Category: Culture

How Richmond Is Rewriting the Story of Gun Violence — One Student at a Time

““There is no public safety without guns. If guns didn’t exist, yes,” said Ra-Twoine Fields. “But we live in America, where there are more guns than people. So no, there is no public safety without guns. What we can do is learn how to manage it, how to live with it responsibly.”

Fields, a firearms instructor, armed security guard, and PhD student at Saybrook University is also the founder of The Holistic Agency and Crenius, two initiatives linking creative expression, public safety, and community healing. Crenius channels art into civic engagement; The Holistic Agency takes a culturally informed approach to defensive, medical, and mental-health training, treating self-protection and wellness as parts of the same system.

He doesn’t speak for shock value. This is the foundation of his work: teaching young people not to fear the world they live in, but to survive it safely.

Fields helps lead Control the Narrative, his philosophy for harm reduction and violence prevention in Richmond. The approach is rooted in community-violence intervention (CVI) meeting those most at risk where they are, interrupting retaliation, and connecting them to counseling, job training, and other supports. He’s adapted those principles locally through The Holistic Agency’s Weapons Program, a five-week course for teens in Henrico County and Richmond who have already encountered the justice system.

The goal isn’t punishment. It’s understanding why they carry and helping them imagine a life where they don’t have to.

 

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Sodom and Gomorrica: The Infant-Poaching Obsession

Documenting the West’s descent into Satanic receivership.

Homosexual ‘fathers’ poach baby for photo shoot in ritual mockery of motherhood

Gay men appear to have an unsettling fetish for poaching babies for themselves from women desperate for cash and then using them as props for Instagram photo shoots and TikTok videos.

Like this radicalizing image from a pair of twinks, one of whom is swaddling a newly requisitioned infant while wearing a hospital admission bracelet on his wrist, pressing it to his chest like he’s about to breastfeed.

Paradigm destruction in chart form
Excellent reporting, buttressed by visually captivating graphs fed by data collected by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), demonstrates that the rate of transgender self-identification among American students has halved since its peak in 2023.
Via Unherd (emphasis added):
A surprising shift is taking place in the gender and sexual identities of young Americans. Data from my new Centre for Heterodox Social Science report, “The Decline of Trans and Queer Identity among Young Americans”, shows that since 2023 both trans and queer identification have dropped sharply within Generation Z.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which conducts a large annual survey of US undergraduates, polled over 60,000 students in 2025. My analysis of the raw data shows that in that year, just 3.6% of respondents identified as a gender other than male or female. By comparison, the figure was 5.2% in 2024 and 6.8% in both 2022 and 2023. In other words, the share of trans-identified students has effectively halved in just two years.

The precipitous decline in trans-identification was accompanied by similar declines in self-reported rates of anxiety and depression, as seen in a separate chart in the thread posted above.

The data would seem to confirm that, in fact, transgenderism is a social contagion that rises or falls in popularity based on social incentives and inputs, rather than anything arising from within the individual.

Per the chart, youth gender-queerness rates spiked substantially in the late 2010s, coinciding with a massive, coordinated propaganda campaign by corporate media, corporations, NGOs, academia, government, and the public school system.

Then, coinciding with the popular backlash that really ramped up around 2023, the rates tanked.

Which looks an awful lot like impressionable kids riding the waves of whatever trend du jour — monkey see, monkey do — and a lot less like the manifestation of deeply held, inborn gender identities being allowed to be expressed after years of heteronormative oppression of gender-queerness, as the progressive argument holds.

If, as the social engineers constantly claim, transgenderism is the deepest expression of the immutable true self, how could the rate among young adults vary so dramatically in just a couple of years?

Were all of the trannies rounded up for extermination camps or forcibly reconverted to normalcy?

Or did they simply change their minds?

Of course, the LGBTQ4GF150+++™ insanity isn’t going to be eliminated overnight — there’s simply too much inertia for that to occur in any other way than gradually.

But all signs point to a massive sea-change in progress.

Cynical Publius

🔥MRS. DR. PUBLIUS ALERT🔥

To the women of the Western world – I have a sober urgent message.

