While no politician is more known for his social media use than President Donald Trump, another high-profile Republican is under scrutiny — and criticism — for his. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah is taking heavy criticism for insensitive tweets he sent out following the shootings in Minnesota last weekend that killed one Democratic state representative and her husband and left two others injured.
Lee tweeted, “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way,” along with the photo of the suspected shooter. In another tweet, Lee posted a photo of the suspected shooter and wrote, “Nightmare on Waltz Street” — the “Waltz” part being a reference to Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz. In another tweet, Lee, upon learning the suspect had papers for a “No Kings” protest in his car, wrote, “Marxism is a deadly mental illness.”
The tweets have since been deleted, and he tried to backtrack by posting another tweet that said, “These hateful attacks have no place in Utah, Minnesota, or anywhere in America. Please join me in condemning this senseless violence, and praying for the victims and their families.”
By then, it might have been too late. It didn’t erase the storm of criticism for what he had previously said.
The Washington Post’s Theodoric Meyer reports that Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith confronted Lee outside the Senate chamber earlier this week. Smith told Meyer what she told Lee: “‘I said, ‘People like you and me don’t talk to each other that much, but this feels like something that we really need to talk about face to face.’”
Smith told reporters, “I wanted him to know how much pain that caused me and the other people in my state, and I think around the country, who think that this was a brutal attack. I don’t know whether Sen. Lee thought fully through what it was — you have to ask him — but I needed him to hear from me directly what impact I think his cruel statement had on me, his colleague.”
Smith declined to say what Lee said in response when confronted, but added, “I think he listened to what I said. He indicated that he, of course, meant no harm. But, of course, these things do cause harm. They hurt people.” Smith said Lee seemed “a little surprised” to be confronted.
Many lawmakers condemned Lee’s remarks, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who said he was “sickened” by Lee’s comments.
Lee ignored questions from reporters at the Senate on Monday about his tweets, and his office has not responded to requests for comment from news outlets, according to the Post.
Meanwhile, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell called on air for some of Lee’s staff to resign, saying, “Sen. Mike Lee’s staff now live in the disgrace he has visited upon them, and they all have a moral choice in front of them now. Mike Lee purports to be a man of great religiosity, but he is obviously not a man of great morality or great decency, and his staff has to decide tonight what to do about the disgrace he has handed them.”
O’Donnell said anyone who doesn’t fully support Lee’s original tweets should resign, adding, “You have your own choice to make. If you agree with Mike Lee’s choice to make jokes about assassination of a Democratic office holder in Minnesota, if you agree with that, then stay with Mike Lee. Stick with Mike Lee; stick with him all the way. But if you do have decency, you know you only have one choice.”
This does not appear to be a one-off in terms of Lee and his social media use. The xxxxxx’s Joe Perticone writes, “Mike Lee Needs an Intervention.”
About the now-deleted tweets, Perticone writes, “The fact that he put them up in the first place — and that it apparently took a very rare, personal rebuke from a fellow senator to get him to take them down — is the clearest illustration to date of the fact that even United States senators can have their brains (and hearts) rotted out by social media.”
Perticone notes that Lee is more than a casual social media user, writing, “The xxxxxx conducted a review of Mike Lee’s Twitter feed, @BasedMikeLee, over the past month. During that time period (30 days), the senator posted nearly 1,400 times, or about 46 posts a day. Of those posts, about half (697) were original tweets. The rest were retweets of other accounts or his own posts. The posts came mostly during normal business hours. But not exclusively. Of the nearly 700 posts Lee authored on Twitter, 47 of them came between the hours of 3am and 6am eastern standard time.”
About 46 posts a day?! That seems troubling for a politician.
Perticone added, “The first step to overcoming any addiction is admitting you have a problem. That’s a step that Lee has not yet taken when it comes to his phone. Perhaps he finds value in being this online. Perhaps it’s good for his political brand, or for fundraising. Maybe he just lives for the liberal tears. But maybe he should enlist the help of a former colleague who quit Twitter after considering ‘the data about the way social media is designed to create dopamine hits for teenage kids.’ Until then, you can expect more deranged and adolescent behavior from Lee. In the meantime, props to Sen. Smith for confronting him about it.”
Covering the shooting
Interesting work here from Slate’s Aymann Ismail: “Two Unimaginable Days in Minnesota.” Ismail talks to Christopher Vondracek, a D.C. correspondent for The Minnesota Star Tribune and one of the lead reporters on the Star Tribune's coverage of the shootings.
Ismail asked Vondracek for the most remarkable bit of information he uncovered last weekend.
Vondracek said, “By the end of the day on Saturday, the police confirmed that they were looking for a suspect named Vance Boelter. It came out that police stopped Boelter’s wife and three relatives at a gas station. They appeared to be on a very popular highway, 169, near this big lake called Mille Lacs where a lot of folks go. Apparently, the sheriff got word from Hennepin County, and a reporter did interviews and found out they had gotten gas-station pizza and soda pops and then sat out in lawn chairs for like five hours at this gas station, doing this interview. And the way they phrased it was that they were questioning her. I’m sure they’re also trying to find out what she knew and what she didn’t know. Finding out who Boelter is was also weird. We found out he has this evangelical fervor and had gone on mission trips to Africa and had made anti-trans, homophobic commentary in the Democratic Republic of Congo. His résumé looked really funky, like something cooked up by A.I. He also had many a half-cooked business plan to be a security professional and had some vehicles that looked like they were law enforcement vehicles; I wasn’t on the Boelter part of this story, but everything from working at a mortuary to managing a gas station. He had a farm down in Green Isle, where he was from, a town of like 200 people. It was where he was found Sunday night.”
Check out the full Q&A for how the story went from the news breaking to the reporting to the publication.
Wanna play a game?
