A certain pattern is emerging on the far left. Political figures spend years currying the favor of other extremists with outrageous commentary, proudly proclaiming their commitment to eliminating the Senate, opening the border, and other measures. Then, they delete all of the comments and declare themselves mainstream. The idea is to run in the center but govern from the far left, the so-called Spanberger strategy. The latest example is William Lawrence, who is running for Michigan’s 7th Congressional District. However, Lawrence’s prior self reveals just how radical this movement could prove.
Like many professors, pundits, and politicians on the left, Lawrence has called for sweeping changes in our constitutional system. Lawrence reportedly has demanded a “fundamental overhaul” of the Constitution while calling for the elimination of the Senate, police, prisons, and borders.
He has even denounced the nuclear family as an “isolating, individualistic, violent way of organizing society.”
Notably, he is the latest radical to show that the “Big Tent” party has little room for moderates. While establishment figures like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries seek to use this mob, radicals have made clear that they will be next. Darializa Avila Chevalier is the latest Democratic Socialist to mock the establishment’s pitch of a Big Tent party: “A big tent doesn’t pay your rent, lower your grocery bill, or take on the corporations bleeding our country dry. Democratic socialism does.”
In Lawrence’s case, he even put the intent to music, writing a song a few years ago that calls for the death of moderate former Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, declaring, “Our generation says f**k you for everything…Hurry up and die so that we can get started.”
Lawrence was previously arrested for resisting police officers while protesting a pipeline.
As discussed earlier, candidates like James Talarico in Texas have scrubbed their social media accounts or dismissed their earlier radical claims, including attacks on capitalism. Supporters view these candidates as already proving their bona fides and understanding that they are just sanitizing their records for voters who want the illusion of a moderate. Accordingly, many applaud figures such as Socialist Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, dismissing her own extremist statements just a few years ago as “Woke 1.,” like some distant childhood stage.
These radical figures are learning that their views are distinctly unpopular with American voters so they are perfecting stealth socialist candidates who can run a type of Spanberger campaign while later pursuing a socialist agenda.
Lawrence’s past positions show little nuance and closely track the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America. Destroying the constitutional system, rejecting the nation-state, eliminating prisons, and other radical positions propelled these candidates through the primaries. The effort to now scrub the records shows the utter contempt that many have for average voters.
Lawrence shows the delusion of establishment figures such as Gavin Newsom that they can use a mob to gain power without being eventually devoured by it. In my book Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution, I discuss the French Revolution and its decline into what the Framers called a mobocracy. What became known as “The Terror” was started not by the working class, but by educated lawyers, journalists, and even aristocrats as part of the Jacobin movement.
These are hardcore revolutionaries with an agenda that would destroy the world’s oldest and most successful democratic system in history. Party leaders facilitate them because they can only think about the next election, not the next generation. Lawrence is a cautionary tale that Benjamin Franklin remains correct, this is our Republic but only if we can keep it.
Our constitution was written by and for people with the capacity for self-government. After 250+ years, why hasn’t anyone identified what that capacity looks like, how to measure it, and then how to rebuild it?
No it was not so written. It was nothing more than a codification of rules to live by aka laws.
After 250 years … if no one bothered then there is no need to “rebuild it”.
Where do you come up with this nonsense man?
William (“Billy the Bewildered”) Lawrence merely underscores the deceit and hypocrisy of the Left. Post one thing to the web in the past; scrub it when it becomes inconvenient and an impediment to present goals; then try to mask and disavow it with lame descriptors like “Woke 1.” Once again, the prime principle guiding the Left and the DSA is vile expediency…, and the main anagram of “vile” is “evil.”
That’s what Turley stated. Good job anon.
Aristotle called democracy a perversion of a constitutional republic for a reason.
Did he now? And what was the reason?
. . . . .and “keeping it” requires much stronger measures tan we have taken in the past.
Once the Jacobins have control again, as they did under FDR, they will not hesitate to burn down the house with irrevocable measures.
Anonymous,
The “much stronger measures” are freedom of speech, an independent Fourth Estate, and educating our children. It’s no coincidence that revolutionaries seek to control these “measures”. May we all remember the Disinformation Governance Board, the former Fourth Estate’s Russia Collusion Hoax, and the Justice Department’s federal task force policing parents at school board meetings.
“. It’s no coincidence that revolutionaries seek to control these “measures”. And conservatives do not seek to control those “measures”?