When Right Wing Governors Put the Safety of “Big Balls” Over Their Own Constituents
The list of Republican governors who will uproot Guardsmen from their home, family, and (for many of them) regular jobs to go to DC continues to grow:
- Ohio Governor Mike DeWine
- South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster
- West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey
- Tennessee Governor Bill Lee
- Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves
- Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry
All of these men believe protecting Big Balls is a higher priority than protecting their own constituents.
How soon we forget that the entire reason why Trump invaded DC is that Ed “Big Balls” Coristine, one of the DOGE boys hired by the richest man in the world to snoop through the private heath and social security data of Americans, got beat up by unarmed teenagers?
Big Balls, whose Daddy runs Lesser Evil snack company, graduated from the elite private school, Rye Country Day. Then, in addition to starting Tesla fan sites, Big Balls worked for a an anti-DDOS company that employed reformed criminal hackers, until he was fired for leaking company secrets.
After that, Elon Musk thought it’d be a good idea to give him access to government data, including at Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and, more recently, at Social Security Administration. In spite of the fact that he has neither relevant experience nor a college degree, after DOGE broke up, Big Balls got hired at a GS-15 level, meaning he may make over $150,000 a year.
The DOGE efforts implemented by such inexperienced young men were riddled with problems. At various times, they shut down nuclear weapon protection, Ebola prevention, pediatric cancer treatment. Food sent from American farmers to starving children overseas got incinerated after it was left rotting in warehouses too long. DOGE boys chasing conspiracy theories about Social Security put earned benefits at risk, even purging still-living Americans from the rolls.
All this was purportedly done to hunt waste, fraud, and abuse. But from the start, DOGE made false and often embarrassingly erroneous claims about their savings — even claiming credit for savings made under Joe Biden. Per a recent Politico review, just 4% of the claimed savings were real, a 96% overstatement of their claimed savings.
And so this 19-year old, brought to DC to fiddle with government data, was out past 3AM one night in August. According to stories based on the police report, his girlfriend walked towards her car close to Logan Square, when a group of teenagers demanded the vehicle. They allegedly assaulted Coristine, who suffered a bloody face and a concussion. But cops arrived on the scene during the assault and the perpetrators fled. Two suspects, a 15-year old girl and a 15-year old boy, both unarmed, were arrested that night and have been charged with attempted carjacking.
And this is why the President has taken FBI officers off the crimes which they uniquely hunt — chasing terrorists, spies, and hackers — and had them patrol the streets of DC where they’ve been making DUI arrests.
And this is why six Republican governors are uprooting their own citizens to send to DC.
The claims Trump made about crime in DC to justify all this are false: while violent crime definitely spiked during COVID, it has been falling.
Even Trump’s own appointees agree. Trump’s then US Attorney for DC, Ed Martin, bragged about a 25% drop in crime during the first 100 days of Trump’s term. FBI Director Kash Patel even predicted that the murder rate was on track to be the “lowest in recorded history.”
But the decision by most of these governors — DeWine and McMaster and Lee and Reeves and Landry — to send their state’s National Guard to DC to hunt crime is especially reckless given that, with the exception of West Virginia, all the states have more serious violent crime problems than DC.
The most dangerous city in the US is in Lee’s Tennessee, three are in DeWine’s Ohio, three are in Landry’s Louisiana. Tennessee and Louisiana rank third and fifth worst for violent crime. Jackson, MS was called America’s murder capital last year and Mississippi the state with the highest murder rate (Louisiana was second). And as maps from Phil Bump show, in both Louisiana and South Carolina there are a bunch of places that are more dangerous than DC.
In short, it’s not just that these right wing governors are sending their constituents away from their homes, their families, and often their jobs, but they’re sending their Guard away to a safer place than their own state, all to avenge a privileged kid with criminal hacker ties whom DC cops helped as the crime was happening.
I’m sorry for Big Balls’ plight. I was mugged at knife point — in a Republican-led state — when I was just slightly older than him and it left me shaken. Unlike Big Balls, the cops never found the perpetrators, as far as I know.
But I’m even sorrier for the men and women that are being sent away from home by their governors as a political stunt, when — if Guard patrols really help to address violent crime — they could be addressing the problem closer to home, in their own states. Those men and women have to leave their homes because a kid who hangs out with the richest man in the world got assaulted, not because DC has the kinds of crime that require a six-state invasion to fix.
Update: I forgot to mention that Ashley St. Clair, who bred an Elon Musk child and claims she’s broke, slammed Big Balls in her first podcast “Bad Advice,” episode.
