Counter-Currents
1,227 words / 9:28
It’s official: There will be no more Boy Scouts.
Don’t panic: There will still be Scouts who are boys. There will also be Scouts who are girls.
There will also continue to be Girl Scouts who are boys, so long as they identify as girls. And there will still be Girl Scouts who are biological girls.
Just no more Boy Scouts.
Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one below or click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link/target as.”
On Tuesday, Boy Scouts of America, an organization which existed for 114 years before feeling the need to publicly distance itself from the word “Boy,” announced that as of February 8, 2025, its corporate name will change to Scouting America.
The announcement comes a year after Boy Scouts of America agreed to pay nearly $2.5 billion to settle sexual-abuse claims made against scoutmasters and adult volunteers by over 80,000 former Boy Scouts whom I’ll presume were all biological boys at the time of their molestation. That massive payout was agreed to after Boy Scouts of America filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in February 2020 so they could provide “equitable compensation” for abuse survivors.
It should come as no surprise that an organization which routinely allows adult males to take young boys into the wilderness for camping excursions might attract pederasts. A 2012 NPR article announcing that the “Boy Scouts’ Confidential ‘Perversion Files’” were made public as a result of a court order alleged that
[t]he organization, founded in 1910, had been targeted by sexual predators from its earliest days. The Scouts began keeping a secret list of accused predators back in 1919, but the national organization didn’t share the information with local chapters so suspected sexual predators could move from troop to troop.
Among the alleged child-molesters caught in the Boy Scouts’ wide but mostly private dragnet over the years were men with intensely pedophilic-sounding names such as Floyd David Slusher and Garth David Snively.
In light of all that boy-diddling, perhaps Cruising America would have been a more appropriate name change than Scouting America.
A 1991 Washington Times exposé about sexual-abuse scandals in the organization noted:
The Boy Scouts are a magnet for men who want to have sexual relations with children. . . . Pedophiles join the Scouts for a simple reason: it’s where the boys are.
But after Tuesday’s announcement, the organization that was known for over a century as Boy Scouts of America will be where the boys were. Again, there will still be boys. And there will still likely be men who join “Scouting America” to molest boys. But in what is being described as “an effort to emphasize inclusion,” the word “Boy” will be excluded from the organization’s official branding.
There’s been a gradual process of creeping inclusion before Boy Scouts of America decided to get rid of all the “Boys.” In 2017, it announced that girls could join the Cub Scouts as well as become regular Scouts who vied for titles such as Eagle Scout. In 2019 the organization’s flagship program, which was known as “Boy Scouting,” subtly changed its name to “Scouting BSA.” The “B” in “BSA” still stood for “Boy,” although it snipped away the “oy” as if it were an unwanted foreskin.
You can buy Jim Goad’s The Bomb Inside My Brain here.
In retaliation, the Girl Scouts of the United States of America filed an ultimately unsuccessful trademark infringement lawsuit against Boy Scouts of America in 2018 “for dropping the word ‘boy’ from its flagship program in an effort to attract girls.”
The Boy Scouts of America and the Girl Scouts of the United States of America have always been completely different corporate entities, but since the dawn of the new millennium, both groups have gradually warmed up to gays and trannies.
In 2004, the Boy Scouts of America adopted a policy that forbade adult leaders from continuing to hold their positions if they came out as “open and avowed homosexuals.” But then, after corporate giants such as UPS, Intel, and Merck cut financial ties with the Boy Scouts for their flamingly homophobic policies, the Boy Scouts allowed gay youth to join in 2013 and ended their ban on gay adult leaders two years later. In 2017, Boy Scouts of America allowed female-to-male trannies to join their “boys-only programs,” a decision that came two years after the Girl Scouts of the United States of America opened its arms to “transgender girls.”
The only true act of “exclusion” in the past couple of decades has been this week’s decision to exclude the word “Boy” from “Boy Scouts.” The Girl Scouts, though, will stubbornly retain the word “Girl” in their name.
I was both a Cub Scout, then a Webelo, and then a Boy Scout back in the early 1970s, when the only officially sanctioned “transition” was the Webelos-to-Scouts Transition. Because we were immature boys who were obsessed with faggotry, but from a safe and ironically disapproving distance, we thought the designation “Webelo” (pronounced “We Blow”) was absolutely hysterical.
I also remember that at our weeklong summer camp in Bushkill, Pennsylvania, the various troops held a sanctioned poolside drag competition where boys dressed in wigs, bikinis, high heels, and makeup, and everyone thought it was hilarious. But I can’t recall anyone back then who thought that a boy could actually become a girl.
