Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily's Art Moore repeats a bit of right-wing clickbait in an April 24 article:
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.”
But as the fact-checkers at Snopes detail, the textbook accurately attributes those views. The book doesn't "depict President Donald Trump as mentally ill" or "castigate both him and his supporters as racist"; it ascribes those views to Clinton supporters. Further, Starnes -- and, thus, Moore -- ignored that the textbook also stated that "Trump’s supporters saw the vote as a victory for the people who, like themselves, had been forgotten in a fast-changing America — a mostly older, often rural or suburban, and overwhelmingly white group" as well as the fact that there was also a negative depiction of Clinton from the point of view of Trump supporters, who "chanted 'lock her up' at political rallies, believing that Clinton’s use of her private e-mail account was not only a serious mistake — which many believed it was — but also a crime. Many within Trump’s base saw Clinton and the Democratic Party as elite snobs out of touch with many Americans’ economic pain or, perhaps even more, many Americans’ anger at being dismissed as not worthy of serious consideration."
Lazy stenography doesn't exactly instill trust in a media organization, even if lazy stenography is all you can afford to do.