Please listen carefully. For those of you who believe the toxic rhetoric of the left -PLEASE LISTEN CAREFULLY.

You must stop this nonsense – raging war against Western civilization. Western men do not (as a cultural norm) rape children or adjudicate cases of rape by allowing the rapist to marry the victim as reparations. That’s not our cultural norm.

Western women, we must use our voices and platforms wisely. Our entire culture is under attack – our real enemy will be the implementation of Sharia law. Please investigate the tenets of Sharia law for yourself- don’t take my word for it. Step back and look at the situation. Even without a profound understanding of history, we must look beyond today’s headlines and think strategically.

I’ve spent several months reading from different resources describing what Sharia law really means for non-Muslim, Western women. With certainty, you WILL lose all of your independence/autonomy – you will lose control over your own body – you will lose control over your own life – things you currently possess in our culture. These things don’t exist for Muslim women.

STOP listening to the left – they don’t care if you become subjugated against your will. Look at the Christian churches being burned in Nigeria or in Sudan’s North Darfur- Christians are being killed or young girls are being stalked and raped by rape gangs in the UK – all at the hands of Muslim men. This is the Muslim community’s idea of tolerance. If we in the West don’t reverse course – stand up and state the obvious truth – the numbers don’t lie – our culture will succumb to the will of people who desperately do not share like values with us. This is our very survival.

Women, it is the preservation of our constitutional rights that gives us true equality with men – and it is Christianity that reflects this authentic equality most clearly in our modern world. I don’t care if you are offended by that – history confirms my stance.

This needs to be said – the left is waging a war of distraction while the real travesty of what illegal immigration has done to Europe (and to a lesser extent the US) is being obscured – this policy is engulfing Western civilization because Islam does not practice tolerance of other religions/cultures in its home countries. This isn’t about “working families,” healthcare is a right, or any of the corrupted rhetoric of the left to engender class warfare – neither is the offensive racist rhetoric against white men. The left only pulls these sound bites out for their convenience.

I understand Islam is a religion and in the U.S. people have a right to practice their religion (unless it infringes on the rights of others), all because our Constitutional rights are the great equalizer. However, once Muslims take over our government at all levels by sheer numbers – they will implement Sharia law – this is why Islam is incompatible with our constitutional republic. Under Sharia law, Muslims may mislead non-Muslims in order to benefit the spread of Islam. So today, the left touts an ephemeral alliance with Muslims against Israel, but under Sharia law, these same neo-Marxists will be executed for being homosexual or transgender or having sex outside of marriage, and Christians will be enslaved, reduced to dhimmitude and/or executed for their faith. Convert or die – that will be the only choice – that is the reality.

So, that’s what awaits us if we don’t STOP this nonsense now and if we don’t change course, the perpetrators who engineered this catastrophic collapse of Western civilization will be enjoying their Mai Tais on their private islands while our culture lay in ruins.

Even the globalists who think they will still be in control when Western civilization has imploded are truly deceived – because they will face the irrational hoards of Islamic jihadists thirsting for their severed heads.

The women of the left have alienated the very culture that would have defended them. Please consider my arguments, and reverse course while there is still time.

Peace and prepare.

Cynical Publius
I’d like to add my own 2c here, A lot of Americans think what my missus is saying is hyperbole. Ask any veteran of Iraq or Afghanistan if this is all true. Ask anyone who has ever lived or worked in a Gulf state if this is all true. Not only will they confirm it, but they will tell you Mrs. Dr. P. Is holding back.

Getting Past the “Duck Dynasty” Stereotype of Gun Owners
Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

The New York Times recently published a super multimedia article about new, nontraditional gun owners called “The Tipping Point” (16 February 2025). Subtitle: “America’s newest gun owners are upending preconceptions about who buys and gun and why.”

I read it with interest and was later told by someone at the Times that the piece took two years to put together. Bravo for real journalism.

In an otherwise fascinating and well-reported story on the changing face of gun owners in America today, the authors include a significant misstatement. They write, “a majority of gun owners are white, conservative, male and from rural areas.”

