In the quiet, leafy suburb of Beachwood, Ohio, a disturbing post appeared on Gab, the far-right haven for extremists. It showed the trunk of a car packed with library books, and a few days later, those books were engulfed in flames.
According to officials, the books had been checked out from the local Beachwood branch of the Cuyahoga County Public Library. The man who borrowed them reportedly said he was trying to understand his LGBTQ son better. He lied.
That was April.
Ohio man checked out 100 books—then publicly burned them to "cleanse the library."
— LongTime🤓FirstTime👨💻 (@LongTimeHistory) May 13, 2025
He checked out books on Black, Jewish & LGBTQ history—then held a book burning on social media Gab.
Gab is a hub for white supremacist, neo-Nazi & extremist content.
He told librarian his son… pic.twitter.com/P5KjWBOT7u
By May, a police report had been filed and the internet shared evidence online suggesting the same man used Gab to boast about torching the collection. Titles focused on Black history, Jewish history and LGBTQ rights, and the works were still tagged with library stickers.
“We should condemn it. State leaders, clergy and anyone of prominence, if they’re made aware of this, should condemn it,” Ohio State Senator Kent Smith (D-Euclid) told TheHub.news.
The book-burning video spread fast, and so did outrage. The estimated value of the destroyed materials was $1,700, but the figurative loss cuts far deeper.
“While it’s still no one’s been proven guilty of anything, and this individual and all individuals still deserve that opportunity, those of us who have to stand in the community need to say, ‘this will not be tolerated.’ This is not acceptable,” said Smith. “This is not behavior that should be applauded. Trying to intimidate any community through intimidation or violence is not appropriate. It is a violation of the marketplace of ideas of the bedrock principle of American life—which is we need more ideas, not less.
The incident is part of a larger, bleak pattern. PEN America reports that nearly 16,000 books have been banned from U.S. public schools since 2021, most of them dealing with race, gender identity or queer experiences. Books are knowledge, knowledge is power and this administration does not want the people to be aware of the power they truly yield.
Book burnings have long been an act of state intimidation tactics.
In 213 BCE, China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, ordered the systematic burning of any philosophical and historical texts which did not align with his regime’s ideology. Confucian scholars who resisted were buried alive, their knowledge erased as the emperor tried to rewrite history and the country’s culture, in his own image. Fast forward two millennia to 1933, Berlin and Nazi Germany lit their own emblematic bonfires, targeting Jewish, Marxist and “un-German” literature.
Image credit: ShutterStock
In Timbuktu, Mali, back in 2013, Islamist militants torched centuries-old manuscripts during their occupation, targeting Sufi texts and pre-colonial African scholarship that questioned their authoritarian ideology.
“These priceless manuscripts are my identity, they’re my history. They are documents about Islam, history, geography, botany, poetry. They are close to my heart, and they belong to the whole world,” Halle Ousmane Cisse, the city’s mayor, said at the time.
All acts were preludes to a totalitarian regime, which appears to be on par with the current administration’s chilling agenda.
What’s happening in Ohio isn’t isolated. Since January 20, 2025, there has been a sharp increase in more overt displays of racism, xenophobia and pretty much all of the “isms.” Gab, a social network favored by white supremacists and conspiracy theorists, has become “A haven for neo-Nazis,” the ADL has warned, meaning that attacks similar to the library in Beachwood, are likely to occur unless action is taken.
Last month, a man checked out 100 books on Black, Jewish, and LGBTQ topics from the Beachwood Public Library.
— Rep. Shontel Brown (@RepShontelBrown) May 21, 2025
He didn’t check those books out to read them. He checked them out to burn them.
This kind of hate doesn’t happen in a vacuum. pic.twitter.com/2bM68qHBGx
However, as Smith points out, this seemingly minor act of defiance was less about destroying books and more about sending a message of intimidation to an entire community.
“We need to let, and this is what the libraries kind of stand for, and we need to make sure that this will be a multicultural nation in kind of every sense, which is to say it’s not just a skin color thing. It’s not just a religious thing; it’s an ideas thing. I try to intentionally not use the phrase ‘the rising tide of antisemitism or the rising tide of LGBTQ discrimination’ because I don’t want to use the phrase ‘the rising tide.’ Tides are natural. Tides are predictable. Tides are something that we can’t control,” Smith asserted.
“This is something we can control. This is something that is manmade, this is not natural. And in that respect, because it is manmade, it is used to divide and we can push back against that.”
But there is hope.
“The good news in this being manmade and not natural is we can suppress this, and we can put it ,down and we can make sure that if these types of incidents occur, that hopefully they will not gain a foothold because they will be stamped out as quickly as possible,” Smith added.
For Senator Smith, a lifelong advocate and now an unlikely digital-age resistor, the fight is about showing up in the halls of Columbus and the streets of Cleveland.
At a recent meeting, he recalled, a wealthy 71-year-old man shared that he had just attended his first protest. Ever. “What Trump had done up to that point was enough to move him into the streets,” Smith said. “That’s where we are now.”
The fact that a suburban septuagenarian had been radicalized not by hate but by resistance struck Smith deeply. “He’s probably looking at his kids, his grandkids, thinking: this is bad for them. And he’s right.”
The senator urges the public to treat these incidents as political acts with political solutions. “We need to resist every time, everywhere. This is about power. And if we don’t push back now, we may not get another chance.”
In the 12th century, Timbuktu (Mali) had 3 universities—one had 25,000 students—and 180 Quranic schools.
— Facts About Africa (@OnlyAfricaFacts) September 23, 2018
There were over 60 private libraries with several thousands of manuscripts in each collection.
Watch how those ancient manuscripts were saved when Al-Qaeda invaded the city. pic.twitter.com/Ki76h751F2
The man at the center of the book-burning incident has not been formally charged, but the case has national watchdogs and local communities on alert; there are still many who are unaware of the incident through no fault of their own.
Senator Smith knows what it’s like to be buried in the bureaucracy.
“I spend an enormous amount of time and energy in Columbus dealing with state government and the very smallest of details,” he said. By the time he returns home, he turns to his partner and asks, “What did Trump do while I was gone?” Not because he doesn’t care—because he’s been too busy doing his job to keep up with the chaos.
Smith says the term “uninformed voter” often misses the mark. These aren’t people who don’t care about democracy; they’re people working 60-hour weeks, getting their news in push notifications between jobs and daycare pickups. “They’re not willfully ignorant,” he said. “They’re just exhausted.” And in a climate of nonstop political drama, even a state senator admits that his hectic schedule means that at times he is “as uninformed about federal stuff as probably anybody,” until he has time to take a breather and be briefed by his political partners and allies.
As President Donald Trump continues to sign executive orders that dismantle fundamental rights and gut federal protections, many Americans are left feeling powerless. But Smith says now is the time to resist, harder than ever.
There are elections in these US states on November 4, 2025. Quote this with #VoteBlue2025 to get out the word and aim to dominate these state elections. pic.twitter.com/DlWschLey0
— #NeverTrump #VoteBlueEveryState 🗺🧱 (@BlueWave2026) May 15, 2025
Still, Smith is clear about the stakes.
“November 2025 is the most important election of our lifetime—and then November 2026 will be the next most important one,” he said.
“This is purely about power so that they can grift,” he said, referencing the former president’s defense of accepting a private plane. “He’s trying to roll Congress, ignore the courts, reshape global alliances with tariffs and side deals and model himself after strongmen,” he said. “This isn’t policy. It’s profiteering.”
