I’m trying to think of four words less appealing to me in American politics than “Eric Swalwell’s erotic poetry” and drawing a blank.
“Vice President Hunter Biden?” Kind of implausible, also kind of funny. “SCOUTUS Justice Judge Judy?” I mightn’t mind that, but also kind of outlandish. And I suppose I could just think of the grossest things possible and then attach candidate names to them, but that’s cheating.
“Eric Swalwell’s erotic poetry,” however, is unfortunately a very real thing. See, the representative is running for governor of California — and while Gavin Newsom has managed to tawdry up the office a bit, he still doesn’t rank up there with Swalwell, a man who’s been plausibly accused of having a sexual relationship with a Chinese spy, in terms of outright scumminess.
And now, because I had to read it, you get to read his college-age poetry about “kissing till veins imploded and exploded,” as well as his support for convicted cop-killers and such — ironic because he tries to sell himself as the son of a police officer to put a law-and-order patina on his progressive bonafides.
The U.K. Daily Mail got hold of the old columns from his time at Campbell University in North Carolina, where he wrote a series of columns called “The Radically Poetic.”
In one March 2000 piece, published by the paper on Monday, Swalwell lamented that “Rich White Guy Will Win Presidential Race.”
“See, I don’t get excited when presidential elections come around, and to tell you the truth, I don’t vote in them either,” he wrote. “I’m not a Republican, nor am I a Democrat, is there really a difference besides an elephant and a donkey?”
Ooh, wow. An incredible, original insight: The establishment two-party system does tend to produce candidates who look like each other in terms of policy and results. Now, the Republican establishment has basically kowtowed to the Democratic establishment and the progressive wing of the party, and our Eric is grifting off of that while lamenting that Donald Trump and outsiders took over the GOP.
The articles, which were exhumed by conservative filmmaker Joel Gilbert — who makes no bones about the fact that he wants to derail Swalwell’s attempts to get himself elected suzerain of Sacramento.
Somewhat more controversially, he referred to convicted cop-killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier as “political prisoners” who had been done in by America’s “systematically corrupt justice system.”
Never mind that the evidence in both cases is pretty overwhelming against the men. Never mind, too, the fact that Swalwell has often leaned on his father’s police background to hide behind, including during his abortive 2020 run for the presidency and his very live candidacy for governor:
.@RepSwalwell tells story of his dad, a police chief, who was fired for writing parking tickets for the mayor and a few council members. “My dad believed no one was above the law and held firm. He lost his job and we packed up our little family and moved west.” pic.twitter.com/uC9LlH8992
— CSPAN (@cspan) December 12, 2019
“America, it’s time to wake up,” he said of the convicted cop-killers in a 1999 piece.
And then there’s his poetic masterpiece, “Hungover from Burgundy,” written in an English class:
NEW
The Daily Mail has obtained the following “poem” written by Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) when he was at Campbell University.
He describes a fantasy in which he and a woman kiss until “veins imploded and exploded” and “blood rolled down our chins”
Bizarre to say the least pic.twitter.com/Dq2webdZhu
— Ryan Saavedra (@RyanSaavedra) February 16, 2026
Yeah, gross!
“You have to wonder what Swalwell’s woke allies in the #MeToo movement would make of his flippant alignment of drunkenness, abuse and casual sex,” Gilbert said.
Now, let’s be fair to Swalwell here: This stuff was written in his teens. Swalwell is 45 now; it’d be surprising if he hadn’t changed a great deal in the intervening years. Even his spokesman sarcastically responded that, “If you think Eric’s poetry at 18 was bad, you should see his diary entries from when he was 12.” (One does hope the very underage Swalwell wasn’t filling his diary with creepy poems involving exploding veins, but one has pretty minimal hopes from Swalwell.)
The problem is that Swalwell’s maturity has always been a bit of an issue for him, particularly as he looks to become governor of America’s most populous (and arguably, most troubled) state. The Chinese spy incident — the other major scandal involving Eric Swalwell and his sexual inclinations — was much more recent and much more problematic.
The Daily Mail’s explication of this:
While progressives have lauded his opposition to President Donald Trump, Republicans have ridiculed the married politician for his past entanglement with alleged Chinese honeytrap spy Christine Fang, known as Fang Fang.
Fang came to the US as a college student and spent years cultivating relationships with prominent California politicians, reportedly working on Swalwell’s 2014 re-election campaign before vanishing a year later.
The scandal broke in 2020 and cost the lawmaker his spot on the House Intelligence Committee, though a two-year standards probe resulted in no further action.
Now, it’s worth noting that a few things are missing from here, despite the admirable brevity of explaining l’affaire Fang Fang. First, Swalwell, given every opportunity to expound on whether he’d had sexual relations with a Chinese spy, never actually answered the question. While this is an answer in and of itself — even Bill Clinton, a man whose frequent extramarital dalliances had been taken for granted by the end of his presidency, thought he had enough plausible deniability to say “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky” — it shows a lack of ability to face consequences for his actions.
Second, when those consequences were forced upon him, he fought vociferously against them; for instance, when he was stripped of his role on the House Intelligence Committee for the problematic relationship, he brayed like a stuck hippo to anyone who would listen, while not actually detailing what his relationship with the spy entailed.
Finally, it’s worth noting that this story broke in late 2020 — after a presidential election in which Swalwell was running. That’s right: This guy wanted to become president of the United States without telling people he’d had intimate relations with a honeytrap spy from America’s biggest geopolitical adversary, something that wasn’t published after America had the good sense to tell him, electorally, what he should have told Fang Fang. (Specifically: “No, thanks.”)
And now, the phrase “Eric Swalwell’s erotic poetry” is a thing. Your rising star, Democrats!
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