PETE HEGSETH AND HIS IDIOT REVISIONISM – REWARDING MASS MURDER

Dr. Common Good

Yet again, we have to wonder. How did the United States, yes, the United States, end up with a Secretary of Defense so generally ignorant and so thoroughly steeped in a dangerous and myopic MAGA-ism?

In the latest of a litany of incidents displaying this ignorance, along with a kind of cruel, racist revanchism, Hegseth has decided that 20 soldiers who committed an infamous mass murder of Native Americans should retain their Medals of Honor; specifically, for the 1890 killing of close to 300 Lakota Sioux men, women and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. This, after legislation had been introduced in 2019 to revoke the medals and the previous Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin III, had ordered a review of whether or not the medals should be rescinded. Hegseth, in announcing this decision, said “we’re making it clear that they deserved those medals.”

Think about this. This is the United States in 2025, rewarding mass murder. The Wounded Knee massacre was preceded by years during which the US government had seized Native land, protected hunters who were killing off the buffalo herds – a staple of Lakota (and Plains Indian) existence — abrogated treaties that aimed to protect Native land from settlers, and generally proceeded to destroy the Lakota way of life. Just prior to the massacre, US cavalry troops had moved in to disarm a Lakota encampment. During the disarmament, it appears that one deaf Lakota man struggled against the soldiers and his gun went off, after which the cavalry opened fire, ultimately killing most people in the encampment, including women and children who fled the fighting and were hunted down. Some Lakota fought back, but they had largely been disarmed.

And for this, Medals of Honor? What is the “honor” that mindless Pete Hegseth is commemorating? What is the “valor”? Is this some perverse representation of the “warrior ethos” he seeks to promote? What an abject disgrace, and a slap in the face to the many soldiers who have earned Medals of Honor for true bravery and sacrifice, including, by the way, many who were Native American. Among other things, this is one more glaring example of the hollow, twisted logic of the Hegseth/MAGA “anti-woke” crusade.

Any American with an ounce of integrity, and an ounce of dignity, should repudiate this sickening act and all that it represents. And I will say this straight out: Pete Hegseth, you are no warrior. You are a sham, and like your president, all you know how to do is create cartoonish displays and ersatz rituals. You know nothing about being truly human, nothing about sacrifice, nothing about human history, and given your religious pretense, absolutely nothing about grace. 

HOW?

Dr. Common Good asks…

How is it possible that we have an American president whose “speech” today before the UN was just a blowhard rant filled with braggadocio, completely baseless and egotistical claims about his “peacemaking,” whining that he has not received a Nobel prize, bragging that the US is the unchallenged “hottest” country in the world, lecturing the UN on its uselessness, spewing out a racist demagogue’s blanket condemnation of migration as the reason countries are “going to hell” and losing their heritage, and issuing a flagrantly ignorant denunciation of green energy and climate change science as perpetrated by “stupid people” and “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”

How? How did we get here? Yet Trump’s repulsive word-sewer is seen as coming from the United States, a key founder of this very United Nations. 

And just a day earlier, a fumbling president who could not even pronounce the word “acetaminophen” stood before the US and proclaimed “Tylenol” as the cause of autism, following the “conclusions” of his depraved and ignorant HHS Secretary RFK Jr. The world laughed, and the scientific experts stood flatfooted with mouths agape.

How?

Right now the United States is seen by most of the world as an idiotic, pathetic caricature of its former self, a country to be ignored, a country giving away many of its greatest assets, and a country to be taken advantage of because of its self-destructive and colossally stupid leadership and policies – which can’t help but raise this question in the minds of many: “How? How did this once thriving, admired country, defender of democracy (at least part of the time), purported “leader of the free world,” fall so quickly off a cliff into a turgid morass of myopic, ill-informed, moronic, mindless and just plain psychotic swill? How? Weren’t we just the country that did a better job than most of the world in addressing and recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic? Weren’t we just the country that was expanding healthcare to cover more people who could not afford it? Weren’t we just the country that, through USAID-funded programs, supported so many efforts to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, starvation, and infectious disease? Weren’t we just the country that harnessed the sometimes-erratic relationships between NATO countries into a galvanized and coordinated opposition to Russia’s cold-blooded invasion of Ukraine? Weren’t we at least beginning to rejuvenate our leadership in the global fight against climate change? Weren’t we? Huh?

