Some of those New England purveyors of intolerance against the Southerners were called out by Edgar Allan Poe in some of his literary criticisms. He caught some of the best known Northern writers with gross misstatements of the actual facts involved--clear examples of a vicious fanaticism.
The outrage manufacturing industry in the North East is still going today. Nowadays it is "transgender this" and "Islamaphobia that."
Whatever it is, it is still going to boil down to smug, morally superior intellectuals lecturing the rest of us on how our morality is behind the times, and we need to change what we believe to conform to what they think we need to believe.