U.S. Medals of Dishonor
The Cowardice of Pete Hegseth and the Whitewashing of American Violence
America never runs out of ways to gaslight history.
Last week, Pete Hegseth, the former Fox talking head who’s now somehow Secretary of War in Trump’s Amerikkka 2.0, looked into a camera and announced that the U.S. soldiers who slaughtered Lakota families including women, children, elderly and babies at Wounded Knee in 1890 will keep their Medals of Honor. According to him, this decision is “final” and “no longer up for debate.” Translation: sit down, shut up, and salute a massacre.
(For accurate context, here’s the full transcript of his statement I’d like to dissect.)
Pete Hegseth’s Statement (Full Transcript)
“Under the previous administration, a review panel was convened to determine whether soldiers awarded the Medal of Honor for their actions at the Battle of Wounded Knee should keep their medals.
Now, upon deliberation, that panel concluded that these brave soldiers should in fact rightfully keep their medals from actions in 1890. The report was concluded in October of 2024.
Yet, despite this clear recommendation, former Secretary Lloyd Austin, for whatever reason, I think we know he was more interested in being politically correct than historically correct, chose not to make a final decision. Such careless inaction has allowed for their distinguished recognition to remain in limbo until now.
Under my direction, we’re making it clear, without hesitation, that the soldiers who fought in the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890 will keep their medals. And we’re making it clear that they deserve those medals. This decision is now final, and their place in our nation’s history is no longer up for debate.
We salute their memory, we honor their service, and we will never forget what they did.”
- Pete Hegseth September 25, 2025
A brief history of Wounded Knee:
On December 29, 1890. Chief Spotted Elk (Big Foot), led his band of Miniconjou Lakota, starving and exhausted after walking on foot from Canada to return to relatives living on the Pine Ridge Reservation. (After the battle of Little Big Horn in 1876 Sitting Bull led a large group of Lakota to Canada to avoid the murderous US government.) But around 350 Lakota wanted to return home– they missed home, were hungry, tired, cold, and scared.
They had already surrendered. The 7th Cavalry had them encamped at Wounded Knee Creek, with Hotchkiss guns pointed down from the ridge. If you aren’t familiar with a Hotchkiss gun, look it up.
A deaf Lakota man, Black Coyote, hesitated to give up his rifle after the cavalry ordered all weapons to be confiscated. A shot went off in the struggle and the unspeakable horror began. Soldiers unleashed fire. Artillery from the Hotchkiss guns shredded tipis, horses and entire families. Survivors trying to escape were hunted down for hours throughout frozen ravines.
By the end, more than 300 Lakota were dead. Half were women and children. Some froze where they fell, days later, discovered under snow.
Breaking Down Hegseth’s Statement
Now that we’ve read the transcript from our glorious leader, let’s take it apart. Line by line. Because buried in these 90 seconds are centuries of bullshit that America keeps trying to pass off as patriotism.
“Under the previous administration, a review panel was convened to determine whether soldiers awarded the Medal of Honor for their actions at the Battle of Wounded Knee should keep their medals.”
First, let’s look at this wording, “the Battle of Wounded Knee.” That word was not a mistake as it is intentionally changing the historical context. It wasn’t a battle, nor could anybody justify that terminology, it was a massacre. Over 250 weary Lakota people who after literally walking from Canada to just shy of Pine Ridge, South Dakota, half of whom were women and children, were gunned down mercilessly by the 7th Cavalry in the snow. The U.S. lost 25 soldiers, primarily to friendly fire. Calling it a battle is like calling The Tulsa Race Massacre a “riot.” It sanitizes a horrific slaughter and strokes the fragile ego of the ignorant historian.
“Now, upon deliberation, that panel concluded that these brave soldiers should in fact rightfully keep their medals from actions in 1890. The report was concluded in October of 2024.”
Now this phrase: “brave soldiers.” For turning Hotchkiss guns on innocent families? For chasing down women and children for miles who were simply trying to run for their lives? That’s not bravery, that is butchery. And “rightfully”? There’s nothing rightful about giving a Medal of Honor for mowing down kids, stomping on babies’ heads and raping women in the snow. Even at the time, people questioned it. Fast-forward 135 years, our glorious leader of the self titled US War Department said this is no longer debatable. Fuck that.
“Yet, despite this clear recommendation, former Secretary Lloyd Austin, for whatever reason, I think we know he was more interested in being politically correct than historically correct, chose not to make a final decision.”
