Show notes
Eric Swalwell’s gubernatorial campaign was a ticking time bomb, and the Democrats knew it. They’ve denied it, but come on, are we really supposed to believe that a story that was kicking around in 2019 and set to break in Politico did not reach the ears of Nancy Pelosi? The question isn’t whether they knew, but why they did nothing about it and essentially let Swalwell loose upon the world with access to Snapchat and hotel rooms.Swalwell was one of Pelosi’s protoges, a foot soldier for the party bosses who decided Donald Trump should never lead this country, no matter the election outcome. They convicted him on Inauguration Day, then spent the next four years finding the crime. The biggest and most embarrassing of these was Russiagate, where Swalwell played a starring role. They knew Trump would not be removed from office, but they decided to wait out the clock, waste his time and ours, with a phony scandal that, to this day, has never been adequately addressed by legacy media or the Democrats. They just moved on to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, and all the while, there was Swalwell doing everything right. There he was on Impeachment Number 2, saying all the things, drawing all of the conclusions, pushing all of the hysteria. For his efforts, Swalwell was beloved by celebrities like Robert De Niro, late-night comics like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert. For a time, he was like Icarus, soaring as one of the Democrats’ shining stars. No wonder he thought he should be next in line to lead California now that Gavin Newsom is running for president. All that’s required of him is that he be someone who can take on Trump. But Icarus flamed out. In the past week, we watched a political hit that has to be among the cleanest and most efficient on record. One minute, he was leading in the polls — the next, he was dropping out and resigning from Congress. Swalwell never had a chance. Powerful forces that will never be known wanted him out because there was a good chance the “open secret” that dogged him for years would drop, handing California to the Republicans. It would be another nightmare on par with Biden’s debate disaster. There was no way the Democrats were going to let that happen.Swalwell never saw it coming. He assumed he had risen to the level of being a valued member of the “resistance.” But he clearly doesn’t know the Democrats very well. If they could force the President of the United States out of running for a second term for the good of the party, they could do it to anyone.What Did the Democrats Know and When Did They Know ItSwalwell had survived the Right’s favorite lurid tale of the Chinese Spy Fang Fang, along with the rumor he’d passed gas during a cable news spot. But in 2019, a woman tipped off a Politico reporter that Swalwell was engaged in inappropriate sexual activity with young women while in Congress. Icarus took flight and attempted to run for president. But for unknown reasons, he dropped out.And then, inexplicably, the reporter dropped the story. Why would they drop the story? Maybe because they lost their appetite for taking down Democrats after the Al Franken debacle, where Franken was pushed out by the most prominent Democrats, like Chuck Schumer, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, with no chance to defend himself against what were flimsy charges at best.As Matt Taibbi writes in Racket:Democrats tripped over each other to denounce Franken, with 32 Senators calling for his resignation on Dec. 6, 2017. Digital stones flew from Minnesotan Amy Klobuchar, ex-presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, and future VP Kamala Harris, among others:The Franken story would sting by 2019, following a redemption piece by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker. No one wanted to do that again, so maybe they figured they’d let the Swalwell story pass. The bigger reason was that the Democrats had one objective in 2019, and it wasn’t to take out the guy who was key in Trump’s impeachment and Russiagate, but to take out Trump himself. It was an all-hands-on-deck kind of moment, and no reporter would have wanted to be caught dead helping Trump and hurting the Democrats. That’s also why they ignored the story in 2024 of Kamala Harris’ husband Dougie who allegedly slapped a woman so hard she spun around. Like so many other stories that could hurt Democrats, including Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, they said nothing, lest they hurt the “resistance.” It was also 2019 when a group of women came forward to accuse Joe Biden of inappropriate touching. No one seemed all that interested in pushing it to the point where Biden would drop out. He denied it, and everyone gave him a pass. Even when Biden was accused of sexual assault by Tara Reade, most in the press wouldn’t touch it. But one person did. Megyn Kelly. Kamala Harris was among those who leaned into the accusations, but that would not stop Biden from choosing her as his VP. Like the good Democrat I was, I tried to discredit Tara Reade, along with the rest of the accusers. I, too, had been burned by the Al Franken story and was disgusted with how the Democrats behaved, and like most people, I was getting exhausted by the Me Too movement and the lack of due process. In our minds, this was too serious a moment. We had to defeat Trump. Everything else would have to be sidelined. I always thought that the harassment charges against Biden were less about Me Too and more about pushing the old man out of the race so that a more progressive candidate might take his spot. Reade, for instance, was a devout supporter of Bernie Sanders, and just before she accused him of assault, she and everyone else on the progressive Left were hoping for a miracle.Is that what happened with the Swalwell story, too? Something about it just doesn’t add up. It was too clean, too well planned, too easy. It makes me wonder who was really pulling the strings. For the second time, he tried to fly too close to the sun and run for higher office, and for the second time, dropped out, but this time, there won’t be any coming back. As Taibbi writes:Which brings us to Swalwell. The accusations are extremely serious. Another woman came forward alleging he drugged her, lured her to a hotel, raped her, and choked her to unconsciousness. “I thought I died,” Lonna Drewes said. Taken with two accusations of sex with women “too intoxicated to consent,” the stories sound more like a developing serial murderer than someone merely guilty of being raised on Bob Hope jokes. Still, Swalwell’s political demise reads like a repeat of the Franken tale, only with context issues amplified a hundredfold, and Epstein playing the role of Weinstein.With Franken, it took weeks for Democrats to denounce him. With Swalwell it happened overnight, and accusers are already being called “survivors,” as in the Democratic Women’s Caucus