By Ehud Would

It’s a sad and sordid story, the fall of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA).

The Scouting movement was founded by Englishman Robert Baden-Powell in 1907. He described it as “Christianity applied”, a phrase later conspicuously reappropriated to  Theonomy. And Baden-Powell’s first Scouting Handbook stated uncannily, “No man is good unless he believes in God and obeys His laws.” Typical of our institutions, the Boy Scouts began as a self-consciously Christian enterprise.

William Dickson Boyce extended the movement, founding the Boy Scouts of America in 1910 “to teach [boys] patriotism, courage, self-reliance, and kindred values” of the Christian faith.

The Scout Oath read:

“On my honor, I will do my best. To do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; 

To help other people at all times; 

To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.”

Alongside the BSA, Boyce also founded the Lone Scouts of America (LSA).  The masthead atop the member-produced LSA magazine read: “The White Boys’ Magazine”.

The British conception of scouting was deeply rooted in chivalry, the colonial experience, imperial reconnaissance, and a stiff upper lip. And its American expression was, of course, couched in frontier folklore, our ancestral memory of Indian Fighting, and Manifest Destiny.

Though altered in the post-war years, the original salute of the Scouting Movement was the now infamous Bellamy Salute. Baden-Powell instituted the straight-arm salute from the beginning. It was the original Cub Salute featured in the Cub Book issued to every Cub Scout. The same salute later designated the “Fascist Salute” of the Axis powers. While the Italians were happy to attribute it to ancient Rome, the Germans identified it as a traditional show of Teutonic good will:

“I’d read the description of the sitting of the Diet of Worms. In the course of which Luther was greeted with the German salute. It was to show him that he was not being confronted with arms, but with peaceful intentions. In the days of Frederick the Great, people still saluted with their hats, with pompous gestures. In the Middle Ages, the serfs humbly doffed their bonnets, whilst the noblemen gave the German salute.

It was in the Ratskeller at Bremen, about the year 1921, that I first saw this style of salute. It must be regarded as a survival of an ancient custom, which originally signified: ‘See, I have no weapon in my hand!’ I introduced the salute into the Party at our first meeting in Weimar. The SS at once gave it a soldierly style.”
~Adolph Hitler, Table Talk, 1942

Even the BSA’s classic ‘Badge of Brotherhood’ was originally in the form of a swastika.

Many have dissembled on the commonalities between the Boy Scouts and the Hitler Youth, but we have authoritative confirmation that they were one and the same movement: aside from the Germans having patterned the overall structure, activities, codes, badges, and dress after the Scouts, founder, Baden-Powell himself initiated talks with German command  and confirmed solidarity of the Anglo-American movement with the German iteration thereof.

Sure, the German rituals of ‘Heil Hitler’ and ‘Sieg Heil’ (hail, victory) salutes denote absolutism and statism to American ears, but BSA troops recite Bellamy’s Pledge of Allegiance at every meeting, too. An avowed National Socialist himself, Bellamy’s pledge is no less ‘Nazi’ than anything uttered by the Hitler Youth. And as noted, the pre-war Scouts recited the pledge accompanied by the same Fascist salute as the Germans; and in the assumption of very similar values. So we are at a loss to discern any substantial difference between such rituals.

Don’t even get me started on the lyrics of the President’s anthem, Hail To The Chief.

Is it any wonder the Scouting Movement was banned in the Soviet Union, Red China, Cuba, North Korea, and the like? They too regard the BSA as essentially Fascist and were replaced therefore with what the USSR dubbed “The Pioneers” — essentially Cheka with training wheels.

However, following Baden-Powell’s death in ‘43 and the conclusion of the war in ‘45, his successors lost the courage of their founder’s conviction. Allied propaganda as well as political and social pressure affected the Scouts much the way it affected nearly every other Anglo-American institution, compelling a retcon of the movement. The old symbols and gestures were first to go. Farewell to the old salute, swastika medals, ‘The White Boys’ Magazine’, and all talk of ‘Christianity applied’.

It isn’t so much that the Anglosphere were like ‘Nazis’, but rather that the National Socialist Germans were so much like us. Hitler, after all, patterned much of his own policies directly after American policy. He esteemed Lincoln’s centralizing strongman tactics. He implemented a ‘New Deal’ much the same as FDR’s. The codes he implemented on marriage, hygiene, and segregation closely followed the American template; and with attribution.

Of course, patriots have no love for Lincoln or FDR, but if these men represented civic vices, Germany gleaned such vices from us.

The BSA would in ensuing decades be recast as a pluralistic, egalitarian, and multicultural order in line with the new post-war values. But this transmogrification would take time to work out. It was, after all, but another front in ‘the long march through the institutions’.

It is parenthetically interesting to note that this Frankfurt school terminology drew directly upon war jargon: particularly ‘The Long March to Freedom’ wherein the whole German population was forced to flee, and was run down by, the advancing Red Army. Make of that what you will.

