The Advanced Placement high-school history textbook “By the People: A History of the United States” spotlights claims of concern about President Trump’s ‘mental stabliity’ (ToddStarnes.com)

A new high-school American history textbook depicts President Donald Trump as mentally ill and castigates both him and his supporters as racist.

Published by Pearson Education, “By the People: A History of the United States” will be used by many Advanced Placement students beginning in 2020, reports Todd Starnes.

In the final section, titled “The Angry Election of 2016,” the book states Trump’s “not very-hidden racism connected with a significant number of primary voters.”

“Most thought that Trump was too extreme a candidate to win the nomination, but his extremism, his anti-establishment rhetoric, and, some said, his not very hidden racism connected with a significant number of primary voters,” the book says.

Trump’s supporters, the author writes, are “mostly older, often rural or suburban, and overwhelmingly white.”

It says supporters of Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton “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.”

Clinton supporters “also worried about the mental stability of the president-elect and the anger that he and his supporters brought to the nation.”

A high-school student in Minnesota, Tarra Snyder, told Fox News she was “appalled” by the “blatantly biased” textbook.

“It was really, really surprising to me,” she said. “I really believe that learning should be objective and that students can make their own decisions based on what they’re able to learn in a classroom, and if the facts are skewed then students aren’t able to make well-rounded decisions on what they believe.”

Starnes said a Pearson spokesman defended the textbook, arguing it underwent “rigorous peer review to ensure academic integrity.”

“This work is designed to convey college-level information to high school students and meet specific Advanced Placement standards. It aims to promote debate and critical thinking by presenting multiple sides of historical issues and offering a broad survey of arguments from the 2016 presidential election and other recent topics,” the spokesman said.

“We have reviewed the passages in question independently and in the context of the rest of the book. This review has confirmed that the text offers a broad view of critical arguments from both sides of the 2016 presidential election.”

‘Raw hatred’

Powerline blogger Paul Mirengoff wrote that the textbook clearly is using the phrase “Clinton supporters” as “a device to plant the idea that President Trump is mentally unstable, a proposition for which there is no basis other than raw hatred of the man.”

Responding to Pearson’s defense, he said the “peers” who reviewed the book “clearly share the blatant partisanship and mindless anti-Trumpism of the textbook’s author.”

“If they didn’t hate Trump, they wouldn’t be peers. They would be academic outcasts,”  Mirengoff wrote.

He said any schools that uses the book “should be the target of vigorous protests.”

“The political blowback should be fierce,” he said.

‘A People’s History’

In an interview with WND in December, a former Reagan administration official, Daniel Oliver, pointed to history books that have falsely portrayed his former boss as an amiable dunce.

As the president of the Education and Research Institute, he is spearheading The American History Book Project, which is critiquing, page by page, the national best-selling, high-school history textbook “The American Pageant.”

The textbook denigrates almost every Republican president, the Washington, D.C.-based group has found, calling Eisenhower a closet racist and Reagan “no intellectual.”

“To say Reagan was not an intellectual is extraordinary,” Oliver told WND, citing his personal knowledge of the president.

Oliver noted the most popular history book at one time was “A People’s History of the United States,” by Howard Zinn.

A longtime member of communist groups in the United States, Zinn died in 2010 after influencing generations of American high school students.

While others have supplanted Zinn’s book, his left-wing interpretation of American history – decades of exploitation and discrimination by privileged upper classes – persists, noted Oliver.

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URL to article: http://www.wnd.com/2019/04/u-s-history-textbook-portrays-trump-as-mentally-ill-racist/