History has many examples when writings and creative works were so unpopular that their destruction became public events, the most infamous being the book burnings of Nazi Germany. Earlier, in the Middle Ages, heretics got burned at the stake with their own books used as fuel. Other examples were less fatal but still striking. When John Lennon made the quip that the Beatles might be more popular than Jesus in 1966, a wave of public Beatles records destruction followed.
The destruction of publications, however, need not always be so visible. Today, we're seeing a wave of hostility to research and scholarship and creative endeavor that involves not bonfires, but the deletion of items. Government agency data and reports are being taken down without warning. It is not just at the federal level, either. In states like Mississippi, library databases are getting eliminated due to their containing of DEI research. Nor is it a product of this year. In Kansas, a law passed over ten years ago made librarians liable for books that were unpopular with the community. The result was a wave of LGBTQ books being removed from the shelves. The loss of these materials is less dramatic but equally harmful. Rather than burned for everyone to see, these items simply… disappear…. until years later someone might be looking for an item only to find that it no longer exists.