Summary

Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old DOGE staffer nicknamed “Big Balls,” reportedly provided tech support to the cybercrime group EGodly through his company DiamondCDN.

EGodly, known for online of hacking government emails and cyberstalking FBI agent, publicly thanked DiamondCDN for DDoS protection in 2023.

Coristine, now a senior adviser at the State Department and CISA, did not respond to requests for comment.

Critics, including former CISA deputy director Nitin Natarajan, expressed concern over Coristine’s recent ties to cybercriminals while holding government network access.

220 points

I have to say, Trump’s tactic of doing so many impeachable things so fast that nobody even tries to impeach him anymore is working stunningly well.

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110 points

He will never have any consequences the Supreme Court has made sure of that.

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76 points

I mean, it doesn’t help that literally everyone is cooperating. Not a single person has refused to leave their post, locked themselves in, thrown a punch, fought back, gotten arrested. Every federal worker “fired” has rolled over and taken it.

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36 points

Americans are pussies. They have been telling themselves that their right to bear arms is enough, so they never bothered to learn actual resistance.

Their schools never taught anything about fascism except “we kicked their asses and saved Europe!” so the general population just aren’t capable of recognizing fascism on the rise.

Now that its here, they still think they can stop it by playing fair.

Pussies.

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33 points

You want to know what happens to people who fight back? Look at Vindman and Snowden and Manning (not saying the latter two did everything right, of course, but they put themselves on the line). Democrats did nothing for them. If no one fights for the people who fight back, why would they just throw everything away? No one wants to be a martyr. No one wants to be left out to dry.

We haven’t fought for the people who fight for democracy. How surprising is the consequence, really?

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16 points

I’m sorry, what personal risk have you taken to stop Trump? You’re demanding that ordinary people put their lives and careers on the line but have you done so yourself? Did I miss an article where you chained yourself to the Whitehouse fence or something?

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15 points

A bunch of DoJ lawyers quit rather than not prosecute Adams.

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17 points

As if impeachment would do anything. He was impeached twice in his last presidency and it didn’t do shit.

When you pack the courts with Trump supporters there are no consequences.

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14 points
*

We call it Three Stooges Syndrome

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14 points

It worked once. Why not twice. Why stop when no one is stopping you?

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-complete-listing-atrocities-1-1-056

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14 points

I don’t know if anyone is trying but someone in Congress should keep a running list of impeachable offenses and keep filing the full list every week until they have enough votes from more moderate Republicans. Sooner or later he will piss off enough of Congress.

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4 points

It’s the gish gallop of presidencies.

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2 points

I mean, if democrats controlled the house he would be getting impeached, it’s not the volume or quality of the crimes, it’s the fact Republicans don’t care.

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186 points

Why does everything have to be so fucking stupid? Is it really not enough that we have to watch the destruction of democracy happen before our eyes? Must it really be carried out by a group named after an early 2010s internet meme featuring a Shiba Inu with bad grammar? Do we really have to read serious reporting about the criminal connections of a 19-year-old government employee called “Big Balls?”

I just never imagined the fall of American democracy would be so… inane.

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45 points

It’s all part of it.

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.

When you complain about Big Balls at DOGE, it makes you sound ridiculous, which makes it easier to dismiss your concerns.

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9 points

Yup. It’s the exact same reason that the KKK has ridiculous titles for its leaders like “grand wizard” and “grand dragon”. It’s an old playbook, but why fix it if it ain’t broke?

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39 points

Reality is exceptionally mundane. I watched contrapoints video about conspiracies last night, and I was struck over and over again by this idea. Reality is boring. Why did Elon Musk decide to surround himself with 19 year old boys in his little DOGE club? Because that’s exactly how he sees himself. He surrounds himself with very young, very online/techy men because he sees himself as a very young, very online /techy man. He sees himself as a popular frat boy. The outsider in politics. I guarantee you he tells them when he sleeps with someone. They absolutely have group chats where they all talk amongst themselves and include him the same way. He’s just a delusional divorced man who is almost universally hated by people who aren’t either literally paid to like him or incentivised to like him because of his politics and position of power.

There are literally millions of men like him in America alone. Most of them are his followers. Why does he have the position of power that he does? Cause he fucking paid for it. That’s all. It’s exceptionally boring. It’s melodrama in its finest. America dies not with a hammer blow but with the slow whistle of air leaving a bike tire. It’s anticlimactic. It’s mundane hollow reality. It’s a story told a thousand times before. Egotistic racist divorced man is promoted to management of an office. A few months later, after thoroughly ruining everything, the office is closed for good. Life is empty. The glory we were told was there never existed. The climactic final battle is largely fictional.

