8647. 86-47. Message Received.
I won’t mince my words here. James Comey knows exactly what he was trying to say with his “cryptic” seashell message posted to Instagram on Thursday. If you believe his “innocent” explanation, you’re either a fool or you share his sentiment: You want Donald Trump, the President of the United States, to come to harm. To be killed, even.
“Cool shell formation on my beach walk,” the disgraced former FBI director captioned his post, which showed an arrangement of shells on the sand. “8647,” they read. I think it was AI-generated. Slop or not, it doesn’t matter.
The uproar was immediate. Comey quickly took down the post, and later he posted an apology, explaining how it was all just a misunderstanding and of course he would never advocate violence.
“I didn’t realise some folks associate those numbers with violence,” Comey explained.
“It never occurred to me, but I oppose violence of any kind, so I took the post down.”
No, I’m sure in all your years as a senior figure in law enforcement, you had no idea whatsoever that “86” could mean “to kill someone.”
“86” is slang originally derived from the hospitality industry, where it’s used to describe the removal of an item from a menu, for whatever reason. “86” is also used to describe refusing to serve a customer or even throwing them out. It’s probably derived from the word “nix,” which it rhymes with. Makes sense.
But “86” is also used as slang for “murder.” Antifa misfits and mutants use it all the time to describe their violent fantasies and violent realities. The type of people the FBI is either monitoring or running, depending on who’s in charge.
It’s also common military jargon for killing or being killed, as is attested in a 1991 New York Times story.
“To 86” as in “to kill” may be a newer meaning, but it’s not that new. Forty plus years of semantic usage at least is enough to make a meaning standard, common, whatever.
President Trump, certainly, is in no doubt.
“He knew exactly what that meant,” Trump told Fox News.
“A child knows what that meant… that meant assassination.”
To muddy the waters, a normal leftist tactic, the Wikipedia entry for the term was hastily updated after Comey’s post, so that it now includes references to examples of when “86” has been used in a supposedly hostile manner by Republicans and Trump supporters. As if that makes any difference. Yes, Matt Gaetz used the term and so did Jack Posobiec—Posobiec even used it to refer to Joe Biden while he was president—but the context was totally different, and that’s what matters. First of all, Matt Gaetz was using the term in the past tense, to refer to members of the Republican party like Mitch McConnell who had been removed from their leadership positions. His use of the term was not an invocation or an imperative, simply a description of a state of affairs. Gaetz has said this himself, and it’s obviously true.
And when my friend Jack wrote “8646,” it was quite obvious he didn’t mean, “Kill Joe Biden.” Jack has been a consistent opponent of political violence, in the streets and on paper. He’s faced it down bravely in his reporting—just the other day he was assaulted by union workers when he challenged Rep. Jamie Raskin at a protest—and he’s also written an entire book about the leftist propensity to murder their opponents (and their own allies too) called Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions. Jack isn’t an unhuman. So there.
What’s interesting, of course, is that these semantic “misunderstandings” just keep on happening, and it’s always the same people.
A few weeks ago, deranged never-Trumper Rick Wilson was suspended from Twitter for 30 days, then banned, after he posted “Kill Tesla, Save the Country” on his account, with a link to a Substack post he’d written with that title.
Wilson spent days protesting his suspension and then ban, bitching and kvetching and claiming it was all a silly mistake. By “kill” he didn’t mean, well, kill, he meant something like, “Crash Tesla’s stock price!” or “Make it morally unacceptable to drive a Cybertruck!” “Kill” was just a convenient shorthand. Honest!
What matters, ultimately, as I said when I wrote about the Rick Wilson thing, is context. These utterances—like all utterances—derive their meaning from the broader social environment of utterances and actions, which also provide messages as surely as words do. Rick Wilson’s entreaty to “save America, kill Tesla” was being made at a time when Tesla dealerships across America were being attacked, Tesla charging stations were being sabotaged, Tesla owners were being intimidated and people were threatening to kill Tesla CEO Elon Musk, all because of his support for Donald Trump and his work leading the Department of Government Efficiency. It was a time when people on the left were talking with great admiration of their new folk hero Luigi Mangione, who assassinated United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in cold blood. Mangione, as I keep saying, is the new model for leftist direct action, now that the Democrat party is engaged in its own internal witchhunts and reprisals, and it’s clear mass mobilisation just doesn’t work to stop Donald Trump.
The truth is, these people—Comey, Wilson—don’t even have to say explicitly, “kill this or that person,” since the context of justified violence, including its legitimate targets, is already established, and there are innumerable unhinged weirdos—people like Thomas Matthew Crooks and Ryan Routh and Nikita Casap—who are ready to strike whenever the opportunity presents itself. They’ve been whipped into a frenzy and primed to kill.
For the better part of a decade, we’ve had warnings that Donald Trump is the greatest threat to American democracy in its 250-year history. Even before he took office in 2016 he was Orange Hitler, and his election would usher in a Thousand Year Trumpenreich, or so liberals, lunatics and Deep Staters like James Comey and Rick Wilson kept telling us.
Before the 2024 election campaign, we had Victoria Nuland’s husband, Robert Kagan, saying Trump was America’s Caesar and a “Trump dictatorship” was “increasingly inevitable.” The implication, unspoken of course but unmissable all the same, was that an extraordinary figure would be needed to employ extraordinary measures to stop Julius Trumpus. A Brutus figure. This time, though, Brutus could strike before the Republic was brought to an end, not after.
And so we got something we thought we’d never see: a presidential campaign where the favourite candidate survived not one but two assassination attempts in as many months.
None of this is incidental to what James Comey was saying with his silly little seashell picture. It’s essential to the full meaning and the intention.
What would it actually mean to “nix” Donald Trump right now? He’s only just been elected, after all. He won’t be out of office for four years. He can’t serve another term. So what does that leave? Impeachment? I’m sure James Comey would support an attempt to impeach President Trump. There’s already been one so far since January, which failed miserably, and no doubt there will be more, especially if Democrats regain control in the midterms. But that simply isn’t what James Comey meant. If it had been, he’d have said so. “Let’s impeach Donald Trump,” he could have said.
All that’s left is death, in some form. The ultimate form of removal. The ultimate nixing.
Comey has already been forced to explain himself to the authorities, and no doubt he’ll be made to feel uncomfortable for some time to come. Good. Set the IRS on his lanky ass again. But he won’t be charged with anything. The threshold to prove intent is too high for a prosecution to be successful, and he can just claim it was a misunderstanding anyway, as he’s doing now. After all, he didn’t actually say somebody should kill Donald Trump, did he? If somebody took him to be saying that and really tried—well, whose fault would that be?