On Friday and Saturday, nights five and six of Washington, D.C.’s occupation by federal law enforcement and the National Guard—boy, I hope the so-called Libertarians are quite livid about this!—I returned to the scene of the inciting incident, the beatdown of Edward Coristine, known as “Big Balls” (the “Big Balls Beatdown”) at 1400 Swann St. N.W. Citing this incident, President Donald Trump hysterically insisted the District is in a state of emergency, “a situation of complete and total lawlessness,” but I spend every day on these streets and see no such thing.
I have been skeptical of the “official narrative” of the event, partly because I know the block Mr. Balls got beat and partly because Mr. Trump’s former co-President Elon Musk straight away lied about what happened:
“A gang of about a dozen young men tried to assault a woman in her car at night in DC. A @Doge team member saw what was happening, ran to defend her and was severely beaten to the point of concussion, but he saved her.”
The CEO of SpaceX, Tesla, xAI Holdings, The Boring Company, and Neuralink told a bullshit version of events that was disproven by the police report released shortly afterwards.
“On Sunday, August 3, 2025, at approximately 3:00 a.m., the suspects approached the victims, who were standing next to their vehicle, in the 1400 block of Swann Street, Northwest. The suspects demanded the victim’s vehicle and then assaulted one of the victims. 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.”
So, there was no failure on DC law enforcement’s part—MPD were nearby, intervened immediately, stopped the assault, and made arrests. This is the best-case scenario for a beatdown.
Unfortunately, no footage has been released for the public to gain additional insight into the DOGE teenager’s walloping. This surprises me, because while going up and down the block, more than half the doors had Ring cameras. Odd to imagine that Mr. Balls, the CEO of “Tesla.Sexy LLC,” would not be driving a Tesla—which, of course, has surveillance cameras. I presume this absence of sensational footage indicates people otherwise prone to sensationalizing shit have something to hide.
According to MPD, the so-called distressed damsel was no stranger and, in fact, was Mr. Balls’s girlfriend. Wired magazine further identified her as Emily Bryant, another DOGE employee (or as Ashley Saint Claire, the mother of Mr. Musk’s twelfth child, called her, Mr. Balls’ “non-committal fluid breeding vessel contender[]”). Unless he was “k-holing while learning the news,” it is unlikely Mr. Musk did not know this, so he either intended to deceive or exercised reckless disinterest in reality. With one lie evident, I am inclined to believe there are others. Mr. Balls allegedly “got the hell kicked out of him” in a well-lit nightlife district, not SEGA’s Streets of Rage.
On one side of the block is Ted’s Bulletin, an upscale diner bar. On the other is a private parking lot with a sign instructing patrons not to commit criminal acts.
Across the street are the legendary music venue the Black Cat, multi-level rooftop bar Salazar, Gypsy Kitchen, the Source Theater, Café Saint-Ex, Bar Pilar, and Solid State Books.
While walking the area, I noted young adults lounging outside Tobacco King and Vape, one of the vape/hookah/cigar head shops that blight every urban corner. Unlike the tie-dye, hippie bong stores of my day, these businesses get straight to enabling intoxication. Cheap Chinese glass pipes, overpriced vape carts full of Delta-8, kratom, nitrous oxide, the works. The shop was a “popping” congregation spot for drunk collegiates (I overheard one college-aged man discussing his Oxford aspirations) who felt safe enough there to wait for their Ubers. Not particularly seedy.
People hear “D.C. at night” and imagine anything can happen. Mr. Trump fictionalized a city “overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people.” Not this neighborhood. This part of the 14th Street Corridor has a Trader Joe’s, Logan Hardware, a Saatva mattress store, Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, SoulCycle, Barcelona Wine Bar, and The Louis luxury condominiums, whose signage reads “Upscale Urban” (a little too on the nose).
