Victor Davis Hanson "A half-century ago, progressives used to push limitless free expression, blasting conservatives for their allegedly blinkered traditionalism. They boasted of obliterating once-normal boundaries in art, music and literature to allow nudity, profanity, sexuality and anti-American boilerplate.
"Now?
"The left is Victorian — increasingly puritanical, regressive and hypersensitive. Even totalitarian censorship and book-burning have weirdly become part of their by-any-means-necessary methods.
"University of California, Berkeley, professor Grace Lavery was so outraged by author Abigail Shrier’s book “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,” that she went beyond the usual calls to ban the book.
"Lavery advocated burning Shrier’s book." . .
“ 'I DO encourage followers to steal Abigail Shrier’s book and burn it on a pyre,” Lavery tweeted last month.
"Did the self-appointed liberal watchdog the American Civil Liberties Union step in to defend free expression?
"No. One ACLU official poured gas on the book-burning fire.
“ 'Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on,” tweeted Chase Strangio, the ACLU’s deputy director for transgender justice." . . .
You are looking into a bare, white room, its walls covered with empty book shelves. It reminds us of one of the darkest days of German intellectual history. On the 10th of May 1933 the main event of an organized burning of books took place on the Bebelplatz. Not only in Berlin, but also in many other German towns hordes of National Socialist students looted libraries.
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