announcing, “We stand with survivors.” The writer in me dislikes the appropriation of a word that means “remaining alive where others have died,” but it is true these women might prove to be “survivors” of something, but what? At this early stage of inquiry, “survivors” functions as a turbocharged version of “Believe all women,” in which the possibility of disbelief is linguistically eliminated.But time is the point. Time means another candidate can build a campaign and beat the Republican in California. That’s the hangover from 2024, and it’s why I don’t believe any of this happened organically. Who ordered the hit?The story goes something like this: two progressive female influencers caught wind of a whisper network, with rumors swirling about Swalwell’s sexual proclivities. How this information found its way to them is not yet known. Will anyone ask or investigate? Probably not. Some of it came from their friends, and that was more than enough to start an amateur investigation, one that will probably find its way to a TV movie near you. Think: Woodward and Bernstein or Kantor and Twohey, the women who broke the Harvey Weinstein story that kicked off Me Too. Now, instead of reporters, we have influencers. To hear them tell it, they believed their best bet was to take the story to CNN, where their staff could fact-check it and, more importantly, make it legal. One is Cheyenne Hunt, who calls herself the first Gen-Z woman to run for Congress, though she did not win. Assertive and confident, Hunt has the influencer game down. She also carries with her the certainty of the Gen-Z woman who does not believe in due process and thinks every man is a predator until proven innocent. Just asking a woman for her phone number could be a reportable offense. To her, Swalwell was a dangerous moderate who was pro-Israel and too sympathetic to and supportive of ICE. These are red lines for the new Democratic Party's progressive wing, especially in a big state like California. The other is Arielle Fodor, also known as Mrs. Frazzled, who is known for talking baby talk to Trump and his supporters to an irritating degree, but that is why she is popular on TikTok.Fodor seems to be the type who would Vote Blue No Matter Who and probably would not be motivated to take down Swalwell unless she was encouraged to do so. Her story is nearly identical to Hunt’s:It’s an awfully strange coincidence that they began mobilizing efforts to break the story in March, and by April, they were out on social media with it. If Swalwell were a valued member of the progressive Left, if they thought he would fight for Medicare for All, defunding the police, abandoning Israel, and transing the kids, would they have pulled this off? I doubt it.What seems more likely to me is that they were egged on by unseen forces that were doing the hard job of pushing the accusers in the right direction and nudging the story ever closer to the surface, you know, like Deep Throat in All the President’s Men? The same forces on the progressive Left that wanted Biden out in 2020 could also be in play here. He looks a lot like the kind of candidate the Democrats say they want and need - someone who can attract the working-class white men all over the country. But for these women and the progressive Left, there is one candidate better suited to fight for what they care about most: Katie Porter. Both influencers have been seen in photos with her, and Porter and Hunt are both affiliated with the same law school.Porter denies any direct involvement, but then again, why would that even need to be said? There is no doubt that Cheyenne Hunt and Arielle Fodor look to be the party’s future, not just as influencers or as women, but as people who are willing to go this far to steer the ship in the right direction. Hunt, in particular, seems committed to rooting out all of the sex pests in Congress, and what better way to make a name for herself? All the Congressman’s D*ck PicsThe Swalwell story unfolded straight out of the writers’ room of a Lifetime movie where all women are victims, and all men are predators. How could anyone, much less a white male politician, much less a Democrat, send Snapchats of his Johnson to a Gen-Z staffer post Me Too? Maybe he did it because no one would believe anyone could be that stupid. Maybe he did it because Snapchat deletes the photos, and it’s his word against theirs. Maybe he did it because the thrill of it outweighed the risk. Was he a predator? Were these consensual? Me Too demands we do not ask.Most of the victims tell the same story we heard hundreds, if not thousands, of times in the old days of Me Too. How a hungry young woman looking for employment opportunities is lured into a trap, only to have their friendly conversation devolve into a cheap proposition for sex. The woman is always portrayed as a non-consenting partner, someone who didn’t flirt back in any way, and was just suddenly hit with an offensive image.That’s always been the biggest problem with the Me Too movement. It is held in the court of public opinion, and those accused have no way to defend themselves. Because both sides - Left and Right - are invested in Swalwell taking a fall, no one really bothers with the specifics. He did it, that’s all. Why, for instance, did one of the victims claim Swalwell assaulted her in 2019, only to go back and get drunk with him in 2024 and claim the same thing happened again? Is that assault, or is that bad choices? Doesn’t matter, don’t ask. I’m not defending Eric Swalwell. I feel about him the way Matt Taibbi does when he writes: I can’t stand Eric Swalwell. A leading torchbearer in Russiagate lore, he’s always carried himself with an air of oozy self-satisfaction unusual even in a politician. I remember wondering if Swalwell was Latin for “Stubble Lizard.”But the Democrats have managed to do the impossible. They’ve made me almost pity the guy. He thought he was doing everything right. He told all the lies they told him to tell. He helped build the very machine that would later devour him. But something about this hit feels too orchestrated and perhaps sets a dangerous precedent. Even guys like Swalwell deserve the benefit of the doubt, even if he never offered it to Trump. Swalwell almost committed the perfect crime. He painted himself as an advocate for women, all the while allegedly going through them like a box of See’s Candies. If it’s true that he drugged and raped women, lock him up, lock him up. But if all of this was over consensual flirting, regrettable sex, and mutual Spapchats, then he’s the dumbest man on the planet.Swalwell is finally learning who the Democrats really are and that life comes at you fast. Unfortunately for him, he wasn’t squeaky clean enough, or well-behaved enough, or smart enough to keep it in his pants. He should never have tried to fly that high, at least not with so much baggage weighing him down.// This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe