RUTHFULLY YOURS

It is sadly common for conservative presidents and political leaders to be portrayed in a less-than-flattering light in the left-leaning textbooks used in public school and college classrooms, but a new volume on American history gives a new spin on the term “rush to judgment.” Less than a year-and-a-half after taking office as America’s sitting president, Donald Trump is already being maligned in the pages of an upcoming high school history text which insinuates that he and his supporters are driven by racism and that he is mentally unfit to serve as our Commander-in-Chief.

Textbooks rarely receive a high profile before their publication, but the new history text “By the People: A History of the United States” written by New York University Professor James W. Fraser and set to be published by the Pearson Education publishing company has already proved controversial for its radical left-leaning and insulting narrative on Donald Trump’s election as president. The book’s one-sided nature was exposed not by an educator but by high school student Tarra Snyder, a junior and AP History student at Rosemount High School in Minnesota, who was provided with Fraser’s book as a sample text that might be used for class instruction next year. Snyder was so incensed by the work’s slanted portrayal of history that she shared images of the book with Indianapolis radio show host Alex Clark, who tweeted images of the text along with commentary that quickly went viral:

The book’s concluding section titled “The Angry Election of 2016” puts NYU Professor Fraser’s hatred and disdain for President Trump on full display. “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,” Fraser writes.

“Trump 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,” he adds, blatantly stereotyping those who supported Trump’s victory.

In another section, he has the audacity to question Trump’s mental fitness for office: “Clinton’s supporters feared that the election had been determined by people who were afraid of a rapidly developing ethnic diversity of the…country…They also worried about the mental instability of the president-elect and the anger that he & his supporters brought to the nation.”

“It was really, really surprising to me,” whistleblower Tarra Snyder commented on viewing Fraser’s text, which is intended to replace an older AP History text in classrooms across the nation next year. “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.”

Responding to Fraser’s claims that Trump supporters are mostly older white rural voters, Snyder said, “I really am surprised by that, I know the multitudes of people who are diverse and who do want to be represented, and when the Democratic Party…pushes them out of the frame, that’s what’s doing the Democratic Party harm because people do feel like they are being forgotten, not just white suburban people living out in the country.”

Snyder is correct in her assertions. Trump, in fact, garnered a higher percentage of African-American, Asian, and Hispanic votes than Republican candidate Mitt Romney did in 2012.

Fraser’s left-wing bias does not begin and end with President Trump. His text also contains a section on the officer-involved shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and the Black Lives Matter movement which casts the police in a highly negative light. According to Fraser, Michael Brown’s parents “were kept away at gunpoint” after he was shot and “The nearly all-white police force was seen as an occupying army in the mostly African American town…the police increased the tensions, defacing memorials set up for Brown and using rubber bullets on demonstrators.”

Scott Overland, a spokesman for the Pearson publishing company, told Fox News that the text was “developed by an expert author and underwent rigorous peer review to ensure academic integrity.” He further asserted that 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.

Pearson Education’s defense of an obvious ideological left-wing smear campaign to discredit President Trump and his supporters in the eyes of American schoolchildren is ultimately even more disturbing than the content of Fraser’s text itself. The notion that a textbook this one-sided was reviewed by multiple academic historians in a “rigorous peer review” process and found to be not only acceptable but to promote “debate and critical thinking” should be cause for even greater concern.