Recently, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the 19 or 20 soldiers who received the Medal of Honor for an 1890 massacre of men, women, and children deserved the medal. Although some have pushed for the medals to be rescinded, Hegseth declared that the soldiers will keep the medals.

Why is that not surprising?

A USA Today article, published September 26, 2025, describes the horrendous event for which the soldiers were honored: “The U.S. Army herded hundreds of Lakota Sioux Americans into a clearing near Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, ordered them to hand over their weapons, and then opened fire, killing as many as 300 people, around half of them women and children.”

“We salute [these U.S. soldiers’] memory, we honor their service, and we will never forget what they did,” Hegseth said.

It should be noted that the massacre occurred AFTER the Lakota agreed to give up their weapons and were surrounded by 500 or so soldiers.

Shortly afterward, when a Lakota discharged his weapon, whether accidentally or on purpose, the soldiers opened fire and killed an estimated 250-300 Lakota. More than half or even two-thirds of the Lakota who were killed were women and children.

“We’re making it clear that [these U.S. soldiers] deserve those medals,” Hegseth said. “This decision is now final, and their place in our nation’s history is no longer up for debate.” 

Hegseth also wrongly called the massacre “The Battle of Wounded Knee,” although it was not a battle since most of the victims were women, children, and unarmed men.

In fact, following the massacre, in 1891, Maj. Gen. Nelson Miles wrote, “I have never heard of a more brutal, cold-blooded massacre than that at Wounded Knee.”

Also, in 1990, 100 years after the bloody massacre, a concurrent resolution of the U.S. Senate and U.S. House expressed “deep regret” for the incident.

And, clearly, if the U.S. Senate and U.S. House both agreed that they needed to express regret, they knew it was a massacre.

Hegseth, on the other hand, clearly wants to make people believe that these war criminals were heroes and deserve to be honored. 

Hmmmmmm.

As I said, it’s not surprising that the Trump administration strives to revise the truth of American history to hide the atrocities committed against nonwhite immigrants, blacks and Native Americans and make the whites of European descent look like “the good guys.” It’s simply white supremacy at work.

And it somewhat helps explain the U.S.’s financial, military, and diplomatic support for Israel’s war crimes and genocide in Gaza and the rest of Palestine. Pushing people off their land is a U.S. tradition – and one that the U.S. government is largely proud of.

The administration does not regret or even recognize the atrocities committed by white people in its own history, so it’s relatively easy to overlook the Israelis’ current atrocities.

Yes, like birds of a feather, war criminals and genociders stick together as long as their crimes don’t conflict with each other’s. 

It’s telling that among the greatest supporters of Israel’s war crimes and genocide have been those who also committed their own war crimes and genocides in the past, such as the U.S., Germany, and England.

And those who’ve been the strongest critics of Israel’s war crimes and genocide have been those who suffered under war criminals. Yes, the South Africans, the Irish, and many Jews who know that the so-called Jewish state of Israel has itself become a genocidal regime, are some of the loudest voices against Israel’s crimes.

Unfortunately, the current U.S. administration is saying out loud where it stands as it continues to try to revise history at every turn – denying and hiding U.S. atrocities against nonwhite immigrants, blacks, and American Indians.

So, will it soon be talking about “the brave U.S. soldiers” [sarcasm] who committed the 1968 massacre of innocent civilians – mostly babies, children, women, and the elderly – at My Lai during the Vietnam War?

Or will it honor the “brave, courageous Americans” [sarcasm] who burned a black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, and murdered its innocent black citizens.

Or will it build monuments to those white slavers who kidnapped and brought millions of Africans to the Americas to enslave them? I mean, weren’t those guys brave [sarcasm] to sail those ships across the Atlantic Ocean?

Or will those members of white lynch mobs who “punished” those “uppity blacks” [sarcasm] now get the recognition they deserve?

What other “heroes” [sarcasm] can the administration find who deserve a medal?

We shall see.

As their whitewashing of history continues, maybe they will also award medals to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. I know they weren’t Americans, but that’s no problem. They clearly meet the main qualification: They were white.

That’s what happens when history is revised based on race rather than facts. 

Hegseth and Trump say they want everything to be based on merit. And by merit, they mean wealth, influence, and whiteness. And whether they’re war criminals or genociders doesn’t seem to matter. 

No, it doesn’t seem to matter at all.