Republican Gov. Spencer Cox denounced social media posts made by Utah’s GOP U.S. Sen. Mike Lee last month that seemed to mock the assassination of a Minnesota lawmaker and her spouse and the shooting of another.
“I thought they were awful,” Cox said when asked for his thoughts at his monthly news conference Thursday morning.
Lee’s posts were the subject of significant outrage after he shared a photo of the alleged shooter and wrote from his personal X account, “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way.”
Soon after, Lee shared the photo again and added, “Nightmare on Waltz [sic] Street,” seemingly attempting to link the shootings to Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz. He later deleted some, but not all, of his posts about the incident.
Lee’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the original posts and the pushback the senator received, particularly from Minnesota Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, both Democrats. His office also did not immediately respond to a request Thursday for comment on the governor calling Lee’s posts “awful.”
Cox did not further comment on Lee’s tweets specifically Thursday, but spoke about his concerns with the proliferation of social media and artificial intelligence.
(Eric Lee | The New York Times) Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, talks with reporters at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on Tuesday, June 17, 2025.
“I will tell you I used to be a tech optimist,” he said, adding that in the early 2000s he was excited about the prospect of the internet for making global connections and saw during the Arab Spring “how the internet was used to help countries get rid of authoritarian regimes.”
“It didn’t work out the way I thought it was going to work out,” Cox said. “In fact, I think social media has been a scourge. There are some good parts of it, [but] it certainly had a debilitating impact on our young people. I believe it’s the major cause of anxiety, depression and suicide rates, and it’s been incredibly divisive for our country.”
Cox said he believes social media “certainly led to the polarization that we’re seeing now” and that it “led directly to assassination attempts, and not just attempts, as we saw sadly in Minnesota.”
The proliferation of artificial intelligence, he added, “is going to make that one thousand times worse.”
That was why, the governor said, he pushed back against a provision originally included in the “Big Beautiful Bill” — the megabudget bill recently signed into law by President Donald Trump — that would have banned states from regulating artificial intelligence for the next ten years.
“It’s just so critical that we are allowed to help put some guardrails around it so it can give us the best of a world where we’re solving the world’s greatest problems using artificial intelligence but not causing more problems,” he said.
Cox, a frequent social media user himself, was asked about his own relationship to the technology, and he said he thought there were “good parts” of social media that facilitate connection and information sharing.
“I try very hard to do it in the right way,” the governor said. “You’ll see I actually post less than I used to. You know, I’ll share some things that I think are valuable or things that impacted me. I stay out of the comments for the most part, because it’s just so toxic out there.”
“I try not to attack other people and tear other people down, even when I disagree with them, and I don’t always get it right,” he added. “Everybody can point to examples where I’ve gotten it wrong, because it has such a hold on us. I wish we could all just log off and be done.”
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