They think it’s perfectly normal
This is the way wingnuts used to sound back in the dark ages when I was growing up. I guess it’s what they mean by “making American great again.”
In August, reporter Yanqi Xu heard her name called from a stage in Philadelphia for a national award recognizing Our Dirty Water, her series examining Nebraska’s high nitrate levels and their potential connection to childhood cancer.
Weeks later, she published a piece looking at the environmental impact of Pillen Family Farms, Gov. Jim Pillen’s company. She found that 16 Pillen hog farms have recorded nitrate levels higher than 50 parts per million – five times higher than is considered safe to drink. One farm recorded a reading of 445 parts per million.
Yanqi combed through hundreds of government records to find that a dozen Pillen operations violated state regulations. Employees at one farm constructed a PVC pipe to drain pig waste into a freshwater channel.
Four days after we published that story, Governor Jim Pillen called into KFAB radio from a trade mission in Japan. He touted Nebraska’s historical support for immigrants, saying “We are the most welcoming state in the country.”
Then the governor was asked to comment on Yanqi’s work.
“Number one, I didn’t read it. And I won’t,” Pillen said. “Number two, all you got to do is look at the author. The author is from communist China. What more do you need to know?”
Clearly, he is a no-nothing bigot. Here’s the rest of the story from her newspaper’s editor:
Yanqi Xu (pronounced “Yen-chee Shu”) did grow up in China, in Guangzhou. She left for Beijing, where she studied English and international journalism.
She then left everything she had ever known. She moved to the United States. She wanted to pursue American-style journalism.
She earned her masters degree at my alma mater, the University of Missouri-Columbia. She got a crash course in the power of government transparency while working at the National Freedom of Information Coalition. She anchored for a radio station. She began using data to find and tell revelatory stories at the National Institute for Computer Assisted-Reporting and the Investigative Reporting Workshop. She eventually joined North Carolina Policy Watch, that state’s chapter of States Newsroom, which also launched Nebraska Examiner.
Then she joined us at Flatwater Free Press almost exactly two years ago now, and wasted no time becoming a key reporter – for us, and for Nebraska.
Her work speaks for itself.
Yanqi sniffed out the larger story behind a recall effort in Alvo. She examined overtime in the prison system to discover employees doubling their salary by working 100-hour weeks. She analyzed the attendance records of the Nebraska Board of Parole, finding that the full board showed up together to hearings 37 percent of the time. (They started showing up for hearings far more in the year after her story ran.)
She has done all of this while pursuing a second master’s degree, this time in analytics. And she is far more than even the impressive sum of her stories.
Yanqi loves live music. She hated the Nebraska wind when she moved here, though she said this week that she’s growing used to it. She works late. She didn’t get to see her parents back in China for three years during COVID-19, until she could finally visit last December.
She’s whip smart. She’s pit bull stubborn. She’s a courageous reporter, a remarkable reporter.
She’s remarkable, period.
She is the American dream. And this governor is a piece of shit.