You don't have to be outraged about everything all the time

When notorious conspiracy-addled Tennessee MAGA pastor Greg Locke held an actual book burning this week, most people on Reddit immediately thought about this:

By contrast, when I heard who was involved, I immediately thought about this instead:

Book burning is never a good thing under any circumstances, unless you’re lost in the woods and have to burn them for warmth or something. Why you’d be in the woods with a giant pile of books to begin with, I have no idea.

But there is a difference between ransacking libraries and schools and seizing doubleplusungood books to burn, as the Nazis and other totalitarian regimes then and now have done, and holding a bonfire with books you already own and/or bought at the thrift store for your dumbass publicity stunt. When you own a book you can do whatever you want with it. You can use it as toilet paper, make it into origami, write in the margins or, yes, burn it. That applies even if it’s the Koran or - as one counter-protestor allegedly did at Locke’s event - a Bible.