We haven’t heard much from Tim Walz since his failed attempt to become vice president. The spastic Minnesota governor had his sights set on Washington, but Donald Trump and JD Vance had other ideas. Given the incredible level of embarrassment Walz and Kamala Harris suffered in defeat, it’s not surprising they’d hunker down for a while.
Walz recently returned to do a little political pandering, though, and that’s not going any better than the election for him. On Thursday, he made a post praising 38 men of the Dakota tribe who were executed in 1862, praising their “sacrifice” as a reminder to “recommit to accountability and healing for the Dakota people.”
Let me start with a disclaimer here because I do think some people take the various wars between the United States and Native American tribes and oversimplify them in the wrong direction. There were a multitude of Native American men, women, and children over the centuries who were betrayed, mistreated, displaced, or killed in completely unjust ways by the U.S. government. To deny that would be to manipulate history for the selfish reason of making one feel better about objectively heinous acts.
Here’s the issue, though. The idea that all or even most Native American tribes were peaceful inhabitants working the land, incapable of immoral actions, is likewise completely false. As I explained back at Thanksgiving in response to those slandering the holiday as an example of oppression, it was the Wampanoag tribe that declared war on the colonists. Likewise, very few of the wars between the newly-established U.S. government and various Indian tribes fell into neat modern ideological molds of “oppressor” vs. “oppressed.”
What does that have to do with Walz’s post? The 38 men he paints as victims actually took part in the massacre of New Ulm. In this case, it wasn’t the U.S. government who declared war. Rather, it was the Dakota, who first ambushed a group about five miles out of town, slaughtering over 50 people. They then laid siege on the town, carrying out multiple attacks. Women and children were brutally murdered, with one account describing a Dakota warrior cutting out the baby of a pregnant woman. I’ll stop there with the description because it gets worse.
While around 2,000 settlers escaped the town, 650 of them were killed in cold blood. The Dakota suffered minimal casualties, and in response, the U.S. government began its war against the tribe.
Returning to the 38 men in question, then-President Abraham Lincoln personally reviewed the convictions of those involved in the attack on New Ulm. He then commuted the sentences of all but 39 who he ascertained had specifically and intentionally murdered civilians. In the end, 38 of those men would be executed on December 26th, 1862.
Could you argue that the justice system in the mid-1800s was flawed and prejudiced in some ways? Sure, but what you can’t argue with any certainty at all is that these men were innocent victims whose “sacrifice” should be looked upon glowingly today. And if you can’t argue that with certainty, then elevating them as martyrs is morally revolting.
That’s what Walz is doing with his post, and he’s doing it because that is what left-wing DEI culture does to the brain. It removes the inability to see any nuance. Instead, if someone belongs to a group deemed to have been “oppressed,” then they must be good regardless of their individual actions. It is a deranged, immoral worldview that seeks to remove agency in favor of monolithic, simplistic judgments of collective guilt or innocence. That is not an accurate representation of history, and treating it as such leads to a society that sidelines fairness and equality.
