IS NO NUDITY ON THE WHITE HOUSE LAWN REALLY TOO MUCH TO ASK?

National Review

 

Is ‘No Nudity on the White House Lawn’ Really Too Much to Ask?

 

People attend a Pride Celebration hosted by President Joe Biden on the South Lawn of the White House, in Washington, D.C., June 10, 2023.(Anna Rose Layden/Reuters)

By JIM GERAGHTY

June 14, 2023 10:31 AM

 

On the menu today: Sure, it’s just one social-media influencer who chose to bare breasts on the White House lawn during the Pride event on Saturday. But perhaps it is what inevitably happens when people are bombarded with messages to “be yourself” or “express yourself” and no one ever bothers to teach the less indulgent lesson that certain places are to be treated with reverence, and that no you can’t “be yourself” or “express yourself” however you wish, regardless of the time and place. Or perhaps Saturday’s embarrassment is an inevitable collision of a White House that is convinced that social-media influencers are irreplaceable messaging allies, and a social-media ecosystem that rewards provocation, controversy, and attention-seeking in all forms. Meanwhile, President Biden’s memory fails him again, contemplating Ron DeSantis’s current moves, and the administration’s go-to move when it comes to bad news from China.

 

When ‘Be Yourself’ Goes Wrong

 

You know, I really figured I would have written that headline during Bill Clinton’s presidency.

 

Rose Montoya, a “transgender-identifying male and Idaho-based model who became famous for TikTok content” chose to bare breasts during the White House Pride event Saturday. The model did so on camera and shared the footage on social media. By Tuesday, the White House had issued a statement denouncing Montoya. “This behavior is inappropriate and disrespectful for any event at the White House,” the spokesperson 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.”

 

During yesterday’s briefing, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre elaborated, “That type of behavior is, as I said, unacceptable. It’s not appropriate. It’s disrespectful. And let’s not — it really does not reflect the event that we hosted to celebrate the LGBTQ+ families — again, hundreds of families who were here to celebrate their community and who were here in attendance.”

 

Shortly before the flashing, Biden posed for pictures with Montoya. I wish Biden had seen the shocking moment, because I would like to think that even in our octogenarian president’s foggier state, he would have objected right then and there. Maybe Biden would have demanded Montoya be removed, or perhaps the president would have taken the moment to explain to Montoya why the White House has certain standards and expectations of conduct.

 

Perhaps we shouldn’t feel just anger at Montoya; perhaps this demonstration of egregiously narcissistic behavior warrants some pity. It appears no one ever taught this person why certain places are to be treated with reverence and cannot be treated like the Playboy mansion or Bourbon Street in New Orleans during Mardi Gras or any other location of raucous debauchery. There are times and places in this life where the rules — written and unwritten — must take priority over your own impulses and desires. There is a reason that some religious sites ask you to remove your hats and other religious sites ask you to cover your heads. It is a demonstration of the attendee’s recognition that, “This place is different, this place is significant, and this place is associated with a power or institution or being that is more important than what I want at any given moment.”

 

In our society, we are regularly bombarded with messages to “be yourself” or “express yourself” or “don’t let others silence your voice.” But there are indeed times in life when it is important to be silent. Life is full of times when what is going on around you is more important than self-expression — although I suppose in some corners of modern American society, that idea is almost blasphemous.

 

This is a free country, and the U.S. has many places where consenting adults can engage in all manner of sexual activity. But the public areas of the White House are not those places.

 

If you ever get the opportunity to visit the White House, I recommend you do so; public tours are available but limited. The White House has been the home of every president since John Adams in 1800. The British burned it to the ground during the War of 1812. This is where Abraham Lincoln presided over the Civil War and sought to restore the Union and reunite the country; this is where Franklin Roosevelt led the country through the Great Depression and World War II; this is where Harry S. Truman made the decision to drop the atomic bomb; this is where John F. Kennedy and his advisers labored to prevent the Cuban Missile Crisis from turning into an all-out world-devastating nuclear war. The White House may well have been the target of the fourth plane on 9/11.

 

The decisions made in that building shaped this country and set its course. Whatever you think of the man currently sitting at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, the institution of the presidency and the president’s official residence deserve to be treated with respect. More than a few soldiers and veterans have had to remind themselves, “We salute the rank, not the man.”

 

The importance of the White House in our nation’s history is one of the reasons some people are irritated at the current administration’s decision to temporarily push aside the American flag and make the Pride Flag front and center, in an apparent violation of the U.S. Flag Code stating, “The flag of the United States of America should be at the center and at the highest point of the group when a number of flags of States or localities or pennants of societies are grouped and displayed from staffs.”

 

Today is Flag Day, by the way.

 

What Should the White House Have Expected from a ‘Social-Media Influencer’?

 

Somehow, it is less than shocking that the attendee of the White House event who did something so unacceptable, inappropriate, and disrespectful was a “social-media influencer.”

