Thug life. It was 3AM or so a few weeks back when Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old working with the Social Security Administration in Washington D.C., walked Emily Bryant back to her car after a party, and a small mob attacked them — around ten people, according to police who witnessed the assault. Edward shoved Emily in the driver’s seat, slammed it shut, and squared off against the assailants. A couple got around him, opened the door, and Edward slammed it shut again. This time, Emily managed to lock the car. Frustrated, the gang tried punching through the windows, Edward threw himself between them one more time, and then, finally, they focused on him. But Emily was safe. By now, most of you have seen the aftermath, as a photo of Edward shirtless and bloodied, with a concussion and a broken nose, went massively viral after President Trump shared it on Truth Social and threatened to take federal control of the nation’s capital due to runaway violent crime. And I recognized the kid at once.

You probably know Edward by another name, a nickname given to him by his friends, which was amplified around the world when earlier this year he took a job with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE): “Big Balls,” they call him. I call him. We all call him. A legend of a young man who already, entirely against his will, loomed large in our minds by the time of the attack. From here, the discourse could only be chaos.

There is no crime in Washington. Or, there’s never been so little crime. But on the other hand, there’s never been so much. I mean holy shit, it’s Fallujah out here, in fact it’s literally worse than Fallujah — at least, depending on the politics of your chosen talking head. The same is true of course of how we’re all responding to the crime that is or isn’t real, and how the White House has addressed this crime. Donald Trump’s a fascist. Donald Trump dissolved the D.C. government! He seized the police. He is presently putting innocent kids in concentration camps. But actually, he’s following the law, to the letter. And actually, a lot of residents have noticed things are kind of nice without the gunshots overhead, and the roving mobs of pillaging, plundering, straight-up Clockwork Orange kinda teenaged lunatics.

But actually, but actually, but actually.

Our national conversation will carry on like this at least through Trump’s presidency, and in all likelihood forever. Chaos is the nature of the internet, and of our president who was born inside the internet like Bane was born inside the darkness. But today I’d like to focus on the living breathing human in our actual reality, who was actually brutally attacked by a mob, and became the early focal point of our most recent never-ending media circus freak show: an actually good person, doing actually good things, and not just depending on your favorite talking head, because none of them have actually talked to him. But I have.

I talked to Edward last week. It was a very brief conversation, after I asked for details of the attack, which have been distorted across the internet. The guy hates attention, and wouldn’t get into much more than that beyond his own personal motivations, which is really all he wanted to express, and I’ll touch on those in a moment. But our brief conversation inspired me. Because that feeling, today, which I might describe as a feeling of hope for the future, is incredibly rare.

When I asked Edward about the attack, he was humble and adamant: “it wasn’t some conscious heroic act.” He wasn’t even thinking. Everything happened very fast. He just… did a bunch of stuff.

But what he did, of course, was save another person’s life. Despite the following noise, and despite what you think about this person who — again — you do not know anything about, all evidence of the night, including not only the police report but this first-hand account, indicates the same thing: in the face of life-threatening danger, Edward, a 19-year-old kid, took immediate action to protect a young woman from a violent mob. He was wildly outnumbered. He threw himself directly into harm’s way. The girl was saved.

Edward is a hero, in other words. Unambiguously.

But that is really not how this story was told.

If you keyword search “Big Balls” on Threads, there are only celebrations and conspiracy theories (ex, ex, ex, ex). On Bluesky, it was a mix of similar psychopathy and also a lot of mentally unwell older men insisting they are capable of defeating Big Balls in a fight? Which they would really love to do (ex, ex, ex). On X, the reaction was far more supportive. Though as Trump moved forward with his plans to police the city, X was also home to some of the most viral posts diminishing the attack (ex, ex), including a distorted portrait of the mob (lie) echoed by the New Republic. But this from Democratic political strategist Sawyer Hackett really stuck out:

Why would a man post something like this about a much younger man who just saved a girl’s life? Why frame it like this? Why, rather than focus on Trump, would even the most committed hater focus on Edward, whose actions were unambiguously good?

Sawyer’s reaction, along with the reaction of most of the trolls of his ilk, is a classic moral inversion. This is a modern phenomenon I’ve written about with horrified fascination for years, in which the good is not only ignored or marginalized, but actually framed as evil, while the evil is framed as good. It’s a tool of demoralization, and dehumanization. When our national political tide finally turns, and the left takes control, I will not be surprised when Sawyer calls for draconian retribution against his political enemies. That is the purpose of rhetoric like this — to justify evil.

