In rather strange online commentary recently posted by Utah GOP Senator Mike Lee, the known aficionado of further-right politics suggested the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) — meaning the well-known federal entity responsible for security checks at commercial airports — might have been targeting him personally. There’s no apparent evidence for this theory.
“Update: days after calling to abolish TSA, I got “randomly selected” for the needlessly slow, thorough TSA screening & patdown. Maybe it’s a coincidence. Or not. Impossible to know. That’s part of the problem with having a federal agency in charge of airport security,” Lee wrote late Thursday on X, the social media platform formerly called Twitter. Lee called to abolish that federal agency in other remarks on the same site. It’s a frequent idea from Lee’s general political corner: abolishing a major federal team. Another target of that group is the federal Department of Education.
Lee was extensively mocked in replies on the platform for his idea he may have been personally targeted. The “patdowns” that he referenced are, while not employed for every passenger, actually used with great regularity by that federal security agency, meaning it’s unclear that the situation Lee was trying to turn into “something” was even much of anything at all. These developments all transpired via the known personal account for Lee on the involved platform.
Lee last won another term in the 2022 midterms, in which he faced challenger Evan McMullin, an independent candidate who received support from state Democrats with the idea that someone outside the political party might be more palatable to certain state voters in service of the broader ambition of replacing Lee. The incumbent ended up winning by about ten and a half percent — after winning in 2016 by over forty percent, making the results from 2022 dramatically closer in the generally conservative state.
