A staged "carjacking" that the police got lucky enough to "stumble upon" — the "victim" of which just so happened to be the DOGE employee known as "Big Balls" — isn't enough justification for the presence of the National Guard for you?
Not a fan of the national guard deployment, but I don’t see why they would bother staging a carjacking when they can reference the very real murder of a congressional intern last month.
Teenagers can be strong. Almost every adult would be dumb to pick a fight with a high school football player. And the reality of fighting is that generally once you’re up against two or three other people, you’re going to get beat up. It’s not a Jason Bourne movie. World-class MMA fighters have been jumped. One person generally cannot fight several people.
If you’re enjoying the fact that two individuals attempted a person’s car and then beat them up, just because the victim doesn’t agree with your politics, you have to examine how far your partisanship has gone that you’re cheering for violence against someone who disagrees with you.
There's a massive gulf between someone merely disagreeing with you and someone taking an active role in (what many people believe to be) deeply evil acts, especially while ignoring the consensus-building mechanism our society uses to determine how taxpayer money is spent (Congressional appropriations).
You can dispute the evil of those acts, but it should be clear that many people do find it evil to kill several hundreds of thousands or potentially even millions of innocent people in order to yield $66 per year per average taxpayer in savings. So their feelings about Big Balls' victimization is not mediated by their disagreement with him.
We can reasonably anticipate these programs will be shuttered for at least another year, if not another decade (or permanently). We can argue here or there about the exact numbers, but it's a waste of everyone's time so I just provided a generous range instead.
At the end of the day... what exactly do you think the billions of dollars of food and drugs sent to unfathomably poor areas were doing if not keeping a huge number of people alive?
I may have said in another comment, that I was actually against most of these cuts. Those programs (like PEPFAR). I actually worked with USAID 20 years ago teaching programming classes in Romania and Serbia, and not once did anyone I encountered have a single cynical view on anything. We were all just working hard to "teach a man to fish". So I know that these types of programs play a huge part in showing the world that we actually walk the walk in wanting a better world.
I still can't get behind the idea of wishing violence for policy changes. Maybe that's a core principle of mine. It feels anti-American, since we (historically) try to rise above that, even if we often fail.
The nature of policy changes at such high levels is that many decisions are going to result in people dying (think of geopolitical decisions, think of Syria, the famine in Sudan right now, etc).
And while this administration has definitely been more damaging than the past administrations, my reaction is to argue till our faces are blue whether it was a bad policy decision or not, rather than wish violence.
I understand (and agree with) the impulse against violence in general, and definitely for things that are reasonable points of political disagreement. But I think you'd probably agree there's a limit, correct?
As a self-aware reductio ad absurdum, you ought to agree that violence in response to a policy of rounding up a certain ethnic group and murdering them en masse would be justified or at least in the realm of "not regrettable?"
And yes, I agree that many policy decisions can result in people dying. The moral valence of each one depends on the costs and benefits and the efforts undertaken to minimize the former and maximize the latter. And the intent is a factor too. Killing someone after a period of community deliberation for killing a child is a very different moral event than killing someone for fun.
In this particular instance, the cost/benefit analysis comes out to many people's calculation outrageously weighted to the cost side, and it is demonstrably the case that zero effort was put into minimizing those costs. This was also all knowable from Big Balls' position given that he knows how to use the Internet and could gain access to any expert in the world to more fully understand what he was doing. So he holds a lot of moral culpability (which does not imply carjacking him is a good way to deal justice, to be clear).
I will take my own advice on “intent matters” - and there’s been little care intent wise shown to actually study the impacts of these cuts. Which does make them feel more malicious.
They are one way in which Ukraine got hurt, without making it specifically about Ukraine. One day there was a USAID presence on every border crossing to help smoothen entry of aid goods and people into the areas where they were needed most and the next day it was all gone, here and there a lost sign lying about or already repurposed.
Not really, maybe I'm just too naive, but I don't want our society to devolve where we're enjoying violence inflicted on the "other" even if I absolutely hate what they're doing and how they're doing it (like in the case of a lot of DOGE stuff).
> you have to examine how far your partisanship has gone that you’re cheering for violence against someone who disagrees with you
Partisan violence was de facto sanctioned by Trump’s January 6th pardons. Coristine, moreover, was directly involved with decisions—almost certainly ones he made outside the cover of law—that cost lives in America and around the world [1].
Finding schadenfreude in a violent person receiving the violence they gleefully meted out to others isn’t toxic. It’s quintessentially human.
