To Catch a Predator

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, April 14, 2026

 

A minority party will typically police itself for bad behavior more exactingly than the majority will.

 

The logic of electoral politics compels it. To persuade swing voters to change course, the opposition seeks to draw as many favorable contrasts with the ruling party as possible, which naturally creates an incentive for them to keep their noses cleaner than those of the people in charge. Look no further than Sunday’s earthquake in Hungary, where Péter Magyar’s Tisza faction obliterated Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz by running on an anti-corruption platform.

 

In the age of Trump, where America’s governing party is dominated by repellent, amoral degenerates, Democrats face an unexpected conundrum when drawing a favorable ethical contrast with the majority. Practicing any ethical standards at all distinguishes them favorably from the GOP, but that impossibly low bar means they can still behave very badly while plausibly claiming to be the lesser of two evils.

 

How ethically should liberals insist their leaders conduct themselves when they need only stop short of total sociopathy to look good relative to their opponents?

 

And before you say “completely ethically!”, bear in mind that Donald Trump and his party won a trifecta in Washington not once but twice by preaching ruthlessness toward enemies and subordinating all sense of morality to partisan tribalism. Many Democrats would point to that and argue that the biggest problem with their party is that they’re not Trumpy enough, eternally too timid to take the gloves off, start smashing norms like the Hulk during a coke binge, and fight fight fight as dirty as the president does.

 

“How much more ethically than Republicans should we behave?” would be an easy question for a political party in a country where the people are virtuous and eager to repudiate miscreants at the polls. We don’t live in that country.

 

The dilemma.

 

Variations of that dilemma keep surfacing on the left.

 

Take Hasan Piker, a far-left chud with a large following on streaming platforms who’s prone to squeeing over Mao’s Little Red Book during propaganda trips to China and saying things like, “I’m a lesser-evil voter, and therefore I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time.” Mainstream liberals are currently navel-gazing over whether Piker and his fan base should be courted or repudiated. Considering how well the right has done electorally while mainstreaming the biggest postliberal scumbags in their infotainment ecosystem, shouldn’t the left weigh doing the same?

 

Or take Graham Platner, the upstart progressive Democratic Senate candidate in Maine. Platner got a Nazi death’s-head tattoo while in the Marines (which he’s since covered up), did an interview with an antisemitic conspiracy theorist (of whom he called himself a “longtime fan”), uses decidedly un-woke terminology like “retarded” to this day, and years ago wondered in a Reddit thread about sexual assault whether women should “take some responsibility for themselves and not get so f—ked up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to.”

 

He’s also crushing incumbent Gov. Janet Mills in most primary polling, by the way, and has been endorsed by Sens. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Ruben Gallego. Democrats in Maine and beyond love his fighting spirit! Why should they care if he reeks of sleaze and opportunism?

 

Speaking of which: How ethically should Democrats have behaved toward the soon-to-be former congressman from California, Eric Swalwell?

 

A week ago Swalwell was a seven-term member of the House and a contender to become the next governor of California, even topping one poll of the state’s jungle primary taken last month. Today his gubernatorial campaign is over and he’s resigned from the House. Had he not quit, odds are good that he would have been expelled from the chamber on a two-thirds vote of his colleagues.

 

He was done in by two bombshell reports published last Friday alleging sexual misconduct ranging from lewd photos sent on Snapchat to raping a former staffer. Of the latter, “two family members and a friend said in interviews with CNN that she told them about the alleged 2024 assault in the following days, and CNN also reviewed text messages she sent two friends describing her allegations at the same time.” Two of those text messages reportedly read “I was sexually assaulted on Thursday” and “By Eric.”

 

The woman told CNN that she and Swalwell, a married father of three, had gone to a bar while he was visiting New York and drank heavily until she blacked out. She says she awoke in his hotel room, in flagrante delicto, and remembers telling him no and trying to push him off. He didn’t stop. “My vagina was bleeding the next day after the sex, I had cuts and bruises on my body,” she claimed. “I could see the bruises of where his hand had been on my rib cage and on my legs and near my thighs.”

 

The Manhattan district attorney is now investigating. An influencer who posted a video of one of Swalwell’s accusers detailing what supposedly happened between them told CBS News she was inundated afterward with messages from other women describing uncomfortable encounters they’d had with him. One alleged a “full-on assault”—and she isn’t the same woman who spoke to CNN, the influencer believes.

 

The congressman seems to have been caught completely off guard by all of this. In a way, I don’t blame him.

 

#MeToo redux.

