Maybe it would have been better for Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) to stay off social media this weekend. Then again, now we know what kind of person he is.
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Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) could have spent Father’s Day with his family instead of embarrassing himself on social media. However, when you have a reputation to uphold as a conspiracy theorist and all-around terrible person, you gotta put in that time on X.
And that is why, while one of his constituents was fighting for his life on Sunday after being shot a day earlier at Salt Lake City’s “No Kings” rally, Lee posted a couple of items that are unbecoming of a US senator.
In fact, they are unbecoming of a decent human being.
Of course, while Lee may be the former, he is certainly not the latter.
Let’s get to the particulars.
Following the murder of a Minnesota state representative and her husband, most Democrats and Republicans have come together to condemn political violence.
In this case, the victim was a Democrat, but Republican politicians have also been on the receiving end of attacks, so this should not be a partisan issue.
However, since the partisan leanings of the alleged murderer and his motive are still somewhat in doubt, there is a subsection of the MAGAverse that is more interested in making the case that the suspect is a Democrat than anything else.
Unsurprisingly, that group includes Elon Musk and right-wing influencer and ventriloquist lookalike Charlie Kirk.
And Lee, who thought this would be a good time to publish a pair of particularly inappropriate posts.
In the first, he asserts that the shooter was a “Marxist.”
Is there any publicly available evidence that this is the case? No. In fact, according to early reporting, he was a devout Christian who once registered as a Republican and, according to his friend, voted for Donald Trump.
But Lee, an avid conspiracy theorist who was a participant in Trump’s coup attempt and believes the federal government was behind the violence that took place during the January 6 insurrection, wasn’t done.
He followed up the first post (after already having spent Saturday trying to convince his followers that the shooter was probably not a Trump supporter) with one that seems to make a “joke” out of the assassination.
Nightmare on Waltz Street pic.twitter.com/Nkifu7cKPA
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) June 15, 2025
His post shows an image of the alleged killer, wearing a mask, at the door of one of his victims and states: “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” a reference to the horror movie “Nightmare on Elm Street” and to Minnesota Gov. Mike Walz (D), whose name he couldn’t even spell correctly.
We imagine that the motivation for the post was to say that this situation could turn out to be a problem for the 2024 vice presidential candidate who has become a lightning rod for Trump supporters because he is one of the most prominent Democrats who supports taking a more combative stance against the administration.
One of the reasons why MAGA conspiracy theorists believe the shooter may be a Democrat is that he was appointed to a state commission by Walz and his predecessor.
Of course, politicians who don’t put loyalty above all else appoint all kinds of people to these panels, even members of the opposite party, which may seem difficult to grasp for Trump’s followers.
In any case, it’s tough to see how anybody would find this funny or appropriate (although some of his followers seemed to think it was).
But the problem isn’t (just) that a US senator would tweet out something in such apparent bad taste, it is that he would spread unsubstantiated (and likely false) information just because it is ideologically convenient.
Oh, by the way, that constituent of his who was shot at the anti-Trump protest in Salt Lake City has now died.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
