NEW YORK, April 25, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) ― A high school history textbook states that people believe President Trump is mentally ill and that his supporters are racists.
By the People: A History of the United States, used by advanced placement students, was written by New York University professor James Fraser and published by Pearson Education in 2018. Its firmly anti-Trump bias was brought to general attention by Fox News’ Todd Starnes this week when he reproduced in his blog sentences from a section entitled “The Angry Election of 2016.”
According to the history textbook, “[Hillary] Clinton’s supporters feared that the election had been determined by people who were afraid of a rapidly developing ethnic diversity of the country” and these supporters “… also worried about the mental instability of the president-elect and the anger that he and his supporters brought the nation.”
Ignoring the 29% of Hispanic voters who supported the Republicans, the book identifies Trump voters as white, poor and working-class.
“… [L]ike [Bernie] Sanders among the Democrats, Trump tapped into the sense of alienation and ‘being left behind’ that many voters ― most of all white, poor, and working-class voters ― felt,” Fraser wrote.
It also employs the words “extreme” and “extremely” to described Trump’s opinions and personality.
“But quite unlike Sanders, Trump was also extremely anti-immigrant, especially attacking Muslim immigrants,” the book states.
It then underscores the idea that Trump and his supporters are racists.
“Most thought that Trump was too extreme a candidate to win the [Republican] nomination,” it says, “but his extremism, his anti establishment rhetoric, and, some said, his not-very-hidden racism connected with a significant number of primary voters ― more voters than any other single Republican candidate.”
By the People described the momentum leading to Trump’s election in unflattering terms, characterizing America as a nation whose “social fabric continued to tear.” It mentioned “revelations” that Trump had made “hugely demeaning comments and actions” toward “many women” while being careful to mention that the reopened investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of her email account showed “no new evidence of wrong doing.”
The history textbook states that the majority of Trump voters were “overwhelmingly white” without reflecting that 70% of all the voters are white or that over 76% of American citizens are white.
“Trump’s supporters saw the vote as a victory for people who, like themselves, had been forgotten in a fast-changing America – a mostly older, often rural or suburban, and overwhelmingly white group,” it says.
The book adds that Democrats thought this “overwhelming white group” was a pack of cowardly racists and sexists.
“Clinton’s supporters feared that the election had been determined by people who were afraid of a rapidly developing ethnic diversity of the country, discomfort with their candidate’s gender and nostalgia for an earlier time in the nation’s history,” Fraser wrote.
Apparently Clinton’s supporters also thought Trump was insane and those who voted from him brought “anger” to the USA.
“They also worried about the mental stability of the president-elect and the anger that he and his supporters brought to the nation.”
“In other words,” Starnes remarked, students “are going to be taught that President Trump is mentally insane and his supporters are a bunch of irredeemable deplorables. Such descriptions would be laughable, but this garbage is being shoved into the minds of impressionable American teenagers.”
Starnes wrote in his blogpost that a spokesman for Pearson Education had told Fox News that the book had undergone “rigorous peer review to ‘ensure academic integrity’.” The pundit found this “laughable.”
“Who was on that peer review board?” Starnes asked. ”Hillary Clinton and the staff of CNN?”
“This is what public school indoctrination looks like, folks,” he added. “There’s no telling how many history teachers will be using this textbook to poison the minds of their students.”
“They may as well be using Saul Alinsky’s ’Rules For Radicals’.”