Also on the nose: On the sidewalk near Sephora, I found a copy of “The Origins of Totalitarianism” by Hannah Arendt, a Jewish political thinker who was imprisoned by the Gestapo and fled Nazi Germany in 1933. To come across this book in this place at this time made me suspicious, so I examined it for RFIDs—might this be a honeypot for dissidents?—and hidden messages from unseen allies. There were no markings or wear on the book. I wondered if someone had bought it at Solid State to prepare themselves for this moment, only to lose it after a night of moderate drinking. I hoped I could find some classic and spookily relevant Arendt quote highlighted to help ground this essay in history, such as:
“Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
No luck. Still, whatever superstitious impulse I have that yearns to assign meaning to synchronicity convinced me that continuing to watch 1400 Swann St. N.W. would be my mission.
I have taken heat from colleagues over my disparagement of Mr. Balls (although I am, to my knowledge, the only one who pays him the courtesy of using an honorific). As I said previously, if I determine I have misjudged his character—that he abstained from Bacchanalia and his only vices were being accomplice to the spread of famine and pestilence across the poorest nations on Earth via the termination of USAID programs (not hyperbole: a Lancet study estimates his actions will lead to 14 million additional deaths globally by 2030, including 4.5 million children under age 5), the ruin of domestic social safety nets, and tens of thousands of federal job losses—I will purchase him a drink when he turns twenty-one. I am not asserting he “had [his beatdown coming],” but I am extrapolating from my own observations that he is a punk bitch.
“Based” Senator Mike Lee of Utah posted AI slop depicting the orange clown draping Mr. Balls with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his supposed “heroism.” MAGA podcaster Benny Johnson later asked at a White House press conference: “Given the heroic actions of a member of the administration just blocks from this building, will the president consider giving the Presidential Medal of Freedom to ‘Big Balls’?” If there is real discussion (I admit, I suspect these men are having a lark) about giving the nineteen-year-old Mr. Balls a medal whose recipients have included Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou, Representative John Lewis, and the Doctor of Democracy El Rushbo, then we ought also to erect a statue depicting Mr. Balls sitting shirtless and wounded, so that each day, passers-by can reminisce about how far American masculinity must have fallen that heels are honored for losing streetfights.
I return to Swann Street night after night and have seen nearly no law enforcement near where Big Balls fell. Instead, most images have been of the police and National Guard patrolling tourist spots where criminals rarely visit—Georgetown, the Mall, the monuments. Despite the surplus of police and federal agents, the occupation has produced only about 40 to 50 arrests on any given night—43 on Tuesday 8-12, 45 on Wednesday 8-13, and 52 on Friday 8-14—numbers that barely exceed—and sometimes fall below—the city’s pre-occupation daily average of 56 arrests. They are creating terror while making approximately the same amount of arrests with more resources—one troubling report said fifteen cops arrived for one drunken woman in need of medical attention. Not efficient!
My observations bear this out, too—when I have seen traffic stops, multiple police cars pull up and join in, presumably so they can also look busy. Cruisers sit on downtown corners with their lights on while the officers play what looks like the dying mobile game “Marvel Snap” on their phones so inattentively that they did not notice me watching through their windows. (They were far better players than me.)
I went to the 14 and U Subway and found police cars, Secret Service vehicles, FBI vehicles, and police in full body armor returning to them. Surrounding them was an angry crowd shouting for them to go home. Someone taunted the fleeing agents: “Clown bitches got up out of here once they saw phone cameras.”
It was more complicated than that. Federal agents are afraid of sandwiches. They saw a crowd outside the sandwich shop and, I believe, were “triggered.”
On August 10, Sean Charles Dunn, a Department of Justice employee, confronted a group of Customs and Border Protection agents at the same Subway and “w[ound] his arm back and forcefully thr[ew] a sub-style sandwich” at CBP Agent Gregory Lairmore. Attorney General and notoriously corrupt bimbo Pam Bondi called Mr. Dunn a “Deep State” operative, and he was terminated the following day. The man of the hour offered to turn himself in, but instead, some twenty armored law enforcement agents brought reality television cameras to his residence to stage his arrest for “felony assault on a federal officer.” This would have been the absolute worst episode of COPS.
