‘NYT’ & Racial Reckoning: Why Cancel Culture Is a Teenage Nightmare

Jimmy Galligan — the 18-year-old biracial teen who has “no regrets” about purposefully derailing the life of his white former classmate for once using a slur when she was 15 — is hardly the first teenage bully. Hopefully he’ll grow out of that. But in any case, neither he nor his target deserves the national media coverage they have been getting.

Here’s the catalytic nonsense: In 2016, Mimi Groves, then-high-school freshman at Heritage High School in Loudoun County, Va., sent a video to her friend on Snapchat in which she said the words, “I can drive, n*****s.” This ill-conceived and inappropriate message was then shared around until it made its way to Galligan, who, incensed by such racial insensitivity, decided to keep it in order to post it publicly “when the time was right,” which, Galligan told the New York Times, meant the specific moment that would “get her where she would understand the severity of that word.” [emphasis added]

About the Author

Madeleine Kearns

Madeleine Kearns is a former staff writer at National Review.

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Jimmy Galligan — the 18-year-old biracial teen who has “no regrets” about purposefully derailing the life of his white former classmate for once using a slur when she was 15 — is hardly the first teenage bully. Hopefully he’ll grow out of that. But in any case, neither he nor his target deserves the national media coverage they have been getting.

Here’s the catalytic nonsense: In 2016, Mimi Groves, then-high-school freshman at Heritage High School in Loudoun County, Va., sent a video to her friend on Snapchat in which she said the words, “I can drive, n*****s.” This ill-conceived and inappropriate message was then shared around until it made its way to Galligan, who, incensed by such racial insensitivity, decided to keep it in order to post it publicly “when the time was right,” which, Galligan told the New York Times, meant the specific moment that would “get her where she would understand the severity of that word.” [emphasis added]