Thin Mints, Samoas, and Peanut Butter Patties
A little conspiracy theory nonsense drizzled in fascism; why people have clashed with Girl Scouts and Girl Guides - and why you should enjoy your cookie booth score.
If you are in my circle at all, you know that the first 14 weeks 2025 were filled with Girl Scout cookies around finals and homework and work (and the grieving of this garbage world which is why I stopped writing anything other than to do lists). I lead my girls’ troop of 15 Daisies (bridging to Brownies this month!) and as the troop leader and cookie manager it was nonstop booths, paper orders, pickups from the ‘cookie cupboard’ and stressing out over doing math in multiples of 6 and the fact that the system said I had 118 boxes of cookies I most certainly did not have . (Council, if you read this - please make the cookies $5 again so my math is a little easier next year, I am begging you, and also let’s get a different computer system for logging all this.) The money just left the troop account and the rewards are in my hands and getting ready to be handed out to my girls, so I can officially say the 2025 cookie season is finished.
While the Girl Scouts of America has the most public facing reputation for selling those delicious (stressful) cookies. This causes a lot of people to assume that Girl Scouts are just focused on sales and baked goods - this misconception couldn’t be further from the truth. (And we’re going to talk about the why behind those recent headlines about cookie ingredients.)
Girl Scouts mission states;
“Girl Scouting builds girls of courage, confidence, and character, who make the world a better place. As Girl Scouts, girls discover the fun, friendship, and power of girls together. Girls grow courageous and strong through a wide variety of enriching experiences, such as field trips, skill-building sports clinics, community service projects, cultural exchanges, and environmental stewardships. Girl Scouts helps girls develop their full individual potential; relate to others with increasing understanding, skill, and respect; develop values to guide their actions and provide the foundation for sound decision making; and contribute to the improvement of society through their abilities, leadership skills, and cooperation with others.”
This all sounds amazing right? I have two daughters who I am trying to raise into cool adult women and I desperately want them to be environmental stewards, have leadership skills, and make the world better through practiced decision making.
People have had some kind of beef with the Girl Scouts mission since they started 113 years ago this year. The idea of girls and teens learning to step into their talents and power from a young age has been something of a boogey man for governments seeking to control flow of knowledge and information, and of course the idea that girls would want to be *gasp* leaders is horrifying to people, historically (and also currently). And Girl Scouts takes a particularly nonsensical level of criticism purely because they have remained steadfast in their mission - which is inherently going to go against other fascistic ideals, by elevating women to leadership positions.
The founder of GSUSA was actually pretty progressive by the standards of her time, making her mark on her organization from the beginning - she was a disability advocate, which makes sense as she was severely hearing impaired early on in life. But she also made sure that Girl Scouts was inclusive of all girls from various social backgrounds and different religions. Girl Scouts continued her push to be inclusive by desegregating their troops on their own after persistent and consistent work from Black parents in the DC area, eventually earning praise from Martin Luther King, Jr as a “force for desegregation”. You can read more about this, here. (In contrast, the Boy Scouts of America didn’t desegregate until 1974, just a year before the Girl Scouts voted in their first Black president, Gloria Dean Randall Scott.)
Children and young adults have always found groups and programs to be involved in, and it’s a global phenomenon. In World War 2, we know that the “Hitler Youth” was started and pushed forward as the way to indoctrinate (this the proper use of that word) the German children and teens. (Side note, I know that we’re so incredibly over all the comparisons between current times and the 1930s, but scouting organizations did some really important stuff then, and also… we keep hearing the comparisons for a reason.)
Something that Hitler did as well was ban and shut down the previous scouting organizations (including Girl Scouts - who were key in some resistance movements in the concentration camps, and were executed for the ‘crime’ of being scouts. You can read about that here but I will say this is incredibly upsetting to read about). I don’t know about you, but I have yet to meet a teenager who hears the words “You can’t do this” and responds with “Oh, okay! That’s fine!” What happened was the Edelweiss Pirates - a group of teens who gathered with the specific intent to counteract and resist the Hitler Youth.
