JOHN,
Wounded Knee was a massacre of hundreds of women, children, and elders of the Lakota Nation, and the men who participated in it were murderers. Full stop.
In 1990, both houses of Congress formally expressed the United States’ regret for the massacre. Before he left office, former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin began the process of stripping 19 Medals of Honor from the war criminals who led the massacre at Wounded Knee, but Pete Hegseth just put an end to it. To Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump, those who engaged in the killings are worthy of our highest honors — just like Confederates who betrayed their oaths and their country, but still have their surnames on our bases, with a wink and a nod.
Honoring people like that tells this generation of Troops that crimes against humanity do not matter and illegal orders don’t matter. That's the kind of Military Trump wants, and that Pete Hegseth is trying to create.
It’s why he’s purged senior officers he finds insufficiently loyal, and why he’s pushing loyalty pledges at the Pentagon. It’s why he has gutted the Judge Advocate General corps of Military lawyers, responsible for enforcing rules and regulations. And it’s why he has banned the free press at the Pentagon, restricting them only to report “authorized” stories.
Decency, honor, the Constitution — these things might not matter to Hegseth or Trump, but they do to real Americans.
It will take decades to fix what Trump and Hegseth are breaking. There are tough times ahead. But each of us has a responsibility to do whatever we can to limit the damage they are doing.
VoteVets is completely dedicated to that task, and we can’t hope to succeed without your support.
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The team at VoteVets
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