Here comes the culture-war framing. Austin didn’t act because he was “politically correct.” Translation: he thought maybe, just maybe, honoring a massacre wasn’t a great look. That’s not politics; that’s decency. Hegseth twists it into cowardice. It’s a neat trick: pretending morality is weakness and cruelty is “historical correctness.”
“Such careless inaction has allowed for their distinguished recognition to remain in limbo until now.”
“Distinguished recognition.” The Medal of Honor is supposed to represent the highest standards of valor. Handing it out at Wounded Knee was like giving a Nobel Peace Prize to Dylan Roof. Calling it distinguished today is an insult– not just to Native people, but to every service member who’s earned that medal in actual combat.
“Under my direction, we’re making it clear, without hesitation, that the soldiers who fought in the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890 will keep their medals. And we’re making it clear that they deserve those medals.”
There’s that word again, “deserve.” According to Hegseth, the men who pulled triggers into a crowd of unarmed Lakota somehow “deserve” our highest honor. Let’s just call this for what it is, Historical Revisionism; it’s moral bankruptcy. What they “deserve” is to be remembered as cowardly and racist perpetrators of an unspeakable atrocity, nothing more, nothing less.
“This decision is now final, and their place in our nation’s history is no longer up for debate.”
No longer up for debate you say? Sorry, Pete, that’s not how history works. You don’t get to issue executive orders about the truth. The truth of history will always be there, and the truth can’t be settled by a simple decree. Declaring history “final” is what authoritarian regimes do when they’re afraid of facts. Why don’t you ask some Lakota families how they feel?
“We salute their memory, we honor their service, and we will never forget what they did.”
I actually agree with the last part of this, “we will never forget what they did,” but not the way he means it. What they did was slaughter innocents, and history should remember that in all its a despicable horror/ Honoring their “service’ is grotesque.
The History of Wounded Knee from a Personal, Historical, and Political Response:
I grew up driving past Wounded Knee almost every week. On Pine Ridge Reservation, that site isn’t just a road marker, it’s a scar on the land where we still lay prayers and offerings for our relatives who were subjected to such inhumanity. For us, it’s not just a paragraph in a high school history book. Wounded Knee is the resting place of our relatives who had no protection from a murderous government. Our grandparents told us stories that came from the mouths of witnesses. Stories of chaos, of screaming, of bodies frozen in the snow. Stories that don’t fade, no matter how many “official reports” try to dress them up as gallantry.
Here’s Black Elk’s first hand account of the events of that day in 1890, it’s a little long but an important eye witness account from a Lakota relative:
“That evening before it happened, I went into Pine Ridge and heard these things, and while I was there, soldiers started searching for where the Big Foots were. These made about five hundred soldiers that were there the next morning. When I saw them starting I felt that something terrible was going to happen. That night I could hardly sleep at all. I walked around most of the night.
In the morning I went out after my horses, and while I was out I heard shooting off toward the east, and I knew from the sound that it must be wagon-guns going off. The sounds went right through my body, and I felt that something terrible would happen.
When I reached camp with the horses, a man rode up to me and said: “Hey—hey—hey! The people that are coming are fired on! I know it!”
I saddled up my buckskin and put on my sacred shirt. It was one I had made to be worn by no one but myself. It had a spotted eagle outstretched on the back of it, and the daybreak star was on the left shoulder, because when facing south that shoulder is toward the east. Across the breast, from the left shoulder to the right hip, was the flaming rainbow, and there was another rainbow around the neck, like a necklace, with a star at the bottom. At each shoulder, elbow, and wrist was an eagle feather; and over the whole shirt were red streaks of lightning. You will see that this was from my great vision, and you will know how it protected me that day.
I painted my face all red, and in my hair I put one eagle feather for the One Above. It did not take me long to get ready, for I could still hear the shooting over there.
I started out alone on the old road that ran across the hills to Wounded Knee. I had no gun. I carried only the sacred bow of the west that I had seen in my great vision. I had gone only a little way when a band of young men came galloping after me. The first two who came up were Loves War and Iron Wasichu. I asked what they were going to do, and they said they were just going to see where the shooting was. Then others were coming up, and some older men.
We rode fast, and there were about twenty of us now. The shooting was getting louder. A horseback from over there came galloping very fast toward us, and he said: “Hey—hey—hey! They have murdered them!” Then he whipped his horse and rode away faster toward Pine Ridge.
In a little while we had come to the top of the ridge where, looking to the east, you can see for the first time the monument and the burying ground on the little hill where the church is.
That is where the terrible thing started. Just south of the burying ground on the little hill a deep dry gulch runs about east and west, very crooked, and it rises westward to nearly the top of the ridge where we were. It had no name, but the Wasichus sometimes call it Battle Creek now. We stopped on the ridge not far from the head of the dry gulch. Wagon-guns were still going off over there on the little hill, and they were going off again where they hit along the gulch.
