Sen. Mike Lee (R-Internet Conspiracy Rabbit Hole)

Plus: The House’s dueling probes into the Trump assassination attempt.

(Composite / Photos: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Utah’s senior senator, Mike Lee, has two different personas: On one side is the dutiful but partisan senior lawmaker from a red state. On the other is his hyperonline alter ego, known on X as “BasedMikeLee.”

Senator Mike Lee and Based Mike Lee are a lot like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as Robert Louis Stevenson originally described them in his nineteenth-century novella. During the daytime, Dr. Jekyll Senator Lee delivers eloquent floor speeches and lengthy filibusters filled with high-minded ideas about the Constitution, the role of government, philosophy, and the Founding Fathers. But after the sun sets, Senator Lee retreats indoors, and Based Mike Lee makes his appearance. Instead of becoming a murderous brute without morals like Hyde, Lee transforms into an online troll without critical thinking skills. As increasingly befits Elon Musk’s social media platform, Lee uses his X account to spread conspiracy theories, amplify nutjobs, and get himself tripped up over the most obviously fake nonsense.

I’ve observed Lee’s behavior for years in the Capitol. He’s a bit more reserved than many of his colleagues, rarely offering comments during walk-and-talks, the short, off-the-cuff question and answer–style interviews that are central to Senate reporting. He’s often too busy talking shop with his aides or rifling off text messages, his reading glasses balanced at the tip of his nose. Lee doesn’t stonewall reporters, though; he simply prefers doing more formal press interviews, and he otherwise makes his views clear by delivering well-written speeches on the Senate floor.

His X account, though, is a completely different story. The extent of BasedMikeLee’s Hyde-like transformation has never been more apparent than it was this past weekend: In response to an AI-generated video depicting the POV of a man with Mr. Fantastic arms taking a face-first trip down a “water slide” that flings him hundreds of feet into the air between disconnected slide sections over forests and dirt roads only to finally dump him in what appears to be the Pacific Ocean, BasedMikeLee asked, “Is this real?”

Um. No. It’s not, Senator.

But it’s not just that Lee—one of a very selective group of 100 individuals tasked with making the laws of this country—is getting duped by obviously fake videos. At around 1:30 a.m. in Utah—or well past three in the morning if, he happened to be back in Washington—Lee began amplifying a theory posted by Kim Dotcom, a German-Finnish entrepreneur soon to be extradited to the United States from New Zealand following a 12-year legal battle involving his file-sharing website Megaupload, which has been accused of costing the entertainment industry millions by making available huge amounts of pirated content. 

Dotcom’s theory, which he posted about on X, revolved around the North Atlantic Fella Organization, an online activist group that has sought to counter Russian propaganda by posting militarized doge memes. While such an organization may seem like the sort of spontaneously forming online community that comes and goes every day on the internet, Dotcom had other visions. According to him, NAFO was actually a CIA-backed operation run by former congressman (and current Bulwark contributor) Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.). Never fear, though, Dotcom writes: NAFO has run out of its secret government funding and is now “officially dead.” 

Lee didn’t question Dotcom’s ridiculous story. He instead took the post as an opportunity to condemn the CIA for supporting “clandestine propaganda campaigns to influence public opinion among U.S. citizens.”

Lee posted several more times about this and the need for the government to stay away from influence campaigns that could possibly touch the United States. But using NAFO as an example commits him to an extreme position. NAFO activities—which, again, are essentially just dog memes being posted by pro-Ukrainian X accounts—are entirely online, and they aren’t particularly focused on American public opinion. If Lee takes NAFO as a template for a type of CIA influence campaign he thinks should be illegal, he is claiming that the agency should not be allowed to conduct virtually any public-facing operations anywhere in the world using the internet or social media; it’s impossible for publicly available English-language content online to be entirely sequestered from the eyes and clicks of American citizens. It’s a curious stance for a Republican senator to take.

Then, too, leave aside for a moment the fact that Lee was amplifying Dotcom, an accused criminal who posts about the “protocols of the Elders of Zion,” in the first place. Consider that Lee was sharing with his quarter-million-plus followers a theory that a former member of Congress was directly involved in a covert influence operation targeting American citizens.

Dotcom’s evidence-free allegation that Kinzinger ran NAFO for the CIA likely stems from the fact that in early 2016, before Donald Trump or Joe Biden were even president, the Illinois Republican was the lead sponsor of the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which established an interdepartmental “Global Engagement Center” that would coordinate the powers of the State Department, DoD, and other federal agencies to counter foreign propaganda campaigns. While the name and mandate might make the GEC seem like a major undertaking, in reality, it has done little more than issue reports and posted statements on its blog. Not exactly the stuff of a John le Carré novel. 

