Good morning. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, appeared before Congress yesterday to discuss the war in Iran. He said that America’s greatest adversary was “the reckless, feckless and defeatist words of congressional Democrats and some Republicans” criticizing the war. And King Charles III and Queen Camilla had a busy day in New York. There’s more below — including good news for hippos that used to belong to the drug lord Pablo Escobar. Today’s number is 86. Let me explain.
Under threatJames Comey, the former director of the F.B.I., was in federal court yesterday to face a charge that he had threatened to kill President Trump. Prosecutors say that when Comey posted an image on social media last year, showing seashells arranged on a beach to read “86 47,” it was “a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President.” The numbers were a combination of the slang term “86,” which means to remove or get rid of, with an apparent reference to Trump, the country’s 47th president. Calling “86” a death threat would come as a surprise to anyone who has worked in a restaurant kitchen. The number is jargon that came out of soda fountains in the 1930s, meaning, We’ve run out of that item, so strike it from the menu. Before I became a journalist, I was a line cook. After I’d fired the final seafood special, say, I’d yell “86 shrimp” to the servers. It meant: Sell no more of those, please. You may know the number from “The Bear,” the restaurant dramedy. Carmy, the chef, 86s the ravioli. (The dish was taking too long to make and putting the kitchen in the weeds.) Language evolves. Mafia lore allows that “86” means someone needs to be removed, perhaps permanently — though it’s probably not a term you’ll hear on a RICO wiretap. But when the former F.B.I. director posted his seashells, was he really imagining a presidential assassination? More and more, the government is seeing political criticism as a threat. It is defining the idea of a threat downward. And Trump didn’t start it.
A shift in thinkingWhy is this happening? I called Devlin Barrett, who has covered federal law enforcement for more than 20 years. “Most lawyers would tell you the ‘86’ case is a very far stretch from the types of threat cases that federal prosecutors generally pursue,” he told me. “It’s an instance where the Trump administration is taking a much more aggressive and elastic use of criminal-threat law and applying it to a phrase where there is plenty of disagreement over what it actually means.” There’s a surprising reason for this: the Jan. 6 insurrection. A flood of social-media threats had preceded the attack on the Capitol. “There was a push from some quarters, very much including from on the left, to say that there is more threatening behavior out there on the internet than you think, and that it needs to be investigated,” Devlin said. In the years that followed, law enforcement officials tracked more threats all across American life and launched more investigations into those threats. Then Trump took office — and stuck with the idea. He was particularly focused on punishing political enemies like Comey and thwarting political opponents. Maybe his aides could nab them on charges stemming from their coarse language? Federal prosecutors, Devlin said, are now seeking threat charges “in some pretty flexible and aggressive ways.”
Facts vs. lawLet’s return to the internet, though. It is absolutely suffused with hideous language — about politics and about people. (It’s often aimed at my colleagues for their reporting.) And the truth is that some acts of violence really do follow ugly political speech by their perpetrators. So it’s important to look at when the government chooses to prosecute for threatening speech, and why. As in threats, so too in prosecutions: Intent matters. “There’s been an across-the-board push within the Trump administration to perceive things as threats and prosecute things as threats that past iterations of the D.O.J. would not have pursued,” Devlin told me. In other words: It is another form of politics.
The Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s map of congressional voting districts, ruling that lawmakers had illegally used race when drawing up a new majority-Black district. The court’s conservative justices said the decision upheld the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a law that guarantees the rights of minority voters and prohibits voting practices that discriminate against them — even as liberal justices accused the court’s majority of gutting that same law. The decision was 6 to 3, split along ideological lines. For decades, states have drawn districts that made Black voters a majority, to ensure those voters could elect candidates of their choice. But that practice could change after yesterday’s decision. It’s hard to know which states’ maps will change, but the decision likely will help Republicans in the midterm elections. Hours after the ruling, Florida lawmakers approved a new map that could give Republicans up to four additional seats. And it’s possible that other Republican-controlled states could attempt even more aggressive redraws, The Times’s Nate Cohn wrote. The maps below show what he calls one plausible outcome:
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Endangered: Colombia planned to slaughter as many as 80 hippos descended from the herd of the drug lord Pablo Escobar. An Indian tycoon offered them a home. Your pick: The most clicked link in The Morning yesterday was about how GLP-1s turn down food noise.
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If you can lay your hands on some of the wild king salmon that’s coming out of California right now, and some bright pink-red stalks of rhubarb to boot, you’ll be in seasonal heaven with Melissa Clark’s great recipe for rhubarb roasted salmon. But if it’s farmed fish you’re seeing at the market instead, that’ll work fine — it’s just fattier meat, with a little less flavor. Get some flaky sea salt on there at the end, to help compensate.
We heard from a lot — like, a lot — of readers about our list of the 30 greatest living American songwriters this week. The responses ran to countless variations on the theme of: You should have included Billy Joel, or Randy Newman, or Stevie Nicks, or Jeff Tweedy. So if you want to submit your own list of the greatest living American songwriters, please participate in our readers’ poll. And read our critic Lindsay Zoladz on 11 great American songwriters who didn’t make our list. More on culture |
