OPINION:
Presidents Day is a fraud. It’s part of the left’s ongoing campaign to elevate mediocrity, downplay or disparage our heroes, and erase U.S. history.
We should be celebrating men such as George Washington, who gave us our country, and Abraham Lincoln, who saved it during the greatest crisis in our history.
Instead, we have this meaningless mush called Presidents Day. Who are we honoring: Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan or Joseph R. Biden? Most of our presidents are better off forgotten. Who wants to remember Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty, which made single-parent families the norm in the Black community?
Although Washington’s Birthday is still a federal holiday, sadly, Lincoln’s Birthday is not.
The left has never been comfortable with either of these giants.
Washington owned slaves, but so did Thomas Jefferson, the father of the Democratic Party. Even Lincoln, who freed the slaves, isn’t popular on the left. His primary mission wasn’t emancipation but saving the Union.
In reality, these towering figures prove the great man theory of history: that exceptional individuals, not impersonal forces, shape the course of history.
Washington guided the nation for the first quarter century of its existence, first as commander of the Continental Army and then as president. His steady hand brought us victory in our war for independence. His support for a federal government helped replace the Articles of Confederation with one of the greatest documents ever written, the United States Constitution.
At the end of the Revolutionary War, a group of his officers wanted to make Washington America’s hereditary monarch. He wouldn’t have it. The old general said he viewed the idea of making him a king with “utmost horror and detestation.” When news of this reached King George III, Britain’s monarch called his former adversary “the greatest man in the world.”
Lincoln’s greatness was of a different sort.
A lesser man would have allowed the Southern states to secede in 1861. Lincoln had the strength of will to prevent it by force of arms. Through the long, bloody Civil War, as casualties mounted and the resolve of many in the North faltered, Lincoln remained steadfast. His monumental Gettysburg Address promised a war-weary people “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Who knows what he might have accomplished in his second term if he hadn’t been shot in the head by a Democrat.
When I was a schoolboy, we learned these lessons well. Today, thanks to the radicals who control public education, they are all but forgotten.
The war on American history extends well beyond Washington and Lincoln. It includes the man who might symbolically be considered the first American, Christopher Columbus.
The left sees the Genovese sailor as a mass murderer and the die from which future colonial exploiters were struck. Altogether, 17 states and the District of Columbia celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day, another scam.
Columbus undertook one of the greatest voyages in history, sailing approximately 3,100 nautical miles from Spain to the Bahamas, an amazing feat in the 15th century. He opened a continent to exploration and settlement.
At the time, the Americas were inhabited by a people who had not reached the pinnacle of civilization, now venerated as Indigenous. If Native American culture was so great, then why didn’t the Indigenous people build a giant canoe and sail east to discover Europe?
President Trump had it exactly right in his 2025 Columbus Day Proclamation, when he said Columbus was: “Guided by steadfast prayer and unwavering fortitude and resolve. Columbus’ journey carried thousands of years of wisdom, philosophy, reason and culture across the Atlantic into the Americas — paving the way for the ultimate triumph of Western civilization less than three centuries later on July 4, 1776.”
The war over our holidays is an integral part of the culture war. Celebrations of our traditional holidays help unite and define us as a people.
You probably don’t number among your ancestors an Italian sailor, a Virginia planter or a man who was born in a log cabin, but we can all identify with the values and vision of the great men who shaped our nation.
Why don’t we let leftists have their own holidays so they will leave ours alone? They could celebrate the success of Josef Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan or Woke Sugar Daddy George Soros’ birthday.
Don Feder is a columnist with The Washington Times.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.