 

Do you remember back in 2015, when the White House communications team chose to have President Obama interviewed by the YouTube “star” famous for eating cereal from the bathtub she was sitting in?

 

The Biden White House continues to see “social-media influencers” as a surprisingly important part of its communications efforts. Back in March 2022, “30 top TikTok stars gathered on a Zoom call to receive key information about the war unfolding in Ukraine. National Security Council staffers and White House press secretary Jen Psaki.” And in September, the White House hosted 20 social-media influencers to talk up the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.

 

While TikTok has been banned from U.S. government devices because of the security risk it presents, more than two dozen members of Congress — all Democrats — remain active on the social-media platform, as of April.

 

No offense to the teeming throngs of social-media influencers who read this newsletter, but generally, people become social-media influencers because they are good at attracting attention, and not necessarily for any other qualities — and attracting attention for doing something stupid, obnoxious, or repugnant is every bit as valuable as attracting attention for doing something smart, virtuous, or helpful. The most important quality in the world of social-media fame is that people are talking about you, even if they’re talking about how dumb and shameless you are. In fact, it is axiomatic that if you have a strong sense of propriety, decorum, and shame, you are not likely to become a big-time social-media influencer. No one says, “Wow, that circus clown is strikingly modest and thoughtful.” (There is a decent amount of evidence that living so much of your life online, constantly judged by strangers and craving their approval and attention, is psychologically unhealthy.)

 

How mad should anyone have been at Logan Paul for not recognizing that the decision to film and post images of the body of a person who hung himself was a terrible thing to do? Paul had operated within an amoral social-media ecosystem where all controversy was good controversy, and every dumb stunt just increased his follower count. Yes, he was stupid, but he operated in a system that continually rewarded his stupidity.

 

In this light, it was just a matter of time before some social-media influencer was invited to a White House event and did something spectacularly inappropriate. The president’s staff keeps inviting groups of people who make their living by breaking rules and behaving outrageously and provocatively, and then expects them to follow the rules while on White House grounds.

 

Biden’s Memory, Clear as Mud

 

At the Pride event on Saturday, Biden told a slightly different version of his oft-told tale of his father’s really ahead-of-his-time beliefs about gay rights:

 

And I was getting out of the car to go into the — in the city hall. And there were these two well-dressed men standing on a corner. The light changed. They kissed each other and went in different directions. One went to the DuPont Building; one went to the Hercules building.

 

In past versions of the story, Biden said this occurred in 1961. Besides all of the other reasons for skepticism that the Bidens would witness two men engaging in a homosexual kiss in public in the middle of downtown Wilmington, Del. — one year before any state had repealed its sodomy laws, eight years before the Stonewall riots, eleven years before Delaware repealed its law banning sodomy, and twelve years before the board of the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses — the Hercules building opened in 1983.

 

DeSantis’s Gamble

 

Luther Ray Abel argues Ron DeSantis’s recent moves make perfect sense. I guess we’ll see if DeSantis continues to contend that Trump’s Supreme Court nominees have been disappointments, emphasize the importance of changing the name of Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg, and be silent about all the classified information Trump kept at Mar-a-Lago. My suspicion is that those first two stances will gradually wither on the vine and that eventually DeSantis will feel a political need to paint Trump as far too reckless, stubborn, and self-destructive to be the party’s nominee.

 

I suppose we could throw in DeSantis hitting Trump on the Covid vaccines — “We can never allow ‘Warp Speed’ to trump informed consent in this country ever again” — as another example of hitting Trump from the right in a stance that could play badly in the general election.

 

A year from now, we may well conclude that there never was a path for a non-Trump Republican to win the 2024 nomination; Trump has stumbled and charged into every possible scandal and misdeed, and suffered a plethora of self-inflicted wounds, and yet he’s still ahead by a very healthy margin. No doubt, DeSantis is attempting a complicated and precise political maneuver that would challenge a Blue Angel pilot — peel away current Trump supporters without ever triggering the tripwire of their reflexive defense of Trump from all criticism from anyone. But at some point, you either make a full-throated argument that Trump would be a bad nominee and that he represents a likely concession of the 2024 presidential election, or you don’t. A half-measure won’t cut it.

 

Yes, the debates could change things, but it is hard to envision debate performances so dominating that they generate the 30-point swing that DeSantis needs. Based on the numbers, Noah Rothman is right: The anti-woke emphasis of the DeSantis presidential campaign so far isn’t sufficient. That’s not to say it’s bad, wrong, or ought to be abandoned, just that DeSantis needs a broader and more compelling argument for why he should be the nominee instead of Trump.

 

ADDENDUM: Over in that other Washington publication I write for, I make an observation that when the Biden administration runs into an unexpected provocation from China, its reflexive move is to say it’s the Trump administration’s fault.