Mr. Dunn is considered in the District to be a “hero”—pun intended. Already, people wear salmon shirts in his honor. Murals depicting him in the Banksy style are popping up, and we are rushing Sean Dunn merchandise into production at the Partisan Hex web store. It has become a trend in the DMV to carry a sandwich and to call it “keeping that mf-ing thing on you.”
I also observed somebody with a long, scraggly beard in tactical body armor marked “Security.” He was not police. I do not know if he worked in that neighborhood, at a liquor store or diner, but the costume was ridiculous. Perhaps a Proud Boy imitating real security, or another loser imitating a Proud Boy. If tourists are going to the city dressed like SWAT guys, that will not end well for anyone.
I continued through the city to find anything scary enough that it needed the National Guard. I saw no emergency. Nothing frightening. The occasional homeless man and one twenty-something wearing an American flag as a cape and loading a big spliff on an outdoor restaurant table, but nothing slum-like.
At the end of Friday night, exiting D.C., I saw five flashing red and blue lights belonging to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. Thankfully, the officers I passed did not appear to be wearing masks like guerrillas. But it did not appear they were dealing with dangerous and violent offenders—they were performing a routine traffic stop. Earlier in the day, I had seen police standing near that same intersection so bored they were doing “the dinosaur.”
On Saturday, Day Five, there were large protests in Dupont Circle opposing the occupation, but I overslept due to my late vigil. I was awakened by an e-mail blast from Aaron Parnas, saying that night he would “be in the so-called ‘high crime’ areas, where military presence is expected to escalate, and the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the National Guard may carry weapons.”
I had not planned to return to the city—I wanted to sit down and read the Hannah Arendt book as if it were a guide from the universe—but if things were going to escalate, I knew I was needed at my intersection. I pulled on a pink golf shirt to honor Mr. Dunn and went back out.
I walked down to 14th Street from U Street and saw MPD cruisers on the party corridor. There were yet more of the Banksy murals to Mr. Dunn posted on building walls. Groups of bored-looking officers had closed sections of street to create pedestrian-style corridors that looked more like Mardi Gras than a war zone. What sort of emergency is this, I wonder, that holds space for revelers?
I thought I saw a police massing outside the 14th Street Subway and wondered if the restaurant had become a #Resistance hub that was about to be crushed. It turned out the security uniforms were for the nearby gay nightclub Bunker.
Next door, Club Revolt appeared closed, with signage reading:
“We’re opening Revolt in the middle of a difficult moment for DC. The heavy police presence has made many in our community feel unsafe, and LGBTQ+ venues across the city are feeling the impact with drops in attendance and revenue. These spaces are more than nightlife—they’re safe havens. As we prepare to open our doors, we stand in solidarity with every LGBTQ+ bar and club in DC. Now more than ever, our safe spaces need your love and support.”
The strip was roaring past 11:30 p.m. Zoomers walked out of bars with beers in hand. I knew elsewhere in the city, people had been terrorized, but the attitude here seemed to be that the police state was not shit. I saw a twenty-something slumped against a pizzeria, stone drunk. It seemed like he was being tolerated because nobody wanted to give a dumb kid over to authoritarian goons for the crime of taking the bottle to the head.
I went into a small bodega to buy a cold bottle of water and overheard a girl ask the owner if they sold “gas.”
“We don’t have any pumps outside.” He explained.
She clarified she meant weed. The “wild youth” were not taking the scene seriously.
I understand that saying the occupation “ain’t shit” undermines the reality that it is unjust and likely illegal, but both the people supporting and opposing it are aware of that already. What has not been adequately communicated to the public is how evidently useless this whole thing is and how disrespected it is on the ground. If the intent is to make the city safe, crime is already at a 30-year low. If the intent is to terrorize, harass, and hassle the city’s residents, much like Mr. Trump’s Grand Military Parade which I dipped on, it is still too flaccid.