But in this case, and increasingly online, the inversion was met with an inversion of the inversion. The louder Edward’s haters mocked and twisted his story, the louder his supporters praised him, which ultimately led to the following phenomenal headline from the Daily Beast:

“An ex-DOGE staffer known as ‘Big Balls’ could end up receiving the highest civilian honor in the United States,” wrote Farrah Tomazin of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, “placing him in the company of luminaries such as Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr. and Mother Teresa.”

And literally no single piece of this sentence is honest. The first half is total speculation, the second half requires a shit ton of context, which I’m about to provide, and the headline is simply, objectively, a lie.

This entire story was woven from a single offhand comment from the president’s press secretary. The day the Daily Beast decided to be crazy, the Presidential Medal of Freedom wasn’t on Karoline Leavitt’s docket. Trump, to the best of our knowledge, had never even discussed this medal by the time of that day’s press conference. Really, this entire story was cooked up after some Trump glazing social media guy asked the press secretary if Balls would get the medal. “Perhaps it’s something he would consider,” Leavitt replied of Trump. And that was it. That was the whole thing.

The Daily Beast then ran a piece effectively imagining what it would be like if the story they just invented were real, and framed it dishonestly for rage clicks — obviously on purpose, and with malice. At the time of the piece’s publication, nobody in government had seriously floated anything even close to what the story suggested.

However.

While I have you here.

Why shouldn’t Big Balls get the medal?

Rosa Parks, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Bill Clinton back in 1996, holds a place of semi-sacred space in the hearts and minds of most Americans, given we were for some reason taught her story with the same reverence as George Washington. But — and you may be shocked to hear this — a lot of people have received this thing. Some of them? Dweebs. Losers. And very bad people. (quote me)

Like most of you I’m sure, the first loser recipient I thought of was Joe Biden, who infamously received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Obama while the two of them were serving together in the White House.

This in turn provoked the legendary:

The Presidential Medal of Freedom was created by John F. Kennedy in 1963. Importantly, he expanded the award from an earlier version established by Truman in 1945 to recognize World War II service, and intended the medal as the country’s highest civilian honor. According to its official dot gov website:

“It is awarded by the President of the United States to individuals who have made exceptional contributions to the security or national interests of America, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.”

It is a medal for heroes, in other words. Though it has since… evolved.

You can find a complete list of recipients on Wikipedia. But in addition to a wide range of fantastic, truly-deserving men and women, as well as a heavy helping of duds in politics who obviously only got this thing as a favor, there are several — let’s say — interesting choices, and they have only grown more — let’s say — interesting over time.

Sure, Barack gave the medal to Bill and Melinda Gates for their charity work (*cough* Democratic fundraising), and Warren Buffet for the Giving Pledge I guess (jk, also Democratic fundraising). He gave it to Stephen Hawking for being a very inspiring smart guy, John Glenn and Sally Ride for being astronauts (we love this actually, no notes), and a handful of deranged left-wing political activists for being deranged left-wing political activists. But he also gave the medal to athletes, musicians, actors, and media personalities he obviously just wanted to party with in Cape Cod. He gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Oprah Winfrey, to Ellen DeGeneres, to Meryl Streep. Trump followed with some of the same, though on a much smaller scale (24 medals to Obama’s 118). Then, most controversially, he gave it to Rush Limbaugh, which opened the door to Biden’s batshit crazy countermedals.

Anna Wintour? Bill Nye the Science Guy? Megan fucking Rapinoe? By the time Biden, or whoever was running the country while Biden was officially in charge, got to the fifth or sixth most popular female soccer player, this thing had already lost most of its legacy meaning. But then, finally, he awarded it to the pro-crime left-wing megadonor George Soros, and the entire country discussed the decision, furiously, for weeks.

What the hell is this thing for?

I guess you could say it’s a kind of cultural project. To receive the medal is to be “good.” Not actually, of course. Soros, for example, is definitely evil. But “good” is what the award means. That stamp of “good” is why men like Soros want it. And recipients, when not so transparently receiving it in exchange for money, are I think intended to define “good behavior.” Biden didn’t give the medal to Rapinoe because she’s, again, the most mediocre of our best female soccer players. He gave it to Rapinoe because Rapinoe is a very loud left-wing political activist, which is a kind of behavior he wanted to encourage. I’m assuming this is because (while trying my absolute best to steelman the decision) he believes more of her behavior will lead to a better country.

