This week on GrokTALK!, a local media piece tries to dampen our perceptions about summer tourism (probably to advance a preferred progressive narrative), but they’ve always done that. I take us on a trip down memory-hole lane to show you how the bastards who try to keep you down keep getting it wrong in all the best ways.
00:00 Introduction to GroKTalk
02:45 Climate Change Narratives and Historical Context
05:19 Tourism Trends and Economic Impact in New Hampshire
08:16 Maple Syrup Production and Climate Change Claims
11:00 Political Implications of Climate Change Policies
14:02 Tourism Resilience Against Climate Change Predictions
16:44 The Role of Government in Tourism and Economy
19:10 Conclusion and Call to Action
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” – Gustav Mahler
Watch on the ‘Grok Rumble Channel if the Embedded Video does not load.
Links
- https://www.nhpr.org/business-and-economy/2026-07-12/tourism-summer-business-season-uncertain-nh
- https://www.businessnhmagazine.com/article/uncertain-summer-looms-for-tourism-industry
- https://newhampshirereview.com/articles/new-hampshire-best-ski-season-15-years-2026/
- https://granitegrok.com/blog/2008/07/jeanne_shaheen_do_as_i_say_not_as_i_do
- https://granitegrok.com/blog/2011/03/ask_jeanne_shaheen
- https://granitegrok.com/blog/2011/06/jeanne_shaheen_wrong_again
- https://granitegrok.com/blog/2013/06/another-maple-syrup-stake-through-their-global-warming-heart
- https://granitegrok.com/blog/2013/06/another-tourism-stake-through-their-global-warming-heart
- https://granitegrok.com/blog/2016/09/tourism-blame-global-warming
- https://granitegrok.com/blog/2017/09/said-nothing-global-warming-affect-nh-tourism-right-2
- https://granitegrok.com/blog/2018/09/global-warming-continues-to-produce-rising-tide-of-tourism-in-new-hampshire
- https://granitegrok.com/blog/2019/11/climate-didnt-ruin-tourism-so-nh-democrats-want-to-add-a-new-tax-that-might-do-it
- https://granitegrok.com/blog/2019/06/damn-you-global-warming-nh-tourism-experts-see-increase-again-this-year
Authors’ and Speakers’ opinions are their own and may not represent those of Grok Media, LLC, GraniteGrok.com, its sponsors, readers, authors, or advertisers.
Edited transcript:
Hey there. Welcome to another edition of GrokTALK! brought to you by Grok Media LLC and GraniteGrok.com We are still running the bare minimum books opportunity. You can donate now and get some free outside-the-box thinking. It’s an excellent idea because you support this and you also support that. And that would be intelligent, outside-the-box thinking.
Trust me, if you read what Ian Underwood writes, you don’t necessarily have to agree with him, but it will make you think about the problem that he’s presenting to you in a completely different way. And that’s always good for your brain. And as it turns out, it could be good for the culture and America as well. So why don’t you ⁓ hop over to Grenickrock.com, make a donation, and we will send you free books. How about that?
Anyway, I was thinking about some stuff. You know, what do you talk about? I say this every week. What am I gonna do, GrokTALK! on this week? Last time I did an interview a couple of weeks back, I still had a little issue with the audio on the other end. So I’m a little hesitant to go back there, but I will get that problem solved, and we’ll have some people on the program. In the meantime, I want to ask if you follow Granite Grok on X, which you certainly should do. I think that would be great because we have a lot of great content on there, including things you won’t find on the website. At least, you won’t find this commentary on the website.
I was at Hampton Beach and I famously, at least in my opinion, had a post a few years back about how they had predicted that Hampton Beach would be gone by 2020 because of that whole fear mongering, scaremongering, global warming, climate change, climate crisis, climate chaos situation, which as you know, has nothing to do with the climate or the weather or anything at all. It’s really just an economic program that wants to use fear of the weather to take over the economy. Anyway, I was there at the beach. It was low tide when I got there, but high tide when I left. We were there for a free concert, which was pretty good. And I hadn’t been to the beach in a while, so it was nice to drop by.
No signs of catastrophic sea level rise, as I noted in my X post, and ⁓ it got me thinking.