This should not suggest this is harmless. Contrary to the president’s false claim of a “restaurant boom,” according to OpenTable data, during the occupation, Washington, D.C. restaurants are seeing a daily decline of roughly 16–31% from last year. If this continues into September, as is expected, it is doubtful that every business in town will survive. To “save” the community, then, Mr. Trump suggests injuring it.
Similarly, Labyrinth Games & Puzzles, a puzzle, tabletop and Magic: The Gathering store near Capitol Hill, begged anybody with “pull” with Congress to make this shit stop and warned customers that the occupation was “KILLING [] businesses…. This is not solving any problems, it’s making them worse,” adding that people were scared to come into the city not because of crime, but because of the National Guard. This should not be surprising: Few people are willing to commute to a city patrolled by the military and with a declared “state of emergency” just to roll dice.
As usual, the most vulnerable suffer the most pain. At least 70 homeless encampments (described by hateful cretin Stephen Miller as “hav[ing] scarred and disfigured the streets of [DC]”) were “dismantled and thrown away” and cleared out with earth movers. Tents and personal possessions were destroyed, and individuals were ordered to go to a shelter or be “susceptible to fines or to jail time.” There are not enough shelter beds to accommodate everyone, and even if there were, destroying someone’s temporary dwelling will hurt them and does not get them housed again. “Beautification,” the president calls it, but it is ugly and cruel.
Police erected checkpoints to stop, examine, and question drivers. I have wanted to drive through one so that I could get the whole police state experience for my notes, but have not been able to locate one while it was active. Still, it makes for quite the excuse, and I have trotted it several times: “Sorry I am late to the outing! I was stuck in a checkpoint.”
The Associated Press published photos of ATF agents questioning a couple for parking illegally while eating McDonald’s (sandwiches again!). A viral story about Christian Enrique Carias Torres, a Venezuelan delivery driver being tackled, beaten, and tazed by masked ICE agents declaring that “liberals already ruined [America]” raised doubts that those agents were real police and not militia. The White House later came out to put their stamp of approval on those thugs.
https://youtube.com/shorts/cFX6q8tsIhY?si=G_--70X-i3TML2Hs
There has been vandalism by law enforcement. An anti-ICE banner in Mt. Pleasant was torn down by agents and replaced with a dildo. They felt comfortable enough to film themselves destroying a citizen’s property and then uploaded it on social media. “Mine. We’re taking America back baby,” one masked coward boasted. Fuck him. This country will never be owned. And why, exactly, are Customs officials the regime’s stormtroopers, when they should be behind a desk, checking passports, stamping visas, and inspecting luggage for illegal cigars?
If a pre-requisite for public order is trust in the legitimacy of law enforcement actions, the occupation has eroded that, too. When searching for drama, I followed flashing lights to a residential side street off U crammed nuts-to-butts with MPD, Secret Service, and FBI cars. It would have been impossible for any residents to park until the convoy left. Uniformed FBI agents were shining flashlights into the backseats of cars. I hope they had something in particular they were looking for and this was not arbitrary snooping pushing the limits of “plain sight.” When the rest of the authoritarian spectacle was built on a dishonest premise, how can I assume this was not similarly shady? That benefit of the doubt becomes foolish when the Mandarin Mussolini demands lawlessness.
I saw plenty of restaurant/bar security in tactical vests. Everybody, it seemed, had the same sense that it was better to look like police than to be hassled by police. But still, nobody was guarding 1400 Swann St.
I came across a man there pissing behind a tree.
“Sorry,” he mumbled as I approached.
“No worries.” I said. “Say, this is the spot where that DOGE boy got beat down.”
“Why I picked it.” He zipped himself back up. “I’m pouring one out for Big Balls.”
I took a photograph of that lonely intersection Friday night, and circulated it to several colleagues, who called it “a depressing place to get your ass beat” and suggested it should include it as a stage in the next Street Fighter II fighting game.
