Eric Swalwell Reaps What He Sows

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, April 13, 2026

 

I have no idea whether Eric Swalwell is guilty of the sexual crimes of which he has been accused. I would note, however, that everything the man has said on the topic over the previous decade or so instructs me to believe that the allegations are true.

 

Back when Brett Kavanaugh was being put through the ringer, Swalwell routinely tweeted out the maximalist shibboleth “#BelieveSurvivors”; engaged in cynical question begging, describing Kavanaugh’s accuser as “all the victims” and proposing that “victims of sexual assault . . . deserve to be heard”; and asked, rhetorically, what the “chances” were that “three or four women independently who never met each other would have similar experiences with one person,” before concluding that “either this person committed these horrific acts or he’s the single unluckiest person in the world.”

 

As it happened, there were not “three or four women” in the Kavanaugh case. But there are “three or four women” in Swalwell’s, and rather than seeing this as evidence that he must have “committed these horrific acts,” he has concluded that he is truly unlucky — or worse. “These allegations of sexual assault are flat out false,” Swalwell said in a video released to counter the charges. “They did not happen. They have never happened.” Later, at a town hall in in Sacramento, Swalwell suggested that the claims had been timed to kill his now-suspended campaign for governor and confirmed that his lawyers had sent cease-and-desist letters to at least two of the women involved. #BelieveSurvivors?

 

Perhaps Swalwell did it. Certainly, he is no paragon of virtue. But the case for skepticism is sufficiently obvious to warrant an airing. Put simply, Swalwell had become a problem for the institutional Democratic Party, and this development helps it solve that problem. A few years ago, the Democrats instituted an election system in California that, while facially neutral, was designed to prevent Republican candidates from getting onto the ballot in statewide elections. The only flaw in that system was that if enough Democrats ran at the same time, a Republican — or even two Republicans — could sneak through. In recent weeks, powerful figures in the Democratic Party have started to worry aloud about just that, prompting the party’s chairman to ask all aspirants to “honestly assess the viability of their candidacy.” As ever, it is a logical fallacy to contend that anyone who benefits from a given action must have authored that action. But it would be naïve to pretend that this fracas doesn’t neatly solve the party’s conundrum. At the very least, there is a plausible motive for shenanigans, and when there is a motive, fair-minded people ought to acknowledge as much.

 

Unless, that is, they are influenced by figures such as Eric Swalwell, who has repeatedly hijacked the #MeToo movement for his own political gain, and who, rather deliciously, is now claiming to be a victim of the very game he himself chose to play. This should not surprise anyone.

 

In theory, #MeToo was about abused women finally deciding to speak up about their experiences. In practice, #MeToo was a disastrous, culture-wide moral panic that pushed influential people to insist that the proper evidentiary standard in a liberal society ought to be “but she said it happened.” The transition was immediate. Within days, the innocuous claim that “women are sometimes assaulted, which is bad” had become seamlessly transmuted into the witch trial scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Within weeks, HR departments and university administrators moved from vowing to take reports seriously to adopting the linguistic tics of the KGB. It was a shameful moment that, in a more conscientious nation, would have ended its architects’ careers.

 

Morality aside, I have long wondered what would possess any public figure to adopt a standard such as Swalwell’s. If one is not a sexual predator — as, mercifully, most of us are not — then it would presumably be useful to be able to deny any false claims without being told that one had preemptively conceded them way back when. And if one is a sexual predator . . . well, then one must be suicidal to utter such a line. At the time, Swalwell must have enjoyed the rush of approbation that is the reward of all sloganeers. Now, as Shakespeare had it, he has joined the unlovely ranks of those who teach “bloody instructions, which, being taught, return to plague the inventor.”