Paging @jack. Florida Senator Marco Rubio on Monday night took to Twitter to engage in what looked dangerously close to online harassment.
The target of Rubio’s ire was so-called “Salt Bae,” a Turkish celebrity chef whose Nusr-Et steakhouse empire spans Istanbul to Doha to New York to Miami. Nusr-Et’s Istanbul location hosted Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s president, on a visit he paid to Turkey last month.
Maduro—like North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, a fat leader of a hungry country—is a malevolent buffoon whose mismanagement and cruelty have resulted in the mass immiseration of what used to be Latin America’s most prosperous country. It was, to put it delicately, poor form for him to fete himself at a pricey steakhouse while on a foreign junket while his countrymen starve. Salt Bae, in Istanbul for the occasion, also personally welcomed Maduro to the restaurant and even served him. This too was a questionable decision.
The moral culpability for this episode lies squarely with Maduro, however: It was his decision to deplete already emptying state coffers for a good steak in a decadent restaurant. (I’m going to go out on a limb and assume he expensed the dinner.) Salt Bae was merely the host. (And yes, it should be noted that the chef has displayed bad political judgment before: He was also once photographed admiring a photograph of Fidel Castro.)
Senator Rubio, whose state hosts many Venezuelan refugees, understandably loathes Maduro. But his Tweet Monday night singled out the restaurateur rather than the president:
This guy @nusr_ett who admires dictator @NicolasMaduro so much actually owns a steakhouse in, of all places, #Miami. It’s called NUSR-ET STEAKHOUSE MIAMI located at 999 Brickell Avenue, Miami, FL 33131
The phone number is 1 305 415 9990 in case anyone wanted to call. https://t.co/7CDkgHVZWh— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) September 18, 2018
No, what Senator Rubio did was not “doxxing”—outing an anonymous Internet user’s “IRL” identity. Salt Bae is a quasi celebrity, and the location of his steakhouses is hardly a state secret. But by including not just the address of Salt Bae’s Miami restaurants (at least plausibly, therefore, simply urging people to boycott the business), but also the phone number in his tweet, the senator crossed a line.
What good, after all, does the phone number do? Salt Bae does not live in Miami—he’s based in Turkey. And even if he were in Miami, good luck getting him on the phone at his restaurant by calling the main line. Providing the phone number, therefore, can only do one thing: Encourage a campaign of harassment against beleaguered wait staff, maître d’s, chefs, and whoever is unlucky enough to pick up the phone there for the next few days. Workers, in other words, who have nothing to do with their boss’s bad political judgment.
Not to mention, a government official singling out a private business for doing something he doesn’t like is almost….well, Maduro-esque.