Way back in the day, two thousand seven, two thousand eight, when Jeanne Shaheen first ran for the US Senate, she was all in on the approved global warming narratives. Yes, they actually called it global warming back then, still. They didn’t change it to climate change until they realized the globe wasn’t warming and they needed a different narrative. They needed better marketing. And I’m not saying they weren’t successful. I mean, they had eight years of Obama to wreck the economy and push the whole global warming thing and weaponize all the federal agencies and all that other stuff that Mr. Trump is still trying to clean up today. B
ut ⁓ she famously said, and I quote, from her website, which of course isn’t there anymore, it’s been gone for a very long time. It was her 2008 campaign website. Reversing global warming is an economic, environmental, and health imperative for New Hampshire. If we don’t act to reverse global warming, New Hampshire’s snow season is projected to shrink by almost 50% by mid-century, severely impacting our skiing and snowmobile industries. Increasing temperatures will also negatively impact fall foliage tourism, the hunting and fishing industries, as if she really gives a shit about hunting, and maple sugar production. Our small but precious coastline faces substantial increases in extent and frequency of coastal flooding, erosion, and property damage. Global warming worsens, air quality, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well, obviously the coastal region is fine, as we expected, because post-ice age melt and rise has not changed significantly. And of course, we have other problems like isostatic rebound, which is the land shifting, which causes a change in what appears to be sea level rise. Lots of reasons you can go look it up on GraniteGrok.com I’m not going there today because it’s so much more entertaining to take a little walk down memory lane.
So 2007, 2008, Shaheen, who we’ve been harassing endlessly about this ever since she said it, because that’s kind of what we do, right? So when you’re wrong, you’re wrong. And of course, she’s stuck to her guns. If you’re gonna lie about something, go all in. And she’s gone all in the entire time she’s been in the US Senate, and she’s retiring.
And so somebody will replace her, and Chris Pappas appears to be the anointed one, and God help us if he wins this race. So whether you like Scott Brown or John Sununu in the primary, whoever wins, please support the Republican. I keep telling you, even a moderate to bad Republican is better than anything approaching a moderate to good Democrat.
It just- you can read all about that on GraniteGrok too. There is no such thing as a modern Democrat. They always end up getting overwhelmed by their caucus. Been writing about it a lot lately. Look for me on GraniteGrok, and you won’t be able to miss the stories. Anyway, so we’re gonna teleport from 2007, 2008 to 2011 in March.
Ask Jeanne Shaheen about diminished snowfall. You guessed right. We had a hell of a winter that year. Lots of snow. My gosh, you know, and this is sort of a watershed moment because prior to this, a lot of people, including the Shaheens, had been saying that our children wouldn’t know what snow is anymore. And ⁓ after this winter, the narrative changed. All of a sudden, global warming became climate change and could cause you to have all kinds of snow.
So they literally just looked out the window and said, yeah, that’s global warming. And that’s pretty much been the narrative ever since. Whatever’s going on outside is caused by global warming, which sort of instructs you to consider the possibility that they’re full of it and that they’re just making it up as they go.
And the sad part, I think, is that an awful lot of lower-level politicians, people in the base grassroots. They just kept repeating this like, well, it was gospel, is what it was. So they just kept on saying, it’s global warming. We gotta that was the job. Anyway, so the Democrat Party said, You will say this; this is the narrative. We have to do this.
And then they started laundering vast sums of money to friends and family, to projects that continue to fail, all on the basis of an assumption that if we gave enough money to the government, it could fix the weather.
Now, anybody who knows the government knows that it can’t fix much of anything, and usually what it does damages what it’s attempting to fix. In fact, the more money you throw at a problem, the worse it gets. And I think that’s just pretty much a simple campaign issue sort of marketing thing that people should just pick up.
You could look at all the fraud issues that we’ve seen lately. So anyway, June 2011. We’re still in 2011. Jeanne Shaheen’s sticky situation. This time we’re talking about maple syrup. Remember, she said maple syrup production would be affected by global warming. And she was right. This particular year, record maple syrup production. Not a good look. Media didn’t pick it up. They were happy that we were having good maple syrup years.
But the fact of the matter is, we have good years and bad years. We’ve always had that problem. One of the things that was interesting about this particular year is that the season started late, and it was still an amazing season. And the reason it started late was because we had so much damn snow that we weren’t ever supposed to have. Remember, your kids won’t know snow. My kids, my kids know snow. In fact, my kids have known snow for thirty years now.