There was much shooting down yonder, and there were many cries, and we could see cavalrymen scattered over the hills ahead of us. Cavalrymen were riding along the gulch and shooting into it, where the women and children were running away and trying to hide in the gullies and the stunted pines.
A little way ahead of us, just below the head of the dry gulch, there were some women and children who were huddled under a clay bank, and some cavalrymen were there pointing guns at them. We stopped back behind the ridge, and I said to the others: “Take courage. These are our relatives. We will try to get them back.” Then we all sang a song which went like this:
A thunder being nation I am, I have said. A thunder being nation I am, I have said: You shall live. You shall live. You shall live. You shall live.
Then I rode over the ridge and the others after me, and we were crying: “Take courage! It is time to fight!” The soldiers who were guarding our relatives shot at us and then ran away fast, and some more cavalrymen on the other side of the gulch did too. We got our relatives and sent them across the ridge to the northwest where they would be safe.I had no gun, and when we were charging, I just held the sacred bow out in front of me with my right hand. The bullets did not hit us at all.
We found a little baby lying all alone near the head of the gulch. I could not pick her up just then, but I got her later and some of my people adopted her. I just wrapped her up tighter in a shawl that was around her and left her there. It was a safe place, and I had other work to do.
The soldiers had run eastward over the hills where there were some more soldiers, and they were off their horses and lying down. I told the others to stay back, and I charged upon them holding the sacred bow out toward them with my right hand. They all shot at me, and I could hear bullets all around me, but I ran my horse right close to them, and then swung around. Some soldiers across the gulch began shooting at me too, but I got back to the others and was not hurt at all.
By now many other Lakotas, who had heard the shooting, were coming up from Pine Ridge, and we all charged on the soldiers. They ran eastward toward where the trouble began. We followed down along the dry gulch, and what we saw was terrible. Dead and wounded women and children and little babies were scattered all along there where they had been trying to run away.
The soldiers had followed along the gulch, as they ran, and murdered them there. Sometimes they were in heaps because they had huddled together, and some were scattered all along.
Sometimes bunches of them had been killed and torn to pieces where the wagon-guns hit them. I saw a little baby trying to suck its mother, but she was bloody and dead.
There were two little boys at one place in this gulch. They had guns and they had been killing soldiers all by themselves. We could see the soldiers they had killed. The boys were all alone there, and they were not hurt. These were very brave little boys.
When we drove the soldiers back, they dug themselves in, and we were not enough people to drive them out from there. In the evening they marched off up Wounded Knee Creek, and then we saw all that they had done there.
Men, women, and children were heaped and scattered all over the flat at the bottom of the little hill where the soldiers had their wagon-guns, and westward up the dry gulch all the way to the high ridge, the dead women and children and babies were scattered.
When I saw this I wished that I had died too, but I was not sorry for the women and children. It
It was better for them to be happy in the other world, and I wanted to be there too. But before I went there I wanted to have revenge. I thought there might be a day, and we should have revenge.” - Black Elk, 1890
The U.S. Army lost 25 men, many from their own crossfire. Still, the US Army handed out 20 Medals of Honor praising “gallantry” and “bravery” for an unnecessary bloodbath. Our dead were buried in a blizzard only to be rounded up and thrown into a mass grave to be a forever reminder of the brutality of the US cavalry that day.
Even Army leaders at the time questioned the event’s legitimacy. General Nelson Miles called it “a blunder” that killed women and children. General Leonard Colby said it was “unjustifiable” and “criminal.” But the medals stood. And here we are in 2025, with Hegseth calling those medals “deserved” and the debate on whether they deserve them over.
And my tribe, the Oglala Lakota, answered back.
Oglala President Frank Star Comes Out , a Marine combat veteran and descendant of Chief Big Foot, said it better than I can:
“Secretary Hegseth’s refusal is despicable, untruthful, and insulting to the Great Sioux Nation. More than 300 unarmed Lakota men, women, and children were massacred at Wounded Knee — it was NOT a battle, it was REVENGE for America’s only loss on what they consider their home soil, The Battle of the Little Bighorn… To call Wounded Knee a ‘battle’ dishonors the truth, desecrates the memory of our relatives, and insults Native American veterans who fought and died for this country from Normandy to present. The Oglala Sioux Tribe will never stop demanding that these medals be rescinded, that history be told with accuracy, and that descendants of Wounded Knee — and all tribal nations — be treated with respect and dignity.”