 

For one thing, it is very hard to believe that Democrats haven’t known about his, shall we say, indiscretions for years and simply looked the other way to avoid embarrassing the party. “I’ve covered Eric Swawell since he was a member of the Dublin City Council,” one California political reporter said on Saturday. “Shortly after being elected to Congress in 2013, his behavior towards women was known by all levels of our local government and the Alameda County Democratic Party.”

 

Other figures, including journalists and Democratic commentators, have also now acknowledged that “rumors” about him circulated widely in party circles, amounting to an open secret. “The broad contours of Swalwell’s alleged behavior, if not the specifics, did not come as a surprise to many working in and around politics, especially in Washington,” Politico reported yesterday. “The 45-year-old cable news darling and Trump antagonist had developed a reputation for unsavory and sometimes unwanted behavior toward women.”

 

Whether the rumors that dogged him involved infidelity, sex pest-ery, or felonious assault is unclear, but his preposterous arrogance in believing that none of it might ever come out seems less preposterous given that, until this month, none of it ever had. Through seven runs for Congress, one run for president, and a now-aborted run for governor, no one in the party seems to have worried much that a guy with a notorious zipper problem might be crossing lines with women and trusting that his public power would intimidate them into keeping quiet.

 

It’s a strange bit of naivete for a party that championed the #MeToo movement in 2017.

 

#MeToo was inspired by film producer Harvey Weinstein, who exploited his professional influence in Hollywood to enforce a conspiracy of silence among his victims. In embracing it, the left seemed to rebuke the logic of the Clinton era: It’s not “just sex” or “a private matter” when an immensely powerful man starts lech-ing around with women who might justifiably fear telling him no or exposing his behavior. One can’t presume coercion in such relationships (the #BelieveAllWomen fanatics can, I suppose), but the possibility must be taken seriously and investigated by the institutions that empower such men.

 

To all appearances, no one in a position of power within the party took the possibility seriously with Eric Swalwell. (Including, ludicrously, his close friends.) Not until he was poised to become the Democratic nominee for governor in California, creating an enormous electoral risk for the party if his alleged misconduct were exposed before the general election, did someone finally drop a dime on him. It’s anyone’s guess how many women who crossed paths with him to their detriment since 2013 might have been spared an ordeal if his “open secret” had been spilled sooner.

 

On a scale of Trump to 10, with “10” representing extreme ethical rigor and “Trump” representing an antichrist level of moral depravity, the Democratic response to Swalwell rates about a two. The rush this week among members of the party to condemn Swalwell obviously clears the bar of Republicans sticking their fingers in their ears to ignore the dozens of accusations (and occasional civil verdict) against the president, but that’s the most one can say of it.

 

I think there’s another reason Swalwell was caught off guard by the backlash, though. Didn’t Democrats renounce #MeToo a while back?

 

Franken versus Swalwell.

 

Maybe “renounce” is too strong. But they’ve certainly expressed remorse about getting caught up in the initial fervor in 2017.

 

That was the year Al Franken, at the time a senator from Minnesota, was pressured into resigning after a drumbeat of reports about him kissing women unexpectedly and touching their breasts and bottoms. In 2019, after the #MeToo wave had receded, he told an interviewer he regretted quitting—and, remarkably, so did many of his former Democratic colleagues who had pushed him toward the exit.

 

“One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made,” then-Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont said at the time about encouraging Franken to step down. Former North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp called it the one decision she’d made in office that she wished she could take back, as it “was made in the heat of the moment, without concern for exactly what this was.” By 2020 Franken’s hasty departure had become a political liability for New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, an especially aggressive #MeToo proponent.

 

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg explained why in a 2022 piece lamenting her own rush to judgment in the Franken matter. “Due process is important whether or not a person did what he or she is accused of, and the absence of it in this case has left lasting wounds,” she wrote. “Carried away by the furious momentum of #MeToo, I let myself forget that transparent, dispassionate systems for hearing conflicting claims are not an impediment to justice but a prerequisite for it.”

 

Al Franken never got the courtesy of a Senate ethics inquiry to determine whether he was guilty before his colleagues mobilized to drum him out. Democrats learned a hard lesson from that. They wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

 

Until this week, when they made the same mistake again. “Expelling anyone in Congress without due process, within days of an allegation being made, is wrong,” Swalwell complained in his resignation notice, going on to say that he felt obliged to step down so that his constituents wouldn’t be represented by someone distracted by having to defend himself.

 

If telling Franken to hit the road before he’d had a hearing was wrong, why is telling Swalwell to hit the road before he’s had a hearing—amid threats of expulsion!—right?