No shortage of snow. This winter, one of the best winters we’ve had in a while. We’ll get to that in a minute. Yeah, tourism was affected in a very positive way. So, in 2011, record snow. Well, not record snow, we had a lot of snow, and the maple tapping season started late, and it was still an amazing year.
Okay, here we go. 2013. Another maple syrup steak through the global warming heart. Quote, the USDA just announced that this year maple syrup producers set a record, producing seventy percent over last year, and that would have been 2012. 2011, 2012, this is 2012, 2013. To put that in proper context, you have to know a few things first. In 2011, production hit a 76-year high, not seen since the twenties. Last year’s production was down from the record year, of course, because when you have a record year, you can’t expect that every year. That’s just crazy. This year’s production, it hit a hundred and twenty-four thousand gallons, up sixty-three percent from last year. So again, covering the quote-unquote down year between the two peak years, maple syrup has had some down years. ⁓ a couple of years ago we had a really bad year, but we’ve had another good year this year.
So it’s again, CO2 keeps going up. They’re not connected.
Jeanne or any of the rest of you, but they will keep pushing that narrative. It’s important to understand. And of course, we’re looking at a very, very tiny section of the Earth’s history, four billion years, and we’re ⁓ not even a blink of that. So again, the hubris is beyond measure.
Okay. 2014.
Alpine ski areas recorded a record 2,276,000 alpine skiers and snowboarders. Visits a twenty point nine percent increase from the prior winter. This is two thousand thirteen, so now we’re five to six years out from Jeanne Shaheen’s original forecast that, you know, global warming was going to affect us if we didn’t do anything. And we know we didn’t do anything, because everything they spent money on didn’t do anything.
And they probably made the problem worse. Remember, that’s the mantra.
Twenty sixteen. Tourism up. I blame global warming. Remember, this is all about tourism. Manchester tourism officials in New Hampshire said that the long holiday weekend may have been the busiest Labor Day weekend ever in the state. That’s ever. It’s been busier since then. Maybe because of global warming. Who knows?
They said – this is ⁓ September twenty seventeen. They said if we did nothing about global warming, it would affect New Hampshire tourism. And they were right. I used that quite a bit. New Hampshire Division of Travel and Tourism is expecting 9.8 million visitors to spend $1.5 billion throughout the fall.
This is just the fall, because we have summer tourism, fall tourism, and winter tourism. There is spring tourism, but that’s also mud season and black fly season. And well, if you’ve ever been in New England during mud season and Black fly season. You’ll know it’s not the best time to go hiking, for example, especially since when you’re in the White Mountains, you could get hit by a blizzard in April, May, or June. It has happened.
So again, we continue to see tourism really unaffected by what’s going on here.
We’ll jump to September of 2018. Global warming continues to produce a rising tide of tourism in New Hampshire, and I know, well, let me just frame this nationally. You all have these examples. In fact, I’m sure you have local websites that are like ours that go out and do this kind of research and make fun of the local Democrats who try to make serious, serious claims about your impact on your local weather.
I love Vermont because Vermont’s got all kinds of crazy Democrats, and they have two Democrat parties over there. They have had for years, the regular Democrats and then the Progressives. And they’re basically the socialists. And of course, the DSA has become this big thing lately with Mamdani and New York City and Graham Platner and the rest. Vermont’s had them for a while, and they’ve been wrecking the state of Vermont for a while.
And Vermont is like, we have to do something about global warming. So Vermont’s effect on global warming in the entire planet is smaller than the tip of this pencil. I didn’t have a pin handy, but it would be smaller than that. No matter what they do, like a manufacturing facility floor manager in China sneezes, and they’ve erased it. But they are saddling their taxpayers and their businesses, their job creators, with all of the heavy-duty fiscal burdens, the regulatory burdens; it’s driving people out of the state. It’s ruining the state.
This is true everywhere Democrats get in power. So if you don’t have a lot of Democrats, you may still have people who think like this. And so that’s why this particular episode is important to you because you can find these examples probably in your local state blogs. You may have to piece together some of this yourself from local news reports, because a lot of the local news will report positive things that contradict the party agenda, the approved media narrative. And sometimes they don’t. And we’re gonna get to that in a second.
