The Republican noise machine has become such an overpowering presence in our world - manipulating the media with its messages, preying on the fear of the uninformed - that the whole idea of facts (the reality-based world, as someone in George W. Bush's administration so dismissively put it) seems to have been undermined, or at least distorted.
The famous quote from the late Daniel Moynihan posited that while you may be entitled to your own opinion, you are not entitled to your own set of facts.
Yet, somehow, facts - and history and science - have been tarred with the brush of liberalism in the past 30 years. Suddenly, simply offering the facts - about climate change, women's health, voter fraud or income inequality - is branded a partisan act, as though facts themselves take sides instead of simply stating the obvious.
As a result, Jacob Kornbluth's illuminating Inequality for All, which focuses on economist and scholar Robert Reich, probably won't reach the audience it needs to. They're too busy watching Fox News - or CNN or MSNBC, for that matter. The 24-hour cable-news networks no longer care about actual information, unfortunately.
The information Reich offers is, of course, exactly the opposite of what almost half of this country wants to believe.
This review continues on my website.