Perched there on the cusp of adolescence with our hormones ready to change our entire life path, we viewed the idea of having sex with females with a mystical, yearning awe. Even the suggestion that one of us had ripped out a picture of some big-boobed all-American girl from his dad’s Playboy and was willing to share it with everyone else was greeted with a hushed sort of religious reverence. I remember being stuck in my tent during one camping trip while cold rains outside pelted everything into mud as I nuzzled up with my air mattress, pretended it was Julie “Catwoman” Newmar, and softly kissed it. We would have loved if they allowed Girl Scouts to camp out with us.
Weekly Scout meetings were held on Friday nights in the basement of a Presbyterian church that sat at the top of my block. There were four patrols in Troop 111: the Buffalos, Beavers, Eagles, and Panthers. The Buffalo patrol was the coolest, and I was of course the leader.
I can’t recall even the hint of man-boy molestation occurring, although there was a rather squirrelly older scoutmaster named Mr. Smith who seemed effeminate and would have been the likeliest suspect. I recall a car ride en route to an encampment when Mr. Smith told us that the filthiest word he’d ever heard was “motherfucker,” which was used exclusively by black Scouts he knew in Philly.
But this was the early 1970s, and America had already started its slow decline. Most of the kids in Troop 111 had long hair, foul mouths, and loved rock ‘n’ roll. I spent dozens of hours in my room poring over my older brother Johnny’s copy of the 1959 Boy Scout Handbook, which remains one of my all-time favorite publications. If you want a sobering and heartbreakingly wholesome glimpse of what the United States looked like before “progress” came along in the 1960s and waylaid the whole project, leaf through the pages of that link.
But now, by official decree, there will be no more Boy Scouts. Instead, the Presbyterian church up the block where Troop 111 held its meetings 50 years ago will occasionally employ a female pastor.
Enjoyed this article?
Be the first to leave a tip in the jar!
* * *
Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate at least $10/month or $120/year.
- Donors will have immediate access to all Counter-Currents posts. Everyone else will find that one post a day, five posts a week will be behind a “paywall” and will be available to the general public after 30 days. Naturally, we do not grant permission to other websites to repost paywall content before 30 days have passed.
- Paywall member comments will appear immediately instead of waiting in a moderation queue. (People who abuse this privilege will lose it.)
- Paywall members have the option of editing their comments.
- Paywall members get an Badge badge on their comments.
- Paywall members can “like” comments.
- Paywall members can “commission” a yearly article from Counter-Currents. Just send a question that you’d like to have discussed to [email protected]. (Obviously, the topics must be suitable to Counter-Currents and its broader project, as well as the interests and expertise of our writers.)
To get full access to all content behind the paywall, please visit our redesigned Paywall page.
40 comments
Can’t wait for the accompanying video for this one.
In hindsight I think I would have welcomed my girl being a Cub Scout instead of a Girl Scout. Three years of that was pure hell. Their activities were nothing but trips to the local library to look at coloring books. The whole organization was nothing but fundraising. I endured only two years of pestering family and friends and coworkers to buy some to help my little girl achieve some unachievable goal that had some promise of a great prize if accomplished. Inevitability each year I’d wind up “eating “, not literally eating about six boxes of cookies. Either we’d get shorted boxes or customers who promised to buy never coughed up the money. I would have to pay out of my pocket. What a hustle. In year three I let my girl down and refused to participate. She later understood why.
And they don’t even make the cookies. I’d be far happier about the whole thing if they baked them themselves. As it is, they’re just hawking a product made in some faraway factory. What’s worse, so many of the Girl Scouts now just sit on their phones while their moms do all the work. And about half of them can’t even work up a smile or a “thank you”… Perhaps they’d be right if they said the whole thing was pointless, but then let’s drop the pretense. The point is just money now, and money for a decreasingly wholesome organization.
I agree with the Boy Scouts having a better program, but I’d be loath to support them either, what with the George Floyd and LGBTQIA2S+ rainbow badges, now.
And their cookies aren’t any good. If you want a shortbread, buy Lorna Doones. Nutter Butter aren’t any different than their Peanut Butter varieties. They’re probably all made at the same factory. Like paint. Just slap a different label on the can.
Until the 1980s, they used to make the cookies, girls in kitchens. Then, just like the boy scouts, they had to professionalize, to support large offices of but-sittings, supported with the help of corporate america. when the latter became totally jewish, both organizations caved.
when i was in scouts, the late 1990s, some jewish lawfare group put a boy up to suing the scouts because of the Christian part of the oath, which you had to say to get Eagle. The suit went to the supreme court and failed. I believe they also won a jewish suit that allowed them to prohibit gays. The book was settled until the corporate, woke, jewish equity money power visited 10 years later.
