JOHN KASS: ERASING CLASSIC LITERATURE FOR KIDS:

Classic Western literature, from Homer to Shakespeare, Mark Twain and even Harper Lee, is now being canceled, much in the same way that the Islamic State group and early Christians destroyed ancient statues that offended them.

There is something quite barbarous about it all.

Just a few days ago, zealots in San Francisco began stripping “offensive names” from public schools. Names such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and even Democratic U.S. Sen. Diane Feinstein, who is a living witness to her own cancellation.

The stripping of names are public events. They pit aging, worried traditional liberals against a radical leftist movement that will devour them as surely as the relentless Bolsheviks devoured the more moderate Mensheviks.

But the purging of great literature often takes place quietly, among woke teachers and librarians. If the classics aren’t exactly banned outright or burned, they have another way:

To place offending literature on the back shelf, out of the reach of the young, where they’re lost to gather dust in the shadows.

Author Padma Venkatraman wrote an essay titled “Weeding Out Racism’s Invisible Roots: Rethinking Children’s Classics” in the School Library Journal. She supports this purge.

The woke are barbarians, and libraries — already facing obsolescence — are killing themselves.