A right-wing pastor held a literal book-burning in Tennessee last night.
The pro-Trump, anti-vax pastor Greg Locke—who, after his recent ban for COVID misinformation, called Twitter “censorship Nazis”—organized and carried out a literal book burning last night in Mt. Juliet, TN, a suburb of Nashville.
Locke—a true shitbag who recently claimed that OCD and autism were signs of demonic possession—told his congregants on Sunday about the planned “burning service.”
“We gonna get rid of some unholy covenants and alliances and some word curses and some witchcrafts,” he said. “We gonna free some homes and some marriages. Gonna burn some stuff.” To which I say, Greg… if your wife doesn’t want to fuck you, it’s definitely not because of Harry Potter.
In addition to books, Locke also encouraged people to burn Ouija Boards (“a portal to hell”) and tarot cards.
The actual burning, while terrifying, looked sparsely attended. Still, it serves as a visceral reminder that the American book-burning frenzy is only getting worse. And while I’m under no illusion that any of Greg Locke’s acolytes would respond to this blog post with anything but a hate-email (“Hate-email thy neighbor,” as Jesus was always saying), I hope that at least the self-proclaimed liberals who claim that the real censors are on the left will take this moment to turn their attention, and their massive Substack audiences, to this bullshit.
God knows they spent enough time defending J.K. Rowling from criticism in the last year. Maybe they want to step up and defend her books from being destroyed in a literal bonfire?
