Right-Wing, Fox & Friends Warn Girl Scouts Promote ‘Liberal Agenda’

Start your day with TPM.
Sign up for the Morning Memo newsletter

Right-wing bloggers and Fox News have managed to squeeze in one more liberal conspiracy theory before the end of 2011.

The controversy is over a section in the Girl Scouts’ media guide that advises readers to use sites like snopes.com and MediaMatters to fact-check what they read on the Internet. Because, as Steve Doocy put it on Fox & Friends on Thursday, MediaMatters is “clearly a lefty blog,” and the Girl Scouts telling members to turn to them means they must secretly be in the tank for the left.

Glenn Beck’s site The Blaze first wrote about the guide on Tuesday, and said that it was pointed out to them by a parent of Sydney Volankski, a fifteen-year old former Girl Scout who left the organization in 2010 when she says she realized the organization has a “clear liberal ideology.”

In response, she started a blog called “Speak Now: Girl Scouts,” and on Thursday she popped up on Fox News.

Doocy asked Volanski how she “started noticing, kind of, what you would feel is a liberal agenda” in the Girl Scouts.

“My sister and I started a website to help inform families of the more leftward leanings of Girl Scouts because they promise to be neutral politically and about certain social issues,” Volanski explained, “but when you examine the women that they promote and the websites and books that they refer girls to, there is a clear liberal ideology, like with the MediaMatters site.”

“For eight years we were in Girl Scouts and we didn’t realize that Girl Scouts was promoting such a liberal ideology,” she added.

Watch the segment here, complete with a “Liberals, Socialists, Democrats” title card:

The story was picked up by a number of right-wing bloggers, including one at Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government who quipped: “Think twice before buying Girl Scout cookies next year.”

Latest Muckraker
Comments
Masthead Masthead
Founder & Editor-in-Chief:
Executive Editor:
Managing Editor:
Associate Editor:
Editor at Large:
General Counsel:
Publisher:
Head of Product:
Director of Technology:
Associate Publisher:
Front End Developer:
Senior Designer: