William Lawrence, the Democratic nominee for a competitive House seat in Michigan, has called for a "world without borders" and to "redistribute all the land and all the money" to make up for America's "evil deeds."
The former Democratic Socialist—who left the party this summer—made the comments less than two years ago. He is now downplaying those and other extremist comments as just "thinking out loud on the internet."
Lawrence, a cofounder of the confrontational environmentalist group the Sunrise Movement, which has called for a "climate revolution," embraced the far-left positions on redistribution and open borders in an Oct. 22, 2024, episode of the Hegemonicon podcast he hosts for Convergence, a publication that describes itself as a "magazine for radical insights."
Lawrence, in an episode on "Protecting Our Migrant Neighbors," mused about the political tactics of left-wing reformers versus left-wing "revolutionaries," siding decidedly with the latter.
"We are lacking for a framework that can make sense of how to be revolutionary in the sense of truly, truly wanting a world without borders and wanting to redistribute all the land and all the money," he said.
Lawrence, a 36-year-old Hasan Piker superfan, added that it would be "just" for such a redistribution to occur because ongoing economic inequality is "the result of violence and evil deeds."
Lawrence also envisioned a "humane society" in which "[we would] throw open the gates and welcome all of the migrants, the refugees, the asylum seekers from climate disaster and conflict all around the world." He spoke of the "visions we hold on the left," such as "the vision of a world without borders."
And Lawrence lamented that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris had both pledged to be "tougher" on immigration. He said that immigration policy would be "bad either way," regardless of whether the Republican or Democrat won the election.
Those views could complicate Democrats' hopes to flip Michigan's Seventh Congressional District seat, held by Republican Tom Barrett. Trump won the district in 2016 and 2024, though he lost narrowly to Joe Biden in 2020. It is rated a "toss-up" for November by the leading political handicappers.
Republicans have hammered Lawrence over his left-wing positions, which also include support for defunding the police. Black Democrats have also condemned Lawrence for calling black political leaders a "big problem for Left politics." Lawrence said black Democratic leaders' embrace of "establishment, capitalist, imperialist American power" had "defang[ed] the white left." Fortunately for Lawrence, his district is about 5 percent black.
Lawrence espoused other far-left views on his podcast, the Washington Free Beacon has reported. He called for "destroying the American way of life" in a discussion with two self-avowed Marxist scholars, and said that the 2024 collapse of Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge was a "climate activist's dream" because it choked off coal exports for several weeks. Six construction workers died when the bridge collapsed after being hit by a ship.
Lawrence has sought to distance himself from his radical rhetoric. And he said in July that he quit the Democratic Socialist of America in order to foster "unity" in the Seventh Congressional District race.
According to CNN, Lawrence deleted hundreds of controversial social media posts that called for open borders and criticized self-styled moderate Democrats like Sen. Elissa Slotkin. In 2021, Lawrence posted that then-Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.V.), a roadblock to Democrats' climate change agenda, should "hurry up and die."
Lawrence said in a statement that he disagrees with "some things I posted in the past."
"Like many millennials, I’ve done my fair share of thinking out loud on the internet," Lawrence told the Free Beacon. "I don't support open borders," he said. "I remain a staunch critic of the political status quo, and the obscene concentration of wealth and power that corrupts our politics and leaves working people unrepresented."
