i think liberals learned about the Nazis doing book burnings in middle school and saw modern republicans banning books in their libraries and instead of getting the correct takeaway of "fascist governments have a vested interest in censoring and destroying literature that undermines their politics" they walked away with "physical books are sacred objects and harming them in any way for any reason is sacrilege". you see it with the performative outrage over those old tweets about people cutting paperbacks in half to fit in their luggage, or people rallying against outdated textbooks being shredded for minor thoughtcrimes like "being wrong and racist".
but probably the most annoying incarnation of this is the thing Anthropic is doing/has done where they mass buy and destructively scan shitloads of books. fuck r/redscarepod but this thread serves as an excellent snapshot of the kind of reactionary attitude im talking about. lots of bemoaning the downfall of civilization and RETVRN-posting about libraries while completely ignoring the fact that nobody was reading or buying these books, and if they were, it's because they were popular enough that a single copy being destroyed has no impact whatsoever on that book being available. the "rare books" being destroyed here are not one-off printings of the Gutenberg bible, they're, like, Microsoft Office 94 For Dummies