By the mid-60s the new age kulturkampf was revving hot in America. So it is that in ‘67 the BSA’s Den Mother position was re-titled Den Leader and opened to women. To make it gender neutral. The Boy Scouts … gender neutral. Yeah.

Two years following they opened “Associate Membership” positions to women and their Explorers program went coed.

The Cub Scouts relinquished leadership positions to women in ‘73. And by ‘76 Cubmaster, Assistant Cubmaster, and all Commissioner positions were open to women.

Catherine Pollard acted as the vanguard to neuter the BSA by her unapproved leadership of Troop 13 in Milford, CT beginning in ‘73. But the BSA deferred acknowledgement of her as a Scoutmaster until ‘88. That deferral obviously had more to do with her continuous snubbing of Scout policy than her being a woman. But having already relented on what may rightly be called the metaphysical question of women in the BSA, what mattered trifles of administrative sanction?

In 2013 the BSA were compelled to redefine the phrase ‘morally straight’ in their pledge: it could no longer be allowed to mean actually straight. Sodomites would henceforth be admitted without reservation.

The following year that resolve would become even more encompassing:

“No youth may be denied membership in the Boy Scouts of America on the basis of sexual orientation or preference alone.”

Such a statement opened the rolls not just to homosexuals, but implicitly, to transsexualism, incest, bestiality, pedophilia, et. al.

And having made such concessions regarding membership, the stage was inexorably set to compel a redefinition of leadership as well.

Though resisting Sodomites in leadership for many years, it was, as most expected, their revised policy admitting Sodomite members which ultimately led to the first Sodomite leader. Because in 2014, Sodomite Scout Pascal Tessier turned 18, and was summarily hired as summer camp leader. This in spite of official policy at the time.

So it was that in 2015 the BSA Executive Committee unanimously voted to lift the ban on LGBT leaders. The unanimity of that vote in itself is, of course, deeply suggestive that this renovation of ethics was settled long aforehand.

And open Transsexuals were admitted the subsequent year.

These moves resulted in a massive hemorrhage of membership. And the remnant is, to be expected, comprised of more Progressives than the previous body.

Fast forward to 2020. Only five years after embrace of LGBT leadership the BSA has announced they are filing for bankruptcy due an avalanche of sex abuse claims.

This was forecast all along as the arithmetical entailment of the new policies by everyone to the right of Betty Friedan: if you make camps coed and grant Sodomites (who everywhere account for a vastly disproportionate rate of molestation) private access to young boys on overnight camping trips molestation will skyrocket. 2+2 does indeed equal 4.

But no sooner had this story hit social media than the dissemblers arrived to contest the obvious arithmetic as — you guessed it — bigotry. Believe it or not, they blame the now rampant molestation suits (which number in the tens of thousands, BTW) on the straight men who predominated leadership prior to the entry of women and LGBT.

The fact that their position only confounds the definition of  “straight men” is apparently lost on them.

So too is the math, it seems. They deny any significance to the recent increase in such suits as they reflexively attribute them mostly to the #MeToo monkeyshines inspiring victims from the past to come forward. This assertion is pure sophistry and based entirely on faith. Ask them to compare the numbers such as a total of 1,200 cases brought between ‘65 and ‘85 (much of which is no doubt accounted for by the introduction of women in those years) against the tens of thousands of open cases at present. And that in spite of a nigh 50% membership drop in the past decade.

That these foreseeable and entirely preventable curses are being laid to the account of the least likely offenders (straight men), and contrary to all evidence, is madness. And doing so at a juncture which so underscores the antithesis (Sodomite pedophiles) amounts to a referendum on said madness. And the vote is in: there will be no impeachment of the LGBT and Feminist actors, only further smears against the traditional White Christian men who constitute the only trustworthy cross section of the institution. The culture vultures have once again resolved that the White Christian Man shall be the scapegoat for the collective sins of all others.

All of which underscores the reality that the West is no longer worthy of the knightly order of Scouts, as founded. The BSA is an artifact of a bygone age. America is no longer a WASP country. It has become a menagerie of heathens, aliens, and heathen aliens with nothing in common but their mutual hatred for everything that defined old America and Christendom and anyone who still resembles them.

Oh, the org will trudge on. For a time at least. Filing chapter 11 won’t quite shutter their properties. And you may, despite all, even still have a ‘morally straight’ troop local. But in the main, the handwriting is on the wall: in an age of Drag Queen Story Hour, LGBT adoption, and ‘Trans kids’ being castrated or otherwise mutilated with approval from church and state, no one is going to purge the BSA of predators. Because the predators are deemed victims in need of protection and the only persons who would be motivated to protect children from predators are deemed the real predators.

For the foreseeable future the Boy Scouts are effectively over, dead and buried. And they shall remain interred until the the inheritors of the old Anglo-Saxon Christendom rise again because no one else truly identifies with Baden-Powell’s order but the sons of his people by faith and folk.