I have been asked by many LRC readers why now the attack on the novelist of beloved childrens’ books Laura Ingalls Wilder (and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane)? It is crucial to put this vilification in context.  One of the key weapons of the Left in the cultural war against Judeo-Christian morality and the nuclear family for well over a hundred years have been attack biographies on persons admired and respected by the middle classes. It is important to observe that these are not persons especially noted for their political views but who are symbolic of the bourgeois civilization the Left wishes to destroy.

The classic and definitive statement of elitist contempt for bourgeois culture is Eminent Victorians, by the scathing, bitchy biographer Lytton Strachey. Strachey, who along with his homosexual lover and fellow Cambridge Apostles initiate, economist John Maynard Keynes, were unabashed advocates of “the higher sodomy,” setting forth the destructive agenda for generations of anti-bourgeois subversion. Later the Apostles served as the breeding nest for treason by spawning Soviet espionage agents Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and Michael Straight.

The preeminent contemporary literary descendant of Strachey was the snarky atheist Trotskyist turned neocon warmonger Christopher Hitchens, particularly in his vicious biography, The Missionary Position, Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. To Hitchens we might add, for the context of this particular blog,  Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which so pleased the Leftist literati publishing establishment that it was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Awards in 2017. It was a major artillery piece in the despicable ongoing campaign by progressives to tarnish and destroy the names of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane for their political views. Such censoring thugs, as in Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four, believe the past must be totally cleansed and brutally disinfected of any vestiges of such treasonous ideas in opposition to the reactionary collectivist regime they wish to reimpose on us. 

The Best of Charles Burris