Greetings and welcome to this sordid, sleaze-saturated 84th performance of the Carnival of Fools! I hope you wore your work clothes to the theater today, because we’re going to be wallowing in the muck all the way through from beginning to end. As for events abroad, I have nothing to add at the present moment. Maybe we’re about to blockade Iran, maybe not; either way, it’s all going to happen after the Carnival has gone to press, which spares me the obligation of trying to sound smart when writing about it. I’ve already said my piece about the strategic situation elsewhere, and I await further developments.
Instead, it’s time to get back to hosing down the Augean stables of U.S. politics. That’s an impossible task, I know — you can clear out only so much horse manure in any one column, and there’s always a steaming, freshly deposited batch to deal with the next week — but let’s at least try to make some progress. And let’s begin with a man who ought to immediately be scrubbed out of politics with a wire metal brush.
You Learned About Eric Swalwell Only Once He Became Inconvenient
Freshman Representative Eric Swalwell arrived in Washington, D.C., in 2013, having just knocked off an incumbent Democrat (ancient snapping turtle Pete Stark) in the first election cycle after California adopted its “top two” primary system. By 2019, the Northern California representative was known to national political observers as a highly visible (and gaseously self-righteous) opponent of Donald Trump’s presidency, a headline-seeking fixture of the cable news “rubber chicken” circuit of endless moral preening during five-minute TV hits. By 2024, Swalwell stood among the vanguard of the Democratic “resistance,” as one of its most aggressively public, square-jawed, elected faces.
And in November 2025 he announced his candidacy for California governor, eventually picking up the endorsements of many of the state’s biggest powerbrokers, including Senator Adam Schiff. With the all-party primary set for June, and the hopelessly split Democratic field all clawing haplessly at one another in the polling like crabs in a bucket, Swalwell was beginning to look like the one who would separate himself from the rest of the pack, the one Democrat who would make it to the general election ballot in November — and thus inevitably to Sacramento in January.
Until Friday morning, that is. Now? It’s all over. Swalwell suddenly suspended his race for governor on Sunday night. And unless you were vacationing somewhere without Wi-Fi until this morning, you already know the reason why: because Swalwell — married with three children — has not only been credibly accused of being an insatiable lecher who preys upon Capitol Hill women like a one-man plague of locusts; he is also accused of raping one of his former staffers. Yes, the man who once tweeted #BelieveSurvivors — in direct response to the outrageously false Julie Swetnick gang-rape allegations during the Kavanaugh hearings, no less — turns out to have allegedly left behind an angry mob of survivors himself. (Many of the accusers have come forward under their own names.)
The allegations have not been proven, but if you can judge a man’s character by his friends, then Swalwell has none whatsoever — because he no longer has any friends, at least no public ones. That was not the case until recently: Swalwell had collected endorsements from 21 members of Congress and California’s most important labor unions (SEIU, California Teachers Association, etc.). Within 24 hours of the story breaking, every single one of them had rescinded their endorsement of his gubernatorial bid — almost as if they had been warned in advance that they might need to do so.
The real sport is now on: the spin game where partisans and operatives from every California Democratic campaign seek to blame the other ones for finally putting the Swalwell allegations out there to the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN; Katie Porter’s people are blaming Tom Steyer’s people, Steyer’s people are blaming Porter’s, and both are suspiciously eyeing the dark-horse campaign of San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan. But honestly, this feels to me a bit like a moral inversion of the old Murder on the Orient Express scenario: Since every campaign had a righteous motive, the true guilty parties are whichever campaigns didn’t knife Swalwell.
Because everybody knew. This is the core fact that we must always return to. Everybody knew Swalwell was an adulterous lech — except you. Swalwell’s name was being whispered through the Democratic grapevine on Capitol Hill by 2017 at the latest, when CNN almost surely mentioned him as the California representative cited by “more than half a dozen interviewees independently” for pursuing female staffers. Of course, CNN didn’t specifically name who they were referring to in that piece — “because the stories are unverified.”
“Unverified.” Such a curious word. Why not seek verification of such claims, especially given the number of allegations? Why such bizarre investigative indifference to a rumored pattern of flagrant professional sexual abuse from a powerful representative? Why are we first hearing about Swalwell-as-sex-pest only now?
But whether the media reported on it or not, they knew. And now they really want us to give them credit for having known, but not told us. Over the weekend, one journalist after another poured forth smugly from the woodwork to tsk-tsk about Swalwell and casually aver that everybody knew and “rumors have swirled in DC for years” — without realizing what that says about them. One local Northern California journalist claimed that “shortly after being elected to Congress in 2013, [Swalwell’s] behavior towards women was known by all levels of our local government and the Alameda County Democratic Party.” Golly, thanks for keeping the rest of us informed.
The pols knew, too. As one who doesn’t typically find himself guiding readers to the American Prospect, I strongly recommend this Monday piece by executive editor (and Los Angeleno) David Dayen, which bluntly laments the “death of accountability” in a D.C. and California Democratic culture where it was known long ago what Swalwell was up to: “The truth, which will be available for all to see before long, is that Swalwell’s conduct with interns, young staff, and female fans was an open secret for a long time, and yet the party . . . had been supporting him and raising money for him.” Give Dayen credit for confronting the ugly reality head-on:
Any of these people who say they were blindsided by the Swalwell developments are not being entirely credible; perhaps they’re not even being straight with themselves. . . . They wanted to ignore the worst whispers about someone in the family. So they did, for over a decade.
Why? I have no trouble understanding why one of Swalwell’s rivals would push to get these sexual allegations into the media before the June election. What I would like explained is why anyone would give a man with a well-known reputation for predation a pass on it for over a decade. I have a cheerlessly blunt theory as to why: because, back then, anyone who had the power to push it as a story had no incentive to make it into one. As long as Swalwell was content to play “replacement-level representative,” it apparently didn’t matter whom he might victimize; he was useful. He was useful during the first Trump term as a sufficiently telegenic talking head; he was useful during the Biden years as a narrative-pusher. Useful men tend to make friends.
But now he is of no use to anyone — neither his rivals for power nor a Democratic establishment that desperately seeks not to have “Literally Worse Than Trump” on the ballot as its candidate in November. And that’s why he no longer has any friends. We learned recently about the nightmare reality of pedophilia and sexual abuse lurking behind the glittering myth of “Cesar Chavez, hero of California farm labor.” For decades, many within Chavez’s organization had known, or at least had powerful inklings, that something was horribly amiss. The abuses of power were too noticeable, the whispers ever-present. And yet all involved kept silent until long after it was too late, because too much was at stake. Chavez was allowed to get away with horrible crimes and abuses of power simply because — even in his retirement, even as a symbol — he was useful.
You’re only finding out about Eric Swalwell now because he is in the way of other Democrats — and easily wounded. It has nothing to do with morality or accountability, only the interests of political campaigns. And it makes one wonder who else out there might still be shielded from accountability — as long as they remain useful.
Mark Zuckerberg Replaces Himself at Work
Finally, Tom Bevan of RealClearPolitics flags a delightfully ben trovato headline from the Financial Times (and not, as he points out, the Babylon Bee): “Meta build AI version of Mark Zuckerberg to interact with staff.” Skip the obvious joke — “how would staff know the difference?” — and realize that Meta has engineered a reverse Turing Test: Any user will instantly be able to tell he’s dealing with the AI and not Zuckerberg when the AI displays human qualities.
Until next week.