A Michigan Democratic House nominee deleted hundreds of social media posts before launching his campaign.
William Lawrence, the Democratic nominee in one of Michigan’s most competitive House races and a favorite of the Democratic Socialists of America, wiped a large volume of old posts before entering the race. CNN’s K-File found them anyway. What they contain is a sharp contrast to the moderate image his party is now promoting.
The reporting came not from a conservative outlet but from CNN political correspondent Andrew Kaczynski and his team. That detail matters. This is not opposition research dressed up as journalism. It is straight documentation from a mainstream news organization.
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As originally reported, the archived posts show Lawrence embracing police abolition and prison abolition. He called for the forced nationalization of fossil fuel companies. He demanded a fundamental overhaul of the U.S. Constitution and urged abolishing the Senate. He wrote about envisioning free and open migration in what he described as a world beyond the nation-state and capitalism.
In one post, Lawrence wrote that the nuclear family is an isolating, individualistic, and violent way of organizing society.
In a 2021 post directed at Sen. Joe Manchin over climate policy, he included lyrics telling an older generation to hurry up and die so that a younger generation could move forward on the issues he cared about.
The pattern here is familiar. A candidate holds views they know are outside the mainstream. They build a following on those views within activist circles. Then, when a real electoral opportunity appears, they quietly remove the record before most voters ever see it. The scrubbing itself is a form of confession. If the views were defensible, there would be no reason to hide them.
Lawrence is running in a competitive district, which means the deleted posts now become a central question for voters trying to assess who he actually is. A candidate’s decade-long paper trail of public statements is not ancient history. It is a window into how that person thinks and what they would pursue if given power.
The K-File’s reporting forces the race into a different frame entirely. It is no longer just a contest between two candidates on standard issues. It is now a question of whether voters in a swing Michigan district are comfortable sending to Congress someone who, not long ago, was publicly calling for the abolition of police, prisons, and the Senate, while writing about moving past capitalism and the nation-state altogether.
Those are not fringe interpretations of his words. They are the words themselves.
