Should the U.S. soldiers at 1890’s Wounded Knee keep the Medal of Honor?
Context: history
Throughout the 19th century, the U.S. military engaged in violent conflicts with Native Americans, many of them armed uprisings, as white people settled native land. On December 29, 1890, a large party from the Lakota tribe made camp by a South Dakota creek called Wounded Knee. Hundreds of Army soldiers surrounded the group, attempting to disarm them.
A shot rang out. Though the exact circumstances are murky, it’s believed a deaf Lakota man named Black Coyote refused to surrender his weapon, which went off accidentally. A violent melee ensued – but since most of the Lakota had surrendered their weapons by that point, they were left largely defenseless. While at least 25 U.S. soldiers died during the battle, hundreds of Lakota people died, including women and children.
In the aftermath, 20 U.S. soldiers were bestowed the Medal of Honor, the nation’s top military prize.
Context: today
In July 2024, President Joe Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced a commission to review those medals, with their recommendations and report due to him by that October. However, this report was never publicly released.
Austin ultimately took no action on the medals during his time in office – neither rescinding them as many predicted he would, nor affirmatively maintaining them. As a result, the medals remain intact.
In September 2025, President Donald Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth revealed the panel had voted nearly a year prior to recommend upholding the medals.
While the actual report has still not been publicly released, one of the commission’s five members told South Dakota Searchlight that the recommendation vote was 3-2. Reportedly, Defense Department members provided the three votes to maintain the medals, while members of the Interior Department (which helps manage tribal lands) provided the two votes to rescind.
Hegseth then announced he accepted the panel’s recommendations and affirmatively kept the medals intact. He declared his decision “final,” meaning the medals would never be rescinded by him… but Congress still could.
What the legislation does
The Remove the Stain Act would posthumously rescind the Medal of Honor for any Wounded Knee participant who previously received the award.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) introduced the Senate version on May 22, then Rep. Jill Tokuda (D-HI2) introduced the House version a day later on May 23. That was several months before Hegseth’s announcement, but in anticipation of its possibility.
Is this even allowed?
Indeed, hundreds of Medals of Honor have been rescinded before.
The most famous case might be Mary Edwards Walker, the only woman ever awarded the Medal of Honor. President Andrew Johnson bestowed the prize upon her in 1865 for saving dozens of soldiers’ lives while working at a Civil War hospital. But in 1917, Congress retroactively changed the criteria, saying medals could only go to those who’d served in combat.
Walker, still alive in her 80s, saw her prize officially revoked but refused to return her actual physical medal. President Jimmy Carter posthumously reinstated her award in 1977.
What supporters say
Supporters argue that the 1890 event was an unjustified butchery.
“The massacre of hundreds of unarmed Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee was a crime against humanity. Honoring the perpetrators with the Medal of Honor adds insult to that deep wound,” Rep. Tokuda said in a press release. “[The bill would] revoke medals that should never have been given, because healing begins with honesty — and the Lakota people deserve nothing less.”
"We cannot be a country that celebrates and rewards horrifying acts of violence against native people," Sen. Warren said in a separate press release. "Congress must recognize how shameful this massacre was and take an important step toward justice for the Lakota people."
What opponents say
Opponents counter that the soldiers in 1890 were under attack and defended themselves valiantly, with 25 of them losing their lives.
Sec. Austin “was more interested in being politically correct than historically correct,” Sec. Hegseth said in a social media video announcing his decision, which earned 29+ million views on X/Twitter. “[Austin] chose not to make a final decision. Such careless inaction has allowed for their distinguished recognition to remain in limbo, until now.”
“Under my direction, we’re making it clear without hesitation that the soldiers… will keep their medals. And we’re making it clear that they deserve those medals,” Hegseth continued. “Their place in our nation’s history is no longer up for debate. We salute their memory, we honor their service, and we will never forget what they did.”
Odds of passage
The Senate version has attracted seven cosponsors, all Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents. The House version has attracted eight Democratic cosponsors. Either version awaits a potential vote in their respective chamber’s Armed Services Committee, both controlled by Republicans.
Several prior versions introduced starting in 2019 never received a committee vote, not even when Democrats controlled one or both chambers of Congress.
Jesse Rifkin is a freelance journalist with The Fulcrum. Don’t miss his report, Congress Bill Spotlight, on The Fulcrum. Rifkin’s writings about politics and Congress have been published in the Washington Post, Politico, Roll Call, Los Angeles Times, CNN Opinion, GovTrack, and USA Today.
SUGGESTIONS:
Congress Bill Spotlight: The Charlie Kirk Act
Congress Bill Spotlight: Department of War Restoration Act
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.