Many Advanced Placement students will be using a new textbook that indicates President Trump as mentally ill and his supporters as angry and racist. The American History textbook By the People: A History of the United States has a section titled “The Angry Election of 2016” which is extremely biased against the president, Christians and conservative voters.
Photos of the book were recently tweeted by a radio show host. “In case you didn’t think there was an effort going on in public schools to indoctrinate kids with an anti-conservative agenda, a friend of mine took pictures and highlighted parts of this AP US History book,” tweeted Alex Clark, co-host of The Joe and Alex Show on WNOW in Indianapolis, Ind.
According to The Federalist, the textbook is published by Pearson Education and authored by New York University professor James Fraser, and it started being rolled out to public schools in 2018.
One student, Tarra Snyder of Rosemount High School in Minnesota, obtained a copy of the book from her school. She said she was “appalled” after seeing the section and how the textbook ignored the Democratic presidential issues at the time.
“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.”
The author wrote in the textbook, “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 author went on to state the president’s supporters were “mostly older, often rural or suburban, and overwhelmingly white.”
“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,” the author continues. “They also worried about the mental stability of the president-elect and the anger that he and his supporters brought to the nation.”
A Pearson spokesperson, Scott Overland, defended the textbook to Fox News, stating it was “developed by an expert author and underwent rigorous peer review to ensure academic integrity.”
He went on to say it was “designed to convey college-level information to high school students” and “aims to promote debate and critical thinking by presenting multiple sides” of the 2016 election.
Overland says he welcomes feedback and is willing to meet with opponents of the new book “as a part of our longstanding commitment and track record of providing unbiased and accurate materials.”