So, I ask again, how has it come to this? What this appalling imposter of a president and his servile, unqualified, self-dealing administration has done should be way over the line, beyond the pale, for Americans of every political stripe. Yet here we are.

You – and I mean all Americans — should seriously be asking yourself, how? And you should be thinking about some answers. Now. It’s past Paul Revere time.

POLITICAL MANIPULATION, DISTORTIONS AND THE SHOOTING OF CHARLIE KIRK 

Dr. Common Good

I am going to make this short and to the point.

First, political violence is unacceptable, period. No matter what Mr. Kirk said, or what his positions were, there is no place whatsoever for assassination or political violence in the United States. We empathize with the Kirk family for their loss.

That said, the canonization of Mr. Kirk by Trump, Vance, and other right-wing voices is grotesque. However clever his manner, he espoused vile racism, bigotry, white Christian nationalism, hostility to immigrants, and a backwards misogyny that fed hatred and violence.  To wit:

• He opposed the fundamental American tenet of equality, calling, for example, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a “huge mistake,” and that Black people were “better off” years ago during Jim Crow and slavery, and he hosted on his podcast a slavery apologist who said that things went downhill after Black people were guaranteed the right to vote. He was a major proponent of the “great replacement theory,” claiming that liberal forces were seeking to replace white people with immigrants. He also once said that Black women – including Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson – “did not have the brain power to be taken seriously.” They had to “go steal a white person’s slot” to be taken seriously. And he spread a litany of lies about the police killing of George Floyd.

• He called for a white Christian state, claiming that “there’s no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the Constitution.” He advocated for an “American way of life” based on “Christendom” and he was routinely, and rabidly, anti-Islamic, saying that he didn’t ever want his children to hear a Muslim call to prayer. He even called the prophet Muhammad a rapist and a pedophile, among other names. Along the same lines, he wholeheartedly supported Israel’s war in Gaza, denying reports of mass deaths and genocide, and professing his belief in the “scriptural land rights given to Israel.”

• He claimed that women should be subservient to their husbands and that having children was their primary role; so much so, that on being asked if his 10 year old daughter should bear the child if she was raped, he unequivocally said that she should.

• He opposed any gun control and argued, ironically, that a few deaths every year was an acceptable price to pay for maintaining his version of the right to bear arms. 

There is little doubt that these and his many other pronouncements fed into extreme MAGA and right-wing hate.

Now, Trump, Vance and generally the MAGA-world, are shamelessly exploiting the Kirk shooting to excoriate and call for vengeance against liberals and “woke-ism,” calling liberals “scum,” exhorting people to root out liberals, and blaming them for political violence, conveniently forgetting the right-wing extremist assassinations of Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, attempts on the life of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro and his family, the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and the litany of mass shootings inspired by right wing hate against people of color, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community, at churches, synagogues, bars, and Walmarts, among other locations. At the same time, they have held up an imaginary Charlie Kirk as a bastion of American values, with Vance taking his casket on Air Force 2, and Trump awarding Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom as an exemplar of American values and a “champion of liberty.” And to cap the hypocrisy, Attorney General Pam Bondi now says the Justice Department will go after hate speech, which, she said, is not free speech. Really. After charging liberals with “cancel culture” allegations when there was any outcry against right-wing hate speech, she can still say that with an apparent straight face. George Orwell would have a field day.

For Dr. Common Good, what Mr. Kirk stood for should never be held up as exemplary American values. What he stood for is not the America the world once admired, not the America of the great democratic experiment, and not an America that many recognize any longer.

Despite all of this, we should be using this as a moment to be reflexive about the ugly political divide, and to seek out ways to move forward, allowing for civil disagreement and not zero-sum game authoritarianism or the politics of exclusion. That is not American. Unfortunately, that is not the path Trump and his MAGA allies have taken. They are instead using this opportunity to ramp up authoritarian control.