Among acts that evoke a sense of outrage — even horror — in those who consider themselves educated, book burning is surely near the top of the list. A dramatic, all-consuming censorship, the fires also serve as an enduring metaphor for anti-intellectualism, anti-liberalism, and mob mentality across the free world. But let’s be honest, most people don’t really have a problem with the concept of burning books. Most people just don’t want their books burned.

In America, a broadly-shared belief in the value of free speech has kept our metaphorical bonfires confined to a smolder. But today, with that value so greatly eroded, the nation has spiraled into a state of perpetual ideological battle, perhaps most visibly waged in our public schools.

What are the good books all children should be forced by law to read, and what are the bad books that should be banned and burned and erased from history? In a free state, this question is not legitimate. But with our culture now so clearly entranced by the power of censorship, defending liberal values increasingly makes no sense. If the law of the land is burn or be burned, the only rational thing to do is grab a torch.

Welcome to the culture war.

Last week, bluecheck coastal corners of the social internet exploded on news that Tennessee’s McMinn County school board banned Maus, a graphic novel based on the experiences of author Art Spiegelman’s family during the Holocaust.

According to minutes from the McGinn County school board meeting, Maus was removed from the eighth grade curriculum for a handful of swear words and an illustration of Spiegelman’s mother, naked and partly submerged in a bathtub full of her own blood after committing suicide. It was suggested teachers find another book about the Holocaust. But since Tennessee is a red state, McMinn County voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, and Maus is a book about, among many things, race, the decision has been widely criticized as antisemitic, and framed as a significant national story. McMinn’s Maus “ban” is more than the tale of a single, fallen book in a single county no one knew existed before last week. It’s the latest blow in an unrelenting, right-wing assault on education, and free speech, across the country. 

This is a superficially compelling position that is nonetheless divorced from reality.

Yes, it is certainly true a grassroots effort to ban books that fall under the loosely defined category of Critical Race Theory from schools has evolved from angry Twitter chatter into a real, if nascent, political force. It’s also true this force is explicitly interested in censorship, and is broadly popular on the political right. A Texas lawmaker recently launched a threatening “inquiry” into 850 books he found problematic, and just a day before the Maus news broke a small Missouri school district removed The Bluest Eye from library shelves — something much closer to an actual banning, and of a kind taking place around the country. But none of this has happened in a vacuum. It’s also hardly confined to the political right.

In Washington state’s small Mukilteo County, To Kill a Mockingbird was just removed from ninth grade curriculum on grounds the famously anti-racist work is racist. The book met a similar fate in Burbank, California, also in the name of combatting racism, along with several other books including Huckleberry Finn, a story literally about a boy’s journey to help free his friend from slavery. These are just the latest in a years-long string of decisions emblematic of a well-intended but ultimately regressive race obsession from the furthest extremes of the far left, which is absolutely committed to banning books.