We knew it was coming, the MAGA beta boy histrionic freakout over the Boy Scouts of America changing its name to just Scouting America. The change is happening for a number of reasons. For one, it’s to be more inclusive, because lots of girls were interested in the program. (The Scouts started officially letting girls in back in 2018, and the Girl Scouts are a whole different org. Also, they already changed the name of the program back in 2019, to Scouts BSA.)
The pandemic hurt the scouting program, and of course there was that whole spate of sex abuse scandals, which is just kind of a thing that happens when conservative adults are allowed to have power over children. There’s new leadership, and it was time for a rebrand.
And the usual suspects are doing their bitching about “woke” and pronouns and God knows what else. “Wokeness destroys everything it touches,” whined Andrew Clyde, the Georgia Republican congressman who likes to lie and say the MAGA terrorist attack on the Capitol on January 6 was a “tourist visit.” Ted Cruz is whining that this means “boys are no longer welcome.”
Stop for a second and realize how insecure you have to be in your severely Caucasian masculinity to think that taking “boy” out of the name automatically means “boys are no longer welcome.”
Now read this blubber-prissing from Fox News’s Pete Hegseth, to his “Fox & Friends” colleagues, about how scouting is over because they took the word “boy” out. (Video is at Mediaite.)
HEGSETH: The Boy Scouts has been cratering itself for quite some time. You see this, this is an institution the Left didn’t control. They didn’t want to improve it. They wanted to destroy it or dilute it into something that stood for nothing. So five years ago, the Boy Scouts let in girls, which was basically the end of Boy Scouts.
If you’re that kind of person.
HEGSETH: And Boy Scouts has had a problem anyway, there was a sexual assault scandal, abuse scandal, which was a real problem that it had never really dealt with very well. That contributed to it as well.
Like we said, when you allow conservative Christian adults power over kids, bad things happen.
HEGSETH: These are things in Middle America, in between us and the government, like churches, like Boy Scouts, like youth groups, like the Lions Club, that are really the richness of the community. And a lot of them have lost what they stand for. And as a result, the government gets more powerful to fill the void.
Hate it when the government starts teaching us to tie knots and make fires instead of the BE-PENISED BOY SCOUTS.
HEGSETH: This is a tragedy. Young kids won’t have the opportunity to learn these skills, but more importantly, the values. And they did it to themselves.
Or they can, and it will just be as part of an organization that welcomes everybody.
If deranged white conservative Christian dudes don’t want to be part of it anymore, then that’s all the better for literally everyone.
Hegseth’s colleague Will Cain joined the freakout, of course, because Fox News White Man:
CAIN: Yeah, so, they’re dead. The Boy Scouts are dead. It no longer exists. It’s now just ‘scouting.’ And it’s pretty, asymmetrical, I think. You know, quick research shows that Girl Scouts don’t allow boys. So if the Girl Scouts don’t allow the boys, but the Boy Scouts are in pursuit of inclusion, am I to be, the takeaway is that the Girl Scouts is not a welcoming environment. It’s maybe even bigoted because the Girl Scouts won’t let in boys. And maybe they’ll follow my path here and actually drop ‘girls’ from the name and they’ll just be scouts too. And they’ll be Scouting and Scouts, and you won’t know which is which. And that’s kind of the goal in the end. We won’t know which is which, because we can’t differentiate between the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts.
Everybody panic.
Cain has another worry, which seems to be that Girl Scout cookies will no longer be made of real Girl Scouts:
CAIN: And maybe some Scout will come sell you cookies and you won’t know, “Hey, [are] these Girl Scout cookies?” I don’t know, we can’t call them Girl Scout cookies. They’re just cookies. And it’s like, “Oh, we already have cookies. But I thought these were Girl Scout cookies?” And everything just becomes the same, Ainsley: Blah, in pursuit of inclusion. It’s sad. It’s really sad. It is the death of the Boy Scouts. Hey, we do need spaces. It’s not bigoted to say some spaces are for boys, some spaces are for girls. We do need our spaces.
OK.
These guys are obviously feeling very vulnerable right now, we should give them some space.
Regarding Hegseth, it’s no surprise he’s being like this. He’s a really weird conservative Christian type, the kind whose identity is very wrapped up in feeling threatened by the spiritual warfare the Devil is waging on Good Christian Patriarchal Families like his own. (Obviously his own personal story involves a lot of adultery, because he’s That Guy.)
Comically, Hegseth wrote an entire book on the “betrayal” of our men in uniform, and how they were tricked into “going woke.” He was in the Army himself (he’d be upset if we didn’t mention) and he’s very, very, very triggered by things like this.
And, as we see, by the Scouts’ new name.
We’re sure Will Cain is equally messed up, but we don’t feel like researching him right now.
Bless both their little he/him hearts.
OPEN THREAD.
[Mediaite]
Evan Hurst on Twitter right here.
@evanjosephhurst on Threads!
I have profiles those other places but I think I forgot how to log on.
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What did the Scout say after fixing the horn on his dad's car?
"Beep repaired!"
— the Boys' Life joke page, ca. 1970, probably also every three or four years before or since
Welp, with Mom's death this morning, it also occurred to me that I no longer have a reason to maintain contact with the MAGA sibs. The parents were the only reason I maintained any measure of civility.