MTracey podcast - "Today's News" -- April 17, 2025: Eric Swalwell, the new Epstein?

Episode Date: April 17, 2026

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mtracey.netWe also finish up, half-heartedly, the “Worst Podcast” March Madness tournament, which was rigged from the outset.

All right, welcome to today's news, which it's not a pedophile-adjacent show. It's not private pedophile party. I'm beginning to think we should actually rename it the moral panic hour, because it's sort of coming into focus as that's what the theme of this era is. I was just thinking, for some reason, tomorrow's news today. Wasn't that a tagline on something? Yeah, it was. Tomorrow's pedophile panic today.

Tomorrow's pedophile panic today. That really flows right off the tongue, doesn't it? It's got a little Christopher Morris meets. I don't know. How about today's Jews? That seems like a recurring theme. I witness Jews. I witnessed you

All right I'm Matt Taibi He is I'm Michael Tracy And we are in different parts of the country Michael is down in Florida Where he has an amusing story to tell Which we're going to

Well not amusing A strange story to tell Which we're going to get to a little bit later We have stuff to cover Because We got to wrap up Belatedly The March Madness thing

We're going to look at a couple of clips Later We're now into the mid-April doldrums of Mark Madison. Right, exactly. Like, the tournament's been over for weeks. Like, this is just half-assery taken to a new level. But we are once again in the middle of a white-hot media panic.

And sort of new things are flowing out at us from moment to moment. And you've got a really interesting new angle on the big. new revelation. Let's start with the thing that most people have probably seen, which is a press conference involving a woman named Lana Drews, with an incredibly serious accusation level at already ex-congressman, Eric Swalwell, from California. And Lana Drews is the latest person to come forward, not the latest. Well, I guess she is the latest person to come forward, but she, she gave a presser under her own name, um, and leveled incredibly serious accusations. Let's listen. He invited me to two public events. I knew he was married at the time and that his wife was pregnant.

He was my friend. Sorry, can we add a laugh track to this? I don't know, Michael, if we can handle putting a laugh track on this kind of this kind of accusation that might be a bridge too far comically for most people but let's hold let's hold off for a moment let's listen I mean it's so

this is a contrived performance but anyway let's listen and all the way through I believe he drugged my drink I only had one glass of wine we were supposed to go to a political event and he said he needed to get

paperwork from his hotel room When I arrived at his hotel room, I was already incapacitated and I couldn't move my arms or my body. He raped me and he choked me. And while he was choking me, I lost consciousness. And I thought I died. Okay, look. For people who have been following the Swalwell story, the original exposés that came out last Friday, the most serious allegations that were in those involved two women recalling that they passed out while incapacitated, that they had signs that they had sex, but they were too intoxicated. to consent uh cnn um michael did you see a quote from either of the accusers using the word

raped because i think cnn just added it in its story i know rape was in the headline it was in the headline but i'm not sure that it was actually i don't think i don't think that there was a direct quote alleging rape as such but yeah it was alleging a set of facts that i guess cnn felt rose to the level of rape right yeah so that was a interesting. The Intercept actually commended CNN for using the word. Oh. So brave. But even so, those two accusations are leagues below what's being alleged here. We're talking about he drugged me. He had sex with me while I'm unconscious in a hotel room and choked me to the point of, again, consciousness and I thought I was going to die. This is like junior serial killer and training stuff.

And it's very dissimilar from what seems to be a recurrent pattern with the other allegations that have been known prior to this, even if we're unsure whether they can be said to constitute rape. It seems fairly plausible that he was flirtatiously sending out feelers with, you know, attractive young women who are maybe a narrative of him and maybe trying to organize meetups or dates or whatever you call it. But this allegation is very much different, it seems, in terms of how the interaction was even initiated from what happened already alleged. Yeah, this is on the Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Bill Cosby level.

If it's like, if true. I mean, it's on the bill. Well, I mean, it would be on the more than Bill Cosby level because at least what was alleged of Bill Cosby is that he would chronically slip quailudes, unbeknownst to women and then have his way with them. I forget, what's the acronym for this kind of behavior? It's a four-letter word that means like drug-induced something or other. I'm not sure, but hold on a second. A few things. Number one, the initial allegations, those all at least ostensibly were sort of given to the media or told to the media.

So there could be some minimal vetting of the veracity done, however insufficient by both the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN, and however much they might have been intent on framing things to bolster a particular narrative and be extra sympathetic toward the, the purported victims. But at least they, they perform some semblance of journalistic due diligence. This was a press conference that was called out of nowhere by Lisa Bloom, the daughter of Gloria Alrid.

Let's get to that. Hang on, yeah. But hold on, but even before we get to that, even just based on what she said there, I'm not sure if she said exactly in that little clip that we played, but she was unconscious, yet she has vivid memories of being choked.

So she, she claimed something like, oh, she had fragments of memory. So she was otherwise unconscious, just one of her memories is saying no right one of her memories was saying the one thing that would make swallwell criminally culpable like beyond any reasonable doubt if he had said it right if she had said it and he had ignored it right um so yeah i mean please this is okay look i'm i'm trying not to be too crass about this but it just the the the the almost well okay the eagerness with which everybody is just so overwhelmingly credulous.

It never ceases to boggle my mind. So let's also not forget that sort of in the Me Too era, this is the beginning of live rape accusations. Remember Michael Avanotti on Rachel Maddow's show, leveling an accusation against capital. Avonaw on live TV. Yeah. Right.

So it's kind of a new thing. Like I would typically news organizations or organizations don't want to go there live. Right. Like yeah. This is the kind of thing that this is right in the strike zone of things you get sued out of existence for for saying or once did. We also have the classic Me Too snowball effect, right? Where even even sort of a hint, a hint, a hint of an allegation that might have been the original one,

somehow gives rise to a proliferation of other accusations that get increasingly more extreme and shocking and graphic. So how this whole narrative started, we're told, is that there was a TikTok influencer who was a former Democratic congressional candidate in California who, um, And basically there was this cohort of influencers and slash operatives on TikTok who were putting out appeals for people to send them information. And somebody gets in touch with them.

And like the first allegation that sort of triggers them looking for additional allegations was somebody who said that the sum total of what occurred between her and Eric Swalwa was as an adult, she was added to his Snapchat. chat. He began to message her. She initially welcomed the messages. They exchanged messages for some period of time. Eventually, he asked if she would like to come meet up at some restaurant, a hotel bar, a restaurant. She didn't want to. They stopped talking and that was it. So that was what triggered this fishing expedition for whatever allegations or claims anybody could ever find about Swallow, just because there were like, there were notions of rumors swirling around. So we go from

that, like, the most not, like, how is that even, how is that, that, that, that sense? of claims even an allegation. But that that person now is considered a survivor. She's being painted as a survivor in the media. Or she's one of like the four or five total accusers who have come out, which now gives credence to every additional allegation, right? Because now it's one after the next. It's kind of the same Me Too pattern.

But after that sort of foundation is set, then you have the addition of these even more incendiary allegations that really don't have much relation to the allegations that came initially. and they are all the more bizarre with these choreographed lawyer press conferences and by the way, how come I watched that whole press conference

we could get into the Lisa Bloom angle she's the lawyer. Yeah, we are. How come none of the journalists who were at that press conference thought to themselves, gee, it's a little odd that we've been preemptively told

that we're not allowed to ask any questions to the purported victim at this press conference that was called. How is that a press conference? It's just this, you know, fanfare media.

availability thing to get the maximum media coverage, which they succeed in doing. It's not a press conference. If you're going to say, look, you can't answer that, you can't ask the person who we just hauled out in front of the press, any questions. Right. And I can't remember which of the stations broadcast it live, but under those conditions, there's no way. I know Fox broadcast it live.

That's what I watched it. I mean, you can't broadcast live under those conditions. I mean, I wouldn't broadcast live in any way, but, but okay, let's, Let's stipulate for a second that this just is what it is on its face. Let's look at SOT 2, which is Drew is explaining why she hadn't brought this up earlier. Although I did not undergo a rape kit. At the time, I disclosed the assault to the people closest to me. I also recorded these events in my handwritten calendar.

the assault and its impact or later documented during my therapy sessions at a sexual assault center in Connecticut. It had a profound impact on my mental health. I self-medicated in an unhealthy way. I did not want to live anymore. My delay in taking action against Eric was driven by fear, not doubt, fear of his political power, his background as an attorney, and his family law enforcement ties. I have never doubted what happened. I stand with the other women who have come forward, and I will be making a report to law enforcement shortly with my attorneys. So her attorney, Lisa Bloom, was asked at some point in this press conference, okay, you're saying, or she's saying, your client is saying that she has additional corroborating evidence, when can we see this evidence?

Like she's saying she told the people closest to her about the assault or rape or episode contemporaneously, then it shouldn't be too difficult to get some kind of statement or affidavit or whatever from the people closest to her that she purportedly told in 2018. But Lisa Bloom says, we're not going to be providing any of that corroborating evidence to the media. We're going to be providing it only to law enforcement. So I'm not sure why that would be the case if they're making a whole media spectacle of this to begin with, but they're going to withhold any corroborating information. Why is that? So look, let's talk a little bit about the difficulty in the inherent difficulties in covering a rape accusation. Ultimately, even in court, unless the person goes to a doctor right away afterward, and or there are witnesses or something like that, it always comes down to a he said, she said situation.

There's always a, you know, it's very difficult for women to find a way to prove what happened to them, almost always, right? That's why this is a crime that is, it's not always easy to punish people who do it in the workplace or who engage in things that are like coerce sex, right, where there's a threat of losing your job or something like that. There's a reason why Me Too, there was a longstanding frustration over Me Too that it's hard. to provide proof. On the flip side of that, however, though, things like I told my friends about this afterwards or, you know, I wrote this down in my calendar, it's regularly referred to in news stories as corroboration.

It's not really corroboration. It's corroboration that there was a story, right? But. Which is why we have to hear from whoever she's claiming, she told it to contemporaneously what they recollect she told. So, and see if it holds up. My point is, it's not the highest level of proof that you could possibly imagine, but the absence of it is kind of striking, right?

So like, for instance, in the, um, in the Al Franken case, when Jane Meyer went to the original accuser, Leanne Tweed, and asked, well, can you put me in touch with all these people that you talk to? at the time and wasn't put in touch with them. You know, that's kind of a red flag, right? Yeah. And in this case, look, the stakes can't be higher. Like, you're accusing somebody of, look,

one of the most serious things in the criminal code. And, you know, you have this very curious condition that doesn't seem like, you know, I don't understand why you would want to withhold that kind of information from the media if it's there, right? And then also on the issue of corroboration, right? Just the mere claim that there are corroborating sources, meaning friends or family or whomever who she's claiming

she told at the time that it happened. Of course, that alone doesn't prove anything. And also, we don't even know what that alleged corroboration consists of because you're right. It could just be they're able to corroborate that she had an encounter of some kind with swah. well or just met up with him or maybe it's like she just told them hey i met this congressman right we don't know that she necessarily told them that she had been raped and was unconscious and

choked and so forth by them but even even if there is some kind of corroboration that's alleged here you want to hear another red flag on these kinds of stories tarot read i hate to even bring that up again it's a quote unquote tarot read because it's like one of her many names that she cycles through is it i didn't even know that yes unfortunately um If you might, you might remember, that story seemed to gain momentum in terms of the corroboration that it had because people were claiming or media outlets were reporting that there were our corroborating sources that Tara Reid told contemporaneously about this alleged assault or rape by Joe Biden. It turned out she got caught, including by me personally, because I found one of these people. She got caught after she decided to orchestrate this brand new story that she had never unveiled until March of 2020. She got caught trying to plant fake corroboration with people she had known throughout her life

because she knew that the media would come calling or she could cite them as a reference to the media who want additional corroboration for the claim of rape against Biden. So there was a woman in California whose farm she lived on for a while. Yeah. A horse farm. I talked to that woman. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who said, I mean, well, then you know, right?

