After Facebook banned several prominent “far right” authors and Louis Farrakhan – who was just as surprised at the label as you are, but less so than the Washington Post, apparently – some people were offended. And when people get offended, sometimes they write without thinking things though. Like President Trump, who, in a fit of pique, decried Facebook’s decision as “censorship” that needed “monitoring and watching closely”. Which it technically wasn’t, but the tweets made liberals angry, so The Donald gets a pass from me.

But I’ve also heard Facebook’s deplatforming described as “the new book burning”, and friends, I can’t let that one go, because there is a world of difference between the two activities. It’s like comparing apples and oranges. This is America. We don’t eat orange pie here.

Book burning is a horrible, tragic event for a lot of reasons. Most importantly, the carbon footprint. You burn a book and you know what gets released? Carbon! Deadly, deadly carbon! And probably other toxic chemicals from whatever books were made of back when people used to make books. Most likely lead and unobtainium, if I know my history.

When you deplatform someone, it’s a carbon-neutral event. All that gets released into the atmosphere are pixels, which are made from light. This means they’re actually GOOD for the environment. Light is renewable, just like solar power and wind and even coal – once we learn how to clone dinosaurs. Kicking Paul Joseph Watson to the curb is probably keeping the Statue of Liberty from being washed away by rising oceans.

Another tragedy of book-burning – books are printed in specific, limited quantities. Every time you burn a book, you come that much closer to having it disappear completely. You might at well burn a bald eagle or a panda.

But when you deplatform, you’re not really destroying anything, you’re just preventing new horrible things you disagree with from being made in the first place. And since the second law of thermodynamics says that pixels can neither be created nor destroyed, you’re actually just repurposing them to create words that DO deserve to be read on the internet. Like the ones you’re reading now. It’s not censorship, it’s pre-emptive recycling.

One of the saddest parts of book burning, though, is that many books that get burned by hateful radicals are seminal, innovative works created by iconoclastic thinkers whose works are decades or centuries ahead of their times. Their brilliant insights confuse and befuddle the lesser members of their benighted societies, causing them to fly into primitive, destructive rages which erupt in a mania of fire. Imagine Nero as the Incredible Hulk. Now fill Europe with him and have him hate Galileo. That’s the book burner mentality.

Thankfully, deplatforming is nothing like that. It’s the necessary task of our intellectual guardians to shut down crackpot notions created by dangerous lunatics who are so out of step with our intellectuals’ best current thinking, it’s like they live in a different century. Their crazy ideas imperil all we hold dear. We can’t behave like confused children in the face of these threats. We need to confront the danger. Kill it with fire. We need to act like a cross between a politician and a superhero, and encourage entire continents to address these singular hazard likewise. That’s the proper mentality for deplatformers.

Finally, I leave you with this thought: book burning hurts real people who put real work into their real creations. Deplatforming doesn’t hurt anyone that you’ve ever met, so they’re probably not even real as far as you know or can prove. They’re probably just those bots that you keep having to check boxes to prove you’re not one of.

And as long as Facebook doesn’t think you’re one of them, you certainly don’t have anything to worry about.

Harvey is a non-disabled Navy veteran accidentally hired to fill an affirmative action quota at IMAO.us. He is also the author of such books as “The Nerodible Hulk” and “Unobtanium: a Book-Maker’s Guide”.

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