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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has found the true enemy undermining the Pentagon. It isn’t “woke” and “fat” generals, as he called them to their faces at a meeting. It isn’t a Russian-spy ring, a terrorist cell, or even the supposed “deep state.” It is the organization formerly known as the Boy Scouts.

In a memo drafted to Congress, Hegseth writes that he wants to cut the military’s support for Scouting America, the 115-year-old organization teaching kids survival and outdoor skills. In the draft leaked to NPR, Hegseth condemns the Scouts for being “genderless” and promoting “gender confusion” and DEI initiatives. (The group changed its name from the Boy Scouts in February and formally began letting girls join in 2018.) “The organization once endorsed by President Theodore Roosevelt no longer supports the future of American boys,” Hegseth writes. Alas, the group supporting over 1 million kids is no longer there to “cultivate masculine values.”

The Pentagon’s main support of the Scouts is to provide logistical and medical resources at a ten-day event, called the National Jamboree, where tens of thousands of kids gather each July in West Virginia. But because of woke, Hegseth wants to cut that aid. In the memo, he cites needing to put other “national security” priorities first. The memo also kills any programs that include Scout troops meeting at military installations in the U.S. or at any bases abroad where Scouts have active programs. (In a statement to NPR, the Defense Department wrote that it would not comment on “leaked documents that we cannot authenticate and that may be pre-decisional.”)

Given Hegseth’s focus on this nonprofit’s policies on gender inclusion, you would be forgiven to think that he was a Scout himself back in his youth in Minnesota. But he has said he spent his days in a church youth group that was focused on memorizing Bible verses. Nevertheless, Hegseth has had this on his mind since at least last year, when he went off on the Scouts on Fox News for changing its name. “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,” he said. “And a lot of them have lost what they stand for. And as a result, the government gets more powerful to fill the void. 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.”

While the move is in line with Hegseth’s larger mission to macho up the Armed Forces, it may not be a great long-term policy to push away the Scouts. The military has long recruited from the Scouts, especially at its academies. The group stated earlier this year that 20 percent of the graduating class at the U.S. Air Force Academy this year had been in the Boy Scouts or the Girls Scouts.

If Hegseth gets his way, it could take years for the full damage to the Scouts’s relationship to the military to be revealed. Unlike last time when the Trump administration came for the Scouts and their Jamboree — that damage was quite immediate. Trump, who is currently embroiled in a scandal due to his long friendship with a pedophile, talked at the 2017 gathering about “interesting” and sexy parties thrown on a yacht owned by billionaire William Levitt. “I won’t go on any more than that because you’re Boy Scouts, so I’m not going to tell you what he did,” Trump said. “Should I tell you? Should I tell you?” the president teased. “Oh, you’re Boy Scouts, but you know life. You know life.”

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