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| Ellen Edersheim/New Hampshire Division of Travel and Tourism Development |
The Guardian 24 April: Meet the new American refugees fleeing across state lines for safety
A New Hampshire educator has fled to Vermont after being doxxed and intimidated by far-right extremists—a disgraceful outcome for a state I once cherished. My childhood memories of the White Mountains and Lakes Region paint it as the safest, most idyllic place imaginable. Yet on recent visits—no more than five times in the last decade, despite living about 30 miles south of the state line—I’ve found its natural beauty enduring and some of the trappings remaining, but its social fabric increasingly reminiscent of Tennessee or West Virginia.
Historically conservative but tolerant, New Hampshire once welcomed all comers without celebrating ignorance. That seemed to change when a certain orange demagogue injected himself into national life, compounded by fentanyl and opioid crises ravaging this rural jurisdiction. Though it narrowly backed the Democrat in 2024’s presidential election, the trend is clear: another Democratic victory is improbable—assuming the party even gets the chance, and regardless of how catastrophically Trump and the GOP govern.
How tragic to witness New Hampshire—my childhood sanctuary of granite peaks and glassy lakes—degraded by opioid epidemics and performative bigotry. That an educator must flee newly emboldened extremists speaks volumes.
I shall state plainly: rural America (the decisive majority of it, do not come barking at me if one is a free-thinking liberal in Buttf**k, Arkansas, or Pigs**t, Oklahoma) must be held accountable for enabling an aspiring autocrat and his Christofascist movement. Their perpetual victimhood narratives—blaming others for crises mostly of their own making—can no longer be indulged. This ‘silent majority’ act has festered too long.
Rural white America’s cultural collapse is almost completely self-inflicted, yet its consequences are national. History shows our weakness: after the (first) Civil War and during the Civil Rights era, we prioritised false unity over justice. The reactionaries were contained for a few decades, but that was never going to hold. The second Civil War is coming, and if the Confederates are to lose again, this time they must be forever eradicated and never allowed to reemerge as they were with the end of Reconstruction and the dawn of the Jim Crow era. I am not convinced the Confederates will lose the next time, though, and I’ll leave it at that. Rest in Peace, New Hampshire as I knew it.
