Last year, we discussed a Democratic candidate (Will Rollins) for Congress who was running on an anti-free speech pledge to increase censorship in the United States. Now there is a GOP candidate for Secretary of State in Missouri, Valentina Gomez, who is literally running on a book burning platform.
Gomez posed a video of herself on X using a flamethrower to burn a stack of library books about the LGBTQ+ community. She then pledged that “[t]his is what I will do to grooming books when I become Secretary of State. These books come from a Missouri Public Library. When I am in office, they will burn.”
She specifically burned “Naked: Not Your Average Sex Encyclopedia” by Myriam Daguzan Bernier and “Queer, 2nd Edition: The Ultimate LGBTQ Guide for Teens.”
Running on good old-fashioned book burning represents a new low for this anti-free speech period. It is a practice most associated with Nazi Germany in the 1930s. However, long before that, German poet Heinrich Heine declared that “where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.” It would prove tragically prophetic in his own country.
It is tragic to see a young person like Gomez, 24, embrace such practices. However, one of the earliest and most significant book burnings in Germany was held on May 10, 1933 by students from the Wilhelm Humboldt University in Berlin. They carried out books from the university library and burned them in Franz Joseph Platz. As many as 25,000 books were decreed by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, to be “un-German.”
There is nothing more unAmerican than book burning. To run on such a vile practice is a shocking example of a crisis of faith in this country, particularly when it comes to the right of free speech.
Any school area, is not a legally public space. Is a space dedicated for kids education. Their education must be equidistant at a long distance, from all adult people believes, so kids can realy aproach subjects with objectivity and make their own choices after becoming adults. Parents are the exception as the best people that can be trusted with their guidance, the persons the kid loves and trust and relly on. A lgbtxyz queer or whatever name asume for their sexual perversion is not allowed to promote pedophilia under the disguise of free speech, or helping kids learn about sexuality. Under the disquise of transgenderism, the pedophiles push for the sexualization of the kids starting with the kindergarden. Next time that woman should make a public invitation to everybody who want to participate to burn a “book”, which in reality is poison for the kids mind.
OK, but, Mr. Turley, you are in favor, as I recall, of the freedom to burn flags. If a book is one’s private property, surely one is free to dispose of that property in any way one likes, so long as one is not actively putting others at risk?
Silly stunts of this sort are, of course, exercises in absurdity, but there have certainly been instances in American history of banning pornography which did not lead to burning of people. And, again, excluding pornographic materials from public libraries is not the same as banning it altogether.
I wrote my earlier reply before reading that these books are apparently public rather than private property, which does materially alter the circumstances of the case.
But I thought burning a book you don’t like is protected behavior. I can do whatever I choose with my own property. If she were to force others to do so, that is a problem.
I completely disagree with the comments printed above. The Supreme Court standard for years has been to allow all kinds of material to be made available, and to sort it out “in the marketplace of ideas.” Burning books you dislike or find objectionable is not okay in a free society. Just pick up a list of books once banned in this country and it soon becomes clear what a slippery slope you find yourself on.
Oddly, it seems like neither you nor Mr. Turley understands what’s going on here. These are explicit and pornographic books that leftist extremists have been putting into the schools! Did you not know this?! Here in California we have our slimy governor and his wife making money off of pushing these books into the schools — it’s disgusting beyond the pale.
Flame Fatale
Discrimination against the wrong and immoral is good.
American society has been trained to accept wrong and immoral.
Wait!
She omitted the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and his fellow traveler, if not co-author/co-conspirator, “Crazy Abe” Lincoln.
The antithesis of the Constitution of the United States of America, its acolytes, disciples and direct and mortal enemies, cannot persist in the United States of America.
I have no problem with her burning that trash. Not all books are the same, and it is simplistic and disingenuous to act as if they are. She burned grooming books, where sexual deviants look to indoctrinate children.
Remember, the United States has executed newspaper editors before, and no one complained about the First Amendment.