The frequency of his social media chirruping has begun to transcend both good taste and common sense in recent months.

A brief note: I’ll admit that I don’t know too much about Utah Senator Mike Lee. I certainly supported him in his primary challenge against the fossilized Bob Bennett back in the hazy days of 2010, as the more conservative option of the two. From that point onward, I, not being a Utahn myself, checked out and just assumed he would handle himself like most Utah Republicans do in public: with stolid dignity and the occasional dad joke about “funeral potatoes.”

Most of the time he does, I suppose. But it’s been impossible not to notice that social media seems to have had a questionable effect on him, ever since he leaned into the persona of “@BasedMikeLee” on Twitter/X. Lee has an official staff account as well; this is his “personal” one. “Based,” for those unaware, is an online coinage that typically means “self-assured” and/or “commonsense,” and that is certainly the persona Lee tries to project. (“Message: I’m cool.”)

And the frequency of his chirruping has begun to transcend both good taste and common sense in recent months. This weekend, as the Minneapolis shooter was on the loose, two were dead, and two more in the hospital, Lee thought it appropriate to juxtapose images of the alleged killer, caught on home security camera at the door of a victim wearing a nightmarish latex mask, with the caption “Nightmare on Waltz Street.” This is only the latest in a long pattern of increasingly “spicy” tweets — bids for attention, one must imagine — from Utah’s senior senator.

Set aside the humiliating fact that Mike Lee doesn’t know the difference between Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger; set aside the fact that he apparently doesn’t know how to spell the governor of Minnesota’s last name correctly, either. What vaguely turns my stomach about this is the flippancy of it all. As if this is just some horror-movie trope to joke about online, as opposed to an authentic real-life horror. People are dead. The motive was explicitly political. This isn’t the time for elected politicians to be making hatefully callous jokes about people’s lives being snuffed out by psychopaths; I am thus forced to question the instincts and decency of one who would. (Also, since Lee felt like making this political, he really ought to have thought more carefully about the shooter’s potential motivations and affiliations.)

It was a stunningly tasteless display all around, veering close to public disgrace, notable precisely because of the bizarrely vicious, performatively “online” heartlessness of it all. He was doing it for applause and laughter from the mob. A Utah senator, no less.

This afternoon, retiring Minnesota Senator Tina Smith was photographed speaking to Mike Lee in the hallway about his online conduct over the weekend. “I think that he honestly, he seemed a little surprised to be confronted,” she summarized. Later on, Smith’s chief of staff remonstrated with Lee’s personnel in an e-mail that, for once, felt unmediatedly honest. Reflecting on Lee’s posting spree, she asked: “Is that a successful day of work on Team Lee?” All I can say in response is that if Mike Lee’s team is actually looking out for his best interests, they will sit down with him and ask him to retire his personal social media accounts. Some people just aren’t “based” enough to handle them without floating away.