Mike Lee, Slop Addict

Plus: How the Titanic sinking is relevant to the U.S. Senate.

(Composite / GettyImages)

Based Labor Day Weekend

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) spent the Labor Day holiday weekend doing what he knows best: posting. An analysis of Lee’s activity over the three-day break shows that he posted his own content, reposted other accounts, or in some cases reposted himself more than 70 times. In addition, he replied over 200 times to other accounts. Much of Lee’s own content included images and videos he generated using AI. One of these slop images caught my attention because even amid all of Lee’s fever-brained X content, it stood out for being uniquely nonsensical.

The latest trope to have captured Lee’s fascination is “Scotland Girl.” If you scan his feed, you will see a number of permutations, most of them depicting a teenage girl wielding a hatchet and a sword in a manner reminiscent of Mel Gibson in Bravehart. Some of them include a secondary illustration of Gibson’s character floating in the background, like so:

“Scotland Girl” is an internet moniker for a Scottish girl named Mayah Sommers, who was recently arrested for publicly wielding bladed weapons, which she claimed to have done in response to harassment from migrants. Police have not yet found any evidence to support her allegation.¹

According to a report from the Guardian:

A 12-year-old girl was charged with being in possession of offensive weapons after an incident in which a Bulgarian couple were approached by young people in St Ann Lane, Dundee, on Saturday evening.

Alleged footage of the incident was circulated widely on social media, including images of a girl holding up bladed weapons. There were claims that she and her friends had been harassed and followed by individuals, who were described without evidence as migrants.

Despite the absence of evidence, Lee, X owner Elon Musk, and thousands of other hyper-online right-wingers have joined in a storm of posting about the incident. Most of them appear to have done so without having the latest details offered by police about what happened. Things got bad enough that Scottish police issued a statement calling out “misinformation” about the case being circulated online.

“That’s what all the recorded data told us earlier on this week—we’re living in a safer country than we did 40 years ago,” said Scottish First Minister John Swinney. “But people like Elon Musk, with the misinformation that has been stoked up about this case, are trying to undermine that sense of cohesion within our communities and it is totally and utterly unacceptable, and Police Scotland are absolutely right to call it out.”

When Lee did take a break from posting about “Scotland Girl,” it was only because something else had apparently caught his interest. He tapped the post button on lots of material that any Lee chronicler will recognize as routine: a claim that the United States will “regret” not leaving NATO because member countries are becoming Islamic states, a jab against Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), a tiresome AI-generated animation of an angry anthropomorphic ice cream cone, and much else. But along the way, he also fell for some medical propaganda.

The senior senator from Utah appeared flabbergasted about a screenshot of an article about a recent Rice University study of the effects of contraceptive use on emotional reactions and memory. “The use of hormonal contraceptives by tens of millions of women could plausibly be having population-level effects on behaviour, including political behaviour,” wrote a far-right pseudonymous account called Raw Egg Nationalist in a post accompanying the screenshot. (While Raw Egg Nationalist uses a photo of a bodybuilder for his X profile photo, in the real world, he is an English academic named Charles Cornish-Dale who lives with his mom. Very based, Charles!)

Musk boosted Raw Egg Nationalist’s commentary on the study, and Lee could not help but reply. “Oh dear!” he wrote. “That doesn’t sound good.”

If Lee had checked, he would have found that the actual article about the study makes clear the observed effects are “subtle,” and did not mention anything about contraceptives altering women’s political behavior—that was just Cornish-Dale’s tendentious commentary.

But Lee didn’t bother to check. That’s for suckers, not real posters, whose primary motivation is the endorphin rush from those engagement metrics. Lee seems to be positively entranced by it. The senator simply can’t quit X, or even dial it down a notch. His habit of late-night, often rage-fueled posting has become both a defining characteristic and a headache for his colleagues.

When Lee shared multiple cavalier reactions to the assassination of multiple Minnesota state officials with his followers in June, it prompted outrage in the Senate. Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) even pulled him out of a GOP-only meeting to give him a dressing down.

Smith’s words apparently didn’t reach Lee’s mind, let alone his heart.

In July, not long after the incident with Smith, Lee fell for a fake, obviously AI-generated image of a resignation letter from Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. He deleted it shortly after posting, later telling reporters he did so “out of an abundance of caution.” Once again, the thought of checking first had eluded him.

Lee’s antics over the holiday weekend show he’s still addicted to seeing red while staring at blue light. Perhaps someone in his office should invest in one of these, for everyone’s sake.

Imagine if Twitter had been around

I had a much calmer Labor Day weekend than Lee. In addition to attending a barbecue and spending some time boating on the Chesapeake, I also started watching the hit television series Downton Abbey for the first time.

Those of you who have already seen it may remember that the series begins with the news of the Titanic sinking in 1912. Because I am a massive dork, my first thought was about the United States Congress. And this thought led me to a recommendation I thought I’d share with you: If you’ve ever wanted to know what a swift yet thorough Senate investigation can look like, check out the Senate Commerce Committee’s final report on the infamous tragedy. While most of us probably think of the Titanic disaster in terms of personal drama and doomed romance (I’LL NEVER LET GO, JACK!!!), the sinking also led to the codification of many safety precautions that still regulate the travel industry today—you know, the kind we all ignore when the plane is getting ready to depart from the gate.²

The Commerce Committee’s report offers a clear timeline of events and an explanation of what went wrong; there are also manifests identifying the various crew, passengers, and more. But because the Committee did its investigative work in the early part of the twentieth century, its ability to accurately address what happened isn’t always that great. One passage in particular sticks out:

The ship went down gradually by the bow, assuming an almost perpendicular position just before sinking at 12.47 a.m., New York time, April 15. There have been many conflicting statements as to whether the ship broke in two, but the preponderance of evidence is to the effect that she assumed an almost end-on position and sank intact.

When French and American explorers found the Titanic nearly 75 years after it sank, they learned it did indeed break in half, vindicating the witnesses (mostly women) who testified that it did crack in two. At the time, their statements were widely discounted as the result of hysteria.

The entire report is archived on the Senate’s website in a scanned 23-page PDF. I recommend printing it out for easier reading. Or, if you’re trying to get it in front of Mike Lee, maybe get Raw Egg Nationalist to tweet about it.

1. I’m just gonna ignore the “Peanut the Squirrel” reference. We only have so much space for unpacking the crazy in each newsletter.

2. Ever wonder why the emergency protocols are restated before every flight? That practice has its roots in the Titanic tragedy.