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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everybody, it's Sam Stein, managing editor, the Bulwark, joined by my pal Joe Perdicone, who is author of Press Pass. Great newsletter all about Capitol Hill and fashion, two of Joe's favorite things. We're going to be talking about his third favorite thing, Mike Lee's Twitter feed. Joe has been an obsessive follower of based Mike Lee for as long as I've been here. We've written a couple times about it. Today's newsletter is about it. There was a flurry of Labor Day weekend activity from the Twitter feed that I think is categorically deranged at certain points. But, Joe, why don't you explain what's going on here? Exactly how often did Mike Lee tweet this weekend? If we did the tally.
- [00:46]
B
So his like, first of all, hope you had a good Labor Day weekend.
- [00:52]
A
Thank you. I hope you did, too. You do? Don't. Who? No one wants to hear about that. We want to hear about Mike Lee's.
- [00:58]
B
Well, I was, you know, I was wondering, because most people, you know, go to barbecues or they get out of town or, you know, they go to the beach for one last time. That's not what Mike Lee did. Mike Lee did what he knows best, which was tweet. So he did about 70. More than 70 tweets. Retweets. Retweets of himself. And then he replied well over 200 times to various accounts like any normal person would on a holiday weekend that you normally say your family.
- [01:32]
A
The tweets are a lot. 70 is a lot. And it's not like. I wouldn't say it's totally extraordinary, but it's. It's an unhealthy amount of tweeting, even for me. But the 250 plus replies suggest a problem.
- [01:48]
B
Yeah. I mean, and they were at all hours of the day. So he was glued to his phone on an otherwise, like, leisurely weekend. So he started off some of his routine stuff saying that America should leave NATO or they'll regret it.
- [02:05]
A
Standard.
- [02:06]
B
Yeah. He's a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
- [02:09]
A
Okay. A little bit weird. Yeah.
- [02:10]
B
Yeah. You know, venturing into that space. He also did something that I don't think I've ever seen from a member of Congress, and particularly one on a committee that deals in foreign affairs. He started creating AI images of King Charles. And he's been very critical of the UK Government. That's, like, putting it nicely to the point that he latched on to a bit of a fake or misleading story. So I guess in dundee Scotland. A 12 year old girl was arrested for carrying a chef's knife, like a kitchen knife and, and a hatchet. She then I guess claimed that it was to defend herself from migrants. But police said there's no evidence that migrants were following her. Like they have no clue. So they just arrested her because she used, you know, there was an incident with another couple, I guess saw her with wielding knives up and down the street. That's all, you know, sad and whatever. But Elon Musk and others quickly latched onto it as, you know, story. A story about, you know, someone standing up to these migrants that are taking over Scotland despite it not actually happening in this case. One of the Scottish ministers said that actually like crimes pretty much like diving down. We don't want this like misleading information getting out. Please stop amplifying it. And Mike Lee said, no, I'm gonna amplify the hell out of it.
- [03:45]
A
Well, let's get through, let's get into. We're gonna post a few here. So here's one of them that is from basement Mike Lee and it says, do you think Scotland girl Maya Summers is to 2025 what Peanut the Squirrel was to 2024?
- [04:02]
B
You have to be, how, like, how online do you have to be to like even understand that? Peanut the squirrel. So like after some googling, I was like, oh, I guess a squirrel was taken and killed because you're not supposed to have a pet squad.
- [04:18]
A
Yeah, you don't remember Peanut? That was a big deal for a while. Anyway, so he posts this AI image. This girl, as you know, doesn't look 12, she looks angry, holding a sword and a ax and is screaming. Yeah, there's a couple emojis in there. Peanut squirrel, Scottish flag.
- [04:36]
B
Girl posted another one that was like Braveheart imagery.
- [04:39]
A
Let's get into that one. So there's Mike Lee again. Basically, when oppressed by tyrants, armed citizens awaken, only tyrants disarm. The law abiding. Sheri, you agree he's not making these images himself, just to be clear, right? He's finding them or someone's finding them for him.
- [04:55]
B
So if, if you look at his feed, he loves AI and he loves making images. Whether he made these ones, we don't know. But there's, you know, he makes so many and he posts so many times that some of these AI images like have to be made by him because below they'll say like, made with Gro for androids.
- [05:11]
A
But yeah, that's the second AI image. Then there's another one. Let's Talk about where he, he, I guess, you know, he writes about King Charles. He says, well, I love the idea that King Charles could dissolve Parliament and get rid of the Labour government that has caused so many problems for the British people. It's my understanding that the monarch lacks the authority, whereas here the government itself has not requested. So basically calling for Parliament to be dissolved.
