Washington Post Celebrates Destruction of Books
10th August 2020
Today, the Washington Post’s Sunday “Outlook” section ran a piece in which Lawrence Downes, formerly of the New York Times editorial board, boasts about feeding books by Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Laura Ingraham, and other conservative authors to worms. Downes says he purchases these books on sale from his public library. He then takes them home for “quarantine.” In this way, he prevents people who might want to buy and read the books from doing so.
For extra pleasure, Downes has taken to putting the books in a compost bin along with coffee grounds, potato and carrot peels, etc., and feeding the pages to worms. He seems to believe that doing so is different in nature from burning the books. He’s right. Taking into account the pleasure Downes gets and his desire to write about the experience, it’s sicker.