Dave Rubin hosts Katie Pavlich and Mikhail Olson to dissect the Eric Swalwell scandal, alleging years of protected sexual misconduct and a $20 million congressional slush fund rejected by 357 lawmakers. The discussion critiques Democratic alliances with figures like Hassan Piker, warns of rising gas prices due to the Iran war, and contrasts these political failures with the heroism of teacher Kirk Moore, who stopped an armed student. Ultimately, the episode argues that ignoring such open secrets signals a dangerous ideological shift within the party. [Automatically generated summary]
So I started contributing over at the Federalist about 2024, kind of mid 2024.
I did that for a few months.
And then I got hired over at Not the Bee as a news writer, kind of contract news writer over there.
I did that for almost a year, um, and stopped doing that somewhat recently.
And now I'm primarily just over at the Christian Post, uh, writing about the woke right and Christian nationalism and all this fun stuff that we've all been dealing with for the last year or two.
We'll dive in to the week that was, we'll start with the scandals.
Eric Swalwell, a man who for years, literally years, everyone has known, banged a Chinese spy named Fang Fang.
That's not even what's taking him out.
It's now all of these other accusations of rape and drugging women and a series of other things.
The video that leaked where there were several people in the room where they think at least one of the people was a sex worker and it's like, who the hell was taping that thing?
And that somebody might be underage.
I mean, it's just an absolute, it's like a little bit of everything here.
Uh, here's Caroline Levitt responding to some of the flip-flopping around Ruben Gallego and some of the other Democrats.
Ruben Gallego, who said he was Eric Swalwell's best friend.
Look, I think the accusations and allegations against former Representative Smallwell are despicable and disgusting.
I think it's also quite plausible, as you point out, Jack, that there were many other Democrats in this town on Capitol Hill who knew about his perhaps illegal behavior, certainly his disgusting and inappropriate behavior.
And why were they silent for so long?
I think those are questions that must be raised of these sitting representatives, including Mr. Gallego.
And I hope that the journalists in this room will do their jobs, and the journalists on Capitol Hill will do their jobs to ask.
Democrats in power, how they knew about such despicable behavior from one of their elected representatives for so long, but never said or did anything about it.
So to that point, earlier in the week when this story broke, one of the things I kept saying was that in DC, there are no secrets, meaning you go out to dinner.
It's all staffers and it's the Congress people and senators.
Everything, everyone's talking to everybody.
They're all out drunk all night long.
The idea that, the idea that People were keeping this a secret, or that certain people didn't know, or something like that.
As Pelosi said, nobody had a clue about any of this stuff.
That's just completely insane relative to the culture around DC, right?
I mean, this has been an open secret on Capitol Hill for years, and it just shows how dirty the Democrats are willing to play.
I mean, Nancy Pelosi was Eric Swalwell's mentor.
She protected him when the Fang Fang scandal broke.
Let's not forget that Eric Swalwell was on the House Intelligence Committee.
Uh, at the time he was having this, um, situation occurring.
He was ripe for blackmail.
Uh, and then he got a free pass on that.
So he decided to continue on with, uh, overindulging in his new position of power.
And the Democrats just kind of put these things in their back pocket until they needed to use them.
Uh, and now all of a sudden they need someone to drop out of the California governor's race so that Republicans don't take the two slot, top slots on the, the jungle primary ticket, uh, starting to panic.
They're going to lose the governorship of California.
And all of a sudden, um, Eric Spawwell and all of his dirty laundry that's been out in the open, really, but, Excuse for so long, uh, forces him to get out of the race.
Now, I'm not saying that the accusations are false.
Uh, the accusations against him are absolutely horrific.
And I hope that if they're true, the women who he victimized, uh, get justice.
However, his overall behavior, uh, was tolerated because he was willing to go out on TV.
He was willing to go out and be the bulldog, the pit bull, uh, for the Democratic Party, uh, especially in the age of Donald Trump over the past 10 years.
Um, so that's why this is excused.
And for people in DC to say, especially Ruben Gallego, who's a senator from Arizona who Is speculated to possibly have been in that video, went on a number of trips with Eric Spawo.
There's a photo of them on an official Kodel riding camels with no shirts on.
To say that he didn't know anything and that Eric Spawo was leading a double life is just absolutely laughable.
So, Mikhail, I was going to say, it's all these people that are up in arms right now about the Epstein files and they're yelling at Trump or whoever else that might be allegedly named in the files.
And who knows what's actually accurate in there and what's not.
But they're up in arms and using this as political ammunition against the right while their own people are being caught doing this and they've kept quiet about it for years.
It's this DC hypocrisy, which is why I'm glad I'm not a DC insider and I never will be.
Why were Democrats on Capitol Hill silent for so long when, in many cases, we're learning some aspects of this behavior, alleged behavior of Swallwell's, was an open secret, quote unquote?
Guys, it's worth mentioning that there was a vote on whether to release the, the, uh, people who have been named in payments, congressional payments to all of these staffers over the years who have been harassed.
And it's a crazy amount of people.
357 members of Congress, including Rohanna, decided to vote against releasing that information.
Well, and on this exact issue, Dave, you mentioned the slush fund.
So we had Anna Polina Luna on my News Nation show on Wednesday night because she's the one leading the charge to get this list exposed of, The people who have been using this slush fund, which is taxpayer money that was codified into law by Congress to pay out settlements for sexual harassment or sexual abuse cases committed by lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
It's to the tune of something like $20 million, millions and millions of dollars.
So she's working to get that list.
Speaking of lists, that list released.
But when it comes to accountability, she talked about look, we're also, I don't care whose party it is, I don't care if we're Republican or Democrat.
If you're engaged in this gross, creepy, inappropriate, unprofessional behavior, especially with subordinates who are working for you, your staffers who are trying to come to DC and have a career, we are going to make sure that you're held accountable.
I mean, uh, Tony Gonzalez, who is a Republican, also resigned this week because there are threats of expulsion against him.
He had an affair with a staffer who then lit herself on fire, uh, committed suicide.
Uh, then you have Corey Mills, who is a Republican as well, also under fire, uh, for having a number of inappropriate relationships.
And that's not even to talk about the Democrats who obviously have ties with terrorist organizations like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and everything else.
But just think how crazy it is that there is a slush fund set aside because these people are all harassed.
Here's White House spokesman Stephen Miller talking to Jesse Waters about how actually all of this blackmail and the slush funds and everything, this is all baked into how the Democrat Party operates.
It doesn't ring untrue to me that when you see Democrats consistently take sort of crazy position after crazy position, that there actually might be a reason behind that beyond the ideological lunacy of the left.
And like people also from a policy perspective, Democrats are willing to tolerate a lot of this behavior and they have for decades, um, to get what they want politically.
So for example, everybody's kind of like, how did they tolerate Eric Swallow's disgusting behavior against women when they claim to stand up for women, especially women's rights, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, I remember being at the 2012 DNC convention and it was all about how Mitt Romney himself and the Republican party was waging a war on women.
He had a binder full of women that women were, Going to have a war against them if Mitt Romney were to win the election.
And during a break in between speakers, they played a seven minute long tribute video to Ted Kennedy.
And on it, they stamped the words women's rights champion.
And I was like, didn't this guy like crash his car into a river and leave this woman to drown, but then she suffocated to death because he didn't call the police in time?
And the reason they tolerated that is because they're doing that so long as you vote for abortion, you can do whatever you want to women.
You can sexually harass them.
You can.
Bill Clinton's a good example of that.
You can sexually abuse them.
You can leave them there in your car to drown so long as you support, uh, the policy positions that they want.
If I had to guess, obviously, I'm not the, the DC insider, so I don't know.
But, um, if I had to guess, I mean, even, even looking at who these people support politically, like kind of what you said, where they're, claiming to champion women's rights.
They're, they're, but they're supporting abortion.
They're supporting all these things that are very anti women at the end of the day.
They're also, you know, championing, which I'm sure we'll get into this later.
They're championing Hamas and Islamic radical terrorist organizations while also claiming to be feminists and pro women and pro women's rights.
And they care about women, but they're tongue kissing these radical Islamists who hate women like objectively and overtly.
And so I don't think we can expect anything else in their private life if this is, or if this is what their public life looks like.
Um, I, we don't see that as obvious on the, on the right.
I think there's a little bit more of a culture of obviously there's parts of it that are bad, I'm sure, but generally speaking, it seems like more of a culture of actual decency and honor and conservatism that still at some level exists on the right that we just don't see anymore on the left.
But you gave me an action, you gave me a perfect segue to the next thing that I wanted to hit on, which is that this guy, Hassan Piker, who, believe it or not, I worked with at the Young Turks many lifetimes ago, he is one of the worst human beings I have ever come across.
He is a multi-millionaire, communist, quasi-Islamist, who is telling his kids, and it's kids that are watching him on Twitch, literally how to build suicide drones, that 9-11 was good, that Hamas is good, uh, that he has nothing, he walked the streets of China and said he has nothing to be proud of as an American.
I go from laughing to like, this is super dangerous.
I mean, this guy is on the record multiple times, dozens of times, calling for murder of people he disagrees with politically, just like a good Hamas supporter would do.
And yet, Democrats are campaigning with him for the midterm elections.
This is not some guy who's on the far fringes of the internet.
He is actively working with the Democratic Party on the campaign trail.
And it just goes to show how far the left has gone to.
solidify this communist Islamist partnership that they're using, uh, this anti-Americanism that they are not just shying away from, but fully endorsing and embracing.
I mean, it's, it's wild.
He was at Yale University.
I believe it was on Tuesday talking about again, which he said before that the fall of the, the communist USSR was one of the worst thing that's, that's ever happened to, to the country.
I mean, it's absolutely crazy that the Democrats are endorsing this guy.
So, Mikhail, for those of us that don't want the Democrats to be in power or win the midterms or whatever, we should sort of want them to attach themselves to this guy, right?
Because at some point, if you push the average person far enough with the rhetoric, for example, I'm, I vote for Hamas who killed, put aside Jews in Israel, they killed 47 Americans.
I mean, you can't go around saying that I'm going to vote for a terrorist organization because I, I, I'm a, what did he say?
Safety voter.
I care about safety or however he worded it.
It's, it's obviously ridiculous to the average person, to the normal person who's not in this, you know, this, this swamp that we mentioned in the first section.
Most people are going to see this and be immediately repulsed.
They're going to want to vomit.
And so I'm not sure how this is in any way different than what they've done in the past, which is what led to them losing the last election.
They were saying crazy stuff under Biden.
They were doing crazy stuff under Biden.
Kamala Harris was saying crazy stuff and people rejected it.
People rejected this woke mind virus because of it.
And Donald Trump won.
And I don't know why they're running the same op again.
So there's, there's two things that are happening here.
There's the first, there's like the camp that are true believers, like the Hassan Piker wing where they, they truly believe that Hamas is better and that the communism is better than the capitalism.
They're the true believers.
But when it comes to, um, like Ezra Klein, they're trying to kind of say in the Obama bros, and they did this in this podcast, they try to kind of say like, you don't really mean that, right?
Like you're just being, you're exaggerating.
Like they try to kind of sanitize it and make it palpable for the average person.
And then the people are like, Hassan Piker's like, no, like, I actually believe in terrorism.
And they don't know what to do with it.
So then they have to, like, change their position.
They're kind of like, oh my God, you know?
Um, so there's the denial people, the delusional people, and then the true believers who are taking over the party.
This guy's the Nick Fuentes of the, of the left at this point.
It's the same kind of thing.
We saw this with Tucker Carlson when he interviewed Nick Fuentes when Nick Fuentes was saying crazy stuff like, oh, I actually really admire Joseph Stalin.
And then Tucker was just kind of like, wait, what?
Like, he kind of had this like, you don't really mean that, right?
Okay, let's just move on.
It's like, not really pressing him.
It's the same thing.
It's the same kind of, as Ben Shapiro says, um, you know, they're laundering bad ideas to the American public so they can have this plausible deniability.
So then when, This Obama, you know, mainstream Democrat gets questioned on this.
He can say, well, I didn't actually say it.
I tried to give him an out.
I don't actually blah, blah, blah.
You know, what you could see how this could go.
It's the exact same thing we're seeing with the woke right.
We're seeing this with the woke left.
And I think most Americans are just, we're just tired of it.
You see these kind of, and this is how the radicals take over.
They.
And you can go back to what we talked about in the first section with blackmail in the Democrat Party, where they'll use things like that in order to force people to vote radical, even though they themselves don't actually probably believe this crazy stuff, but they'll go along with it anyways.
It's like party loyalty is the highest value to these people instead of actually telling the truth, actually being honest and serving the American people, like what they swore an oath to do.
It's just all about dollars and party loyalty and all this.
And at this point, honestly, I think that Fetterman's probably the only person in the Democrat Party that doesn't have brain damage.
Since the start of Trump's war of choice, it's $15 more every time you fill up your tank of gas.
The price of diesel has now gone up 80% since the start of the war.
And you best believe that's going to carry over to how much you're paying for all the goods that are being transported on those semis.
We've got a president who is paying more attention to what he thinks is in his best political interest and personal interest as opposed to what is in the best interest of working people in America.
Uh, the woman who was pledged to prosecute oil companies is now going to say that we, we need oil and that, you know, we, we actually have to make sure that people have access to things that cause climate change, in her opinion.
I'm so tired of Democrats also using this term war of choice.
Uh, that, that along with, uh, it wasn't an imminent threat.
It's like, okay, so do they have to be, you know, pointing a nuke at your face before you get to call it an imminent threat?
Clearly, she's thinking about running again.
She talked about this week with Al Sharpton that she was considering going another presidential run.
She apparently wants to go back to trying to do math by standing in front of California gas prices, not mentioning, of course, that California has the highest gas prices in the country because of all of the rules and regulations they put on the gas companies there and also the taxes that they put.
Onto everyday people who are just trying to get back to and from work.
So I don't think this message is going to resonate, especially given during the Biden administration, the reason why things were so expensive at the grocery store and all that is because of gas prices.
But that was something they inflicted on the country through their overspending and policies against the oil and gas industry.
You're seeing this weird emergence because, I mean, I think, again, to reference Ben Shapiro, I think he's been saying a lot of good stuff about this lately, where he put this video, or maybe.
Couple days ago, where he said something along the lines of there's not a Democrat Republican as much anymore as there is a America, you know, you actually care about America.
American exceptionalism versus people that hate the United States.
And so everything you're seeing, whether it's the woke right or the woke left, the trying to rehabilitate Adolf Hitler to the crazy stuff going on in the Democrat party, it all serves one central purpose.
That is to demoralize the American people, get them to hate their own country.
That's why you have Kamala up there.
You know, talking about gas prices the way she is.
She doesn't actually care about the consumer good.
She doesn't actually care about the voter.
She wants you to hate the current administration and as a result, hate the country and, and, and become black-pilled essentially against the United States at large.
And so I think this is what we're seeing on both sides.
And they're, they're trying to attack middle America.
They're trying to attack the middle class as best that they can and get us to hate the country we live in because historically that's been the problem with communism is they've had a really hard time attacking the middle class.
That's why it wasn't successful in the West like it wasn't Eastern Europe and other places because we had a strong middle class.
They don't want to blame other people for their problems.
They want to stand on their own two feet.
And that's why you're seeing this argument of grievance policy because it's so toxic.
And that's what communism is.
Communism is all about being jealous of your neighbor and therefore the government has to control and make sure everybody has the same thing because people have grievances and, and they're envious of the success of others.
The American family and the American people, especially the middle class, Generally does not have that attitude.
It's actually what sets America apart from the rest of the world is to reject that grievance ideology.
And you're seeing it infecting, uh, the, the discourse on both the right and the left.
I also think they're making just a tactical mistake here because if your whole argument is Iran war bad because temporarily oil prices are high, then all Trump has to do before the midterms is one way or another get them low, which I think will happen.
And then suddenly the argument disappears.
Actually, here's, uh, Caroline Levitt and Scott Besson on that.
You know, the president's been very clear again, as the secretary just said, this is a short term disruption for the long term strategic goal of the United States to ensure that the world's leading state sponsor of terror cannot obtain a nuclear weapon.
I'm optimistic that sometime between June 20th and September 20th, we can have $3 gas again.
And as I said this morning, too, we are going to be watching the gas stations because they raise prices very quickly when they stated.
When the crude oil prices went up, we hope they'll bring them down just as quickly as crude oil prices have come down, which they've come down substantially just in the past 10 days.
There's a lot of good ingredients right now that just need to cook together over the course of the next couple of months for Republicans to be successful.
Now, historically, it's very difficult for presidents to hold on to a majority.
If the president were to lose the House, that would not be abnormal.
That would be actually very normal.
And then Democrats will use their time.
Exactly.
Democrats will then use their time and their power to impeach the president again, which they've openly stated.
That's something that voters should actually think about too.
Like if Democrats win, do I really want them to spend the time impeaching the president for a third time?
Um, but there's a lot happening with the economy.
The tax rebates are coming.
Tax day was yesterday.
It was on Wednesday.
Um, you have GDP cooking along the, the economy as a whole, which the president talked about on the campaign trail is shifting from a government jobs program based economy to having the lowest federal government workers in something like 50 years.
What else do you think the average 30 year old guy in the middle of the country needs to hear or see happen so that we don't get Yeah, I think, and again, this goes back to what I've done a lot of writing on, which is how we got connected in the first place, is right now you're hearing a message identical to the woke left from these woke right people, people that a lot of us trusted at one point, Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly got on the list.
We're all familiar probably at this point.
You're seeing this message, this grievance, kind of what Katie said, this grievance study style message against the United States, and they're using the conflict in Iran.
They're using the Israel conversation.
They're using The economy, or whatever it might be, as the wedge to convince young Americans like myself that it's hopeless, it's lost, everything's doomed.
And therefore, the only proper solution is to make sure everything is torn down.
And this is why you see people like Dave Smith, Nick Fuentes, and others openly telling young Americans, young conservative Americans like myself, to go and vote for the Democrat Party.
They're openly saying this.
And so, in order for young people like myself to understand that, especially with a conflict like this, there might be high gas prices for a short time.
But we have to have a long term strategy.
We have to look at the whole picture and we can't get caught up in these internal grievances that will literally never end.
That's what critical theory is.
The purpose of why it exists is to create constant conflict.
They want you in a perpetual state of conflict so that you revolt and violently against the entire system that you live in.
And they're going to use every anecdotal set of information to try to convince you to do that.
You just have to tune it out because it's not real life.
Take ownership of your own life in any way that you can.
Like, you have to connect to some of that other stuff because the disconnect between the rhetoric online and what's happening in reality just seems to be widening and widening.
But to that point, I always like ending the shows, particularly on Fridays, so that people can roll into the weekend feeling good about.
There is an incredible story.
Like, you want to find, like, a great human being, a wonderful American, and someone that's educating kids that actually should be doing it.
Listen to this story from the New York Post, and we're going to show you some video.
Kirk Moore 60 charged at 20-year-old Victor Lee Hawkins, who was armed with two loaded semi-automatic pistols in the lobby of Paul's Valley High School last Tuesday afternoon, according to surveillance footage obtained by KOCO.
The crazed gunman's weapon malfunctioned before he aimed his pistol at another student who begged him not to open fire.
Moore, who has worked in the school district for more than 35 years, rushed to the school lobby to investigate the commotion.
Hawkins was seen pointing his weapon at Moore's head and firing a shot, which struck the educator's right leg before he was tackled.
The principal shoved the gunman toward a bench before getting on top of him while the terrified student fled.
Hawkins admitted to stealing the gun from his dad and told investigators he wanted to conduct his own school shooting like the Columbine school shooters did, referring to the 1999 massacre that left 14 victims dead.
Hawkins has been charged with Shooting with intent to kill and other firearms related charges and will appear in court on May 8th.
Meanwhile, Moore said he's healthy and recovering after being hospitalized.
And, uh, Amazing that someone would risk their life to make sure that others are safe.
So, kudos to him.
And we know that there's a lot more Americans out there every day, maybe not stopping a school shooting, but doing absolutely heroic things to help people in need and strangers who they don't even know.
I mean, similar to what Katie said, I think it just goes to show that that is like the American spirit personified this heroic, I'm going to go sacrifice myself.
Potentially for somebody else.
That's a value that seems to be lost on a lot of young people these days.
It's all about the self and self help and self preservation and me, That's what we constantly hear from the media these days and on social media.
And it's like the, the, the reason why this country is so great in the first place is because we used to be a group of people that didn't think that way.
It was about others.
It was about serving others.
It was about sacrificing yourself and working for other people for the benefit of other people and seeing a story like that.
Man, she's even got that look when you try to mansplain how to drive to a chick, which is oddly similar to the look that Arnold used to give Willis when he was up to one of his harebrained schemes.
Speaking of Coachella, concertgoers from around the world paid thousands of dollars to watch Justin Bieber play D's Nuts on stage.
Well, from crackers to crackheads, it was revealed this week that Hunter Biden is no longer living in the United States and is $17 million in debt.
He's so broke that he's offering to fight Don Jr. and Eric Trump in a cage match for money.
Of course, with that money, he'll likely buy a lifetime supply of ass pillows on Amazon.
Is that not what same day shipping is for?
This week, Britney Spears checked herself into rehab after her latest DUI.
And before going in, knowing she might be gone for a while, she made sure to post one more butt slapping video on Instagram.
You know, you may think that's in poor taste, but Eric Swalwell.
Paid good money for that show.
In other news, Madonna's releasing a new album, her first in seven years.
She says making the album made her feel like a virgin again, something she hasn't been since the Hindenburg disaster.
And that's why I'm always grateful to do This Week on the Internet, because if it wasn't for the Internet, we wouldn't know half of this insanity, and guys like Eric Swalwell wouldn't get exposed, and guys like Hunter Biden wouldn't expose themselves.