Big Balls Attacked

Federal night patrol: The Trump administration plans to send more FBI agents to patrol the streets of D.C. at night, according to officials who spoke anonymously with The New York Times. “Most of the agents will be pulled from their regular duties at the F.B.I.’s Washington field office, but it was not immediately clear if agency leaders would need to pull additional personnel from nearby cities,” the sources tell the Times. The deployment of federal authorities has already been going on for at least two nights, but it is expected to ramp up further in the coming days.

This is at least in part related to the attack on the prominent Department of Government Efficiency engineer known as Big Balls. Edward Coristine, the 19-year-old software engineer who worked on the team formerly helmed by Elon Musk (and now works in the Social Security Administration), was bloodied and beaten following an attempted carjacking in D.C. last week. The alleged suspects are two 15-year-olds. “The suspects demanded the victim’s vehicle and then assaulted one of the victims,” said the police on August 7. “During the assault, an MPD cruiser pulled into the block causing the suspects to flee. Two of the suspects were apprehended by the on-scene officers.”

“Crime in Washington, D.C., is totally out of control. Local ‘youths’ and gang members, some only 14, 15, and 16-years-old, are randomly attacking, mugging, maiming, and shooting innocent Citizens, at the same time knowing that they will be almost immediately released,” wrote the president on Truth Social. “They are not afraid of Law Enforcement because they know nothing ever happens to them, but it’s going to happen now!”

“The Law in D.C. must be changed to prosecute these ‘minors’ as adults, and lock them up for a long time, starting at age 14,” he added. “Washington, D.C., must be safe, clean, and beautiful for all Americans and, importantly, for the World to see. If D.C. doesn’t get its act together, and quickly, we will have no choice but to take Federal control of the City, and run this City how it should be run, and put criminals on notice that they’re not going to get away with it anymore.”

Look, I’m hugely in favor of stopping violent crime, but using federal agents to get the job done—and perhaps more worryingly, having the president direct how minors are charged—is likely to get into sticky territory rather quickly. “Because D.C. is not a state, the federal government has unique authority to exert control over city affairs—even amid objections from the residents and locally elected government,” notes The Washington Post. “The Home Rule Act of 1973 gave D.C. residents the ability to elect their own mayor and council members. A federal takeover of the D.C. police force would be an extraordinary assertion of power in a place where local leaders have few avenues to resist federal encroachment.”

NEW: WH official shares with @DailyCaller the success of night 2 of increased law enforcement in D.C.

Several arrests were made, some include:
A fugitive wanted from Maryland.
Multiple persons carrying a pistol without license.
Driving on suspended license.
Dirt bike riding in…

— Reagan Reese (@reaganreese_) August 10, 2025

Currently in D.C., both homicides and violent crime overall are down compared to this time last year. Still, D.C. has an oddly high car theft rate, which has gone up this past year, and Trump seems especially fixated on the youth crime rate, so I’m not surprised the president’s ears perked up when those two factors combined and played a role in victimizing Big Balls.

Trump, ever an obsessive, will be pivoting his normally-scheduled press conference later this morning to talk specifically about improving D.C.—its cleanliness and beauty—and solving its crime problems.

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Scenes from New York: Andrew Cuomo, the former “love gov” who is now running for New York City mayor, is struggling to focus on what he himself would actually do in office. Instead he is focusing his criticisms on Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani.

“Somewhere last night in New York City, a single mother and her children slept at a homeless shelter because you, assemblyman @ZohranKMamdani are occupying her rent controlled apartment,” wrote Cuomo on X. “You grew up rich and married an even wealthier woman. You’ve had weddings on 3 continents. You own property in LGTBQIA+ murderous Uganda. You make $142,000 a year plus stipends, and your wife works too, meaning you together likely make well over $200,000. No matter which way you cut it: Zohran Mamdani is a rich person. You are actually very rich. Yet you and your wife pay $2,300 a month, as you have bragged, for a nice apartment in Astoria. That should be housing for someone who needs it.” (Cuomo may be wrong to assume Mamdani’s wife, who is an artist, makes such a hefty sum as $60,000.)

“You are a rich person stealing affordable housing from the poor,” added Cuomo. And you’re not the only one. It’s past time we address this injustice.”

Cuomo isn’t totally wrong. To the extent that rent stabilization must continue to exist in New York City, it would be improved if were means-tested and much more limited in scope. (Of course, the optimal outcome is scrapping it altogether.)

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QUICK HITS

• Perhaps “social media” isn’t really social anymore:

.@Meta says most time on FB and Insta is spent watching videos, and only 7% of time on Insta & 17% on FB involves consuming content from friends.
Company argues @FTC hasn’t proven it monopolizes ‘personal social networking services market’ b/c such market doesn’t exist pic.twitter.com/hr45zE6rej

— Wendy Davis (@wendyndavis) August 7, 2025

• President Donald Trump is considering federally reclassifying marijuana as a less dangerous drug, reports The Wall Street Journal. Making it Schedule III instead of Schedule I, as the president is considering, would open it up to much more medical research.
• The Department of Veterans Affairs announced Wednesday that it had terminated the collective bargaining agreements for most of its employees, pursuant to President Trump’s executive order excluding many agencies from the Civil Service Reform Act’s provisions that allow collective bargaining,” writes National Review‘s Dominic Pino. ”About four-fifths of the VA’s workforce was unionized.”
• “Nvidia Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. agreed to pay 15% of their revenues from Chinese AI chip sales to the US government in a deal to secure export licenses, an unusual arrangement that may unnerve both US companies and Beijing,” reports Bloomberg. “Nvidia plans to share 15% of the revenue from sales of its H20 AI accelerator in China, according to a person familiar with the matter. AMD will deliver the same share from MI308 revenues, the person added, asking for anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. The arrangement reflects US President Donald Trump’s consistent effort to engineer a financial payout for America in return for concessions on trade.”

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Source: https://reason.com/2025/08/11/big-balls-attacked/