This “Duck Dynasty” stereotype of gun owners is one I have challenged for years now, from my 2019 presentation on Gun Culture 2.0 to my recent opinion essay in The Hill on the unrecognized diversity of gun owners.

To build a better gun debate, we need to ground our arguments in the diverse reality of contemporary gun ownership, rather than perpetuating divisive mythologies.

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1 Timothy 5:8
KJV
But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.

“You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” – VPOTUS J.D. Vance.

A Hard Heart Kills: Why Liberal Values Breed School Shootings

Traditionally, the school shooting phenomenon was perpetrated by young, disaffected males. But, a disturbing new trend seems to be forming. The tragic shooting at the Abundant Life Christian School this week was committed by a young girl. A fifteen-year-old with a digital history indicative of the deep angst experienced by many young teenagers left adrift in existential darkness.

It is a very disturbing trend indeed when our young girls, typically characterized by feminine compassion, who should be anticipating the joys of family, motherhood, or career, instead are driven to find meaning in mass homicide. Surely, this is a sign of cultural apocalypse.

Reportedly, Natalie Rupnow had an online obsession with mass shootings and death. Can it really be surprising that our culture of death (the death of God, death of the unborn, the death of personhood) produces mass-murdering kids?

We treat the unborn like bio-waste and devalue life to the point of absurd irrelevance, discarding it at will. The message to anyone paying attention is that life is disposable and subject to whim or convenience. Making a statement with the lives of innocent people is a simple metaphysical extension of the secular culture of grievance and lack of eternal accountability.

Perhaps some old-fashioned hell-fire preaching might go a long way toward saving lives, both temporal and spiritual.

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The Clock Strikes Thirteen
And the Establishment gets washed away by a preference cascade. But it was a damn close-run thing.

What happened? It’s like a spell broke. Since November’s election (re-election?) of President Donald Trump, the woke is going away, and all sorts of problems are resolving themselves. But why?

There are several reasons, but basically, it’s a preference cascade.

In law we talk about the proverbial thirteenth chime of the clock, which is not only wrong in itself, but which calls into question everything that has come before. Most of our institutions have been chiming thirteen for quite a while, and people have noticed.

But it’s not enough to notice. Soviet citizens knew their system was founded on lies, too, but the system kept them isolated, unaware that so many of their fellow citizens felt the same way, and unable to come together to act.

This technique, used by totalitarians of all sorts, is called “preference falsification,” in which people are forced to profess belief in things that they know not to be true. If the powers that be are good at it, virtually every citizen can hate them and want them out, but no one will do anything because every citizen who feels that way thinks they’re the only one, or one of a tiny number.

In his classic book, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, economist Timur Kuran notes how governments, and social movements, do their best to enforce this sort of ideological uniformity. People tend to hide unpopular views to avoid ostracism or punishment; they stop hiding them when they feel safe.

This can produce rapid change: In totalitarian societies like the old Soviet Union, the police and propaganda organizations do their best to enforce preference falsification. Such regimes have little legitimacy, but they spend a lot of effort making sure that citizens don’t realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime. This works until something breaks the spell and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers — or even to the citizens themselves. Kuran calls this sudden change a “preference cascade,” and I believe that’s what’s happening here.

In America, the left spent years bullying people into accepting “woke” ideas on race, gender, and politics. There’s considerable reason to believe that a majority of Americans never accepted these ideas, but between constant media repetition, and the risk of being mobbed and canceled if you disagreed with them, most people for years were afraid to stand up.

But two things put a stop to that. One was Donald Trump’s election. The other – and the two are related – was Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now X, which is now a free-speech platform with roughly equal representation of Democrats and Republicans. Both had the effect of blowing up the lefty bubble and letting people realize that they, not the woke, were the actual majority.

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How We Know Guns Aren’t Albuquerque’s Problem

When New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham took her animosity toward the Second Amendment and ramped it up to 11, trying to ban all lawful carry in Albuquerque, she said it was in response to the rampant violent crime in the city. She called it a public health crisis and used the draconian restrictions we saw during COVID-19 to justify this particular draconian measure.