 

There’s no bright-line rule I can see that explains the difference. The fact that Swalwell has been accused of a much graver offense than Franken should have no bearing on whether he’s entitled to due process. If anything, the gravity of the allegations arguably makes it more urgent that he be given a fair chance to clear his name.

 

To understand why the two have been treated disparately, we need to look at the totality of the circumstances, to borrow a term with which law nerds will be familiar.

 

Totality of the circumstances.

 

To begin with, the gravity of their respective alleged offenses obviously does bear on the process Democrats believe they’re due, whether it should or not. Had Swalwell been accused of the same kiss-and-grope misconduct as Franken, Democrats might have been boxed into insisting that he receive an ethics committee inquiry. But once the word “rape” was in the mix, their desire to not have to answer uncomfortable questions about him trumped their post-#MeToo awakening about due process.

 

Fair hearings are nice and all, but politics is politics—especially at a moment when Republicans are sinking under public discontent over foreign policy and the cost of living. Why would Democrats want to keep Eric Swalwell around as a convenient distraction for the GOP instead of axing him and turning the focus back to Iran and gas prices?

 

Franken was also a prominent and well-liked figure on the left, a celebrity progressive who had delighted Democrats by mocking Republican bogeymen years before entering electoral politics. Swalwell is a backbencher who gets by on sheer pugnacity in his various cable-news appearances, as so many of Congress’ performance artists do. I suspect the paths each took to Congress also influenced perceptions of them. Franken came to politics late, after becoming a successful comedian, whereas Swalwell is a cookie-cutter version of an ambitious career politician. One is easily replaced, the other isn’t.

 

A determined Al Franken might have had the juice on the left to pull off a defiantly Trumpy fight fight fight strategy had he chosen to confront his accusers in 2017 instead of bowing out. But Swalwell? He’s dead weight.

 

Trump matters here, too, as he usually does. It’s not a coincidence that #MeToo fever gripped Democrats in 2017, his first year in office, following a presidential campaign in which he prevailed despite the Access Hollywood tape and repeated accusations of sexual misbehavior. By 2019 all of that was old hat, and so Franken remorse set in. Now, in 2026, ethics suddenly matter again: The current White House hasn’t seen a major sex scandal yet, but the other forms of corruption in which it’s engaged are so comprehensive as to be almost orgiastic.

 

Go figure under the circumstances that the spirit of left-wing moral indignation would have swung back from “now, now, everyone deserves a hearing” to “our rancid political establishment can only be cleansed with fire.” Toss in simmering public disgust over the Epstein files, a smattering of lurid Republican misconduct in the House, and the fact that no less a progressive icon than Cesar Chavez was recently exposed posthumously for his predations on girls, and the time seems ripe for a #MeToo mini-revival.

 

And then there’s the gender gap.

 

Young women have leaned left on balance for many years, but the trend is accelerating over time. According to Gallup, between 2001 and 2007, 63 percent of women aged 18 to 29 said their political views were closer to liberals than to conservatives; between 2017 and 2024, that share rose to 87 percent. In 2013, per Pew Research, the number of young men and young women who identified as liberal were roughly comparable, with 23 percent of the former group saying so versus 30 percent of the latter. By 2023 those shares were 25 percent and 40 percent, respectively.

 

In 2024, married women favored Donald Trump narrowly, 52-47. Unmarried women, which of course skew younger, preferred Kamala Harris by 23 points.

 

I wouldn’t say that that entirely explains the varying degrees of seriousness with which the two parties take allegations of sexual misconduct, but it certainly explains a chunk of it. Americans as a whole may have stopped caring about ethics in politics but an important left-wing constituency has good reason to care about a very particular form of ethics. Democrats increasingly are a party of young women, and a party of young women has little choice but to take reports of a congressman behaving badly around young women more seriously than its counterpart does.

 

After 12 years of pretending not to notice, I mean.

 

So, for Democrats, maybe the answer to the question of “How much more ethically than Republicans should we behave?” is another question: Who stands to suffer if we behave unethically? The left will happily punish the right by exploiting the many rotten precedents Trump has created for it, I’m sure—transparently corrupt Justice Department investigations of enemies, blatant influence peddling in the White House to reward partisan cronies, all manner of dubious executive action to advance their side’s cultural agenda. But they’re not going to punish young women by running interference unto eternity for a cretin like Eric Swalwell.

 

“A decade of predation is enough” isn’t very inspiring for a supposedly progressive feminist party, but it still beats “when you’re a star, they let you do it” as an ethos. Congratulations to Democrats on their moral victory.