Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NHCorrection, Sept. 22, 2026, 9:09 a.m. EDT: This column said fentanyl overdose deaths in New Hampshire had not meaningfully come back down since crossing a threshold a decade ago. The state Office of Chief Medical Examiner counted 282 overdose deaths in 2024, a 35 percent drop from 2023 and the lowest count since 2013. The column’s notes also called the Laaman v. Helgemoe findings First Circuit precedent; Laaman is a federal district court ruling. The column now reflects the decline, describes the ruling accurately, and adds 2026 figures on the YDC settlement fund to its notes.
Epistemic tribalism is the cognitive habit of sorting truth by team color. It is also the reason New Hampshire’s worst institutional failures keep outliving the governors who promised to fix them.
Tell a partisan that his side did something monstrous and watch his face. The eyes narrow. The mouth tightens. He is not processing the claim — he is processing whether the claim can be true given who he is. If it cannot, the claim is filed under “smear,” “context missing,” or “the other tribe’s propaganda” before he has heard a single fact. This is epistemic tribalism: the cognitive habit of sorting truth by team color. It is also the most efficient cause of civic decay currently operating in New Hampshire.
What it is
Epistemic tribalism is not “people disagree about politics.” It is the deeper failure where the question is this true? gets replaced by the question whose side does this benefit? The second question is faster, cheaper, and feels like virtue. It is also useless for finding out anything real.
The mechanic has three steps. First, identify the speaker’s tribe. Second, determine whether accepting the claim helps or hurts that tribe. Third, calibrate belief accordingly. Evidence is the last thing consulted, if at all — because consulting evidence is the precise moment you risk discovering you have been sorted into the wrong answer by people you trust.
The New Hampshire proof
Anyone who thinks this is abstract should look at what New Hampshire’s two tribes refuse to fix together.
The Secure Psychiatric Unit at the New Hampshire State Prison houses civil patients — people who have committed no crime — inside a maximum-security prison. It runs against the Eighth Amendment standards set out in Laaman v. Helgemoe in 1977,1 and against the spirit of the federal Community Mental Health Agreement. It is the most settled civil-rights failure in the state. Both tribes know. Neither tribe spends political capital on it, because the people inside are not a constituency either side wants to claim. Reform requires admitting that decades of governors from both parties watched it happen and did nothing.
The Youth Development Center settlements ran past nine figures2 while the legislature still cannot decide what the institution was. To one tribe it was a containable scandal involving a few bad actors. To the other it was a systemic indictment of the carceral mindset. The adjudicated facts — documented, paid out, on the record — sit in the middle, and nobody picks them up because picking them up costs you team status.
Fentanyl drove overdose deaths in this state to crisis levels a decade ago. Deaths have since fallen, to 282 in 2024, the lowest count since 2013 according to the state Office of Chief Medical Examiner, but only after years of losses both parties watched. Per-inmate corrections spending kept climbing. Aid to the families of overdose victims is still essentially zero. Both tribes can recite their preferred half of this picture. Neither will say the whole sentence out loud, because the whole sentence implicates both parties.
Why smart people do it
The mechanism is not stupidity. Most epistemically tribal people are smart. The mechanism is cost.
It is cheap to agree with your team and expensive to dissent. Dissent costs friendships, party access, donor relationships, social standing at the diner counter. Agreement costs nothing. Over a decade the cheap option compounds. By year ten you are not choosing the team’s view anymore — the team’s view is your view, indistinguishable from the rest of your personality. The merger happens so gradually that the merged person experiences it as integrity.
The media accelerates this, and the new media accelerates it harder than the old. The Union Leader and NHPR split was at least built around institutions with newsroom standards and named editors who could be called and held accountable. The Substack-and-X economy has no such friction. A Substack writer monetizes a single tribe directly through paid subscriptions, which means the financial incentive runs precisely against telling that tribe anything it does not want to hear. An X account grows by maximizing engagement, and engagement is highest on content that flatters the in-group and ridicules the out-group. The platforms did not make silo-building easier as a side effect of something else. They turned silo-building into the business model. Curation has been replaced by algorithmic affirmation, paid for in subscriber dollars and engagement metrics, and the cost of dissent inside the silo is no longer just social. It is now financial.
Epistemic tribalism (n.): the practice of accepting or rejecting beliefs based on the tribal identity of the speaker or the perceived benefit to one’s own coalition, rather than on the evidence for or against the claim itself. Symptoms include reflexive dismissal of inconvenient findings as “the other side’s propaganda,” and the inability to credit a true claim simply because the wrong person made it.
The actual tax
Every institutional failure in this state that survives a decade survives because both tribes get something out of leaving it alone.
