Commentary Book burning has always been a crucial ingredient of totalitarianism. In the 1930s the German Student Union infamously made bonfires from books considered antithetical to National Socialism. Similarly, the zealots who executed Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution destroyed books opposed to the diktats of Chinese Communism. The United States hasn’t been immune to suppressing ideas by destroying books. For example, during the years leading up to the Civil War, abolitionist tracts were gathered in public squares by Southern post masters and burned instead of delivered. In the North, abolitionists’ printing presses were destroyed, and their offices set on fire. John Milton wrote back in 1644, “Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature… but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.” Which, of course, is the point. Book burning is fueled by emotional zeal and an intense desire to silence opposition. Conservative author and public intellectual Ryan T. …