I also find it striking that the author’s experiences, 25 years prior to my own, were almost similar, even with the internet and computers, VCRs. It takes a while for technology to take effect.
Originally Girl Scout Cookies were actually made by actual Girl Scouts (formerly Girl Guides), the Girl Scouts of America. Yes, they actually baked cookies.
Then GSA jobbed that franchise out to Famous Foods of Virginia. Then Little Brownie Bakers. By this point they weren’t Girl Scouts of America any longer, they were Girl Scouts of the United Nations, or Girl Scouts of Globalism, or Girl Scouts of the Third World. Cookie boxes adorned with people from Mungomungo and Chichicaramba. No more Girl Scouts of America.
What we need is a new product. All-American Girl Cookies®.
Tag-a-longs
“She later understood why.”
I love a happy ending.
I’ve talked to parents of both boy scouts and girl scouts and have heard stories similar to yours. That is the fact that it’s a major investment in both time and money, which takes a toll on parents. This article describes the major reason that scouting is in decline. There are a couple of lesser known reasons that have contributed to scoutings decline from what I’ve read. First is that, it has to compete with youth sports, which are more popular. Parents seem to be more willing to devote more time and money to sports. It’s also, from what I’ve read, has to compete with electronic media such as video games and the internet. A lot the youth would rather play videogames or be online as opposed to something that is outdoor focused, which is what a lot of scouting is based on.
Any organization that abets child molestation, indeed almost ensures that some children in its care will be molested, deserves every bad thing that comes its way.
Keeping secret lists of molesters and allowing them to migrate from one hunting ground to the next is far more than dereliction of duty. It is evil. Indefensible.
But enough about the Catholic Church.
The Boy Scouts are equally corrupt and culpable.
Sigh. Is there anything impervious to ruin?
For an organization to go coed at every level and to also allow transgender members is setting itself up for problems, but enough about the U.S. military and women’s college sports.
So sad. Like the author, I encountered ne’er a whiff sexual impropriety from any scoutmaster as a scout myself. Boy Scouts have gone the way of boy choirs as well.
Perhaps the “Boy Scouts” could have survived had they held up the $2.5B suit until pedophila is officially sanctioned ( just like the rest of faggotry-turned LGBT bla bla.) in 2026 so that those 800,000 boys would have no case.
A section of chapters from the scout guide Jim linked to:
Duty to God
Duty to Country
Obeying the Scout Law
Helping Other People
Physically Strong
Mentally Awake
Morally Straight
We can’t have that stuff anymore. It’s all “problematic”.
A similar reason for why West Point dropped duty, honor, and country from it’s motto.
Hey Jim Goad
consider writing a similar blog about the demise of the Hell s Angels biker club .
Meth and fights over HA club copyright royalties seem to be the main causes there.
I agree. I remember seeing on Mr Goad’s Web site a while ago, or maybe it was Takimag, a clip of a 60s talk show where they had Hunter Thompson on, and they surprised him by having a Hells Angel vice president ride his bike up on the stage to talk to Thompson about his HAs book. Beats anything I ever saw on Letterman.
Hunter S. Thompson Meets a Hells Angel (1967)
Is the picture with the article what you got when you used AI to create an image of a Boy Scout?
The prompt was “androgynous scout.”
Some of my fondest memories were in the Boy Scouts. It was a place where young men could act like young men, which is to say like violent, savage animals half the time, and learn some discipline the rest of the time. I can’t imagine boys getting to do either of those things in the presence of sensitive, bitchy young girls.
When I started reading this I though this was going to be about the Grave New World of IVF to eliminate the chance of boys altogether. I don’t recall any discussion of Toxic Masculinity an accusation to eliminate women… those miscreants seem more likely to be trying to woo them. Further evidence the west is accidentally grooming its way into a caste system.
https://slate.com/technology/2024/05/ivf-daughters-toxic-masculinity-sex-selection.html
Julius Evola talked about an ‘occult war’ in which bad individuals would be used to discredit otherwise good institutions such as the Church and monarchy, whether they knew that was what they were doing or not. The Boy Scouts have fallen victim to it as well.
Mom of 3 Eagle scouts here. (I was a Camp Fire Girl in the 70s. We, Campfire Girls, NOT the Girl Scouts, were the official civic girl club modeled after the Boy Scouts. Lots of Catholics were Campfire Girls because Girl Scouts promoted too many pro-choice/liberal women leaders. In the late 70s, Campfire girls was destroyed & made co-ed into “Campfire Kids”.
