Pete Hegseth’s obsession with Boy Scouts continues, and Scouting America has bent to his will by banning trans kids from joining as their gender identity and agreeing to dissolve its DEI board committee.

Hegseth took time out from planning a war with Iran to take on Scouting America and policies that the Secretary of Defense finds objectionable.

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Pete Hegseth threatens to cut funding to Scouting America over its gender-inclusive policies

Hegseth’s rationale for dictating the behavior of a private organization? Dollars the Defense Department provides to help with the Scouts’ annual Jamboree in the mountains of West Virginia, and a long, now-threatened, synergistic relationship with the military.

Reporting from NPR late last year indicated that Hegseth was going to do something about the Scouts’ “woke” ideology, a longtime obsession of the former Fox & Friends host.

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“This is a tragedy!” Hegseth ranted on the network after Scouting America’s name change two years ago. He laid blame at the feet of “the left.”

“They wanted to destroy it,” Hegseth whined.

For the record, Pete Hegseth was never a Boy Scout.

In January, Scouting America responded to the rumors, quietly offering to dial back programming the secretary found objectionable to maintain their longstanding ties to the military.

Negotiations ensued, punctuated by public threats from Hegseth over terms he apparently didn’t find acceptable.

“Back to God and country—immediately!” read a post to X by Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell in February. “They are on the clock,” Parnell said of the Scouts, about an unspoken deadline on a deal. “And we are watching.”

Today, Hegseth spoke from his flag-draped office in the Pentagon to claim victory in his war on the Scouts. The only thing missing from the six-minute, multi-camera address was a “Mission Accomplished” banner hanging in the background.

“For more than a century,” Hegseth began, “Boy Scouts of America prepared over 130 million American boys to make moral and ethical choices.” He followed with an anodyne recitation of Boy Scouts history before finally telling the organization where they’d gone wrong.

“After 2012,” Hegseth claimed, “the Boy Scouts lost their way, and a once great organization became gravely wounded. Diversity, equity, and inclusion — DEI — crept in. The name was changed to Scouting America. Girls were accepted. The focus on God as the ruler of the universe was watered down to include openness to humanism and Earth-centered pagan religions. Scouting became an organization that no longer supported and celebrated boys. They even welcomed the destructive myth of gender fluidity and transgenderism to infiltrate their membership.”

Hegseth then declared victory over Scouting America, announcing the private organization has banned DEI from programming and trans kids from their ranks.

Among the concessions, the Scouts swapped out a Citizenship in Society merit badge, which Hegseth claimed advanced DEI “activism”, and introduced a Military Service merit badge in its place.

Membership in the Scouts, Hegseth said, will now be based solely on “biological sex at birth” and not gender identity, a de facto ban on trans kids in the organization.

“That means that the application, any application, will have only two sex designations, male and female,” Hegseth said of the paperwork to join the organization, “and the application must match the applicant’s birth certificate.”

What’s to stop transgender kids from joining scout troops anyway? The secretary didn’t say. The organization said that it would continue “our service to the more than 200,000 girls who participate in our programs.”

But he did warn the Scouts that his “Department of War” would “vigorously review progress and decide whether or not to continue our support.”

That new deadline is in six months, just in time for Hegseth to declare another “Mission Accomplished” ahead of the midterm elections, or suffer the consequences shortly after for failures the Boy Scouts are meant to distract from.

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