White Rural Rage by columnist Paul Waldman and political scientist Tom Schaller makes the claim that the root problem in our politics today lies squarely on the shoulders of white rural Americans. Yet the book makes a lot of negative assertions about this group without the methodological rigor or correct characterization of existing literature to back it up.

The authors make the claim that white rural Americans are rampantly conspiratorial, to the detriment of society. Yet they find that less than a quarter of them believe in conspiracy theories such as QAnon, and though this is seven percentage points higher than urban Americans, that difference in QAnon support loses statistical significance when controlling for other factors—in other words, this is not a distinctively rural phenomenon. The authors repeat this error on several topics.

White Rural Rage also accuses white rural America of being a hotbed of Christian nationalism, using assumptions without the evidence to back it up. And they argue that white rural Americans are more supportive of political violence, painting them as a very real and violent threat to the rest of the U.S., when the very study they cite to back this up actually found the opposite. And they have also been criticized for using data with sample sizes that are too small and biased to draw meaningful conclusions.