[SteveR]

I truly do not care about and do not want to know about the political views of an author of a history book. Doesn't matter if I agree, disagree, or am indifferent to those views. If I'm reading history I want to read history, not an author's personal political opinions.

Making it worse, IMO, is when the author tries to present their subjective opinion about someone with whom they agree politically as if it is objective fact, usually through a massive amount of cherry-picking, gaslighting, ignoring things inconvenient to the political narrative they're espousing, and/or whataboutism. "He was just a freedom fighter!" "He didn't want to but those bad guys, who were bad for having different political ideas, forced him to." "But he did so many good things that those few accidental missteps, which totally aren't his fault, shouldn't be held against him!"

Finally, when an author makes alignment with his own political biases be the determining factor on whether or not source material is factual and credible, rather than letting those sources stand or fall on their merits, I'm done with that author.

Cleaver is very guilty of that last point in his books on Korea (I haven't, and won't bother, reading anything he's written on Viet Nam). As an example of what I mean, according to Cleaver, anything asserted in Russian, Chinese, or North Korean sources (like an aircraft being shot down at a given place, date, and time) is 100% true and factual even though there's no corroboration from American records, because American records are full of errors, lies, omissions, and gaps whereas communist records aren't because communists don't lie, they have no reason to, and they don't make errors.

Umm, at the most basic level humans are still humans and thus subject to the same errors and foibles before you start adding in other things/factors.

Never mind that the truth is often somewhere between what that side says and what the other side says in terms of objective facts.