https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-26-2025
"Today Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that twenty men who were
awarded the Medal of Honor for their participation in the 1890 Wounded Knee
Massacre would keep their medals, despite more than a century of controversy
over them. The defense secretary who preceded Hegseth, General Lloyd Austin,
had ordered a review of the awarding of those medals to “ensure no awardees
were recognized for conduct inconsistent with the nation’s highest military
honor.” Hegseth today called the men “brave soldiers” and said: “We’re making
it clear that [the soldiers] deserve those medals.”
It’s fitting that Hegseth, a political appointee whose tenure has been marked
by incompetence, would defend the awarding of those particular Medals of Honor,
because they were awarded to cover up the incompetence of political appointees
that led to the deaths of at least 230 peaceful Lakotas, as well as about
twenty-five soldiers who were caught in their own crossfire.
The road to Wounded Knee started in 1884, when voters angry that the
Republicans had sold out to big business elected Democrat Grover Cleveland to
the presidency. The first Democrat to occupy the White House since before the
Civil War, he promised to lower the tariffs that squeezed ordinary Americans in
order to protect big business. Horrified at the growing opposition to a
government that worked for those industrialists who would soon be called
“robber barons,” Republicans began to circulate pamphlets as soon as Cleveland
was elected, claiming that lowering the tariff would destroy the economy and
warning that voters must return Republicans to power or face economic ruin.
In 1888, Cleveland nonetheless won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes, but
after an extraordinarily corrupt campaign, Republican candidate Benjamin
Harrison won in the Electoral College. This is “A BUSINESS MAN’S
ADMINISTRATION,” the editors of a pro-Harrison newspaper boasted. They
predicted that “business men will be thoroughly well content with it.”
Knowing that the popular mood had turned against tariffs and the party that
protected them, Harrison Republicans looked for ways to cement their control
over the government."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
