In the opening of the trailer for the PBS documentary on the group Radical Monarchs, the group leaders says to raise your hand if you ever felt left out at school. In my head, I saw the hand of every person in the world who has ever gone to school going up. But that doesn’t square with radical indoctrination so let’s leave the fact that at some point, for many different reasons everyone feels left out. Thus, the birth of a new group. A group that would have been fathered by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, if they were not men of their time and racist against Brown people.

Let’s take a gander at the trailer for the Radical Monarchs:

Their once was a man named Adolf who would have loved that kind of talk. We are grateful to Not The Bee without them we might never have heard of this Brown Shirt empowerment organization. Because of that article, we looked at the Radical Monarchs website. Whoa! Nelly. Welcome to Radical Monarchs:

WE ARE RADICAL FIERCE STRONG POWERFUL CONFIDENT BEAUTIFUL
The Radical Monarchs create opportunities for young girls & gender expansive youth of color to form fierce friendships, celebrate their identities and contribute radically to their communities.

Let’s leave aside “gender expansive” for a moment. If you are thinking Girl Scouts, you are barking up the dogma. Radical Monarchs don’t sell delicious cookies where 100% of the profits stays with the local council. Pfft. You can earn badges:

You can only learn regular coding with the Girl Scouts, but with the Radical Monarchs you can learn Radical Coding. And, you can learn about failed radical groups from the recent past. This is from the Not The Bee article:

It’s Saturday morning and while other scouting troops are at shopping centers selling cookies, members of the Radical Monarchs are excited to start their field trip to the Black Panther Museum in West Oakland.

While other scouting troops are having fun ,while at the same time learning practical life skills in the areas of sales, marketing, inventory control and how to present yourself in a respectful and professional manner, the Radical Monarchs are being indoctrinated in the machinations of a Marxist-Leninist black power political organization.

Not to put to fine a point on it, but FAILED machinations. The Brown Shirts of Germany would love this, except no girls allowed and they were not gender expansive. They were weird for the whole two genders thing. Kathryn Styers Martinez wrote this for Minneapolis Public Radio without acknowledging other associations with brown berets or vests:

Radical Monarchs wear vests reminiscent of Brownies, but their focus is very different.

The berets they wear signify their radical roots, connecting them to activist organizations like the Brown Berets that were part of the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles or the Black Panther Party, whose leader, Huey P. Newton, was famously photographed wearing a beret sitting on a rattan chair, holding a rifle and spear.

Of course, the radically aligned, fart parcels at Salon wrote about the Radical Monarchs three years ago:

In 2015, a group of young girls wearing matching brown berets and uniforms, decorated with colorful badges, arrived at a Black Lives Matter protest in Oakland, CA. The group, aged from 8 to 10 years old, looked like your typical Girl Scout troop, but instead of selling cookies, they were calling for justice and reform.

This troop is now called the Radical Monarchs, an organization made to empower young girls of color to celebrate their identities and learn about social justice. The Radical Monarchs point not only to the future of girl troops, but also to the bright future of youth activism and social justice.

A core mission of the Radical Monarchs is centering girls of color. “Girls of color and girl identifiees of color live at the margins of so many different oppressions,” Anayvette Martinez, cofounder of the Radical Monarchs, told Salon. They’re often othered or excluded, so having a space made for and by girls of color is rare. The Radical Monarchs reveals the power of friendship among girls of color, or what they call “fierce sisterhood.” The environment fosters radical self-love and celebrates individuality.

I am an old-fashioned White woman but I think these girls wouldn’t be as oppressed, othered or excluded, if they learned the lessons of cookie sales. Marketing, presenting yourself and staying with it. Plus, the profits might allow them to fund another troop. After almost ten years and a documentary, plus the love thrown at them from the legacy media, there are only a total of 104 little Radical Monarchs floating around.

It’s hard to grow when you don’t have a great product, results in growing young ladies with influence or delicious cookies. Mmmm. Thin Mints or Radical Coding?

Featured Image: dignidadrebelde/flickr.com/cropped/Creative Commons