Certain things are red flags. If your teen suddenly starts smoking, getting tattoos and body piercings, and associating with a rough crowd, you know he’s on a bad road. You also should think twice about having him babysit a young sibling or giving him the car keys for a night. Yet today, we give the most bizarre, most damaged, most troubled among us the car keys — then we’re surprised that our civilization is crashing.
Enter cross-dresser Sam Brinton, whom the Biden administration had made a deputy assistant secretary at the Office of Nuclear Energy. Brinton loves attention, and got perhaps a variety of it he didn’t bargain for when he was arrested on three different recent occasions for stealing women’s luggage from airports and then wearing the clothing therein. What’s more, not only was he seen displaying this clothing in videos and photos, but now some of it has been discovered at his home.
As Fox News reported Wednesday, “Police returned articles of clothing to a Tanzanian fashion designer they obtained while executing a search warrant of disgraced ex-Department of Energy (DOE) official Sam Brinton’s home.”
“The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) Police Department confirmed the clothes were returned to Asya Khamsin, who has alleged Brinton publicly wore clothing she designed, but which was in her bag she reported missing at Ronald Reagan National Airport years ago,” Fox continued. “In May, MWAA police officers executed a search warrant in connection with the case at Brinton’s Maryland residence.”
Thankfully, Brinton is no longer a high Biden administration official, having been let go after his second luggage theft; due to these crimes he is, as Fox put it, “disgraced.” But is, perhaps, the real disgrace that it took these crimes for Brinton to be considered disgraced?
Many would say that, morally speaking (not criminally), Brinton’s luggage lifts were some of his lesser transgressions. Yet as far as his federal government hiring prospects went, it didn’t matter that he “identifies as an imaginary creature known as a ‘non-binary,’” as commentator Andrea Widburg puts it. It didn’t matter that he apparently lied about his past, claiming he was abused via conversion therapy (by order of his Southern Baptist missionary parents), a tale that was challenged by a homosexual-activist journalist. It also didn’t matter that he frequently sought attention by cross-dressing and publicizing his bondage activities, wherein he derived pleasure from “dominating” men who pretended to be dogs.
Actually, though, strike that.
All the above did matter — a lot.
In this identity-politics time, they’re precisely why Brinton was hired.
Now, again, who (or what) is the disgrace?
To cement the point, take a gander at Brinton in the videos below and ask, “Would I hire this man to watch my dog?”
In other words, there wasn’t just a red flag with Brinton, but ones coming from all directions, jumping up and down and spinning around. Widburg provides perspective, writing:
Naturally, we don’t expect the agencies charged with vetting someone for security clearance to comb through years of airport CC footage to determine whether a potential employee was stealing women’s clothes. However, we do expect common sense from our government. Common sense says that a man credibly challenged for lying about his past, who believes he’s the sexual equivalent of a unicorn (i.e., a non-existent being), and who puts his weird sexual peccadilloes up on social media probably has…um…issues.
People who manifestly have issues shouldn’t be anywhere near America’s security. I don’t care if he graduated at the top of his class at MIT. This guy was like a firefly in heat, flashing out his behavior as hard as he could. Only a government in the grip of madness would ignore those signs and hire him anyway.
The rule here is simple: If you wouldn’t allow a person to babysit your child or even perhaps your dog, don’t trust him with national security. The problem here, though, is that what once were recognized as red flags are now considered green lights. And how did we get here?
It didn’t happen overnight. Rather, it’s the result of decades of calling bad “good” and, correspondingly, re-branding the vice-ridden as virtuous.
Just consider how, decades ago already, prostitutes would be portrayed positively in movies and shows; examples are the “Rita” character in ’70s series The Rockford Files and “Ophelia” in 1983’s Trading Places. The message: They’re just like your daughter — only, with a different career.
Then there were efforts to normalize cross-dressers, such as with the Beverly LaSalle character on the ’70s sitcom All in the Family. Ditto with homosexuals; e.g., “Jodie” on the sitcom Soap (’77-’81). In fact, as with “Vaughan Cunningham” in the 1997 film Sling Blade, such an individual is often portrayed as a voice of reason, the story’s most enlightened, well-adjusted character.
(This legitimization process has even been effected with pedophile/pederast characters; examples are movies L.I.E. [2001] and For a Lost Soldier [1992].)
In contrast, we’re now supposed to view a straight, white, Christian man with suspicion: “He’s too much of a boy scout. He must be hiding something!” And such a person could be, too. Yet as with MUSS man “Stacie-Marie Laughton,” a Democrat and ex-New Hampshire state representative arrested earlier this year for distributing child porn, the reality is that those flaunting sin are also often hiding something — a lot more sin.
The bottom line is that hiring Sam Brinton was like a guy trying to pet the tiger at the zoo: You know that common sense and self-preservation are not instincts he possesses.
