Last week the Boy Scouts of America made the surprise announcement that their organization would soon allow girls to join and eventually attain the rank of Eagle Scout. And, contrary to popular belief, troops will not be co-ed — boys and girls will have their own separate programs.
And as National Review‘s John Carlson pointed out, this decision was not made by “PC corporate offices” or “left-wing lawyers,” but rather the BSA board itself — and unanimously at that.
But that didn’t stop the kvetching and fearmongering from some on the far-right, such as Proud Boys member and walking cosmic brain Jason Van Dyke. In an episode of the online show West Is The Best, Van Dyke — who once sat on the Board of Directors for the Foundation for the Marketplace of Ideas, a white nationalist hate group — complained that that women were invading a male-only space.
“This is the Boy Scouts, it was always intended to be separate from the Girl Scouts,” he said, “There are are only two genders. There are differences between men and women, and those differences should be respected. Men should have their own space, like they have in the Proud Boys and like up until recently they had in the Boy Scouts of America.”
And he, somewhat amazingly, said that “when men don’t have their own space” it results in sexual harassment and sexual assault, as with the Harvey Weinstein case. Van Dyke didn’t elaborate on his reasons for connecting the Boy Scouts decision with Weinstein, but instead went into a tangent on child sex abuse in Hollywood.
He brought up the allegations of sexual abuse made by actors Corey Feldman and Corey Haim (d. 2010), and hypothesized that Weinstein might have been their abuser. He recalled an interview in which Feldman claimed pedophilia is “relatively common” in Hollywood, and that he and Corey Haim were abused by a “Hollywood mogul.”
“When this story broke, I got to thinking, ‘Who is powerful enough for this person, who’s obviously had this sex abuse affect him his whole life, to be silent so as to prevent this man from being thrown into prison where he belongs?’ And I was thinking one of the only people I can think of in Hollywood that has this kind of power is Harvey Weinstein.”