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This is what I was saying last Friday when the memo dropped. The memo was a nothing burger. Functionally nothing changed about the program. Hegseth got nothing he wanted.
People online just can't help themselves from losing their minds. Literally anything can make people lose their minds. A headline could be "Hegseth declare that all banana splits served to troops be gendered as male" and y'all would lose your minds like clockwork.
Yeah, I would absolutely take issue with the head of a government institution saying something like that. That is a bonkers thing to say as a public official and should invoke some kind of mental health check.
I'm aware Hegseth is just posturing for brownie points with this Scouts thing, but this kind of behavior should not be normalized. I still remember when Howard Dean lost his bid to be a presidential candidate because he got too excited during a speech.
Yeah. He knows that. That's exactly why he does it. How do y'all not know their playbook by now? There are only two plays.
That's the whole playbook.
That's not a playbook. That's an evil Nazi doing evil Nazi shit and then never letting us forget that he's an evil Nazi.
But while you should focus on the no. 1 stuff, you are far too easily distracted by the no. 2 stuff.
The Scouts news this weekend is a perfect example. Functionally nothing changed in the program, but they are able to make you go insane like a puppet.
It's a signal for what they want to do to the program, and the government has a lot of ways to pressure Scouts to make it happen. It's a distraction until it becomes reality, like all the other evil Nazi shit they do. This is how they signal their future plans, just like forcing us out of sports and forcing us into the wrong bathroom and taking away our identification paperwork and putting us in men's prisons and then taking away our hormones when we're in prison. They push push push until they get what they want.
They're evil Nazis and they want to exterminate all trans people. This is just another thing they want to do, and if we let them, they will.
But I'm just a stupid fucking puppet, what the fuck do I know?
They didn't change much, but there were changes made and not insignificant ones, and theyre using some really weasely words to mask that.
They have done away with the Citizenship in Society merit badge, which was a relatively new badge, but was also a required badge to earn eagle. This was a badge that basically focused on the importance of DEI.
They've also agreed to add a "military service" merit badge. Not a whole lot of details yet about what exactly that will entail or if it will be a required badge or not.
It also sounds like they'll be making youths register accordingly to their biological gender as opposed to the one they actually identify as, and will need to use facilities like bathrooms and share tents and such with other scouts that corresponds to that.
It's not massive changes, but it's certainly enough that you should be pissed about them. And hegseth has indicated he wants to reevaluate in a few months and likely will be pushing for even more changes.
I'm an eagle scout, I'm fucking pissed about this, it goes against all of the good values I learned from scouts for them to give into this pressure, and I'm sure that when kegsbreath comes back around in 6 months or so they'll cave even more.
I'm sending my eagle medal back in protest.
Hi, venturing silver here (sending that shit back, too). Do you have a handy link to all of these changes that I can send to my old scout buddies?
Also thank you for showing real scout spirit and taking this seriously.
I've been talking to a lot of other eagles and other former scouts, and so far none of them have been happy about this. I have a couple other people also planning to return their medals, and a few who can't find their medals or who are (understandably) reluctant to do so but are at least planning to write some letters and make some noise over this.
I don't have a specific link to share, I've been following this whole situation for a few weeks now since it was all first announced. There's a lot of articles being written about it now, your best bet is probably just to see what your favorite trusted news sources are saying.
They did away with one merit badge and added one elective. "DEI" is baked throughout the scout program and basically all the topics covered in that one merit badge are covered in lots of other parts the program. Including the whole point of the scout law.
You are losing your mind over nothing. Get a grip.
And do you really think that they're not going to try to come after that too? They're already leaving the door open for them to come back and put more pressure on scouting in a few months, and Drinky Pete has pretty clearly said that he hopes the organization will go back to being the boy scouts.
When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
Also really convenient of you to just ignore the concerns about trans youths. I'm sure you're not pushing an agenda here /s
Yes, I do think they are dropping this issue. I think Hegseth realized that he wasn't going to get the traction on this he wanted so he agreed a nothing burger and declared victory for himself.
I'm not ignoring the concerns of the Trans youth, it's just that the "demands" won't actually change them. The BSA has already issued a statement that trans youth are still welcome in scouting. No one is going to be checking anyone's birth certificates. Literally nothing changed.
Get a grip.
Maybe you're right, and I'll have sent my medal away for nothing, in which case I'm down a prized but essentially useless trinket.
Or maybe I'm right, in which case I'm either ridding myself of a symbol of an organization I'll no longer wish to be associated with soon, or maybe, just maybe I'm doing something that helps to prevent that from happening.
If you're right, I'll feel a little silly and otherwise continue my life as normal, content that I at least stood up for something I believe in.
But what will you do if I'm right? How would you feel knowing that you brushed this off as a non-issue if girls and trans youth, and maybe eventually other "undesirables" are eventually kicked out of scouts, when their commitment to dei wavers, and maybe they're even twisted into a militaristic, nationalist organization like some modern Hitler Youth?
I’m not the person your reply is to, but you’re spot on about where this is headed. From the DOD’s initial statement about Scouting America, it’s obvious that they want it to go back to excluding girls from the organization. As a current den leader, I was already dissatisfied with the way the organization is being run, and this is probably the final straw for me to just step away from them completely. Leadership is acting like cowards while also asking for donations. It’s incredibly disappointing.
I'm honestly a little conflicted about how people like you who are still actively involved in scouting should react to this.
On the one hand, yeah, screw the organization, they don't deserve support for this kind of stuff.
On the other hand, it's about the kids, and I do overall believe that the core values of scouting and the kind of structure it can provide are great things for a lot of kids to experience. There are other ways to provide that sort of program, but scouting is already there, and it makes more sense to me to try to preserve and improve that than to try to start something else from scratch.
And good adult leaders can do a lot to insulate their units from the bullshit from higher-up. I know my troop wasn't at all afraid to bend or even outright break the rules when it made sense to do so (I actually remember first learning the term "plausible deniability" from one of my leaders,) and being active at the district or council level can help put pressure from the inside (back in the 90s my local council actually tried to force the issue and allow gay scouts to join, they got shot down by national but imagine if more councils would have stepped up to do that.) Good leaders with their heads on straight leaving scouting will just result in the organization collapsing into exactly what we don't want it to be.
I'm not currently active in scouting, I don't have kids and my schedule doesn't really work with it these days to be active as a leader, so all I can do is try to make some noise from the outside leaning on my experience as an eagle scout and former leader. I have nothing to lose but also very little leverage. People like you have more leverage, but also not much to lose- absolute worst case scenario they find an excuse to kick you out, but if you don't succeed at making change from the inside you were probably going to leave anyway.
Except there's the whole "military leader threatens a private organization" thing.