So anyway, a big fall tourist season is expected for New Hampshire. The opening sentence is tourism officials are predicting a record number of visitors who will come to New Hampshire for the fall season. This is 2018. Beautiful year for leaves and foliage in the state. Most years are.
It doesn’t seem to matter what’s going on economically everywhere; we still have lots of tourism. But again, it’s one of the largest bringers of income and revenue into the state. So it’s an important thing, which is why Shaheen brought it up, because it’s fear-mongering; it’s a trigger. She triggered people and they voted for her, and we were never able to get her out of the US Senate. And while she was there, just for the record, because I bring this up every chance I get.
The national debt rose from just a little over ten trillion to almost forty trillion dollars. Yes, she ran on irresponsible federal debt. Apparently, what she meant was that you were misunderstanding the definition, and she was there to correct it. And we have forty trillion dollars’ worth of irresponsible debt now. Climate didn’t ruin tourism, so New Hampshire Democrats want to add a new tax that might do it.
Whenever Democrats have an opportunity to raise a tax, they do. To implement a tax, they do. Because it isn’t anything about anything they say. If a tax on tourism could harm tourism, they don’t care. They’ll tell you it won’t.
They’ll tell you it’ll generate revenue that they will then spend on some wonderful thing. But we know that never happens. What happens is they spend it on a thing, and that thing gets worse. It certainly gets more expensive.
RSA 2020 2578 would include ski area ticket sales under the meals and rooms tax and dedicating the revenue to the governor’s scholarship program for New Hampshire resident students. So we wanted to pay for a scholarship program for students in New Hampshire at the expense of tourism, which would, in theory, reduce ticket sales and result in fewer jobs for New Hampshire students and a lot of other people. They could have just left it alone. They could have asked the ski resorts, ” Hey, is there any chance you guys might be interested in, say, this scholarship program we created where if you donate some money to it, we’ll reduce that from your gross obligations to the business tax.
See, that would actually work. Democrats hate that because we did that with education. We had an education tax credit, which they brought to court, which they tried to overturn. And the education tax credit works. That’s how you should do it. You give the business the incentive to participate in an opportunity to reduce its tax burden.
And it will.
It – people will freely give money to a program they believe in, assuming the state isn’t actually running it, if it just sets it up and gives others permission to manage it and then just supervises it because you have to do that because of all the you’ve seen all the other fraud we’ve seen with all these other government programs. Those are actual government programs engaged in fraud. ⁓ And you need to keep on top of that. But that’s limited; that’s the extent. It’s policing.
You are innocent, going about your business, victimless crimes, which they do – I’m not gonna go down that rabbit hole. Anyway, I hope you know what I mean by that. So we were doing so well, they were like, ” We should tax that. We could look at Vermont again. They do that. Vermont is swirling the toilet bowl. And hopefully, Vermonters in the last election tried to make a difference, and fewer Democrats; they took away their majority, their supermajority, and maybe in this election, who knows? They might make some more advances over there. Maybe they’ll start pushing back and clawing back some reality in the Green Mountain state.
2019, damn you, global warming. New Hampshire tourism experts see increase again this year. New Hampshire Department of Business and Economic Affairs says it is expecting to see a 2.7% increase in summer visitations.
And spending over 2018. Now, you all know what happened in 2020. They locked everything down. And so naturally, tourism went down. So that brings me to this.
New Hampshire Public Radio story, which has a great shot of Hampton Beach not being inundated by catastrophic sea level rise, but they don’t bring that up. I mean, if you look at this beach, again, if you can find it, I mean, I’ll look for the picture for this particular segment,
But I shared a picture from the nineteen forties or fifties, and it looks, I mean the buildings look different, the parking situation’s changed, but the beach is identical, which is why in
2018 or 2020, I may be it was twenty twenty, maybe it was twenty twenty-one. Since Hampton Beach wasn’t gone as predicted by twenty twenty, they changed it to twenty one hundred, so far away that you can’t possibly prove them wrong except by pointing out how wrong they’ve been about everything up until now, which they continue to be wrong about. And if I have a couple of minutes, I’ll point that out too. So
New Hampshire Public Radio, Uncertain Summer Looms for New Hampshire Tourism Industry. And you know what this is. This is the same Doom and Gloom. They could have written a story about the potential greatness of our summer New Hampshire tourism industry. But it turns out this is actually a repost from the Business New Hampshire magazine. So I went right to the cow, and they sent some people; some people went to Montreal.
