Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I had high hopes for this work. It represents that it is a scholarly and unbiased look at the topic. It's not. It is scholarly only in the sense that a main stream media journalist might think of scholarship. The fact of its hard bias comes out in chapter 6 when Barbara has to discuss the specifics of the US. The copyright date is 2022 but Barbara still believes the Steel Dossier was real and she still rides the Lafayette Park tear gas photo op even after the Park Service explicitly denied events transpired that way almost two years ago now. She names names of hard right media personalities, but Ken Olberman is the only left wing one she can think of. No Joy Reid, no Andrew Cuomo, no Stelter. Hannity and Carlson are held up as paragons of the Republican party and representative of its supporters. The first five chapters are the supposedly scholarly part. It is scholarship of the non-quant liberal arts variety trying to be quant by using numbers and creating indexes. It is basically journalistic mediocrity. People who had power and lose it or think they might are more likely to start a civil war. Wow. Insightful. Protesters who are fired on or abused are more likely to become violent. Who'da thought? I put this question to Barbara and those who think like her: the Republican party is almost certain to take the House in November. It is quite likely they will take the Senate as well. Come 2024, if Joe Biden or Kamala Harris are the candidate, the Republicans will win the presidency as well. If the Republicans control all three branches of the government (they already have SCOTUS, having packed the court per Barbara), why do they need a civil war? And how is it so many Republicans are getting elected if they are all just knuckle-dragging fiends? The answer to both questions comes in the firm understanding that Barbara isn't the least bit interested in preventing civil war really. She is really interested in power for her own partisans. And for this reason, you should skip this book.