ABC News’ ‘The View’ Shows Off Expertise In Fake History

While Disney and ABC were duking it out with the Federal Communications Commission over whether or not The View was a “bona fide news” program (HINT: they’re not), they were proving that they certainly were not bona fide historians. From the origins of Memorial Day to claims that President Joe Biden never embarrassingly fell asleep while performing his presidential duties, The View cast was engaging in revisionist history this week.

While attacking Secretary of War Pete Hegseth for his Memorial Day speech at West Point and claiming he was ignorant of military history, co-hosts Sara Haines and Sunny Hostin claimed he was “losing sight of the first Memorial Day.”

According to her, Memorial Day was a holiday celebrated by blacks and women before becoming popularized by whites.

HAINES: It was celebrated because Union soldiers, black soldiers that were put in mass graves, a lot of the black community came out and said, “We’re going to honor these soldiers by giving them a proper burial for giving their life to a country that did not treat them as equals.”

HOSTIN: So, Memorial Day was started by black people!

HAINES: By black people, and then a year later, it was women who laid flowers on the graves of these people.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs tells a slightly different story. According to the VA’s Memorial Day history page, it was a multi-racial affair: “In the waning years of the Civil War (1861–1865) and immediately afterward, communities in the North and South, Black and White, decorated soldiers’ graves with floral honors on springtime ‘decoration days.’”

Even left-wing PBS doesn’t acknowledge a singular racial origin, noting that “The practice was already widespread. Waterloo, New York, began a formal observance on May 5, 1866, and was later proclaimed to be the holiday’s birthplace.” PBS does note that blacks in Charleston, South Carolina, held a memorial for Union dead who died in a Confederate prison, but it doesn’t appear to be for only black soldiers.

Later in the week, they tried to do some more revisionist history on a more recent event. Since President Donald Trump’s health was the topic du jour, they toed the liberal media line that Trump was supposedly falling asleep all over the place.

Co-host Joy Behar seemed to scoff at the notion by bitterly asking, “Wait a second. Joe Biden didn’t fall asleep, did he?”

Well Joy, while meeting with the leaders of African nations in Angola, Biden fell asleep. When attending the late President Jimmy Carter’s funeral at the National Cathedral, Biden fell asleep. When attending the COP26 summit in Glasgow, Biden fell asleep.

To brag about “what Sleepy Joe got done while he was asleep,” moderator Whoopi Goldberg read from a note card someone gave her and claimed Biden “oversaw an historic economy that produced over 16 million jobs” and “revitalized NATO.”

Obviously, no serious person gives Biden credit for that number, since it was the economy coming back online as COVID lockdowns were being lifted. Even The Dispatch admits that. Meanwhile, the pressure Trump put on NATO in his first term and the war in Ukraine were what spurred the members of the military alliance to invest in rearmament.

ABC News shouldn’t be allowed to rewrite our history like this. Especially the parts we’ve seen with our own eyes.

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Nicholas C. Fondacaro is the associate editor for the Media Research Center and NewsBusters.