Torching Free Speech: Republican Candidate in Missouri is Running as a Book Burner

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.