Follow the assassination of Minnesota House Speaker Emerta Melissa Hortman, U.S. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah wrote a social media post that said “this is what happens When Marxists don’t get their way” and another in which he captioned a photo of shooting suspect Vance Boelter “Nightmare on Waltz Street.” He took the posts down after a backlash that included both of Minnesota’s U.S. senators confronting him. (Alex Brandon, Associated Press/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

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This is the apology that we, the Salt Lake Tribune Editorial Board, wish Sen. Mike Lee would give:

I come before you today a humbled man.

My thoughtless actions posting tasteless and false messages on social media have brought dishonor to my state, to the United States Senate, to my family, my party and my faith. I have caused additional pain to people who were already mourning the loss of close friends to acts of horrible political violence.

For this, I apologize and I ask your forgiveness.

For more than a year now, I have posted and reposted on the social media platform X many thousands of times. Many of those posts raised or repeated false accusations against my political opponents and others. In that forum I supported many false claims, including the lie that the violent assault on the United States Capitol on January 6 was orchestrated by federal agents.

In the realm of social media, where outrage overwhelms reason and lies outrun the truth, I may have felt that my statements were just more of the ugly background noise that defines so much of our era’s political discourse. I was sadly caught up in an alternate reality, where stoking falsehood and anger is rewarded and becomes downright addictive.

But in a few posts made in reaction to the vicious attacks on two members of the Minnesota Legislature and their families — killing two people and seriously injuring two others — I went seriously beyond the pale.

I see now that in seeming to make a joke out of such a serious and tragic series of events, in using the pain of others to score cheap political points, I sullied my own status as a United States senator and brought shame onto the Senate, to the people of Utah and to fellow members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Those people are wrongly made to suffer because my name and my face have become objects of derision in national and international media.

Many have brought home to me the fact that my father, Rex Lee, a renowned legal scholar and LDS leader, would be appalled by my actions. Indeed he would be, and for that I feel great shame.

I have not striven to be honest in all that I do.

I sincerely apologize to my Utah constituents, my Senate colleagues and, most of all, the people of Minnesota.