Mike Lee: Not Every Fool is Charming

Utah Senator Mike Lee's depravity is deeper than social media snark

You may not know about the Supreme Court case from 1832, Worcester v. Georgia, but it is likely you have heard of one related event that followed the ruling. Two years after President Andrew Jackson signed into law the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Supreme Court ruled in Worcester that the federal government held authority to negotiate with and enforce laws affecting Native Americans. However, this authority did not include the Native American’s rights to possess their own land or determine their own government. They could not be deprived of their lands without losing a war—which they were not then involved in—or having them justly purchased. Jackson allegedly said of the ruling, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” Without the executive branch enforcing Supreme Court rulings, by 1838, the Cherokee Nation was forcibly relocated from its ancestral homes in Georgia to Eastern Oklahoma. They would travel a route that came to be known as The Trail of Tears. Jackson was a slave owner who would earn the moniker “Indian Killer” from the Cherokee who he viewed as an inferior race that “must disappear.” Thus, the government forcibly moved to new territories between 45,000 and 60,000 Native Americans from dozens of tribes as well as their slaves. The forced march resulted in the deaths of 10,000 including 4,000 Cherokee.

When an executive and their legislative sycophants abandon decency and ignore the rule of law, rest assured they have their reasons. Jackson believed in a God who took interest in and managed the results of human affairs. Not strictly Calvinist in his Presbyterianism, he nevertheless “repeatedly insisted that God controlled military battles, illness and death, natural disasters, and political developments.”¹ Since he was a devout supplicator of God in prayer, he seemed to believe that if he had the idea or the impulse, it must be divinely inspired or condoned. “Jackson did little to help blacks, Native Americans, or white women because he did not recognize them as equals or see their potential to contribute to American life.”² In his mind, how could someone like that contribute to American life?

No doubt, by now, you have heard the fallout on account of Utah Senator Mike Lee’s assholery. I am proud to see bipartisan critique from members of congress as well as confrontations between he and fellow senators Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith. Don’t be fooled: Lee’s removal of the offending posts and his disappearance from the spotlight this week mean nothing about him reaching some clarity or heretofore unseen level of empathy. His track record of despicable comments are just symptoms of a deeper degeneracy. How can I know? I can’t. To my credit, I do share the life experience of attending the same religious university as Lee, and I was long committed to the same Mormon cult to which he continues to proclaim his allegiance. Do not accept any expression of contrition from him. He might feel sorry that someone was offended, but that doesn’t mean that, like Andrew Jackson, he feels his intuitions or impulses are wrong. Until he is willing to openly criticize his faith both in Mormonism and in the MAGA cult leader as well as tearily express his remorse, anything he says or does is merely placating. It won’t be genuine. It can’t be because, more than anything, like Jackson, he believes he is on God’s side and, therefore, completely in the right. In that frame of mind, even lying can be part of God’s purposes. He learned to lie from his revered Mormon founder and subsequent leaders as well as the Book of Mormon and he learned that is okay to do so.³ Rest assured that Mike Lee feels called and empowered, even endowed, by God to be a U.S. Senator. The fact that he won an election is confirmation for him of divine approval for his agenda and the vulgar manner in which he carries it out.

Mormonism claims to be a restoration of the church established by Jesus Christ and his Apostles and which was lost from the earth via apostasy no later than 325 C.E. at the Council of Nicea when the nature of God was completely muddled. Christianity itself was the result of its metamorphosis from the Judaism that preceded it. God’s chosen people has ALWAYS managed to make a home for their enemy in the nations or factions they oppose.

The first empire that opposed Jehovah was Egypt. Passover spared the Jews but brought destruction upon the corrupt Egyptian people. The land of Canaan posed a threat to Israel due to its idolatry. God commanded the eradication of the Seven Nations⁴. Every sin or depravity attributed to Satan was part of Canaan’s culture and program. Bael became a polymorph, attributed to several gods whose adherents that opposed Jehovah’s dominion. Isaiah promoted Babylon as the great big bad guy that would enslave Israel. By Jesus’s time, it was Rome and its pagan empire that had taken Satan’s mantle. For Mormons, these evil deities are all one-in-the-same: they are the cultural and practical representations of Lucifer, commonly known as Satan.

Mormonism’s own foundational scripture, the Book of Mormon, has its own Satanic cults rise up to do the bidding of Hell’s proprietor. When Mormon Apostle, Bruce McConkie, published a glossary of Mormon terminology known as Mormon Doctrine, in 1958, he included in it a section on the The Great and Abominable Church (also called the ‘great whore of all the earth’). This is a direct reference to a Book of Mormon story that includes a vision of the future—presumably the time in which you, dear reader, currently live. Who or what is this entity? It is the Catholic Church. Except, in later revisions, this explicitness was removed. I can tell you, like Mike Lee, they didn’t really mean it, they just wanted to appear ecumenical. If anything, the definition only broadened to include all churches that were subject to the apostasy only started by Catholicism from which they “reformed” and from which they broke away.

