Conservative filmmaker Joel Gilbert has unearthed a collection of poetry, op-eds, and personal columns written by Rep. Eric Swalwell during his time at Campbell University in North Carolina, and the material reads like a parody of every campus radical cliché imaginable.

The seven-term Bay Area congressman, now running to replace Gavin Newsom as California's governor, spent his college years from 1999 to 2001 writing eroticized violent poetry, defending convicted cop killers, and bragging about an elaborate fraud he pulled on spring break in Cancun.

Gilbert shared the writings exclusively with the Daily Mail.

Swalwell's spokesman responded with a quip rather than a rebuttal:

"If you think Eric's poetry at 18 was bad, you should see his diary entries from when he was 12."

Funny line. But Swalwell wasn't twelve. He was a college student writing for his campus newspaper and submitting work for upper-level English courses. The content deserves more than a punchline.

The Poetry

Writing under the moniker "The Radically Poetic," Swalwell penned a poem titled "Hungover From Burgundy" for an ENGL 412 creative writing class. It was published in a campus literary journal called The Lyricist. A sample:

"While I screamed / She bent her lips to mine / Kissing till veins imploded and exploded / Till blood rolled down our chins / For bounded mouths cannot speak of parting."

Gilbert didn't mince words about the material. He told the Daily Mail:

"It's disturbing how he eroticizes violence. 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."

That's a fair question. The same political class that has turned decades-old yearbook photos into career-ending scandals tends to grow remarkably incurious when the subject wears their jersey.

Defending Cop Killers

The poetry is embarrassing. The political writing is worse.

In a December 1999 op-ed for The Campbell Times titled "US Political Prisoners: A Cry for Justice," the young Swalwell mounted a defense of Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier. Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther now 71, was convicted for the 1981 shooting of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.

His death sentence was eventually overturned, but he remains behind bars with no possibility of parole. Peltier, now 81, was convicted of killing two FBI agents during a 1975 shootout on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and served two consecutive life terms before President Biden commuted his sentence to indefinite house arrest in January 2025.

Swalwell urged readers to view these men as political prisoners:

"I encourage everyone to research for themselves the stories of these prisoners and others who, at the very least, deserve a fair trial."

He opened the piece with a call to action: "America, it's time to wake up."

Fast forward to this week, and the same Eric Swalwell posted on X about his law enforcement bona fides:

"As the son of a cop, I know what our first responders face every day. As governor, I'll fund wildfire prevention, disaster response and protect the health and safety of those who risk their lives to keep us safe."

His father, Eric Nelson Swalwell, served as the police chief of a small town in Iowa. Swalwell invokes that biography constantly. He built a brand around it. But the college-era Swalwell championed men convicted of murdering the very people his father served alongside. You don't get to wear the badge and defend the men who targeted it. Pick one.

The Cancun Con

Then there's the spring break column, which Swalwell apparently thought was charming. Before a trip to Cancun, he and his friends decided to impersonate MTV employees, complete with forged credentials, three video cameras, and a disconnected microphone. The scheme worked better than expected:

"We were admitted free into every club as well as granted unlimited food and drinks (non-alcoholic, of course)."

"At each club we performed a stage show, usually karaoke… one club asked a friend and me if we would be interested in being honorary guest judges in the largest swimsuit contest in Cancun."

Swalwell described the episode as a "classic example of a prank getting carried away" and assured readers that "no one was hurt and our dishonesty stayed on the other side of the border."

A man who fabricated credentials and used them to obtain goods and services under false pretenses now wants to be trusted with the governance of the nation's most populous state. He thought the story made him sound fun. It makes him sound like someone who treats deception as a skill set.

A Pattern, Not a Phase

The instinct from Swalwell's camp will be to wave all of this away as youthful indiscretion. College kids write bad poetry. College kids do stupid things on spring break. Fair enough. But college writings reveal the instincts a person carries before handlers and consultants sand down the edges.

And the pattern didn't stop at graduation. Consider what followed Swalwell's 13-year congressional career:

• The Christine Fang scandal, in which an alleged Chinese honeytrap spy cultivated relationships with prominent California politicians and reportedly worked on Swalwell's 2014 re-election campaign before vanishing around 2015. The story broke in 2020 and cost him his spot on the House Intelligence Committee. A two-year standards probe resulted in no further action.
• A March 2000 op-ed in which Swalwell declared, "I'm not a Republican, nor am I a Democrat, is there really a difference besides an elephant and a donkey?" He said he belonged to his "own party" called "Lost Cause." Progressives later lauded his opposition to President Donald Trump, apparently unconcerned that his convictions arrived on a schedule that matched his ambitions.
• A residency question that now hangs over his gubernatorial bid. Gilbert has petitioned a Sacramento court to disqualify Swalwell from November's gubernatorial vote, citing a clause in the California Constitution requiring candidates to have lived in the state for the previous five years. Swalwell appears to reside full-time in Washington, DC. He has said he keeps his living arrangements secret because of death threats. A hearing is set for March.

Swalwell has dismissed the lawsuit as "nonsense."

The Race Ahead

Swalwell announced his gubernatorial run in November and entered a field that includes Democrat Congresswoman Katie Porter, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and conservative commentator Steve Hilton. It's a crowded contest for a state that has been governed into rolling blackouts, insurance collapses, and population decline.

Gilbert, whose films include Trump: The Art of the Insult and The Trayvon Hoax, made his assessment plain:

"This was a guy who glorified cop killers in college, bragged about rough sex and thought it was funny to lie to people. The warning signs are all there: Eric Swalwell would be an absolute disaster as California Governor."

Swalwell's team wants voters to laugh this off. Bad poems from a teenager. Who cares?

California voters should care because the man asking for the keys to Sacramento has spent his entire adult life revealing exactly who he is. The college writings just put it in his own handwriting.