And, of course, she got slapped down over it.

But it’s clear that she never got the message regarding the right to keep and bear arms nor the fact that while the city does have a problem, it’s not guns that are causing it.

In fact, it’s probably something else fueling a lot of the problems.

The Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office seized 65,000 fentanyl pills and three guns on Tuesday during a search of an apartment off East Central.

Richard Cortez, 44, who authorities say lived in the apartment, is charged with drug trafficking and three counts of possession of a firearm by a felon.

Michael Herrera, 18, who was inside the apartment at the time of the raid, is charged with resisting, evading or obstructing an officer for not surrendering “for over 30 minutes.”

Both men were booked into the Metropolitan Detention Center. Neither man had an attorney listed in online court records.

Court records show Cortez was sentenced to prison for drug trafficking in 2010 and for years afterward bounced between prison and probation after repeated violations.

In 2016, a BCSO deputy arrested Cortez on felony drug possession, according to court records. Cortez faced another potential prison stretch, but the case was dismissed, and Cortez was set free after the deputy didn’t show up for court.

Prosecutors filed a motion to detain Cortez until trial following Tuesday’s seizure, calling him “dangerous.”

“The defendant is a major dealer of fentanyl in the Albuquerque area,” according to the motion. “He had three firearms ready for use.”

How could he possibly have gotten guns? Gun control laws are in place to prevent people like this from getting guns, after all.

Then again, there are laws intended to prevent people from getting 65,000 fentanyl pills, too, and we see how well they worked.

See, the issue with most violent crime is that the violence is often ancillary to something else. In the 1990s, when the homicide rate was so ridiculous, it was gangs and drugs. To some degree, that’s still the case. Convicted felons aren’t reformed, they’re just put back on the streets where they seek out ways to continue with their previous criminal endeavors.

In this case, Cortez was a known felon with a long and prodigious history as a criminal, only to be able to become a “major dealer of fentanyl in the Albuquerque area.”

It looks to me like putting him right back on the streets time and time again wasn’t really doing all that much, and knowing a deputy didn’t show up for court in 2016, which got his case dismissed makes it that much worse.

Let’s remember something, folks. If fentanyl is so heavily controlled–and yes, it is–and people like this jackwagon can get it, why does anyone believe you can keep someone like this disarmed? What makes them think that suddenly a law will be passed that will make it so he can’t get firearms from any source?

It’s insane.

Then again, what about gun control isn’t?

The Trillionaires of Mars

The first entity to establish a Mars colony will be the universe’s first trillionaire.

Lately, we’ve had a lot of puddlefish whining about how “we” shouldn’t go to Mars. Some of them actually think they get a vote, based on economic illiteracy and the delusion that SpaceX is somehow part of the US federal government. [Closed caption for the hard-of-thinking: it isn’t.]

But others just think they are giving good investment advice… SpaceX investors can do what they want, but Mars is a frozen wasteland full of nothing but near-vacuum and rocks.

So why would anyone want to go there?

Source: @cb_doge

Elon Musk likes to answer this question by pointing out that it’s not a good idea to store all humanity’s eggs in one basket. He’s right, but this kind of argument isn’t comprehensible to everyone, nor is it the full picture.

So now it’s the SF writer’s turn.

And therefore I present to you…

An Economic Roadmap for the Future of Humanity.

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The Decline and Fall of the Western Church

I read a heartbreaking column in the Deseret News on Friday. It was by a pastor named Ryan Burge. It was titled, “My church is closing, and I don’t know what comes next — for me, or America.” In the column, Burge tells how his congregation, First Baptist Church of Mount Vernon, Illinois, recently shuttered its doors for good. At one point, Burge questions whether he was ever fit to lead a church. That speaks highly of him since no pastor should ever look himself in the mirror and say, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” He also struggles with the fact that while his profile as a Christian academic grew, his congregation continued to age out and shrink.

