[American Spectator] How long must the South be chastised for its history? For the editors of the New York Times, apparently, the answer is, "Forever." Nothing could be more obvious in its intended purpose than the non-accidental choice of Leesburg, Virginia, for the latest iteration of the tiresomely familiar "Legacy of Slavery" theme in the New York Times.If you are not a Southerner, or if you pay no attention to the New York Times, you may be unfamiliar with that newspaper’s long tradition of invoking slavery, the Civil War, and Jim Crow as a means of insinuating the South’s permanent status of moral inferiority. As a native of Atlanta — and by "native," I mean, literally born there, as opposed to most of the city’s current residents, who moved there from up North somewhere — this sense of hereditary stigma is something I’ve resented since I was old enough to notice it. Because our national media establishment is mainly headquartered in New York, this insulting anti-Southern prejudice is taken for granted by most journalists, who seem incapable of reporting any story below the Potomac River without bringing up lynching, segregation, or some other way of implying that the Original Sin of racism forever defines the South.
Certainly it was not an accident that when the New York Times wanted to do a story about "cancel culture," involving a white teenager who was castigated for using the dreaded n-word on social media, they chose such a situation in historic Leesburg, Virginia. In the 13th paragraph of Dan Levin’s 2,400-word feature article about the plight of Mimi Groves, he describes her as "among many incoming freshmen across the country whose admissions offers were revoked by at least a dozen universities after videos emerged on social media of them using racist language." But the New York Times didn’t do a feature story about Nate Panza of Watchung, New Jersey, or Sean Glaze of Springfield, Ohio, students who have experienced "cancellations" for similar reasons as Miss Grove. However many white kids might be punished for saying the n-word New Jersey or Ohio, such locations would not give the New York Times an opportunity to apply its trademark "Legacy of Slavery" theme.
Leesburg, the reader is told in the third paragraph of Dan Levin’s article, is "a town named for an ancestor of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee and whose school system had fought an order to desegregate for more than a decade after the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling.