ByBEN ASHFORD, US SENIOR REPORTER
Published:17:34 GMT, 16 February 2026|Updated:22:30 GMT, 16 February 2026
He is desperate to be takenseriously in the raceto succeedCaliforniaGovernorGavin Newsom.
But long before he got into politics,US Representative Eric Swalwellwas a wannabe campus radical who dabbled in erotic poetry, arranged wacky pranks and sympathized with notorious cop killers.
The Bay Areacongressman's eye-openingpast is laid bare in decades-old student writings shared exclusively with the Daily Mail.
The trove includes an unsettling 2001 poem about two lovers kissing and biting until their veins 'imploded and exploded' during a kinky hotel hookup.
The youthful Swalwell also used his student newspaper column to mount an impassioned defense of former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal, serving life for the shooting of a police officer.
It was a peculiar stance for someone who, on numerous occasions during his 13-yearcongressionalcareer, has boasted that he is the proud son of a cop.
Democrat voters might also be curious to hear what the fledgling firebrand thought of their politics prior to representing them.
'I'm not a Republican, nor am I a Democrat, is there really a difference besides an elephant and a donkey?' sneered Swalwell in a March 2000 op-ed for The Campbell Times, the student newspaper for Campbell University in North Carolina.
Source: Drudge Report