While my online platform was rising and I was being offered a variety of opportunities to speak and write, things were continuing to decline at my little church. I would come from home from speaking at a conference that had a couple hundred in attendance to preach before a nearly empty sanctuary on Sunday morning.

Not all denominations are struggling, but many churches in America and the West are declining. But Burge is taking too much on himself. The deck was stacked against him. While the world may increasingly hold Christianity in contempt, we have often been complicit in our own destruction.

In “The Screwtape Letters,” Screwtape, a senior devil in Hell, writes to his nephew Wormwood. Wormwood is a junior tempter trying to win the soul of his “patient.”

The real trouble about the set your patient is living in is that it is merely Christian. They all have individual interests, of course, but the bond remains mere Christianity. What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call “Christianity And.”

You know—Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring. Work on their horror of the Same Old Thing.

 The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart—an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship.

The issue of “Christianity And” is not merely a stumbling block for the mainline Protestant denominations. It is true that those churches subscribe to ideas such as Christianity and LGBTQ+ or Christianity and Abortion. As a result, those denominations splinter, and their congregations shrink. I have heard them say that they are “small but mighty.” If they are mighty, it is because they have yoked themselves to the popular causes of the day.

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Notice that the AI actually doesn’t answer the question.
Garbage in/Garbage out

Take a minute to get through the accent. I wouldn’t say ‘education’ per se is the problem. An indoctrination of a partisan agenda feeding the normal fallen human condition is.

What if democracy is merely the politic or superstructure of a particular cultural stage? Simple mass literacy in that case, continuing advances in teaching and learning in secondary and post-secondary levels will necessarily upset democracy in the places where it first appeared. Secondary education and especially higher education will introduce the notion of inequality into the mental and ideological organization of developed societies. After a brief period of hesitation and scruples the more highly educated end up believing they are truly superior.

In developed countries, a new class is emerging that comprises roughly 20% of the population in terms of sheer numbers, but controls about half of each nation’s wealth. This new class has more and more trouble putting up with the constraints of universal suffrage. It is a surprising return to the world of Aristotle, in which oligarchy may replace democracy at the very moment when democracy is beginning to take hold in Eurasia, it is weakening in those places where it was born.

These are indeed curious democracies, in which the political system pits elitism against populism and vice-versa. And although universal suffrage persists in theory, the elites of right and left close ranks to block any reorientation of economic policies that would lead to greater equality.

The common understanding among the elite, reflection of a common superior language among them prevents any correcting of the political system facade when universal suffrage would suggest the possibility of crisis.

Emmanuel Todd, After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order, (2001)

The Top 11 Flags You Should Fly To Trigger Communist Enemies Of The People.

Corporate media recently took old smears about a Revolutionary War-era flag and applied them to Justice Samuel Alito after his wife allegedly displayed the “provocative” symbol in front of his home.

The meaning behind the “An Appeal To Heaven” flag, a pine-tree-adorned symbol used by squadrons of the Continental Navy during the Revolutionary War, is rather innocuous. George Washington’s secretary Col. Joseph Reed created the flag in 1775 to publicly display “an appeal to God to save the colonists from the King’s oppressive ruling.”

The same outlets fomenting fake scandal about the alleged Alito flag have never taken issue with any Americans displaying Black Lives Matter, Ukraine, pro-terrorist, and rainbow flags, despite their connections to anti-American agitation. The New York Times, however, suggested the historic “An Appeal To Heaven” flag was associated with a “push for a more Christian-minded government.”

Here are 11 flags you should fly to not only show your loyalty to God and country but also your disdain for the top enemy of the people that is constantly looking for ways to smear Americans who love their original flag and the Constitution it stands for.

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BLUF:

The United States makes up less than 5% of the global population, yet we Americans hold nearly 50% of civilian guns worldwide.
With all these guns, you’d expect America to be at the top of the charts in gun violence and deaths, right?

When you dive into the statistics, past the fear and the headlines, you find that the U.S. doesn’t even crack the top 10 globally for gun violence or deaths per capita.
“The U.S. has the 32nd-highest rate of deaths from gun violence in the world: 3.96 deaths per 100,000 people in 2019.”

Most gun violence in our nation isn’t scattered randomly across the vast landscapes of America.
No, it’s concentrated in just 2% of our counties.Over half of all our murders happen in these small pockets.

This isn’t just about advocating for the right to bear arms. It’s about advocating for the right to live in a society that tackles the root causes of its problems

Federal Court Rules Maryland Parents Can’t Opt Kids Out Of Classes With LGBT Content.

The Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled 2-1 against Maryland parents who sued their local school board for not letting their children in grades K-5 opt out of reading books supporting transgender ideology and gender transitioning.

The Montgomery County Public Schools board denied the parents their request to be notified when the books would be read to their children and the opportunity to opt out.

“The Board is violating the parents’ inalienable and constitutionally protected right to control the religious upbringing of their children, especially on sensitive issues concerning family life and human sexuality,” The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, litigated the lawsuit, stated, explaining:

In fall 2022, the Montgomery County Board of Education announced over 20 new “inclusivity” books for its pre-K through eighth grade classrooms. But rather than focusing on basic civility and kindness, these books champion pride parades, gender transitioning, and pronoun preferences for children.

For example, one book tasks three- and four-year-olds to search for images from a word list that includes “intersex flag,” “[drag] queen,” “underwear,” “leather,” and the name of a celebrated LGBTQ activist and sex worker. Another encourages fifth graders to discuss what it means to be “non-binary.” Other books advocate a child-knows-best approach to gender transitioning, telling students that a decision to transition doesn’t have to “make sense” and that doctors only “guess” when identifying a newborn’s sex anyway.

A district court ruled against the parents, prompting them to appeal to the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals, which denied the parents’ request for a preliminary injunction but allowed the possibility of changing its position once the classes have already been taught, writing:

We take no view on whether the Parents will be able to present evidence sufficient to support any of their various theories once they have the opportunity to develop a record as to the circumstances surrounding the Board’s decision and how the challenged texts are actually being used in schools.

At this early stage, however, given the Parents’ broad claims, the very high burden required to obtain a preliminary injunction, and the scant record before us, we are constrained to affirm the district court’s order denying a preliminary injunction.

Judge Marvin Quattlebaum dissented, writing, “I disagree with the majority’s conclusion that the parents have not produced enough evidence to establish that their free exercised rights have been burdened. The parents have met their burden. They have produced the books that no one disputes will be used to instruct their K-5 children. They produced declarations explaining in detail why the books conflict with their religious beliefs. They have produced the board’s own internal documents that show how it suggests teachers respond to students and parents who question the contents of the books.”

Boy Scouts of America changes name after 114 years to ‘boost inclusion’

“Scouting America”

Comment O’ The Day:

BSA was worried about losing donations and membership because they weren’t “inclusive” enough.

As a non-secular organization God was at their core belief. The BSA was totally inclusive provided you believed in God. Didn’t matter which one, as long as you believed. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc., all at a place within BSA. That was why Boy Scouts is a world wide organization.

But then atheists decided to tell what was essentially a religious group that they had to put aside their religious beliefs. That’s like atheists telling the Roman Catholic Church they had to accept non-believers and accommodate them, altering sermons, Bible studies, etc.

Then came allowing homosexual scout leaders. What a recipe for disaster, especially after the BSA already had a lot of baggage with male scout leaders molesting male scouts. Which no matter how much spin you put on it is homosexual pedophilia.

Then they had to allow girls and LBGTQEIEIO.

Somewhere along this slow motion train wreck the LDS, who were a huge subset of BSA, decided to have the its church form their own scouts. They up and left and took about 1/6th of all BSA revenue with them. Which ironically is what those trying to morph scouting to fit them should have done – form their own groups.

Now the perplexed leaders of BSA are renaming it to ‘Scouting America’, in order to further alienate their membership and donors.

This is nearing the end. Only a matter of time before they auger in. Another classic moral institution destroyed by the Church of Woke, Altar of Inclusiveness and Temple of Moloch.

This is what happens when you compromise your core principles. Pretty soon, you have no principles left.