Historical shenanigans

 This decision is now final, and their place in our nation's history is no longer up for debate.

-- Secretary of Defense/War/Whatever Pete Hegseth, on Wounded Knee

And with that, another coat of whitewash gets slapped on our national narrative.

(And, yes, before you start, I am wandering away from the Sportsball enclosure again. The standard procedures apply.)

Anyway, this time the whitewashing brush reaches all the way to a snowy field of frozen corpses in South Dakota, where on the next-to-next-to-last day of 1890 a detachment of U.S. Army forces, backed by four Hotchkiss cannon, opened fire on a Lakota encampment to which the Army had escorted the group the day before. Before the killing was done, anywhere from 230 to 300 Lakota -- most of them women, children and disarmed men -- lay dead.

Army casualties were 25 killed and 39 wounded, most by friendly fire. Nineteen of the soldiers were later awarded the Medal of Honor for their part in the day's festivities.

Which is where Hegseth and the Regime come in.

Last week they declared an investigation into the merits of those 19 Medal of Honor winners null and void, ruling that the recipients would retain those medals. Hegseth, ever the loyal mouthpiece, said the previous administration's investigation -- aimed at preserving the high ideals of the MOH, and what's wrong with that? -- was more about "political correctness" than "historical correctness."

Well, of course he did. These people are nothing if not consistent, not to say consistently wrongheaded.

"Historical correctness"?

The Regime has been hard at work leaving that in the dust since seizing the levers of power nine months ago, and they've made some fair progress with it. In some cases the whitewashing has been all but literal, like removing the famous photo of the scarred back of a slave from the Smithsonian; in some cases, acolytes of the Regime, like the meathead head of public education in Oklahoma, have decided certain historical un-pleasantries are not fit for Our Children to contemplate.

Such as, in Oklahoma, the murderous 1921 burning of Black Wall Street in Tulsa by an angry white mob. The meathead in question decreed that, yes, you can teach it, but only if you make it clear race had nothing to do with it.

No, really. He said that.

In like fashion, the Regime has decided slavery is too much discussed in our national history museums, which accounts for the removal of the aforementioned photograph and other energetic scrubbing. This of course ignores the clear truth that slavery is and always has been one of the singularly defining threads in our history -- from the founders' inability to reconcile its contradictions, to the breaking apart of the nation over it, to its shadow legacy of Jim Crow and the atrocities committed to keep that shadow legacy alive.

These  matters, and the legacy of the "brave soldiers" of Wounded Knee (as Hegseth characterized them) are still very much open to debate, no matter what the Secretary of Defense/War/Whatever says. History is like that, you see. It is layer upon layer upon layer, and the peeling back of each reveals fresh insights that spark, yes, eternal debate.

So it is with Wounded Knee, where Hegseth's interpretation of "historical correctness" sounds more like historical shenanigans. The so-called "Battle of Wounded Knee," after all, was a straight-up massacre of a people reduced to begging for scraps from a government that had all but erased them from the earth. That they were in any way capable of fighting a "battle" against that government was beyond laughable.

And those 19 Medal of Honor winners?

Hardly Audie Murphy or Alvin York or Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, or any of the other recipients across the decades who brought distinction to the military's highest honor. The soldiers of Wounded Knee, conversely, were mostly officers and men spooked by a native dance craze (the Ghost Dance) into believing a pitiful band of Lakotas was somehow planning an armed uprising.

Of such unreasoning fear is born the slaughter of innocents.

It was carried out that shameful day not by heroes, but by scared men who were products of a time when native Americans were regarded as something less than human. The scared men likely weren't all monsters, in other words, but they certainly weren't Medal of Honor material, either.

No matter how much the Regime tries to shenanigan history.