I noticed Uber drivers chose Swann Street as a spot to idle between pickups. Some even felt secure enough to nap. That the Ground Zero of this DC crime emergency was left unguarded is not a tactical error by law enforcement. It is a legitimately safe area. The narrative error of police deploying to fucking Georgetown, of all places, while ignoring the “dangerous crime scene” clarifies that nobody seriously thought public safety was at risk here. If Mr. Balls was slapped silly by “roving gangs,” this intersection should be a hotspot requiring constant patrol. Mr. Trump used the Big Balls beatdown to justify the entire federal occupation, yet pays it no homage. I have started to feel like I am the only one still thinking about Mr. Balls.
To show my explicit disrespect for the DOGE teen and the notion that 1400 Swann St. honestly marked a national emergency, I purchased a bowl of delicious and very melty hot fudge sundae overtop “Milk Chocolatiest” from Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream, sat on the same curb he kissed, took up my plastic spoon and napkins, and enjoyed a leisurely picnic. When I finished, I properly dumped my trash and continued my vigil, aching to find some soap to rinse sticky dessert residue from my hand. While I scraped my fingers against the sidewalk, I wondered, did Mr. Balls’s face run across this pavement, too?
Perhaps it is unfair to continue to reflect on Mr. Balls’s humiliation, which was the only thing I think real about this whole affair. In my defense, I have heard far worse things about what he was doing on the street that evening, allegations which I have deigned not to type until I see somebody put their name on them. So do not let it be construed that I have ever said he did worse than talking shit, trying to fight ten teenagers, and ruining the world with his reckless DOGE cuts.
Ohio, West Virginia, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana are now joining the fray and too gleefully deploying hundreds more armed Guardsmen to the District. The unique legal status of the Capitol might make this “cheap” and doable for them, but I wonder how the good people of Ohio would appreciate if their high crime cities, like Cleveland (whose violent crime rate is 1,550 incidents per 100,000 residents, compared to Washington, D.C.’s 932 per 100,000), experienced an invasion from their neighbors. Mr. Trump has, after all, promised the rest of America he intends to do the same to them when he is done here. Suppose armed Californian and Maryland Guardsmen started checking vehicles in the United States murder capital Jackson, Mississippi, or perhaps Memphis, Tennessee (2,572 per 100k!). Would they accept that as fate, or would they rebel?
I will tell you, I might have loved former President Barack Obama like he was my favorite teacher for eight years, but if he had fucked up my commute with checkpoints, man, I would call him a motherfucker. I assume that is human nature.
There is a risk the president has not anticipated: soldiers returning from this deployment might tell their families they saw “irrefutable proof of [Mr. Trump’s] falsehood,” that there were no roving gangs, no “bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor,” no emergency, and instead of defending their countrymen, they were used as subjugate them. That must be cause to “desert[]the leader[] who had lied to them.”
Towards the start of 2025, I saw many brash, bold commentators tell Americans to find their “red line,” past which they are prepared to fight. I am confident that, for many, the obvious boundary was “troops in the streets.” Was that just posturing, then? Is this acceptable to them because the communities under siege are not yet their own? How many streets need how many troops before this finally sets off alarm?
The unremarkable intersection where Big Balls met his fate, ignored by the same forces deployed to avenge him, is a monument to the chasm between authoritarian rhetoric and reality. The real villain that feds need to arrest is the criminal—the man with 34 felonies—that deemed this corner pretext enough to put soldiers against American citizens. Washington, D.C., ought to at once be freed. Lock up Mr. Trump instead. This cannot continue.
Please note: I retract earlier speculation in the article “Big Balls Beatdown,” wherein I wondered if an intoxicated Mr. Balls got “spun right round like a record baby” while stumbling out of the Black Cat's Billy Idol-themed '80s night. After speaking with Black Cat management, I learned the party ended at 2:00 a.m., not 3:00 a.m.—the hour Big Balls got his ass handed to him by teenagers). This timing makes it unlikely he was among the leather-jacketed revelers before his ill-advised attempt at street heroics.