As I’ve said since forever, VW was a much easier target for America than America was. Dropping a regulator hammer on the Berkeley Professors and Marin Dairy Farmers driving a VW station wagon is like a walk in the park.

Sure, VW got raked over the coals and there was serious fall-out in Germany. In some sense idling with low emissions isn’t the problem people made it out to be, which is why lying about it was such a stupid strategy. But the real story has always been that direct action against the huge number of American diesel egregious cheaters was only signaled — a big overseas takedown was like warning shots seen at home.

And now finally, the wheels of justice are starting to make the rounds on the actual problem. It’s amazing just how intentionally dumb and blind about harms American car “tuners” were, while watching regulators clean up Germany.

Feds Nail Another Diesel Shop With $10M in Fines for Deleting Emissions Equipment: It was caught selling, installing, and manufacturing tuning devices that imitated another company’s products.

So dumb. And of course it was run out of the infamous “what do you mean slavery is wrong” state of North Carolina.

Fun history fact, the Department of Justice and National Parks were created by President Grant after he won the Civil War, to stop the KKK-minded southern states from trying to profit from massive systemic harms in America including pollution.

Fast forward to today and the Department of Justice is busy shutting down dangerous and dumb North Carolina business models like it’s 1865 again.

But my favorite part of the story is actually this buried lede:

Rudy’s then started faking these tuners in-house. This involved an $850,000 laptop purchase, as the computer contained the software to convert other tuners into Mini-Maxxes and XRT Pros. Until stopping in July 2018, Rudy’s sold nearly 44,000 imitation tuners and generated about $33 million in revenue from them. All this is as reported by the DOJ.

Should we really call that a $850,000 laptop purchase? It “contained” valuable software, while the laptop was likely worth next to nothing on its own. The idea someone could license software on just one laptop for nearly $1M tells you just how stupidly lucrative causing intentional environmental harm had become even after the VW takedown.

Related: North Carolina was the first to secede to start a Civil War meant to preserve slavery. They refused to end slavery in some similar fashion to refusing to stop polluting. As the rest of the world was ending slavery in the late 1700s, America primarily had fought a Revolutionary War to preserve and expand it instead. Regulation of harms overseas was stopped when it started to hit home. George Washington, literally recruited his soldiers by asking if they opposed the British King being too progressive and setting free the Blacks in America. And Washington himself went on to keep his slaves even when it became illegal in America, ordering his lawyer to find him loopholes that allowed taking hostages and raping Black women for profit. Thus the haters in North Carolina apparently have had a hard time accepting there could be any faster or better way to make money than… intentionally cheating regulations in a manner causing massive harms to society. It’s on that note we can see how President Grant was the best President in history. And Washington? Awful.