Big Balls is only 19 and was intervening, unarmed, in a carjacking attempt of a woman by up to 10 people as reported. DC is one of the highest murder rates in the country. Would you have the balls to protect a woman in that situation?
No no, Big Balls was carjacked while with his girlfriend.
This type of crime is obviously bad, even when it happens to people like Big Balls who are directly involved in the likely deaths of a couple hundred thousand to a couple million people over the next few years, but regardless of that: this was not him stepping up to defend some random person.
He was carjacked and injured during the carjacking.
Either that, or he happened to unexpectedly encounter his girlfriend getting carjacked and unbeknownst to him, stepped up to defend her, only to discover later in the glow of the police floodlights that she was in fact his girlfriend the whole time! I'm doubtful. I think it's more likely the world's most prolific bullshitters were bullshitting bits of this story.
You are absolutely wrong. People have died as a direct result of USAID cuts and will continue to die. Here's some reporting on the subject: https://archive.is/YknTv
There are ethical ways to reduce humanitarian aid. Eliminating it all at once ain't it.
Sorry, I did not make myself clear enough. I'm not disputing that there exist people whose lives depend on USAID. I'm disputing the claim that there is a direct moral culpability on the part of the people who work for the administration that cut USAID funding, or the American electorate that empowered said administration, for those deaths; and that said moral culpability means it's fine when those people are victimized by criminals.
> There are ethical ways to reduce humanitarian aid. Eliminating it all at once ain't it.
The nature of government-funded programs is that the actual source of the funding, the taxpayer, has very little direct say in it, and the people who are involved have very little incentive to remove it. Politicians love attaching their names to bigger and bigger budget numbers in headlines, and of course the people whose salaries depend on that budget aren't inclined to make it go away.
Every now and then the taxpayer gets fed up and elects some boor to make a hatchet job out of it, and intellectuals remark on how heartless it all is.
To me, the true ethical blame is on whoever it is that allowed these millions of people to be permanently dependent on aid.
Sorry, but no: the person pulling the trigger does not get to shirk ethical culpability, especially if they're sadistically relishing their hatchet job.
There is no trigger being pulled, metaphorically or not. USAID isn't a force of nature that would have continued to flow, as though water going downhill, if only it weren't for those sadistic meddlers at DOGE!
It's humanitarian aid funded by the American taxpayer and brought to life by every dedicated worker involved. To choose to stop being a part of this chain of actions is to go from acting on something good to becoming neutral, not becoming evil. What's next, calling someone ethically culpable for quitting their USAID job?
In the BBB, they deferred tax hikes on poor people to after the midterms (we all know why, but that's an aside), meaning they didn't feel they needed the budget balanced immediately.
Yet with USAID they cut it the next month, meaning people have died, without any warning.
If they had done this by saying "We will cut off this funding starting 2027, other countries, foundations, organizations, etc would have time to plan/divert/ramp up to fill the gaps.
Your argument fails, not on principle, but on details.
Evil is stopping all aid immediately without a tapering period. Evil is letting life-saving medicine and food rot in warehouses because somebody was horny about taking a chainsaw to the federal government, saving nothing and wasting billions in the process. Evil is making a cruel decision to let people die solely for the sake of political theater.
You can talk about this in the abstract all you want, but at the end of the day, someone chose to let people suffer and die when a far more humane approach with the same financial outcome could have been taken. For flash. For pizzaz. For revenge, perhaps.
He knows that. That's why he's fine if someone were to shut off the water supply to his city. Simply shutting off access to something necessary for survival is totally different from killing someone! /s
Huge portions of the United States do in fact have a very similar relationship with their water companies, because their water companies are given water rights by the relevant state governments.
I think if someone decided to save money by shutting off water to Phoenix or Los Angeles, they will have some portion of the relevant blood on their hands. That's especially true if they did so with zero effort toward a smooth transition.
I literally said "one of the highest" not the absolute highest. Being in a top 10 or 20 list on murder rates is not an achievement to strive for, but it absolutely places you in upper echelon of murder. DC has had 100 murders so far in 2025, just 12 shy of 2024 with 3.5 months to go: https://mpdc.dc.gov/dailycrime
St. Louis situation is absolutely abysmal. 20 is way too high, 69 is way too high. These are 3rd world numbers that are absolutely inexcusable. And we're only talking about murders here, if you look into other violent crime data, it's also substantial for D.C.
The FBI frequently gets involved in murder cases all over the country, there are field offices everywhere. States are significantly different things than the special federal District of Columbia. There, it is generally up to the Governor to deploy the national guard, although plenty of exceptions and precedents exist for the President to do so.
