The news that a prominent Energy Department official has been sent packing by the Biden administration shouldn’t come as a surprise. Sam Brinton, the (former) senior-most nonbinary member of the administration, has been accused of stealing multiple suitcases carrying items worth thousands of dollars.
The real question is why Brinton was hired in the first place.
Brinton made headlines after being appointed as the Energy Department’s deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition because he claims to be “gender-fluid” and has been publicly involved in a number of inappropriate and bizarre kinks. Last month, for example, Brinton participated in a leather-kink conference, where he delivered a seminar on the science of spanking and “turning butts red” under the pseudonym “NuclearNerd.”
Really, Brinton’s very visible involvement in these kinds of sexual displays should have been reason enough not to give him a U.S. government job. It may not be the administration’s job to police what people do behind closed doors, but at the very least it could attempt to hire people who are able to represent this government with decorum and decency.
Now it turns out that Brinton was responsible for something much more serious than tying his sexual partners up like dogs. He’s an alleged thief who stole women’s suitcases in the Minneapolis-St. Paul and Las Vegas airports while working as a member of the administration. The Las Vegas incident allegedly occurred in July, just 18 days after he was hired by Biden’s team, and the Minneapolis theft reportedly took place in September.
This is extremely embarrassing for the Biden administration and could have been prevented had those in charge decided to apply some common sense to their hiring decisions. The reason they didn’t in Brinton’s case is obvious: they were much more concerned about which boxes he’d check on their identity politics roster than about his ability to represent the administration professionally.
This is a pattern with the Biden administration. They have elevated several officials whose strongest qualification for the job was their race or sex. Vice President Kamala Harris, for example, is disastrously bad at her job and was only brought on because Biden made a very public commitment to choose a black woman as his running mate.
Likewise, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra had no background or experience in public health (other than harassing religious healthcare institutions in court), yet was appointed to lead a health agency in the midst of a once-in-a-century pandemic because he checked two boxes: he’s Hispanic, and he’s a rabid leftist culture warrior. In fact, it was public knowledge at the time that the only reason Becerra was being considered for the job was because Biden was under pressure from Hispanic activists to “diversify his Cabinet.” A number of prominent medical groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, even asked Biden to appoint a “qualified physician” to the role given the extraordinary public health circumstances.
Instead, the Biden administration gave the public a health secretary who doesn’t know anything about public health; a vice president who doesn’t know anything about anything; and an energy official who allegedly steals women’s luggage for fun when he’s not attending kink conferences. Maybe if the administration stopped focusing on appearances, it could focus on sending their best — instead of whatever poor excuse of a practice squad this is.