U.S. Militarism — Born from the Indian Wars
When Pete Hegseth talks about being “historically correct,” what he’s really defending is the myth that America’s wars have always been noble. But if we’re actually being historically correct? The U.S. military was forged in the Indian Wars with campaigns of dispossession, annihilation, and control.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz puts it plainly in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States which should be a must read for all peoples in America today:
“The US military has been at war every day since its founding. The first hundred years of war were wars against Native peoples for their land.”
For over two centuries, the Army’s main job was not fighting foreign enemies, it was driving Native nations off their lands and policing enslaved people who dared to escape. The “frontier” was the original battlefield, and Native resistance was cast as the first “insurgency.”
Even the Marines, often romanticized as America’s knight-errant abroad, have their roots in conquest. Their hymn brags: “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.”
Montezuma = invading and pillaging Mexico City in 1847 as an act of aggression.
Tripoli = an imperial foray into North Africa in 1805.
These weren’t noble defenses of democracy. They were land grabs, resource grabs, and empire-building which is the very definition of colonization to be blunt– and that same logic powered the Indian Wars.
And that logic never ended. The U.S. military has always violently chased a sprawling frontier, from the Ohio Valley, to the Great Plains, then onward through South America, the Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the list goes on. There’s always another “Indian Country” to pacify and resources to steal.
Dunbar-Ortiz calls this the “never-ending frontier.” Now we have fucking Space Force.
So when Hegseth insists that the 7th Cavalry at Wounded Knee “deserve” their medals, he’s not just defending a massacre. He’s defending an entire tradition of a military culture built on glorifying conquest, wrapping it in honor and patriotism, and calling it American history.
Conclusion: Facing True American History, Demanding Reparations
Pete Hegseth says the place for Wounded Knee in our nation’s history is “no longer up for debate.” But that’s fucked up. Because history isn’t finished and history is what we choose to remember, what we choose to honor, and how we choose to act in the present.
The fallacy at the heart of America is that we like to pretend we can wipe away Black and Indigenous histories when they get inconvenient, but still pocket the privileges they created. We erase massacres by calling them battles. We downplay slavery by calling it states’ rights. We pretend to make the trauma vanish on paper, but all the benefits reaped including the land, the wealth, the power keep accumulating for a small wealthy few. That’s what Hegseth’s statement really protects. It’s not just a set of medals, but a worldview where conquest is honorable and questioning it is treason.
His motivation is transparent. Today, on September 30, 2025, Hegseth convened more than 800 generals and admirals at Marine Corps Base Quantico to showcase military loyalty to his political agenda. That’s not a defense briefing, that’s authoritarian theater. This spectacle echoes what happened on February 3, 1933, when Adolf Hitler summoned Germany’s generals to the Reich Chancellery and bound them to his vision of rearmament, expansion, and ruthless suppression of opponents. Both moments sanctify violence as national destiny, turning atrocity into honor. When a U.S. defense secretary stands before America’s top brass to call the Wounded Knee massacre “deserving” of medals, we are not watching patriotism, we are watching white propaganda in uniform.
Truthfully, non-BIPOC people may never feel the generational trauma of Wounded Knee or slavery in their bones. And yes, no one alive today personally pulled the triggers at Wounded Knee or auctioned off enslaved people in the square. But every white American alive today benefits from the structures those crimes built. That’s not guilt, that’s reality. And reality demands responsibility and accountability.
The opportunity today isn’t to rewrite the past, but to repair the present for a better future. That means actual historical reparations, not just symbolic apologies. It means revoking Medals of Honor that never should have existed and it means investing in the communities left bleeding by those histories. It means teaching children the full truth that America’s greatness was built alongside America’s atrocious crimes against humanity. And it means creating space for healing, where facing the past isn’t seen as an attack on patriotism but as the only path to a just future.
This kind of historical revisionism is not an accident. It’s part of a larger authoritarian agenda and a deliberate attempt to sanctify past violence so future violence can be justified. That’s why it has to be challenged every single time it appears.
Healing starts with truth. Justice starts with reparations. And dignity starts with refusing to decorate the racists and the atrocities they carried out with medals of honor and valor.
Which history to teach should no longer be up for debate. True American history, the good and the awful, must be learned by all. If we want any hope of healing in this country, we have to embrace it in full.
Pete Hegseth’s “warrior ethos” is nothing but American cowardice.
Fuck that guy and release the Epstein Files…
Fuck that guy is right. Shameful. Thank you for the truth.
This is a great piece. It's outrageous that these medals weren't receded. There can't be any justice until the truth is faced. They fear that, because the truth would crush myth and claims to legitimacy.