William Lawrence, the Democratic nominee for a Michigan swing district, has a history of defending the Chinese government and criticizing U.S. economic and military dominance.
From May 2023 to October 2024, Mr. Lawrence hosted a podcast titled “Hegemonicon,” in which he repeatedly said America treats China’s government unfairly.
“I’m just always going to say this is madness,” he said in an August 2024 episode about the U.S.-Chinese competition.
Mr. Lawrence, a self-identified socialist, explained that he lived in China for six months as a teenager.
“The caricatures that are drawn of Chinese people and the Chinese state is so far from reality. This stuff we hear in the news every day, it’s just … really sad,” he said.
The show was published by Convergence, which describes itself as “a magazine for radical insights.”
In a separate episode that summer two years ago, Mr. Lawrence criticized what he saw as anti-Chinese positions of the Biden administration and suggested the U.S. lacks high ground when it criticizes China for falling short on human rights and democratic standards.
“There’s a big frame out there that the Biden administration would really love for us to take up that sees this as a conflict between a democracy and an autocracy,” he said of Chinese-American relations.
“China has a bad human rights record with its treatment of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang and Tibet — arguably as bad as the U.S.’ human rights record,” he said.
Mr. Lawrence called the idea of preferring America as the leading global power over China, based on it being a democracy, “hypocritical.”
“We could point out how this is obviously hypocritical coming from the Biden administration and from the U.S. in general. Its sort of celebration of democracy has always been self-serving,” he said.
Campaign manager Stevie O’Hanlon said Mr. Lawrence’s pro-America record speaks for itself.
“Will has spoken out for years against politicians in both parties who have allowed multinational corporations to squeeze American workers and send jobs overseas,” she said in a statement to The Washington Times.
Mr. Lawrence is the Democratic nominee in the race heading into November for Michigan’s 7th Congressional District, a seat held by Republican Tom Barrett. The district is a closely watched congressional battleground that backed President Trump in 2024.
A climate activist, Mr. Lawrence came out on top over two more moderate Democratic competitors in the primary. He supports a federal moratorium on data center construction.
Mr. Lawrence’s criticism of the Biden administration’s cold relationship with China was a common theme on the podcast.
In another episode, Mr. Lawrence criticized those on the left who are “pro-economic nationalism … who are unabashedly celebrating Bidenomics, including its anti-Chinese protectionist elements.”
He accused those figures of resorting to “ill-informed American chauvinism or false or incomplete characterizations of the Chinese system.”
Finally, Mr. Lawrence denounced the goals of American military and economic dominance.
“We must strengthen the anti-war movement, the movement for an arms embargo against Israel, but also a broader push against militarism and the U.S. doctrine of primacy,” he said.
Mr. Lawrence defined the doctrine of primacy as the U.S. being “capable of winning any war in any arena of the globe at any time.”
He said that idea is “actually crazy if you stop to think about it.”
In the same episode, Mr. Lawrence lamented the “troubling and under-interrogated identification of U.S. labor with the project of U.S. economic dominance.”
At one point, Mr. Lawrence credited his guest David Adler with teaching him that “U.S. leftists need the sobriety to recognize that the U.S. is the heart of global capital and its warmaking enterprises.”
Based on that lesson, Mr. Lawrence concluded that some aspects of “Americanism” must be abandoned.
“If being a patriotic U.S. citizen means support for imperial wars, this is a part of Americanism that we must reject wholeheartedly,” he said.
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