Dingus of the week: Sen Mike Lee

Guys would rather shoot each other than go to therapy

AI is taking over every aspect of our lives. A lot of “writers” are even using it to create their newsletters. However, at MYAM Inc., we offer a no-AI guarantee.

I can offer this guarantee for many reasons. One is that I think generative AI is at its core a simple regurgitation of smarter ideas, playing on our vanity and laziness, offering the promise of ease at the cost of our labor, our souls, and our environment. But also because AI is a humorless cuck.

I asked ChatGPT to write today’s dingus and it declined because ChatGPT simply cannot do something that hasn’t been done yet: make really great jokes about radioactive waste of space Utah Sen. Mike Lee.

In this is a profound lesson about humans and machines in our modern era. As it turns out, the dumbest and most goofy-ass things about humanity are what separate us from the robots.

And for that reason, you should subscribe. Because I will always be a goofy-ass human, creating content that targets the worst people (and things) in America. Because they deserve it. And sometimes, laughter in the flat face of fascism is a profound way of holding onto our humanity.

Mike Lee has the kind of face that looks like he’d think a “God bless this mess” sign, Instagram poetry, and Chip and Joanna Gaines are deeply profound. The kind of face that’s gonna tear up to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” when it comes on at the bar but tell starving kids to get a job. It’s a face that uses the word “synergy” with 100 percent earnestness and the word “woke” with a hard R. You've heard of a punchable face? Lee has what I call a wiffle-ball-battable face.

Before becoming a senator, Mike Lee spent his career as a lawyer defending high levels of radioactive toxic waste. Which seems fitting as that’s what his brain is filled with.

Recently, he’s become notable for promoting conspiracy theories and believing that obviously AI-generated images were real. Maybe Joni Ernst should have a word with him about the tooth fairy.

This week, the walking toxic dump of a man posted on X, “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way,” in response to the murders of Minnesota State Rep. Melissa Hortman, and “Nightmare on Walz Street” referring to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who was also on a list of potential targets found in the car of the alleged gunman.

The posts themselves are that uniquely toxic mixture of stupidity and cruelty that has come to define the Trump era. An era when no moment of fear and suffering is so bad that a Republican senator can’t make a little joke. It’s a verbal torture porn designed not to be funny (it so rarely is), but to show dominance, to put people in their place, cloaked in the language of humor. It’s a performance for an audience of Americans so inured to violence that they need more and more outrage to react. The outrage cycle itself is an addictive ouroboros for these guys. Say something vile. Claim to be a victim of the outrage. Dominate the news cycle. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The only thing not funny for a Republican in 2025 would be a gas range going woke and convincing your kid to be transgender. And I hear Samsung is working on that model and Josh Hawley is already introducing legislation to stop it. Marjorie Taylor Greene will lead the House hearings. Everything else — war, terror, senseless violence — is all just a barrel of laughs for these guys. After all, it’s just like Jesus said in Matthew 67:243, “Be ye kind to one another, unless your enemy is liberal, then everything is thine own opportunity for the worst joke ever.”

After Lee made his posts, Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith tracked him down, pulled him out of a meeting, and gave him her thoughts on his posts, which were 1. Not funny. 2. Deeply untrue. The alleged shooter is conservative and a Trump supporter, and was apparently motivated by his anti-abortion stance.

Hell hath no fury like a Minnesota mom.

I would have loved to overhear that moment. But I imagine that much like hearing the voice of God or staring too long into the sun, I’d emerge both permanently damaged and forever changed. It worked on Lee; after the confrontation, Lee took down the posts.

Dingus Runner-Up: LASD v. LAPD

During the No Kings protests in LA last weekend, the LA sheriffs and the LA police shot at each other in a move that that ripped open a hole in the time-space dingus continuum. Dingus-on-dingus violence? We simply love to see it.

Is the answer to the male loneliness crisis guys shooting rubber bullets at each other? You know, boys, you don’t have to fight, you can simply just make out.

It’s like guys would rather shoot each other than go to therapy.

Thank you to newsletter reader Caitlin for this amazing image.

And now for something good

I logged on to X for the first time in a very long time and discovered that Miranda July and I are, in fact, the reasons for the male loneliness crisis. YOU ARE WELCOME.

A judge ruled that the cuts to the NIH grants are discriminatory.

An appeals court struck down Trump’s attempts to appeal the ruling in the E. Jean Carroll case. And E. Jean Carroll published a book this week.

Women are behind in the use of AI. Nice work, team!

Something I am enjoying

Summer is in full swing, and I, an American mother, am learning the same lesson I learn every summer: It never gets easier.

This summer, my teen is busier than I am, with swim team, marching band, driver’s ed, clarinet lessons, and the online PE class she’s taking so she can get a head start on high school. I keep telling her I am trying to start working on my new book, but she is not impressed.

I am, of course, shuttling my kids to camps and sports and classes, worried about money and deadlines. When your income is so closely tied to your output, it’s hard to regulate. To find a happy place in the work. “What is enough?” I keep asking myself. “What is good work? And what is a good life?”

Everyone I know is worried about jobs, money, the economy, groceries, deportations, and war. I am doing what I can with the Iowa Abortion Access Fund, but it sometimes feels like too much and not enough.

In this hot miserable summer of our discontents. I am trying to just be present with the people in my life who I love. Not check my phone. Not respond to the constant dings and arrows of my outrageous Apple devices. The bad will keep. The good never does.

I’ve found a real joy in taking my son to the pool. He’s 11, soon to be 12. His sister doesn’t want to go with us anymore, so it’s been just him and me. I sit and read. He finds friends and plays water games. I love seeing what a charming, friendly kid he is. It’s fun spoiling him with ice cream and soda, and debating the 100 weird little things his mind comes up with, like if you can smell rain, can you smell thunder? (Maybe?) How many flavors of chips exist in the world? (Answers vary from 376 to a billion) My thoughts on plasma? (None). And could he and I win on Guy Fieri’s Grocery Games? (Obviously, we could.)

And also, I am finally reading Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World. And it’s just as glorious as everyone said. Such an heir to that Kundera-esque sense of fiction and non- that is simultaneously minutely specific and gloriously transcendent.