Check out the tourism situation there. And of course, everybody’s saying 30% drop in Canadian tourism is going to dramatically affect border states like Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Vermont’s definitely feeling the pinch. New Hampshire is ⁓ they’re kind of giving you that idea, and the only reason they’re doing that is because they hate Donald Trump and they want to blame him and tariffs for severely impacting our tourist industry. Except there’s a problem.
If you look at places that actually promote the state, you will see that our tourism industry will be completely unaffected. Last year we had about two point six billion in summer tourism ⁓ you know, dollars, just the summer. And this year, we’re gonna have at least two point six billion in summer, you know, four, five million visitors, all tourists.
And this is after having one of the best winters for tourism we’ve had in a while. So what we’re really saying is that it’s 2026, and that’s almost 20 years since Jeanne Shaheen’s prediction. And tourism is fine, regardless of what you think about global warming. Now, that should mean something to you. Obviously.
That was BS. And ⁓ it does matter because second-generation BS, Stefany Shaheen, is running in a nine-person primary for ⁓ to represent Democrats in Congressional District One in New Hampshire, which is being abandoned by soon-to-be former Congressman Chris Pappas, and soon-to-be hopefully private citizen Chris Pappas because he needs to lose that Senate race to whoever wins the Republican primary.
He’s a useless sock puppet. Just look up Chris Pappa’s sock puppet. I got a nice AI-generated image of him. Might be worth your time. So anyway, again, we’re looking at something like in 2008, roughly four point four five billion annually for the whole year.
You jump forward to today or 2025, and the estimate was, I’m sorry, 2024. The estimate was 7.5 billion. possibly more. So we’re looking at maybe double. Now I don’t think that accounts for inflation, so that’s a fair point to make. But in the grand scheme of things, New Hampshire is adding population.
New Hampshire has almost doubled its gross domestic product since the 2007-2008 magical claim that New Hampshire tourism would be affected. So we’re generating wealth. We have the lowest poverty rate in the country, which, of course, wouldn’t be true if tourism were dramatically affected, since tourism is so damn important to the state of New Hampshire. We’re one of the healthiest states; we’re one of the safest states.
Our average annual income per household is one of the highest, around ninety-five thousand a year now, I think. So there are areas in the North Country where, you know, I mean, there’s a balance, obviously. It’s an average. And there are places up north that really, really need the tourism. I’m not disputing that. And there are times when it becomes difficult economically. And I get that. But big picture.
New Hampshire’s tourism is fine. And planetary magical mystery pronunciations about it have had absolutely zero effect. So moving forward, you should probably not believe when somebody says an uncertain summer looms. I was at Hampton. There was no uncertainty. The week after the Fourth of July, the traffic sucked, the parking sucked, and we got there late.
We went in the afternoon so that we could see a live concert that started at seven. Got there a couple of hours early.
Tourism looked fine. And again, I don’t want you to just think this is a New Hampshire-specific example. The left does the exact same thing everywhere. Wherever you live, whatever your tourism situation is like, they’re trying to ruin it and profit from it to grow the government. And they will send whatever message they think people need to hear to convince them to let them do it.
The best thing New Hampshire can do for its tourism is to keep Democrats out of power. One good example? New Hampshire Republicans lowered the rooms and meals tax. They increased the amount of money from the rooms and meals tax that goes to towns. Democrats want to reverse that.
But every dollar starts to add up, and eventually, when places get expensive, like Vermont, which is having a hard time because its taxes are too high, its tax burden is too high, and it is affecting every part of its economy. We don’t want to be them. New Hampshire Democrats are no different from Vermont Democrats. So let’s make a promise to ourselves to try to convince people of the truth.
The actual truth, not the imagined truth, not the pretend truth. One party wants more government. One party wants higher taxes. One party wants more regulations. They want to intervene in more aspects of not just your life, but also the fun things you try to do when you’re not working, trying to work, or trying to raise a family.
The Republicans want to leave you alone. They want you to keep more of your money. The Democrats want the exact opposite. And everywhere you look, where this has been tried, everything goes downhill. It’s a happy message for a Monday evening. It is Monday, the 13th. I think I said that on my morning update. Dun dun dun. All right. That’s enough of this for today. Check out the tourism data where you live. Check out the messaging where you live.
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