Each of these grand enemies shares the distinction of being the embodiment of every evil impulse of the Father of Lies, Satan. The 19th century was a fertile ground for Satan’s lies and degeneracy to infiltrate even seemingly secular political ideology. Heavily influenced by the John Birch Society in the late 50’s, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture to Dwight Eisenhower from ‘53 to ‘61 and Mormon Prophet in embryo, Ezra Taft Benson had it all. He was both an Apostle of Jesus Christ AND a high ranking U.S. Cabinet official! If anyone knew about both politics and spirituality, it had to be him! He would go on to write a book titled The Red Carpet that proclaimed communism the great counterfeit that would lead us down a slippery slope of economic, social and, most importantly, spiritual destruction. In effect, socialism in any time and place is the first step on a slippery slope toward communism and the latter would inevitably follow any movement toward the former. Other Mormon intellectuals like Cleon Skousen would write their own contemporary exposes of this great and abominable ideology such as the grimly titled The Naked Communist.⁵

Thanks to the Civil Rights movement, frequently excoriated by Benson as a tool of communist expansion, Mormons began to believe that any social policy—especially mistaking welfare and women’s and minority rights—as tools of Satan himself. Sure, Jesus said some things about helping the poor, but communism is a counterfeit. Fast forward to today and the pugnacious repugnance of Mike Lee.

Men like Mike Lee are always looking for a place to home Satan because they can’t comprehend a world where they may in fact be on the wrong side and/or the bad guy. They are almost irrevocably convinced that they are and will always be on the right side, in the moral minority, and that the chosen land of America will need to call upon them to rescue this promised land, even Zion, from its own worst impulses. What impulses are those? Well, they do NOT include the impulse to brazenly lay blame via social media during the early, ignorance-rife minutes following murder. When even the people directly investigating the case are still searching for facts, inspired men like Lee already know because they know where Satan’s ideals are to be found. For Lee, the worst impulses of mankind come from an ideology that they believe to be Satanic.

Right or wrong, Marxism was born from the minds of men who’d seen the worst that capitalism had to offer. Only their acolytes decided to read their work in the way Mike Lee reads the Book of Mormon or The Red Carpet. Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism require a cult-like following far more akin to Mormonism’s reverence for Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and Russell Nelson than skeptical, socialistic, secular governing requires. The a-religious government encourages debate, gathering of new and relevant information, trusting legitimate experts over self-proclaimed ones, and appreciation of viewpoints that may contradict your own. At its best, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot never even tried to permit such open inquiry. Instead, they used any opportunity to create monsters out of any situation so long as it promoted their own narrative, power, and purpose the actual facts were irrelevant. Sound a lot more like Mike Lee than Bernie Sanders.

In writing of Marx’s remarkable contributions to journalism including his considerable time living in the United States, Christopher Hitchens remarked: “If you are looking for an irony of history, you will find it not in the fact that Marx was underpaid by an American newspaper, but in the fact that he and [Friedrich] Engels considered Russia the great bastion of reaction and America the great potential nurse of liberty and equality.” As American policy and alliances align with Russia, the reactionary tendencies with deep roots in American politics rear their heads in the inane tweets of men like Mike Lee and other Trump sycophants. We’ve long known of Lee what he reaffirmed when he jumped to the conclusion that a democrat in America is the same thing as a Marxist. Lee gives the impression that, like most reactionaries, he’s spent absolutely no time or effort in exploring any argument against his position, ever.

Despite speaking with him, Senator Klobuchar, you’ll never convince Mike Lee to view the world any differently because if your way isn’t his way it’s not the right way even if it’s a good way.⁶ He basks in the self-importance of feeling that he on the right side. His God gives him feelings that confirm his beliefs in the face of facts or even when put up against the frisson felt by humans of every other religious persuasion. He takes comfort in believing that he cannot help but stand for “truth” even if he must stand alone.

Marxism as the great motivator for murder is a universal truth to Mike Lee. He needs no facts and, therefore, no facts are of any use. He can spout off his divisive rhetoric as he orgasmically stands in what he sees as a holy place. God will reward him even if the world scorns him. It may be on the other side of death, but he will receive his reward. If I were his son, I’d refuse to go on a hike with him to the top of a mountain.⁷ You can’t know what the voices in his head are telling him. All you know is that he’ll believe anything on absolutely no evidence at all and that his apologies are simply lies that should be given less attention at believing or understanding than the adult voices of a Peanuts cartoon.

As for the man whom Senator Lee so reflexively blames, the Utah Senatorial ghoul may do well to remember these words Marx said in lieu of British imperialism in India: "There is something in human history like retribution; and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended but by the offender himself.” Mr. Lee, you forge your own manacles through your bigotry, chauvinism, and enmity. Something tells me you wear them proudly.

1. Smith, Gary Scott. Religion in the Oval Office: The Religious Lives of American Presidents (pp. 130-131). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

2. Ibid

3. One of many examples of founder Joseph Smith’s penchant for lying is when he famously declared that he had only one wife in the months preceding his execution when the FACTS were that he had dozens. Current Mormon leadership have declared that they do not seek nor give apologies, presumably including when they lie.

4. Composed of the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites.

5. For an interesting read on why Utah seems so politically red, check out Professor Matthew Harris’ book Ezra Taft Benson and the Making of the Mormon Right.

6. I believe it was Dallin H. Oaks—second it divine right to lead the Mormon church—who once said that if you do something in a way this is not God’s way, even if it is a good way, don't do it.

7. Abraham and Isaac