From the decline phase to the collapse phase
Behold your nation in this dark, cold June
Scenes from a flatlining nation.
The White House has banned trans influencer Rose Montoya after she flashed her breasts at President Biden’s Pride party — blasting the stunt as “inappropriate and disrespectful.”
Montoya, 27, was barred from the executive mansion on Tuesday, as footage went viral of her pulling her shirt and cupping her breasts moments after meeting Biden on the South Lawn at a Pride party Saturday.
In a statement to The Post on Tuesday, a White House spokesperson said she flouted basic etiquette and is persona non grata at future events.
“This behavior is inappropriate and disrespectful for any event at the White House,” the flack said.
“It is not reflective of the event we hosted to celebrate LGBTQI+ families or the other hundreds of guests who were in attendance. Individuals in the video will not be invited to future events.”
Former president Donald Trump faced down the most serious threat to his personal liberty and political future like just another day on the campaign trail — waving to fans, giving a thumbs up, swinging by a storied eatery, soliciting donations and planning a spirited speech to supporters at one of his properties.
In New Jersey:
Trump returned to his golf club here Tuesday night for a prime-time speech in front of Republican donors, party officials, past and present advisers and politicians. Staff spent the sunny afternoon setting up a stage festooned with flags in front of a portico with a faint resemblance to the White House as soundspeakers blasted Trump’s signature rally playlist.
Trump walked through the doors miming wonder at the adulation that poured over him and mouthing “thank you” as the crowd chanted his name. The speech took a dark turn, however, as Trump attacked Biden and special counsel Jack Smith in vicious terms and portrayed his arrest as a political persecution like in repressive regimes.
“If the communists get away with this, it won’t stop with me. They will not hesitate to ramp up their persecution of Christians, pro-life activists, parents attending school board meetings, and even future Republican candidates,” Trump said. “I am the only one that can save this nation.”
The audience included Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), longtime New York GOP chairman Ed Cox, former White House aides Kash Patel and Sebastian Gorka, election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, televangelist Robert Jeffress, former Senate candidate Bernie Moreno of Ohio, former Senate candidate Leora Levy of Connecticut, former Nevada secretary of state candidate Jim Marchant and potential Senate candidate Jeffrey Gunter of Nevada.
My most recent post dealt with what each of post-America’s two political parties is embracing as a substitute for reality. It seems that each day exposes a new level of desperation with which they’re clinging to these substitutes.
What made the Biden administration think lines could be drawn for a White House pride party? The president (or as a chyron briefly flashed on the “fair and balanced” Fox News channel characterized him, “wannabe dictator”) had just posed for a picture with this pitiable creature. Has someone who’s spent his entire adult life as a politician not developed any sense of what kinds of ways of carrying oneself indicate that someone he’s meeting is bad news? The entire trans movement is about obliterating societal guardrails. Waiting until you had a gaggle of them at “the people’s house” leaves no room for what-ifs. Actually, make that inevitabilities.
What’s the money line in the Very Stable Genius’s belching-forth of self-adulation and vitriol at Bedminster? It’s surely “I am the only one that can save this nation,” isn’t it? This seven-year-old in a geriatric body, with a miles-long record of betrayal of all kinds (marital cheating, stiffing contractors, responding with glee to his vice-president’s endangerment) wants to position himself as the last hope for a restoration of decency and normalcy.
And it’s ironic that Fox was running that chyron, directed at Biden, on the evening of Trump’s bellowing. This position is classic dictator rhetoric. Can there be any doubt that, in a second term, he’d surround himself with third-rate hacks slavishly eager to stomp all opposition to his solipsistic vision into the dust?
And still we apply the balm of well-I’ll-just-take-care-of-my-immediate-realm-of-concerns-and-do-what-I-can-to-contribute-to-my-local-community, as if we have no idea how this process of decline and collapse got underway, or the degree to which it’s permeated every level of post-American life. Do you really think you can escape it in your neighborhood and town?
No, folks, we have completely jettisoned any notion of seriousness. And the momentum of the fruits of that is only going to accelerate.
Meanwhile, two developments on the world stage point out that seriousness might be of some use to us.
China has been spying on the U.S. from Cuba for years, according to a Biden administration official.
The admission came days after the Biden administration denied a Wall Street Journal report on Thursday that China and Cuba had reached an agreement to put an electronic eavesdropping facility in Cuba — calling the story inaccurate.
But on Saturday, the administration said that China has had a listening post in Cuba for years, that it was a problem the administration had “inherited” and that China had even upgraded the facility in 2019.
And from Belarus:
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has said his country has started taking delivery of Russian tactical nuclear weapons, some of which he said were three times more powerful than the atomic bombs the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
The deployment is Moscow's first move of such warheads - shorter-range less powerful nuclear weapons that could potentially be used on the battlefield - outside Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.
One would think such developments might break through our frivolous giggle fit.
Those days are over.