I forget, what was her name again? Lynn, I think. I can't remember, yeah. I think it was Lynn. Who said, like, yeah, look, I'm a lawyer. I would represent actual sexual assault victims pro bono, but I know for sure that she was trying to pressure me or sort of induce me into becoming a so-called

corroborating witness for her claim even though all the time that i knew her she never said the slightest thing about joe biden and i would have helped her if she had she only ever cited him positively because she had supposedly you know she briefly worked on his staff and she but she kept it on that on her resume like 25 years later even though it's this like low level nothing position um so so you know which is all this to say beware of attempts by somebody using emotional manipulation to try to create brand new corroboration that they're going to claim served as contemporaneous corroboration and therefore would be the most dispositive in terms of it actually indicating that something actually did take place.

Right now, it's a whole kind of strategy, especially if we're talking about something that is timed to some political development, which the Biden thing in 2020 was. I mean, that was a Hail Mary by like these aggrieved Bernie Sanders people in the media who knew that the primary was lost, but they thought, oh, maybe... It could have been that, yeah, but... No, it definitely was. I mean, the people who were most out front in pushing it said that explicitly. Like, Nathan Robinson at current affairs, he, like, explicitly said, this is my motive

for amplifying this bogus... Oh, I see. He didn't say it was a bogus claim, but for amplifying this claim with zero, uh, journalistic scrutiny, really. Um, and then like that whole media cohort basically followed suit. So, I mean, it was, it was repulsive. And of course, I didn't, I wasn't trying to, like, advocate for Joe Biden, obviously. But, like, come on, you have to have some standards.

And so, and likewise with Eric Swalwell, I mean, yeah, it all just did coalesce at warped speed in the context of this jungle primary situation in California where the Democrats were spooked that given the quirks of that voting procedure, it could end up being the case that two Republicans end up getting the top two vote. shares in the primary and then a Democrat doesn't get elected cover. So like, I mean, so there are like extra reasons to be wary of this stuff, even if it all seems possibly plausible, which I'm sorry, this person's tail just does not. And then it's, it's even further into the gutter of discreditability. And again, it's going to sound crass, but like, I'm sorry, if you're represented in a press conference type scenario by Lisa Bloom, who's a chronic hoaxer. Right.

Like, she is the one who cooked up the so-called Katie Johnson hoax in 2016, where it was a hoax. It was it was, it was a, it was confabulated by a former Jerry Springer show producer who filed a hoax lawsuit, alleging that a 13-year-old girl, Katie Johnson, who was like a figment of their imaginations. It's, it's a pseudonym. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, 13-year-old, quote-unquote, Katie Johnson was viciously and violently gang raped by Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.

Right. In New York when she was 13 years old. Yeah. So Lisa Bloom did that, but that's not supposed to bear on her credibility now in terms of how much stock we should give to just, like, presume the reliability of what's being put before us. The presence of Lisa Bloom in this story is one major red flag, but the other one, um, which is even bigger to me. And I didn't, I didn't know this until I saw you reporting on it. It's the fact that she, that Drew has went, underwent EMDR therapy.

Yeah. In 2021. Now, Michael, do you want to tell people what EMDR therapy is? Okay. So, yeah, so Lisa Bloom, she was on News Nation, either yesterday the day before. and she disclosed that in that 2021 visit to some kind of sexual assault center that the purported victim mentioned in the clip that we played, she underwent a therapy procedure called EMDR therapy,

which, you know, people get really angry if you question like the sanctity of any of these novel trauma therapies. There's a whole subculture around like the primacy of trauma and how like trauma is the main force, you know, driving everything in the world now. And like, you know, the body tells the score. Like, so they have to like locate all these like secret pockets of trauma that exist within your corpial being. And like everybody's got trauma to one degree another. You have generational trauma and her generational trauma. There's even claims that like everybody's traumatized just by the violence of childbirth and you have to get a

over that, you know, so it, like, it never ends. And it's, like, totally non-falsifiable. It's like a weird sort of, like, folkloric sort of, I don't know, like quasi-religious sort of thing, more than anything else. Well, is it- But this is one of the instantiations of it is there was this therapy that was invented by a woman in a, you know, sort of a freelance therapist woman in the 1980s, because one day she was taking a walk in the woods in solitude, and she was contemplating the difficulties of her past,

and she noticed that her eyes were fluttering around. And she somehow, you know, intuited some connection between the movement of her eyes and her ability to process her disturbing memories. And so she innovated a new therapeutic technique called EMDR therapy. now it's a little bit complicated. So I'm going to say that in general,

