(LifeSiteNews) — Amid reports of lapses in protective service training for its agents and its devastatingly poor coverage of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump resulting in injuries and death, the U.S. Secret Service is prioritizing sending employees to an LGBTQ+ “Out & Equal” Summit.
News that the Secret Service is sending staff to the Summit at Disney World in Orlando, Florida, is “rankling many rank-and-file special agents and Uniformed Division officers,” according to Susan Crabtree, RealClearPolitics national political correspondent.
Agents and other staff will attend the Disney Summit to learn and embrace their queer “magic” and “magnificence” as recounted in a video clip of last year’s “Out & Equal Workplace Summit Highlights.”
“A large number of Secret Service employees are working so hard — many seven-day work weeks with no time off — that they’ve already hit their ‘supermax limit’ for overtime pay, meaning they can no longer receive overtime for their work,” Crabtree noted. “One special agent characterized that phenomenon as essentially working for free.”
“Many special agents and Uniformed Division officers say the call for nominees for the LGBTQ+ conference at the height of campaign season is tone-deaf when resources are stretched so thin — especially in the wake of the J13 assassination attempt against former Pres. Trump that killed Corey Comperatore,” Crabtree said. She continued:
The email also comes less than a week after the Secret Service announced that its employees are so overworked by the security requirements of protecting former Pres. Trump, JD Vance, Kamala Harris, Tim Walz + other protectees, as well as the United Nations General Assembly, scheduled for NYC later this month, that the U.S. military is being called on to supplement Secret Service personnel. That help from DoD will continue throughout 2024 through at least Inauguration Day, the USSS announced Thursday.
Senator Josh Hawley: ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me’
The news, treated as a non-story by woke legacy media, has been met with alarm in conservative circles.
“I wish Secret Service had held a conference called ‘How to Protect Presidential Candidates and Former Presidents,’ or maybe ‘Don’t Leave a Rooftop Unattended,’” Republican U.S. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah wrote on X.
“Instead, Secret Service holds events like this one — even though it has nothing to do with keeping protectees safe,” Lee said.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Republican U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri wrote. “Agents assigned to Trump in Butler were only given online zoom training — but Secret Service has the resources for a DEI summit in Orlando? This is beyond outrageous.”
“Secret Service can afford to send agents to DEI Camp at Disney but don’t have the resources to make sure protectees don’t get shot???” Ashley Hayek said on X.
“This is a mind-blowing report. Unbelievable that they are capped for overtime and still forced to work,” JC said on X. “They risk losing a lot of good candidates for recruitment with rules like this.”
Just the tip of the National Intelligence/National Security rainbow iceberg
The recent communication from the Secret Service to its staff is not just a one-off instance of pro-LGBTQ fervor within the U.S. Intelligence community. On the contrary, it is just the tip of a large LGBTQ National Intelligence/National Security rainbow iceberg.
The Secret Service along with the entire U.S. intelligence community which is composed of 17 different agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Department of Homeland Security, and the intelligence arms of each branch of the U.S. military, has a decades-long history of pioneering LGBTQ affiliations, predating and even outpacing the woke corporate world.
The “Out & Equal” website features more than 250 corporate and government “partners,” with Apple, Airbus, Boeing, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Dell Technologies, and Experian among the organization’s top donors.
Government “partners” include agencies critical to the safety, health, and well-being of all Americans: CIA, the United States Intelligence Community, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the Department of Energy, the Naval Nuclear Laboratory, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
The office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) boasted in 2017 of “IC (Intelligence Community) Pride” dating at least as far as 1996:
IC Pride stems from early pioneering efforts at both CIA and NSA. Chartered at CIA in 1996, the Agency Network of Gay and Lesbian Employees was the first employee resource group within the IC.
In 1999, the Gay, Lesbian or Bisexual Employees became officially recognized as an NSA Employee Organization.
By 2008, other agencies, such as NGA, also formed LGBTA groups or special emphasis programs. IC Pride was created in 2009 with only a vision, a chairperson, and an executive champion, officially launching in 2011.
Since then, IC Pride has quickly matured, drawing upon ODNI’s IC leadership role to identify and shape LGBTA community priorities and implement best practices across the Community.
At the time, IC Pride had just won Out & Equal’s “Outie” award for “advancing global workplace equality for LGBT employees,” beating Fortune 500 peer groups, including Comcast NBC Universal, Deutsche Bank, Verizon, and AT&T.
As early as 2018, IC Pride formed an “IC-wide transgender working group, partnered with ODNI (Office of the Director of National Intelligence) to develop agency policy guidance for the inclusion of transgender and gender nonconforming employees.
Ric Grenell
In 2020, many were surprised when then-President Donald Trump tapped homosexual Richard Grenell to head DNI, making him the first openly gay White House cabinet member in history.
After leaving his position in the Bush administration as the United States’ United Nations spokesperson, Grenell publicly condemned the Bush White House for opposing U.N. resolution urging the full acceptance of homosexuality.
Evangelical leader Gary Bauer, a former member of the U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom, said at the time that while Grenell “is not weak on defense(.) … Conservative pro-family leaders are disappointed because Grenell has been an outspoken advocate of redefining normal marriage.”
“Grenell has made a particular crusade of the marriage issue, with a kind of unhinged devotion that suggests a man with questionable judgment,” the Witherspoon Institute’s Matthew J. Franck wrote tin a National Review piece.
“Rick Grenell has proven in his work for the Trump administration that he is a gay activist first and a loyal Republican second,” Peter LaBarbera, founder and president of Americans for Truth about Homosexuality, told LifeSiteNews after Grenell’s appointment was announced. “He has made it his primary mission to work for the normalization of homosexuality worldwide, which would seem to be more of an Obama foreign policy goal than a Trump goal.”
In retrospect, with the sprawling, decades-long history of the Intelligence Community’s affinity for LGBTQ inclusion and promotion, the choice of Grenell should have been no surprise at all or should the Secret Service’s ill preparedness to protect from harm those whom they are charged to protect.