Bulwark Takes - The Strange World of Sen. Mike Lee’s Twitter Feed

Episode Date: September 2, 2025

Sam Stein talks with Joe Perticone about Mike Lee’s wild weekend on Twitter. More than 70 tweets, 200 replies, and a handful of AI-generated images later, the Utah senator is making headlines for all the wrong reasons.

Hey, everybody. It's Sam Stein, managing out of the Bullwork, Joe and Bob McPowell, 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 newsletters 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? So, his like, first of all, I hope you had a good Labor Day weekend. Thank you. I hope you did too. What'd you do?

don't who no one wants to hear about that we want to hear about likely 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 um for one last time that's not what michley did michley did what he knows best um which was tweet uh so he did about 70 more than 70 tweets 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 spend with your family. The tweets are a lot, 70's a lot. It's not like, I wouldn't say it's totally extraordinary, but it's an unhealthy amount of tweeting, even for me. But the 250 plus replies suggest a problem.

Yeah. 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. Standard. Yeah. He's a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Okay. A little bit weird. Yeah. Yeah. So, 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 Karen. a chef's knife, like a kitchen knife, 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's, you know, there's 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, this 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 going to amplify the hell out of it. Well, let's get through. Let's get into it. We're going to post a few here. So here's one of them that is from Base Mike Lee, and it says, do you think Scotland girl, Maya Summers, is to 2025, what Peanut the Squirrel was to 2024?

And what's 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 squirrel. 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 an axe, and is screaming. Yeah, there's a couple of emojis in there, peanut, squirrel, Scottish flag, girl. Posted another one that was like Braveheart imagery. Let's get into that one. So there's Mike Lee again, Base Mike Lee. When oppressed by tyrants, armed citizens awaken, only tyrants disarmed the law by Sure, if 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.

So if you look at his feed, he loves AI and he loves making images with GROC, 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 GROC for Android. But yeah, that's the second AI image. Then there's another one let's talk about where he, I guess, um, 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 labor 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. Yeah, that's like normal statesman-like statement from a member of Congress. Well, I want to do my last one, and then I want to talk about Mike a little bit, because this one really, was trippy, like super trippy. The ice cream one. What is going on here? The radical left is one gigantic self-licking ice cream cone.

It's a ice, I don't even, how would you even describe this? Like an anthropomorphic ice cream cone that's like vomiting up ice cream. It's weird. Like this, I don't really understand this one. At least with the Scottish one, you have a cause. This is just deranged. I think, you know, maybe the prompt is just, like, Like, what is the prompt?

Triggered ice cream cone lib and it produces like this, you know, monstrous Tony Soprano hybrid of an ice 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 of it was a shooting of lawmakers there and he was just tweeting a bunch of nonsense about the motivation of the shooters and all that stuff in his colleagues. in the Senate and modished him and urged him to take down the 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 hell for this stuff? So he's been kind of crazily tweeting 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 and gave him a dressing down and was like, you're posting all this crazy stuff that, like, is hurting people who've like just lost 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. Oh, I remember this one, yeah. And he was like, wow, golly. Like, how did that happen? 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 garbable 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. Well, I always thought that he just made sense if he was stuck in D.C., obviously he's from Utah. Maybe he's just kind of like alone and all he's got us the phone. He's just, you know, you're killing some time. He's just going to go into the replies as one does and respond 250 so times over the course for a couple days.

But in this case, I assume, you know, it's a Labor Day weekend, I assume, and it's off of August races, assume he's back home. I mean, what explains this behavior? Do we have any insight? 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. And are you sure he's got this, and there's no reason to doubt it, but this is him on, it's him tweeting, right? Yeah.

So it started out how, like, he wasn't a regular tweeter and it was just like a Mike Lee press office account where statements would go out and that wouldn't be 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, nonstop.

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, that could have market ramifications. And 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. Yeah, it could have not tweeted in the first place. You would think someone who dabbled 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 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 michael on twitter no i appreciate it everyone should read the newsletter it's really it's really fun stuff everyone should follow joe on twitter and uh on sub stack and here on youtube subscribe to the feed we'll talk to you soon