In Poland, scouting organizations taught native language and culture - something also outright banned in the occupied area. With most girl guides having a focus on fighting for the greater good, many of those Polish scouts felt compelled to fight for their country, including in combat. Fascist regimes do not love scouting and its nature of being a mouthpiece for youth to be convinced and united, and it certainly does not like when that mouthpiece is for young women.
There was even a push in the 50’s to call the Girl Scouts communists… Far right groups accused them of having ‘radical beliefs’ that would undo the American way of life. It’s also just so interesting that it happened after they committed to desegregating troops, right? (For those who were dozing in history class, it’s not surprising, and yes that was on purpose.)
So what about all of those current law suits?
As history has progressed and the it’s become clear that the Girl Scouts in the United States are going to continue to ruffle feathers - and it’s almost always because they’ve chosen being ‘inclusive’ in some way or another or they’ve continued empowering women and girls, in order to stay true to the mission that Juliet Gordon Low had for the organization. The current cookie lawsuits are no exception to that.
Right smack in the middle of cookie season this year, a lawsuit from an alt-right group called “Moms Across America” dropped, claiming that there were heavy metals in the cookies. (Spoiler alert, there aren’t any more in our cookies than there are in other foods that we eat consistently.) The lawsuit claimed the metal levels were at a higher level than safe, and while the ‘study’ has some methodology issues, the main question I have is why Girl Scouts? Why not, say, testing the Boy Scouts of America popcorn? Why not test Frito-Lay’s full variety of bagged chips that are out year round for all of us? The published study mentioned the organization of the Girl Scouts and their bylaws more than it talked about, say, their methods used in said “study”, or even why they were comparing the levels of solid cookies to the levels allowed in water.
Even though people debunked the study almost immediately (a child would have to eat 9,000 cookies in a single day to reach levels considered harmful), the effects were felt from multiple troops - a quick search on the r/girlscouts subreddit says that troop leaders and cookie managers were feeling it, and multiple booths had people comment on the study to them as a reason for turning down a purchase. Joe Rogan, not exactly notorious for his thorough fact-checking or researching, put it on his podcast and away it went. A cruise through TikTok shows a host of mommy bloggers and weird wellness bros doing extremely misinformed videos about it and bullying troops during their cookie booths. So freaking strange.
Who is “Moms Across America”? They’re a group professing to “seek the truth” about what is in our foods, and educating people on the risks of GMOs and pesticides. They’re currently listed as a 501(c)3 however they have obviously decided to align themselves conservatively by endorsing RFK Jr. (who was also on the Joe Rogen podcast) and supporting his “MAHA” approach to health and wellness. His opinions on transgender and neurodivergent kids and people in general are widely known to be completely.
If I were an alt-right mom group wanting to go after Girl Scouts for including (and accepting and encouraging) trans girls, I would almost certainly utilize the ‘wellness to alt-right pipeline’ to get moms and concerned parents on their side via concerns and anxiety about feeding their kids because of course you want your kids to be healthy. This is a pretty well-known tactic that the right uses (“What about the kids?!”) and the Girl Scouts ended up as a convenient target under the perfect storm of transphobia and lack of understanding about health regulations - with a little extra added diet culture for ‘fun’ - because of COURSE we’re going to comment on bodies around developing young girls.
The Girl Scouts and Girl Guides world wide are continuing to come under attack due to their commitment to being inclusive of trans girls and their families (special shout out to the Archdiocese of Cincinnati for being particularly weird about it), and are seeing their outreach programs for girls in lower income communities get huge funding cuts. It’s coming at a time when having organizations around to empower girls to speak their mind could not be more crucial as we watch more and more countries, and states here at home, strip rights away from women and girls. While I don’t see the weirdness slowing down, I am extremely heartened by the approach that the Girl Scouts in America have taken as an organization - doubling down on their inclusivity and their DEI efforts. So, if you were one of the people who bought some of the 200 million boxes of cookies (specifically the people who helped my girls’ troop sell 2,080 packages) then enjoy your thin mints with peace of mind and a happy conscience .