Resistance isn’t really about grand fights or sweeping upheaval. It’s about changing material conditions for people. Helping those who need it. Organizing communities and building solidarity. Sweeping upheaval comes as a consequence of those things, but isn’t itself a conscious focus. We remember revolutions for their sweeping upheavals, for their bloody final battles. But that wasn’t what people in those movements had been working for. We don’t talk about the growing class solidarity in the face of repeated violence from the ruling class over decades. The disillusionment people feel from their rights being lost. We ignore those things cause they don’t make good stories to tell in the moment. Resistance itself is (mostly) boring labor and nuisance civil disobedience.

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10 points

Definitely some “peaked in high school” vibes lol

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1 point

Ok, for real this just helped me make sense of a whole mess of stressful shit running through my brain today. Thank you.

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38 points

Yeah it’s so sad Elon actually believes the fictional stereotype of the young gifted super hacker. Fully self taught, uber smart and able to hack anything in seconds. And when they get caught they don’t go to jail, the government hires them.

Except in real life those are just dumb fuck kids, calling themselves “Big Balls” and would never ever be hired by the government for IT related tasks. They only hire people with proper credentials, education and a clean sheet. You don’t put criminals in sensitive positions for a reason.

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23 points

We used to call them script kiddies

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8 points

Now they’re prompt kiddies

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16 points

In hindsight Idiocracy seems prophetic.

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6 points

One of my favorite documentaries.

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6 points
*

Idiocracy gets the causes of its particular type of dystopia pretty catastrophically wrong, to the point of basically being inadvertently pro-eugenics (“society collapsed because stupid people wouldn’t stop breeding” implies that intelligence is exclusively tied to genetics, which is… a very bad take), but it sure seemed to be an indicator of just how brazenly dumb things could get.

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7 points

I guess it should be viewed that way but I always took it to be that the parents didn’t value education and didn’t push it on their kids, rinse and repeat. They didn’t act like they weren’t teachable, it was like they looked down on smart people, as if it was a cultural value.

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4 points

Idiocracy is an optimistic projection…Think 1984 but stupider. Ie, like Russia in the 90s.

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2 points

Try the future as a blend of Wall-E, The Matrix, Soylent Green, and Logan’s Run

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13 points

For shits and giggles, I tried to go the path of “yeah but…” starting with his nickname. Surely he was named “big balls” a decade or so ago by other people, no he named himself. Surely his previous connections are just that, previous and years if not decades old, no, it’s 2 years, at most.

“Big Balls” is 19 y/o 🙄 at this point. He gave himself that name and has ties to unknown hackers. He has “senior advisor” status, filling a role, that should likely be filled by a bureaucrat accountant - as opposed to a kid whose resume is being a ‘techbro with hacker connections’ and programming knowledge.

I just have to curse here. Jesus fucking Christ! What the hell! Dummkopf, i’idiot, idiota, was zur holle, що в біса, що в біса

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1 point

He probably took big risks in online video games because he paid for an ultra low latency connection.

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11 points

It has to be this fucking stupid, because the weapon of choice against democracy is idiocracy.

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8 points

Yeah, it seems like the original Nazis tried to present themselves as some form of sophisticated aristocracy. They wouldn’t have had some kid from the Hitler Youth Boy Scouts called “Big Balls” reporting to Goebbels.

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2 points

Maybe, maybe not.

But you cannot deny Goebbels sounds like a noise made during oral sex. Or at least it is a request for it.

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If I saw this as a plot of a Movie/TV show, I’d think it’s ridiculous and not watch it.

This is just bizzare and absurb, this simulation is broken.

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7 points

This has the plot of a CBS show.

19 year old hacker kid gets contracted to work for the government because he’s “the best”

Except this is the real world where 19 year olds aren’t good at much of anything beyond learning that dating sucks and unlimited masturbating is fun.

Guarantee you this kid got hired because he can use ChatGPT to generate code that barely does what he wants.

Also guarantee you this kid is also the target of honeypot stings from every intelligence agency outside of America, plus maybe a few inside, and he will fall for it and divulge dangerous information.

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1 point

Tin Cup was a good movie.

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95 points

Idiocracy was way too optimistic about the future.

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28 points

It’s going to be more like Back to the Future 2 but Biff is Trump

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58 points

Biff IS Trump, that’s who they based the character on

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15 points

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2 points

I didn’t know that but it’s obvious now you point it out.

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9 points

The president in Idiocracy was willing to listen to someone else… so yeah. Definitely way too optimistic.

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8 points

Except we have the phrase “young people just know tech better than everyone else!” instead of: “Brawndo has what plants crave!” and we have the supposed “genius” (lol) fElon waving around a gigantic shiny chainsaw instead of Camacho’s gun…

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59 points

The Orange Turd and his buddy Elon are running a criminal operation so sounds about right.

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21 points

I was gonna say. The past tense “provided” is a bit misleading when he’s still doing it.

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I have a feeling Big Balls actually has teeny-tiny balls.

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15 points

He’s so young I don’t think they’ve dropped yet.

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8 points

every time I hear big balls I just imagine big head from silicon valley

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