The tell in modern progressive politics isn’t what a candidate says on the trail. It’s what they scrub from social media before they run. And who they’re associated with. And who is associated with them.
William Lawrence, the ‘Democratic’ nominee and DSA fav in one of the most competitive House races in Michigan, deleted hundreds of old social-media posts before launching his campaign. CNN’s K-File found them anyway, and the archive tells a very different story than the ‘moderate’ the party is now selling.
Credit where it’s due: this exposure came from CNN, not a conservative outlet. CNN political correspondent Andrew Kaczynski’s team documented posts in which Lawrence embraced police and prison abolition, called for the “forced nationalization” of fossil-fuel companies, demanded a “fundamental overhaul” of the Constitution, urged abolishing the Senate, and envisioned “free and open migration” in “a world beyond the nation-state and capitalism.” He wrote that the nuclear family is an “isolating, individualistic, violent way of organizing society.” And in a 2021 screed aimed at Joe Manchin over climate policy, he wrote lyrics telling an older generation to “hurry up and die so that we can get started.”
Typical socialist/commie: Tear down the traditional values so you can replace them with something more miserable and authoritarian.
The standard defense is that everyone posts youthful nonsense online. It doesn’t apply here, and that’s the point worth pressing. These weren’t teenage tweets. Lawrence was a grown, established left-wing organizer in his thirties when he wrote most of them — a man building a career, not a college sophomore venting. He was a dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America until this summer, when he let his membership “lapse” in July, conveniently, as the campaign got serious. Bernie Sanders and Rashida Tlaib have endorsed him. This is who he was, recently and on the record.
Now for the part that reaches past one Michigan district. Lawrence isn’t a random activist — he co-founded the Sunrise Movement, the outfit that staged the 2018 sit-in at Nancy Pelosi’s office and turned a freshman named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into the national face of the Green New Deal. Sunrise’s own website credits that moment as the launch of both the movement and AOC’s climate stardom. Lawrence helped build the machine that built her. And this July, the two shared a stage again in Lansing, alongside Sanders and Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, at a progressive rally.
“Woke 1 was crazy”
“Rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric they would use today”
AOC is already walking back and trying to rewrite history on her radical positions to appear moderate to she can run for president
We will never let her forget pic.twitter.com/dbyLAmI8dS
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) August 10, 2026
That connection matters because Ocasio-Cortez is now busy repackaging herself as a reasonable moderate ahead of a widely expected 2028 presidential run — dismissing her past positions as rhetoric she wouldn’t use today. Lawrence is running the identical play, telling CNN he’s “done my fair share of thinking out loud on the internet” and no longer supports defunding police or open borders (riiight). Same movement, same donors, same script: hold the radical views long enough to build the career, then delete the evidence and claim conversion when the general election arrives.
Voters in a swing district are entitled to decide whether that conversion is real or merely timed. Voters in AOC’s district are entitled to know the company she keeps.
