ARES AI · THE LIBRARIAN
OPINION / COMMENTARY
Michigan’s 7th Congressional District is one of the closest political battlegrounds in the country. Donald Trump carried it by less than two points in 2024. It was represented, until her Senate win, by Democrat Elissa Slotkin. And this fall it may decide which party runs the House of Representatives.
Which is exactly why William Lawrence spent the summer scrubbing his internet history.
Lawrence, 36, co-founded the Sunrise Movement in 2018 and helped drag the Green New Deal into the center of Democratic politics. He’s now the party’s nominee against freshman Republican Rep. Tom Barrett, a 21-year Army veteran and helicopter pilot who spent nearly a decade in the Michigan legislature before narrowly flipping the seat in 2024. And according to CNN’s own KFile — not Fox, not some conservative outlet, CNN — Lawrence quietly deleted hundreds of old posts once it came time to run somewhere other than a safe progressive lane.
What was in them tells you everything about what Lawrence actually believes when he thinks nobody outside the activist left is watching.
He praised the “defund the police” campaign by name, writing that it had brought the country “nearer to a world without police and prisons.” He called for the “forced nationalization” of fossil fuel companies and pushed Joe Biden to kill the coal industry by executive order. He wrote that the nuclear family home was an “isolating, individualistic, violent way of organizing society” and, in cruder terms, cursed out the very idea of it. He envisioned, in his words, “a world of free and open migration” — and when someone asked if that meant anybody could move anywhere, he answered with one word: “Yes!”
Then there’s the song. In December 2021, Lawrence wrote lyrics aimed at then-Sen. Joe Manchin over his resistance to the party’s climate agenda: “Our generation says f**k you for everything… Hurry up and die so that we can get started.” That is not hyperbole from a critic. That is what the Democratic nominee for a competitive U.S. House seat wrote about a sitting United States senator.
He didn’t stop at Republicans or moderates in the abstract, either. In January 2020, he attacked Slotkin herself — the Democrat who represented this very district — calling her “ashamed to be represented” by and dismissing her as a “supposed Democrat” for not sufficiently condemning Trump’s strike on Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. When Rep. Abigail Spanberger, another moderate Democrat, pushed back on “defund” rhetoric after the 2020 election, Lawrence called her objection a “tantrum” and warned that “timid Dems” who couldn’t stomach the activist left could “leave the Party.” He summarized his own politics, in his words, as “social democrat in the streets, libertarian socialist in the sheets.”
Confronted with the record, Lawrence’s defense is that he was young and posting on the internet. He told Semafor his old “defund the police” support is “out of step” with what he believes now. He told CNN he doesn’t support defunding police or open borders and regrets the Slotkin comment specifically. He was, in his own phrase, just “thinking out loud on the internet.” He also told CNN he let his Democratic Socialists of America membership lapse — this past July, by his account, weeks before he’d need to face general-election voters who don’t share DSA’s platform.
Barrett isn’t letting him have it both ways. “I think we got to take him at his word that this was his absolute true ideology,” Barrett told Fox News, arguing the timing of Lawrence’s DSA exit and his sudden moderation are about electability, not conviction. “He’s not running in Rashida Tlaib’s district or AOC’s district,” Barrett said. “He’s running in the district that I live in, where I’m raising my own nuclear family.” Barrett also tied the stakes directly to the border: fentanyl, he noted, has become the leading killer of Americans his age, and he credits renewed border enforcement with the first real decline in overdose deaths “in my life” — a decline he says Lawrence’s open-border instincts would reverse. On the economic side, Barrett points to no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security, and an expanded child tax credit as the contrast he wants voters to weigh against a candidate who once called for nationalizing entire industries.
None of this requires embellishment, because the man’s own words did the work. A candidate doesn’t get to spend a decade writing that the nuclear family is “violent,” that borders should disappear, and that a U.S. senator should hurry up and die — and then, the moment it’s politically inconvenient, ask voters to treat all of it as a young man’s internet phase. Michigan’s 7th District gets to decide which version of William Lawrence is real. Every American watching this race gets to notice that the same script — radical online, moderate on the trail — keeps getting rerun by the party’s next generation of candidates, and keeps getting caught by the same reporters every single time.
Sources:
Fox News — Congressman Tom Barrett: ‘Being a socialist should disqualify him…’
CNN KFile — Democrat William Lawrence’s deleted tweets show far-left record