The SPU stays open because closing it requires admitting the state cannot run a real psychiatric hospital, which embarrasses every administration since the 1980s. DCYF’s structural problems persist because reform would require one tribe to admit the agency overreaches and the other to admit it is under-resourced — and neither tribe wants its half on the record alone. The school funding architecture stays Byzantine because clarity would force a property-tax fight neither side wants to own. The Rundlett South End building aid statute fight was a perfect miniature of the pattern: a fact-question about RSA 198:15-a3 got swallowed inside thirty seconds by tribal sorting on both ends.
These are not partisan failures. They are bipartisan failures, protected by the tribal sorting that makes citizens incapable of holding both parties accountable at once. You cannot demand reform from a coalition you have psychologically merged with. You can only demand the other coalition reform, which is exactly what both tribes do, indefinitely, while the institutions rot.
That is the tribe tax. It is paid in dead overdose victims whose families never got a dime, in civil patients held in prison cells they did not earn, in YDC survivors who waited decades for a settlement and still cannot get a straight answer about who knew what when.
The journalism problem
Accountability journalism cannot function in an epistemically tribal audience. A reporter who tells a tribal audience something their tribe does not want to hear is not corrected. They are dismissed. The audience does not say show me the evidence. It says I knew you were one of them.
This is the trap every honest reporter in New Hampshire eventually hits. You can document a Republican failure with citations and you lose the Republican readers. You can document a Democratic failure with citations and you lose the Democratic readers. Do both and you lose both, and the only audience left is the small remnant willing to evaluate evidence on its merits regardless of which tribe gets bruised. That remnant is what civic journalism is for. It is also what shrinks every year that tribalism deepens.
The way out is unglamorous
There is no clever exit from epistemic tribalism. The exit is one issue at a time, evidence first, conclusion last, with the team affiliation of the source treated as the least relevant variable.
It looks like reading the statute before reading the press release. It looks like calling the agency before calling the partisan source. It looks like accepting that your team has been wrong about specific things and the other team has been right about specific things — and that this does not require you to switch teams. It requires you to stop confusing your team with your epistemology.
If New Hampshire wants its institutions to work, citizens have to be willing to be told they were wrong about something specific, by someone they were predisposed to distrust, and to update on the evidence rather than the messenger. Until that happens, both tribes can keep paying the tax. The people inside the SPU, inside the YDC files, inside the overdose obituaries — they will keep covering the bill.
Editor’s note on method
The editorial method at Granite State Report is to report findings on the evidence available, without first checking which tribe the finding helps. The result is that pieces in this publication will sometimes hurt Republicans, sometimes hurt Democrats, and often hurt both — because most settled institutional failures in this state are bipartisan in origin. Readers will not always like what gets reported. That is the job.
- Laaman v. Helgemoe, 437 F. Supp. 269 (D.N.H. 1977). Class-action civil rights ruling under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 in which the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire (Judge Hugh H. Bownes) found conditions at the New Hampshire State Prison violated the Eighth Amendment, with specific findings on inadequate medical and mental health care. Implemented through a 1978 consent decree, amended 1990, terminated 2001 under the Prison Litigation Reform Act (see Laaman v. Warden, NHSP, 238 F.3d 14 (1st Cir. 2001)). Laaman is a federal district court decision, not binding First Circuit precedent; its findings on medical and mental health care remain part of the record on conditions at NHSP, which houses the Secure Psychiatric Unit.
- YDC Settlement Fund. Established by the New Hampshire Legislature in 2022 under RSA 21-M:11-a as the Youth Development Center Claims Administration and Settlement Fund. Initial $100 million authorization, subsequently expanded; total program value reported at approximately $239 million across published sources. As of the administrator’s mid-2024 quarterly report (former Chief Justice John Broderick), the fund had paid out $95.6 million to 186 claimants out of 552 total claims filed, with the majority alleging both physical and sexual abuse. Approximately 1,300 former detainees have come forward since 2020. Per-claim cap is $2.5 million (against the standard state-agency tort cap of $475,000 under RSA 541-B); average award reported at roughly $500,000. The filing deadline closed June 30, 2025. Litigation continues over 2025 statutory amendments and pending claims; see InDepthNH coverage of the survivors’ NH Supreme Court appeal (Feb. 2026). By June 2026 the state had appropriated $185 million to the fund, almost 1,700 claims remained unresolved, and administrator Gerard Boyle estimated that settlements and administrative costs could reach almost $1 billion (Concord Monitor, June 22, 2026).
- RSA 198:15-a (School Building Aid). New Hampshire’s statutory framework governing state aid to local school construction projects, including eligibility criteria, calculation of the aid percentage, and disbursement to school districts. The Concord School District’s Rundlett South End / Broken Ground building aid question covered in earlier GSR reporting turned on the statute’s application to specific project siting and the documentation submitted in support of the application.
Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a dated note identifying what changed and when. The corrections policy and the corrections register are public, and correction notes are never removed.
