus The Grey Lady

The Old Man of the Mountains fell from high above Profile Lake fifteen years ago, but it remains the symbol of the Granite State, and always will.
I can’t pinpoint the year when the Gray Lady – the New York Times – fell from journalistic grace, but I’m having a hard time remembering when the “paper of record” wasn’t just a Progressive shill. “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” isn’t supposed to be ironic, yet with every edition one imagines the editors smirking at their own masthead.
A case in point comes from the July 27th edition, under the patently-offensive headline, “New Hampshire, 94 Percent White, Asks: How Do You Diversify a Whole State?” Talk about a question nobody is asking – at least nobody who isn’t a race-hustler, misguided politician, or champion of corporate welfare.
New Hampshire is one of the least racially-diverse states in the nation. But our “Whiteness” isn’t a problem, much less something that needs to be “fixed” by newspaper editors, business and political leaders, or crusading busybodies. We are a product of historical and geographical forces, and our status quo is not just fine, it’s better than most.
Our history doesn’t include enslaved Africans working our small family farms. When emancipated slaves left the South, many followed the navigable rivers north into what would become the industrial heartland. Some were part of the westward expansion, while others settled in the cities of the mid-Atlantic and northeast. New Hampshire wasn’t on their map.
Waves of foreign immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries largely bypassed us as well. We lack large cities or open land that historically attracted new arrivals from Europe. We are far from the Mexican border and the flow of Latinos northward; further still from Pacific ports where Asian immigrants landed.
None of those factors are race-based. But at the New York Times, every important issue has a racial component, and race shapes the questions asked and not asked. Fear of running afoul of the Thought Police limits the questions many in the political center will dare ask out loud. These days any utterance, even one grounded in facts and spoken in plain, rational language, will be labeled “racist” if it fails to put racism at the top of the What’s-Wrong-with-America pyramid.
The Times quotes business and “community” leaders telling us that we need to attract young working families to maintain our healthy economy and standard of living. But it then pivots to the race angle and the idea that we must therefore be more “welcoming” to “lure other racial and ethnic groups.” The idea of doing a better job growing our own never occurs.
Even “with nonwhites poised to make up a majority of the American population in the next three decades,” the huge US labor market dwarfs the NH market to the point where we are little more than a rounding error. In other words, there are plenty of fish in the sea. There is no need to use the heavy hand of government to change who and what we are to accommodate anyone’s race-based “requirements.”
What are some of those requirements? The Times leads the article with the story of a woman who moved here from Lynn, MA, where she had provided cultural training to hospital workers. Her complaint: “I went from being able to speak Spanish every day to not speaking Spanish at all…”
She couldn’t find an ethnic hairdresser. She had trouble finding ethnic restaurants, supermarkets, and clothing stores, referring to these as “basic services,” as if she expected them to be available to her simply because she chose to move here. Call me old-fashioned, but I find such carping rude and ungracious.
Speaking of rude, one week after publishing its article critical of our “ethnic vacuum,” the Times hired an Asian woman to an editorial position whose Twitter history would have made her radioactive if she were a White man. “Dumba– f—–white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs p—— on fire hydrants” is just one of her bon mots. If you want more like that, Google “Sarah Jeong.”
Adding an Asian woman to its editorial staff makes the Times more diverse, but does that make it a wise choice? Diversity qua diversity isn’t an unalloyed good.
In survey after survey, New Hampshire ranks near the top for quality of life, place to raise a family, strong economy, school outcomes, per-capita income, low crime, low taxes, and general happiness. That should be enough of a draw for people – minority or otherwise – to join us. But the thought that our strengths might come from our small-town homogeneity wouldn’t occur to reporters at the Times. Even if it did, they would never write it. And even if they did stray so far off the Progressive reservation, editors like Sarah Jeong would never let it go to print.
“All the News That Fits the Narrative.” If they were honest, they’d change the masthead.