By Granite State Report
New Hampshire House Resolution 19 is not a defense of free speech. It is not a principled stand for intellectual diversity. It is a political tantrum—formalized, laminated, and passed off as legislation.
The resolution “encourages” state colleges and universities to invite more conservative speakers to campus in the name of viewpoint diversity. That alone should raise an obvious question: if conservatives truly believed their ideas were being suppressed, why would they settle for a nonbinding resolution that accomplishes nothing?
Because HR 19 was never meant to solve a problem. It was meant to signal a grievance.
Sponsored by Reps. Donald McFarlane, Henry Giasson, Bryan Morse, Jordan Ulery, Robert Wherry, James Thibault, Kristine Perez, Michael Moffett, Matt Sabourin, and Kristin Noble, the resolution is pure culture-war theater. It carries no force of law, allocates no funding, establishes no standards, and imposes no obligations. It does, however, allow its sponsors to posture as victims of censorship while exercising political power.
That contradiction is the point.
HR 19 rests on an unproven premise: that conservative viewpoints are systematically excluded from New Hampshire’s public campuses. No evidence is offered. No data is cited. No analysis is provided. The resolution simply asserts the grievance and demands validation. That is not policymaking; it is ideological self-soothing.
And let’s be honest about the hypocrisy.
Many of the same lawmakers championing HR 19 have spent the last several years pushing bills to restrict what teachers can say, what topics can be discussed, and which identities may be acknowledged in schools. They have sought to ban discussions of race, gender, and sexuality, and to punish educators who stray from approved narratives. Having spent that time narrowing speech, they now claim to be outraged by a lack of “viewpoint diversity.”
You do not get to censor first and then complain about silence.
More importantly, HR 19 misunderstands how universities work—or pretends not to understand.
Colleges do not invite speakers by ideological quota. They invite speakers based on relevance, scholarship, expertise, and student interest. If conservative ideas are underrepresented, the answer is not legislative whining. The answer is better arguments, better scholarship, and better engagement. Universities are marketplaces of ideas, not affirmative-action programs for political ideologies.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth the sponsors avoid: many conservative speakers are not excluded because they are conservative, but because they are unserious. Provocation is not scholarship. Outrage is not expertise. Cable-news personalities who traffic in slogans are not owed a campus microphone simply because they feel ignored.
HR 19 also reveals a deeper insecurity. It assumes that students exposed to a broad range of ideas will naturally reject conservatism unless it is artificially amplified. That is a stunningly low opinion of conservative thought—and of students themselves. If your ideas require legislative encouragement to survive, the problem is not the university.
Finally, the resolution is a waste of time.
New Hampshire faces real issues: housing shortages, rising tuition, workforce attrition, mental health crises, and underfunded public institutions. HR 19 addresses none of them. It consumes legislative attention to produce nothing but press releases and applause from partisan audiences.
That is not leadership. It is cosplay.
If the sponsors of HR 19 actually cared about free expression, they would defend it consistently—even when speech makes them uncomfortable. If they cared about higher education, they would invest in it rather than sneer at it. Instead, they have chosen symbolic grievance over substantive governance.
HR 19 deserves to be dismissed for what it is: a hollow resolution for lawmakers who want credit for fighting an enemy that exists mostly in their own talking points.
New Hampshire deserves better than this kind of intellectual fraud.
https://gc.nh.gov/bill_status/legacy/bs2016/billText.aspx?sy=2026&id=1513&txtFormat=html