Deployment of the National Guard within a state is at the discretion of that state's governor. DC is the only place the president has jurisdiction in this scenario.
> Deployment of the National Guard within a state is at the discretion of that state's governor.
Legally, there are exceptions to that (primarily the Insurrection Act, though there are some deployments that are permitted within states on federal authority on other legal bases with tightly-constrained functions), and practically, the legal limits don't matter because response time off the courts is to slow for them to act as a meaningful brake. (E.g., the lawsuit filed the first court day after the order to mobilize the guard for LA just reached the trial stage this week.)
... except this president federalized and deployed the national guard in California only earlier this summer, over the objections of the state's governor, so is that rule still a rule?
He was able to provide a justification, however thin, which he presumably can't in the case of St Louis. Not that I disagree with the general sentiment. He's only doing this as a political stunt and St Louis wouldn't serve that purpose as well even if he could somehow swing it legally.
I'm sure there are also federal buildings in St Louis; the justification from California works almost anywhere.
But critically, the trial in which the legality of that action is considered is happening the week. Whether or not the action is judged to have been a constitutional violation ultimately doesn't matter; the administration did it, and even if the court rules against the administration, it will have been two months too slate. Effectively, the president has demonstrated he can federalize the national guard whether or not the governor consents for long enough to score whatever political/media points he's currently fixated on, and if the legal system stops him, he will have moved on to other issues.
There's exceptions to general rule, the national guard is ultimately a state-federal entity and the President can activate them to enforce federal law. Laws on this go all the way back to 1807. They've been federalized by Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon without consent of the associated Governor.
The cause is not "poverty and guns," because Idaho, which has a lot of poverty and a ton of guns, has one-third the homicide rate of Maryland, which is one of the richest and most educated states.
Nah, it's not justification at all that some kid was trying to buy ket and got his ass beat on a bad drug deal that we need to deploy the whole NG for this.
I don't know if it was staged, but i am skeptical. The reason why is the photograph of the guy covered in blood. It's obvious that he has suffered a bloody nose and maybe been punched in the mouth, but that all the blood on his body is smeared over him rather than being from multiple injuries. I have been in a lot of fist fights in my life, including groups rather than 1 on 1, and had a good few bloody noses. Such an injury doesn't leave you covered in blood like that. All the blood on his body is smeared, and so is all the blood on his pants - note there aren't any tears in the fabric. A bloody nose bleeds a lot but it doesn't spray all over the place.
It's conceivable this his shirt got pulled off during the fight, but equally conceivable that he took it off and wiped blood on himself. I've seen people fake injuries at political demonstrations, using the old pro wrestling trick of making a small cut in the hairline with a sharp blade (scalp wounds bleed a lot because there are so many capillaries on the head). I can't say this is what's happened here, but it just doesn't look consistent with real violence.
Another reason I'm skeptical of the reported account is that there's no mention of injuries to his female companion. If it were a regular mugging or carjacking, you'd expect to read the woman was pushed to the ground and her bag taken. This could be poor quality reporting, but stories like this generally include a catalogue of all victims' injuries.
Evidence? These days, who needs evidence? Windmills cause cancer, redistricting mid-decade is totally necessary, and the president is 6'3", 215-pounds.
No proof, it’s just incredibly convenient. Just like when Kristi Noam just happened to get her purse stolen by someone who was in the country illegally right when the ICE raids were about to start. In this case, the well-known DOGE intern just happens to get carjacked in the city limits of DC right when Trump’s new DC Attorney General is being installed and the National Guard is ready to go.
No proof, but wow do they just happen to get exactly the event they need for the PR.
If crime was going crazy in D.C. the GOP would be all over it in a flash and the local and national press would be monetizing the info. All this is a stunt to deflect from whatever is bothering the big orange dummy at the moment.
It is, in part, a distraction, from (particularly) discussion of the Epstein files, but the one thing the Trump regime is efficient with is using elements of their real authoritarian agenda as their distractions when they need one. So, sure, DC is a distraction, but its also a part of a fairly overt broad campaign against the homeless (not against homelessness as a social condition, against homeless people as subhuman enemies), that is itself tied into the national campaign of ethnic cleansing and the national campaign against the mentally ill (again, not against mental illness), and the DC operation is also part of the progressive militarization of civilian law enforcement.
If this sounds like things that occur together in fascist regimes, well, there's a reason for that.
Washington DC is already federalized under the Constitution. DC does not belong to a state and exists as a special region with very specific Federal definitions for its existence.
