Backlash against Mike Lee’s tasteless tweets reminds us that online cruelty has a real-world impact

It’s amazing how far a firebrand politician has to step over the line of decency in 2025 to prove that such a line even exists anymore.

By any metric, U.S. Senator Mike Lee of Utah sprinted past that line over the weekend, with a deeply distasteful, macabre string of tweets about a political assassination in Minnesota. Now, he’s experiencing something vanishingly rare in modern American politics: sustained, real-world blowback for something he wrote online.

The day after a...