Disrespectfully, I disagree.

The United States of America is over $37 trillion in debt. We have outsourced most of our manufacturing capacity, and almost all of our capacity to process most of the essential stuff of modern civilization: rare earth metal mining and processing, semiconductors, battery production integral to solar power and electric vehicles, large power transformers, and pretty much all uranium enrichment. We have a housing crisis. We have a student debt crisis. We have, depending on who you ask, a rather large crime problem on our hands, and the reason this depends on who you ask is our even larger problem of a fractured information ecosystem, which has shattered our common identity. Americans in 2025 will have to fix this country, but — insanely — before we can do that we’ll have to agree on whether the existence of this country is even legitimate, as radical Boomer philosophy has metastasized over these past five decades into a pathological self-hatred among (mostly) well-meaning Millennials suffering from a politics that looks suspiciously like mental illness.

We are facing a lot of problems, in other words. Dying your hair purple and taking a knee at a soccer game is not going to solve them. The only thing capable of solving these problems is first accurately identifying them, and then working on a solution.

Edward joined DOGE because he was inspired by the mission, which was to fix the government’s ability to work by shattering our bureaucratic paralysis. That paralysis is a problem so enormous, and so apparently intractable, it has kept competent people from working with the government for generations, which constitutes another huge problem: nobody good, who you would actually want working in Washington, wants to work in Washington. DOGE addressed both of these problems, and despite constant, obsessed maligning from the media, the team has achieved some important wins.

I asked a couple of high-ranking DOGE officials about their work beyond identifying billions in waste and fraud, and while the project is still ongoing, I did discover a bunch of interesting, overlooked accomplishments. On the ground floor, the unit empowered career bureaucrats to raise efficiency roadblocks they’ve long since identified, but never had a path to surface. DOGE has rationalized… the entire federal fleet, apparently? In terms of acquisitions waste, the team is currently rewriting the Federal Acquisitions Regulations (FAR), which governs how and what the government buys. And they have also employed an AI deregulation tool to analyze something like 200,000 federal regulations no longer required by law, which can now safely be ignored. There are no shortage of regulations that still need to be eliminated. But you can’t kill what you can’t see, and using agentic tools to identify bottlenecks in need of deregulation is just a smart good thing all of us should be excited about.

Still, maybe the most important thing DOGE did was make, for the first time in any of our lives, the prospect of working for the government on difficult projects seem cool to competent people, and especially young people in tech. But for people who have made a career of hiding extremely unpopular policies and pet projects inside our crippled bloated government, the prospect of efficiency sounds like a threat, which is why they’ve ratcheted the volume on their histrionics up to 9, and why younger guys like Edward especially have been targeted. Not that he seems to give a shit.

“I don’t care for what people have to say online,” he said. “I haven’t from the start, just trying to do what is right, public opinion is just a wave.”

That shook me to be honest.

“Is Big Balls… wise?” a colleague of mine asked.

I thought about that picture of him covered in blood. “Just trying my best,” he told me. “Just trying to do my work, and do a great job at that work.” “Just trying to make a better future.”

He hates the spotlight, but the spotlight is drawn to him. That is because he has exhibited rare degrees of goodness, which — in this fallen ass world of darkness — makes him a target. But we could all stand to have a pair as big as Edward’s.

We notice problems every day. I’ve written about them for years. But Edward noticed one and did something. Despite all of the attention he never wanted, Edward did the hard, right thing. And as of this month, it’s now apparent he has a habit of doing the hard, right thing. Which means he is exactly the kind of person who, in 2025, should be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

There’s not a chance in hell he wants this thing, given his aversion to attention. But if he could do the hard, right thing just one more time and accept this, maybe with all of the younger DOGE guys, the country would be better for it. Because America doesn’t need another athlete who hates America. We don’t need another athlete at all, in fact, nor do we need another musician, or actor, or megalomaniacal partisan political donor. Today, right now, what we need is a generation of young men willing to do the hard, right thing, even as millions of people across the world tell them that they’re wrong and bad, and wish them harm because of it.

Today, America needs balls. And so balls are what we must reward.

-SOLANA