DC Has Had Its Chance to Self-Govern. It Failed. Enough Already. | The American Spectator

On Monday, a crime that would be shocking in most of America happened in Washington, D.C.

That crime, where it occurred, wasn’t shocking at all. And this fact should create consequences that Americans from Maine to Hawaii ought to be proud of.

Edward Coristine isn’t quite 20 years old, but he’s nonetheless a famous figure. Coristine is known by his alias, “Big Balls.” He’s a college student and programmer formerly appointed to the Department of Government Efficiency, but he’s now a permanent federal employee. Coristine held the title of senior advisor at the highest pay grade (GS-15) in the General Services Administration and then moved on to a job working for the Social Security Administration.

But on Monday his eventful life took a frightful turn, as he stepped in to protect a woman targeted by a group of animals on a D.C. street bent on carjacking her. She managed to get to safety inside the locked vehicle; Coristine was beaten severely by the would-be carjackers.

This incident was notable only because it happened to someone in the public eye. Violent crime in Washington, D.C., especially that perpetrated by feral youths with zero fear of prosecution or incarceration, is off the scale.

Consider that the current murder rate in Washington, D.C., is 41 per 100,000. That’s almost the highest in the world; it’s rivaled only by places like Caracas, Guatemala City, and Pretoria among international capitals. A murder rate more than four times higher than Mexico City, three times higher than Bogota, and at least 20 times higher than any of the capitals of major countries in Asia or Europe is utterly unacceptable.

Property crime in Washington, D.C., is every bit as horrific. The police don’t even investigate muggings. Car thefts are mostly just reported to the insurance company.

The last time I was in Washington I was walking around and ducked into a Five Guys for a quick lunch. $28 later I was nearly in a fistfight with an aggressive panhandler who came into the restaurant to demand that I buy him a meal. None of the employees did anything; they certainly didn’t bother calling the police. When I told a few Washingtonian friends about the incident, the response was “be glad it was lunchtime; it would have been a lot worse at night.”

You don’t walk the streets of Washington, D.C., at night.

Washington is a place where the local government thinks it’s a good idea to paint rainbow flags on all the crosswalks and essentially turn the police into lawn ornaments. Unless someone should deface those crosswalks, of course.

In 2020, a mob of rioters burned a church near the White House and so threatened the presidential residence that Donald Trump was moved into the basement by the Secret Service. The reaction of the local government? Not a crackdown. Instead, they turned 16th Street NW, just a few blocks away, into Black Lives Matter Plaza, complete with garish yellow “BLACK LIVES MATTER” paint in the middle of a tourist area, and didn’t take it down for almost five years until the returning Trump administration began threatening to pull federal funding.

Washington, D.C., should be the jewel of the nation. It is our federal city. It is the repository of our most precious national landmarks — the White House, the U.S. Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, the Library of Congress, and on and on.

And it is a Third World hellhole run by some of the most incompetent, corrupt, and malevolent human beings the First World has ever seen.

Why? Why, in the world’s most prosperous and powerful country, is the capital city such a terrible embarrassment?

If you want, you can blame it on Richard Nixon.

Before Nixon’s ill-fated second term, Washington was a federal city run by the federal government. But as the Watergate scandal was destroying his presidency, Nixon signed the District of Columbia Home Rule Act on Christmas Eve in 1973. This act allowed D.C. residents to elect a mayor and a city council for the first time in over a century, marking a significant step toward local self-governance, though Congress retained ultimate authority to review and veto local legislation. The transition to an elected government took effect with the first elections held on Nov. 5, 1974.

Washington, D.C., has not had competent or effective municipal government since, and the effects on the population are nothing short of devastating. For example, last year only 31 percent of the city’s fourth-graders were grade-level proficient in reading, and only 39 percent met that mark in math. For eighth-graders, the numbers were worse: 30 percent and 28 percent, respectively. Those numbers reflect the presence of a persistent, nearly ungovernable underclass, incapable of honest employment and increasingly predatory toward tourists and the productive classes.

There is no middle class in Washington, D.C. There are the rich and the poor. Washington is a classic example of what I’ve called Weaponized Governmental Failure, which is the deliberate refusal to do the basics of municipal governance so as to push out the kinds of voters who would otherwise hold incompetents, tyrants, and kleptocrats accountable on election night. The rich send their kids to Sidwell Friends and hire private security in their neighborhoods; the poor are placated by SNAP and midnight basketball.

And radical leftist politics, the kind of demagoguery that results in the Inauguration Day riots of January 2017 and the attempted home invasion and vandalism at Tucker Carlson’s house the next year by a group calling itself Smash Racism DC.

Nowhere is governmental failure more weaponized than in Washington, D.C. And nowhere is this more disgraceful and unacceptable than there.

President Trump had the right idea for responding to the attack on Big Balls…

One hundred percent.

The only solution to weaponized governmental failure, and its catastrophic effects, is to take the power away from the weaponizers.

Nixon gave local control of our nation’s capital to a gang of Democrat mobsters, and the results have been predictable. It’s time to reverse that mistake and allow America to reclaim its principal city as the jewel it was designed to be.