I have it on good authority Big Balls is dining out on this. … This is how empires die, guys, not with foreign invasion, but with government troops to protect the testicular reputation of a guy whose primary skill is shitposting. Rome had bread and circuses. We’ve got medals for getting your ass kicked.
She also coins, “non-committal breeding vessels.” Not at all bitter.
I know “math is hard”, but if only 4% of DOGE’s claims of stopping “fraud, waste & abuse” are true, that is not a 96% overstatement. It is a 2,500% overstatement,
I knew I was going to misstate that.
I’ll try again tomorrow.
That is getting to Trump levels of making up beautiful numbers. Numbers that noone has ever seen before.
It’s a good thing that those states are reliably free from natural disasters in late summer
and early fall, so there’s no need for the National Guard to be cooling their heels at home.
Logan Circle is a long walk east from and a few economic indicators south of the more well-known Dupont Circle, the locale a lot of commenters have incorrectly focused on. It’s an equally long walk from the popular U Street nightlife corridor to the north, where the Feds chose to locate their stop and frisk campaign at the start of Trump’s occupation.
Logan is a different demographic from both. It’s been gentrified, but less so than Dupont, and it borders on less gentrified areas. On Sunday, with the all-day church services nearby, you won’t find a parking space or traffic warden for blocks, not until after 2.00 pm.
All of which is preliminary to my question: WTF walks around Logan or Dupont at 3.00 am?
WTF walks around Logan or Dupont at 3.00 am?
“Big Balls”?
Folks leaving gay bars that close at 2am?
Near Logan Circle, the odds of that are good, though some of them are restaurants, not just bars.
As Whiskey Pete continues to throw the Title 10 military into border work, maritime drug interdiction, and performative terrorism of blue state residents there are opportunity costs in readiness, training, and retention. Breaking the ratio of the so called “BOG to Dwell” delays long-scheduled equipment upgrades costing $$ in contracted services, long-scheduled training slots are cancelled putting schoolhouses in idle (again costing $$), and extended or unanticipated deployments stresses military members and their families. “First Term” retention becomes more difficult as skills learned in Service schools become saleable in the civilian world. Unlike our twenty years in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is no supplemental budget (“Overseas Contingency Funding”), so each spurious deployment depletes each Services’ existing fixed budget further than the already eight to fifteen percent FY25 budget reduction.
The Secretary Of Defenses’ “Order Book” tracks the cost of each redeployment or extension, but probably does not count these down-stream ripple effects.
Any dubious DOGE cost savings within the DoD have already been negated.
Harold Meyerson has a great suggestion. The governors of the much safer Blue States, like Massachusetts and New York should offer to send their National Guard troops to Memphis, Jackson, Baton Rouge and other scary places in the neo-confederacy. https://americanprospect.bluelena.io/social/3f647cadf56541fb9513cb63ec370187.3540
I have a relative who lives and works in DC. At night, apparently, the streets are desolate. No one will go out, not even to a restaurant.
Is that what the MAGA cult wants?
Thanks for the American Prospect link, Ed. The very first paragraph lays it out plainly and chillingly:
>> “Under Abraham Lincoln, the armies of the Confederacy, despite strenuous efforts, never managed to take Washington, D.C. Donald Trump, by contrast, has invited in the neo-Confederates twice: once on January 6th, 2021, when a racist rabble carrying Confederate flags seized the Capitol, and now, over the past week, when National Guards chiefly from the Deep South are arriving to occupy D.C.”
That’s about what I see too. Sending the National Guard into blue cities is prepositioning the military for eventual civil war, geographically dispersed in cities all around the country, rather than on the Northern/Southern framework of our American Civil War imaginary. It is all tied in with planned disruption and turmoil around voting and other forms of civil participation, all intended to intimidate, lower the threshold of what counts as a crime and who counts as a victim, all to provoke violence as pretext to attack. This seems obvious, sometimes to the point of invisibility, as who wants to actually bear witness to it?
Having come this far, the Project25ers and their bedfellows are not going to retreat, constitution or no constitution, Trump or no Trump. Still, I look hopefully towards tomorrow’s obituary pages.
Along with your thoughts on planned disruption and turmoil, I might include the attacks on power substations over the last few years.
There have been groups of right wing extremists foiled in a few plots to disrupt the electrical infrastructure. Many attacks were not thwarted, though. These attacks may have been practice runs.
The grandfather of one of the most prominent DOGEbois — I think it was Coritzine, but would have to check—was a high-ranking KGB agent. Who was executed for working too closely with the Americans (ex CIA agent Michael Sellers was also arrested at the time, although later released by the Russian security services and he writes of this, still apparently plagued with guilt). The Russian mafia is known to target family members, even minor children. Probably just a weird coincidence.