But helping cooked-brain conspiracists like Kim Dotcom find new audiences for their hunches is becoming typical for Lee, whose behavior online has become increasingly erratic since he decided to start posting all on his own two summers ago. For instance, he’s boosted posts claiming disguised federal agents participated in the January 6th attack on the Capitol, wondering, “how many of these guys are feds?”

Earlier this year, Lee credulously hopped on a bogus BREAKING NEWS–style post that claimed Biden was having a “medical emergency” aboard Air Force One.

It goes on and on. Whenever Lee pulls out his phone and taps the bird app, he appears to simultaneously press pause on his ability to question or think critically about whatever flashes before him. That’s dangerous enough when it’s happening to the public en masse—we’ll get to the upshot for the American electorate in a moment—but the idea that the minds of elected officials are being poisoned by the internet in the same way creates a whole new set of reasons for concern. 

Community political theater

A group of House Republicans are dissatisfied with the pace of the investigation being conducted by the official bipartisan task force assigned to look into the failures that allowed former President Donald Trump to nearly be assassinated at a Pennsylvania campaign rally in July. Annoyed at the lack of activity during Congress’s August recess, the group of far-right members decided to hold their own hearing across the street from the Capitol at the Heritage Foundation on Monday.

The competing probe is being run by GOP Reps. Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Cory Mills (Fla.), Eli Crane (Ariz.), Andy Biggs (Ariz.), and Chip Roy (Texas)—all vocal Trump allies. Recently defeated Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) was also present in the audience.

The witnesses included Erik Prince, the founder of private military contractor Blackwater; conservative podcaster, former Secret Service officer, and thrice-failed congressional candidate Dan Bongino; and Ben Shaffer, a SWAT counter-sniper who was working onsite at the rally where Trump had his brush with death. 

The hearing featured lots of speculation and innuendo about what really happened. A common refrain was, “Do you find it odd that. . .?”

It’s natural that House Republicans would have different ideas for how to investigate the attempted Trump assassination, and that the more MAGA of them would be compelled to launch their own competing probe. But it’s not as though there aren’t already far-right members on the official bipartisan panel. The real task force includes six Democrats and seven Republicans, and the latter contingent includes Reps. Clay Higgins (R-La.), Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), and Pat Fallon (R-Texas), among others.

Yesterday’s unofficial hearing is only the beginning of the alternative investigation, and while it lacks the legal authority of the official task force, it does have the ability to take the spotlight. Its members enjoy close ties to Trump and enjoy favored status with conservative media outlets.

The lost demographic

Returning to the subject of people who consume bad information through their screens, I wanted to share this New Yorker essay by Charles Bethea.

Bethea spoke to a handful of people who consume their news through alternative media and primarily in homeopathic amounts. “Low-information voters” is how these folks are often described in the mainstream media. The essay paints a grim picture of a significant chunk of the population that is apparently wholly uninterested in getting a handle on matters of fact pertaining to American politics (or reality itself, in some cases). You might think that characterization is a bit harsh. I’m curious if you still feel that way after reading this excerpt: 

A middle-aged man who introduced himself as Chuck, and said he worked in cell-phone sales, told me that he found his political news on the Internet—“mostly YouTube.” Chuck, who is Black, said that he was leaning toward voting for Trump: “I feel more at ease with him.” A bearded white man in his sixties, who wore a Black Sabbath shirt, told me that he got his political news from “people in the neighborhood. Friends. I don’t got no TV or nothing.” He had a felony on his record, he said, and couldn’t vote. “Biden is a pedo,” he added. Another shopper waved me away, and pointed to his bumper sticker: “HOW ABOUT WE WATERBOARD THE MEDIA TIL THEY TELL THE TRUTH?”

I walked over to a stand selling fireworks in the parking lot. Stepping up to the counter, I cautiously began my spiel once again. “It’s O.K.,” Riley Charnote, the young man at the cash register, said, gently cutting me off. “I listen to NPR.” He said that he was “exhausted” by the misinformation he regularly encountered around him—talk of stolen elections and poisonous vaccines. “The older people tend to fall for it,” he said. “Just be careful. If you say the wrong thing . . .” Eventually, a security guard rolled up in a truck. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but you can’t do it here,” he told me. I left and headed to a nearby Kroger. I asked a woman named Juanita, pushing a cart loaded down with watermelons, where she got her political news. “My husband watches it sometimes,” she said. “Trump news. . . . We don’t have Internet.” She continued, “I usually get my news from the Bible.” A Kroger official briskly approached us. “It’s the end times,” Juanita added. “It’s almost here.”

If you have a stomach for more, read the whole thing.