Due to this, I had suspicions of what was in store for the BSA. BSA didn’t cave to pushy feminist to go co-ed; BSA top leadership bowed to the gay mafia, agreeing to allow openly gay adult leaders. Immediately, the Mormon Church (which was 30% of BSA) quit & announced that they’d start their own (non-gay-glorifying) LDS boy scouting group.
The BSA lost a third of it’s membership overnight, & then announced they needed to allow girls, beginning with the sisters of the Boy Scouts, in order to survive economically.
These problematic brand names can be easily rectified (no pun intended!):
THE PERSON SCOUTS OF AMERICA
THE WASHINGTON INDIGENOUS PEOPLE
PLANNED INFANTICIDE
CAMPFIRE SENTIENT BEINGS
PROTOPLASM MATTERS
THE 4H+ CLUB
I’m 71 and was a Boy Scout, going as far as Second Class. My memories of scouting are mixed. It was good to camp out and mix with boys, but no one wore uniforms, a lot were rowdy, and on our camporees, a lot of them smoked. Man, everyone smoked then. Once we hiked past another troop, and one of them blew cigarette smoke right in a guy’s face.
I just didn’t see the point of going on, and I didn’t get much help for merit badges. I liked it, but could do without it. What I notice between now and then was my scoutmasters were all skinny and somewhat muscular. Now, they all seem fat.
As for Girl Scouts, I remember in Boy’s Life back in the 60’s, one girl said she wanted to join Boy Scouts because they did camping and sports, and her troop wasn’t into it, and were kind of prissy (“don’t forget to bing your hairspray for overnighters!”, she said they said.)
I never buy Girl Scout cookies, but I go up to the stand at a store and tell the Girl Scouts if they can recite the Girl Scout Law and Pledge, I’ll give them 5.00. Most can’t, but three of them together got through most of it. It seems very basic: you got to learn that stuff. I still remember my scout laws (“A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.”) This is from memory. One of the Girl Scout leaders said they cut some of it out “because it was too hard.”
But I like giving the girls 5.00 when they do it. They’re very appreciative and happy.
I still have a copy of the 1960 Boy Scout Handbook, a really fun and happy book to read. Robert Fussell (of CLASS) wrote an essay on the handbook, saying it was a very reliable and thoughtful guide for young men. I think it started going bad after 1963 edition, when you started putting blacks in everywhere. I remember a scouting program for blacks called “street corner scouting.” So, the rot was starting early.
Some of the best American boy scout troops were in Germany during the Cold War. Awesome scout leaders, camps and no question of not wearing your uniform! Of course it wasn’t for German kids, they were reading their soft porn teen magazines. Ahead of the curve.
In Australia we had boy scouts and girl guides until age 15 then co-ed scouting from ages 15-18 (Venturers) and Rovers to age 25. I don’t know how many of these people ended up pairing off but on reflection it seems like a system with some potential.
Even better are my books from childhood: The Boy Mechanic and The Handy Book for Boys. Example: How to make a crossbow out of the leaf spring from a car. So powerful it also shows how to make a lever system to cock it!
There will be no more Boy Scouts. According to the gen-AI picture, only Interdimensional Scouts.
Maybe the new scouts could be avatars. That way, scouts wouldn’t have to sleep inside of a tent when a cold rain is falling. A potential scout wouldn’t have to exert themselves, carry a backpack, or put up with the extremes of nature. Your avatar could do that for you while you are gaming. You would only have to check on your avatar a couple of times a day.
Chicken Scouts and Hawk-leaders
Guess they weren’t prepared after all….
I think they should’ve renamed it The Soy Scouts, or “The SS” for short.
My previous comment was meant as a reply to Shift’s comment (#12); not sure if I did it right…
Nice work.
The girl scout cookies racket is a scam. They use peer pressure to con parents into buying the cookies then it is on them to unload the crap. The parents use tacky methods such as having the kids solicit outside grocery stores or even try to pressure people at work. Like I’m supposed to help them out because they got swindled into buying a bunch of junk? Plus, what lesson does that teach the girls, use “cuteness” to get what you want? Being a “merchant” isn’t the noblest vocation. I’d respect them more if they were picking up trash or helping out old people at the nursing home.
The Boy Scouts is a pedophile haven that makes the Catholic Church look tame. There’s a watchable Boy Scouts documentary on Netflix called “Scouts Honor: The Secret Files of the Boy Scouts of America.” The pedophilia in the Scouts portrayed in the documentary dates back decades. I can’t imagine anyone sending their kids there.