- [05:37]
B
Yeah, that's like normal statesmanlike statement from a member of Congress.
- [05:43]
A
Well, I want to do my last one and then I want to talk about Michael a little bit because this one really was trippy, like super trippy. The ice cream one. What. What is going on here? The radical left is one gigantic self licking ice cream cone. It's a. Ice. How you don't even. How would you even describe this?
- [05:59]
B
Like a anthropomorphic ice cream cone that's like vomiting up ice cream.
- [06:08]
A
It's weird like this. I don't really understand this one. At least with the Scottish one you, you have a cause. This is just deranged.
- [06:15]
B
I think, you know, the prompt is just like.
- [06:17]
A
Yeah, what is the prompt?
- [06:18]
B
Triggered ice cream cone lib. And it produces like this, you know, monstrous Tony Soprano hybrid of an ice.
- [06:27]
A
Cream cone that seems to be melting in the middle of Brooklyn. I don't even understand it. Joe, as you remember a couple months ago that he got in trouble because he was tweeting in the aftermath, that was the shooting of lawmakers there. And he was just tweeting a bunch of nonsense about the motivation of the shooters and all that stuff. And his colleagues in the Senate admonished him and urged him to take them tweets. And he did take down the tweets. And there was a question about whether that would change his behavior at all. Obviously not. But can you talk about what his reputation is on the Hill for this stuff?
- [07:04]
B
So he's been kind of crazily tweeting at late at night all the time for a couple of years now. When that happened, Tina Smith went into. There was a Republicans only briefing after votes and she went in and yanked him out, gave him a dressing down, was like, you're posting all this crazy stuff that like is hurting people who've like just lost family, family members and friends and colleagues. Stop. And so he took down the tweets and then, you know, this kind of like didn't get a lot of traction. But a couple weeks later that. So that happened in June. A couple weeks later in July, there was a very obviously AI made image of a resignation letter from Jerome Powell, the Fed chairman.
- [07:48]
A
Oh, I remember this one? Yeah.
- [07:49]
B
And he was like, wow, golly, like.
- [07:52]
A
How, how did that happen?
- [07:53]
B
And it was like any person who looked at this for more than a fraction of a second could see like the letters of the Federal Reserve seal were not even letters. They were just like garbled nonsense. And so it's clear he's not stopping and you know, long weekend, stuck to his phone. You know, he loves the blue light.
- [08:15]
A
Well, I always thought that he, this made sense if he was stuck in D.C. obviously he's from Utah. Maybe he's just kind of like alone. All he's got is the phone. He's just, you know, you kill him some time, he's just gonna go into the replies as one does and respond 250so times over the course of a couple days. But in this case, I assume, you know, it's Labor Day week and I assume and it's off of August 1st, assume he's back home. I mean, what explains this behavior? Do we have any insight?
- [08:44]
B
No idea. Because like you would expect someone especially like during the August recess, like they go do town halls, they campaign, they go to fundraisers, they do all the stuff they have to do, like they're not really off, but the Labor Day weekend, like that is a time to actually take a vacation and then fly either this morning or maybe last night back to D.C. because they got votes again today. And no, he like he has, and he has like three kids. And what like normal people are like either doing nothing or they're doing something fun over the weekend.
- [09:21]
A
And are you sure he's got this? There's no reason to doubt it. But this is him on it, it's him tweeting, right?
- [09:28]
B
Yeah. So it started out how like he wasn't a regular tweeter and it was just like a Mike Le press office account where statements would go out and that wouldn't him tweeting. And then this account named based Mike Lee started tweeting like crazy. And it wasn't really sure if this was him. Everyone was like, that's weird. Then it was confirmed that it is indeed him. And now it's verified and all that. And he's famous for it. And so he's just been doing this like non stop. And each incident that's gotten worse and worse, like a weird letter of the Fed chairman resigning if it wasn't so obviously fake, like if it looked more real and you have a senator posting about it, like could have market ramifications. And he, he was just like, whoops. And then he said afterwards, like, oh, I deleted it out of an abundance of caution. It's like, yes, very cautious man.
- [10:20]
A
Yeah, he could have not tweeted in the first place. You would think someone who dabbles so much in AI would have recognized what was clearly a forgery. All right, man. Well, look, I appreciate the fact that you spend your days keeping track of this man's Twitter habits. It's. It says something. I'm not sure if it's good. Joe, maybe we need to help you out a little bit, give you better hobbies than following Mike Lee on Twitter. No, I appreciate it. Everyone should read the newsletter. It's really fun stuff. Everyone should follow Joe on Twitter and on Substack and here on YouTube. Subscribe to the feed. Talk to you soon.