Changing the name to Scouting America and allowing girls to join will simply attract Scout Leaders who enjoy molesting boys AND girls.
It would be better if the whole thing went away completely. Same with Girls Scouts. It accomplishes nothing. If kids aren’t taught Christian morality and to support freedom from government over democracy, we shouldn’t waste our time. All large institutions have become corrupted by the globalist agenda. We’d be better off having clubs at the local or state level. As soon as it is national, we get what happened to BSA.
I was in BSA for two years. I am a City person so I never went camping or did an overnight. I don’t see how sleeping in a tent with other boys or men is something to aspire. That sounds like the opposite of fun for a straight person. Hunting, fishing, Kayaking, and other activities could be done solely as day trip things. We certainly aren’t getting any safer. If we had abusers when the public as a whole opposed lgbtqa, imagine how it will be now that kids, teens, and adults are encouraged to be those things and then sleep in tents. If we can’t exclude based on race, religion, sexuality, and etc we are better off at home in safety.
the problem too with the Scouts is they don’t teach anything useful. They basically push the honor, duty, and country nonsense when the police who enforce leftist laws and the military who serve the federal government monster do the same. This hasn’t gotten us anywhere.
Let the whole thing die as a relic of the past. Same with the cookies. It’s undignified to make kids sell food so they can earn badges. It’s one thing for poor people to sell water, fruit, and etc by the side of the road because they have to. It’s a waste of time for kids from positive income households to do the same.
the whole idea of helping doesn’t apply anymore because who are they helping. More than half the people in this fake country are irredeemable. Helping only harms us.
You can’t have Boy Scouts — or boy or man anything — in a feminist nation. And the U.S. in reality is a post-feminist nation.
Wish you success with the film, Jim. Glad to see somebody besides me standing up for American boys.
t seems like Jim Goad’s article really resounded with many of us. It did for me for two big reasons.
First, the fall of the Boy Scouts is yet the fall of another institution that used to be a rock-solid institution of White America. Just like our churches, schools, civic organizations and clubs, so many organizations caved into the racial madness of Black Lives Matter and other current woke lies. Yes, the Boy Scouts had rot that started quite a long time ago, it still managed to be a source of male strength and direction. I know I was better for having gone through the Boy Scouts. Second, like Jim, I too went through the scouting program during the late 60’s and early 70’s. My scouting took place in the northern suburbs of Chicago. The Mormons had a good troop and they were always open to let in a few of us gentiles. There was even a Jewish boy or two. Religion never was an issue between boys. The Scout Masters were all top-notch men. In addition to the Scout Masters, there were numerous merit badge counselors who readily gave their time and talents. It wasn’t until decades later when it hit me what a sacrifice these scouting leaders made for us. What family guy wants to work a full hour work week only to come home Friday night and head out for a rainy weekend with smart-mouth teen boys? Our scouting highlights were many: the annual Klondike Derby, frequent campouts at Sol Crown Scout Camp just over the Illinois border in Wisconsin, and the real highlight was two weeks at Camp Ma-ka-ja-wan in Wisconsin (we were East Camp alumni). I remember very vividly the Scoutmaster who strongly discouraged us from using the word “suck” to describe someone (except the scouts of West Camp. They sucked). That summer, the word ‘suck” was THE word. All the cool guys used it. He explained why we shouldn’t and part of his explanation was that a man didn’t need to use such low words to describe a fellow human, a man did not need to swear. The values we were taught were straight out of the 1940’s, 1950’s, and the 1960’s, somewhat square values but the values that were taught in the Scout Handbook Jim linked to. These were values of White Men and therefore the values that both not only built this country but also, more importantly, keep this country going smoothly. These scouting values keep order, they create civility, they make the trains run on time.
I enjoyed my time in scouting and I am a better man for having gone through the program. It breaks my heart that yet another institution has failed to keep its solid beliefs. At least it can join the large club of other once rock-solid institutions who caved when saint Floyd died and blacks got their collective feelings hurt. Thanks again, Jim. Another excellent article.
Aussie view
In summary, my 10 or so years in the Australian Boy Scouts did me a world of good. Introduced me to life-long bush & outdoor skills and confidence. Never saw or heard of any leader ‘funny business’, but I got a start in homosexuality education on a 3-mate ‘challenge’ weekend in Venturers – did me no harm. I do wonder now how leaders found the time…
I am amazed how the organisation has survived as well as it has here. My son met his wife in Rovers, in the 1990s. Their two boys are still in it, as teens, despite all the digital distractions.
Comments are closed.
If you have a Subscriber access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.
Paywall Access
Lost your password?Edit your comment