I think it's pretty well established that there's no valid scientific basis for the efficacy of EMDR therapy for anything. However, as a component of EMDR therapy, it is possible that some people might perceive improve symptoms for whatever is getting them down in terms of the trauma that they think that they're suffering from because it includes something called

exposure therapy, which has some benefits in that, like, you know, it gives people, way to think about something that has been troubling them in a way that doesn't like prompt the same stressors that could cause something like a PTSD, right? But the main feature of EMDR therapy is supposed to be this like eye fluttering thing where that's supposed to correlate somehow with how your brain or body processes the memory. And there's just no basis for that. But like if you look at the EMD Institute, which is like this proprietary, you know, training that people can buy. And so

there's like, you know, there's a lot of, there's a profit motive here. Yeah, exactly. They say that, you know, during the during these dual stimulation with using bilateral eye movements and things and tones or taps so you have like a you know the therapist like waving like a an instrument around

to like get people's eyes to flutter in a certain way during that time clients generally experience the emergence of insight changes in memories or new association so changes in memories so okay the emergence of insight

Red flag, red flag, blinking red light, because that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's recovered memory stuff and recovered memories are just bunk. Well, it's not, everything supposedly suppressed memories and then altering them, right? Well, it's actually the opposite of recovered memory, right? Because recovered memory, the idea is to bring, is to bring it out, is to surface trauma and confront it in kind of a quasi-froidian fashion so that you can, uh, the, the, the, the, the, the, process can begin. This is about changing your response to existing stored memories, right? And my understanding of it anyway is that it's about changing how you respond to or experience. It's reprocessing memories. Reprocessing memories, right? And therefore, like implanting on the memory different features or emotional connotations.

Yeah. And there's every reason to think that in so do it. you're just basically generating brand new memories. Yeah, and look, I haven't looked into this a lot. The one person that I talked to about this talked a little bit about how, you know, there are people who experience benefits from things like PTSD, but we don't know whether that's due to things like, you know,

confirmation bias. You know, you get some podcast. positive effects just from getting attention and therapy sometimes, right? There are all kinds of things that could be in play here. Either way, the minute you start, you combine Lisa Bloom with EMDR, it raises a gazillion red flags, right? Let me just say, anybody out there who might think that they personally or someone they know experience benefits from this EMDR therapy, please don't take out your rage. on me i'm going to make you a book recommendation because this is where i'm getting my information this

this is a book called science and pseudoscience in social work practice by ruth a fire and monica g picnati it's by a springer publishing company which is one of the you know the big um scientific basically publishing publishers and it's from 2015 and i'm just going to read you a brief excerpt here because i don't want anybody to think that's just this is just my you know don't be uninformed opinion. What right do I have? It's not about B. Okay. This says, so for one thing, they say a large body of recent memory research on trauma has failed to support the notion that there are any special mechanisms for the processing and storage of traumatic memory. Interestingly enough, contrary to popular belief among trauma therapists, the notion that fragmented,

unprocessed memories are at the root of PTSD has been brought into question. Studies have on the people with PTSD are no more likely to have such fragmented, unprocessed memories than people who do not have PTSD. And they go on to say specifically about EMDR is that what sets it apart from most approaches considered to be pseudoscientific is that a number of RC, of random controlled trials have been conducted on EMDR, leading it to be enlisted as an empirically supported treatment for PTSD. However, nevertheless, they say to date, there is no evidence that anything unique to EMDR is responsible for the positive outcomes in comparing it to no treatment. And the florid manner in which it has been marketed, they say, lead them to call it pseudoscientific

and pretty much Joe's bunk that's promoted by lots of charlatans but has gotten mainstream validation by unscrupulous people, often with a profit incentive. Because this whole trauma therapy industry is hugely lucrative. You can convince anybody that they have trauma to some extent. because like the criteria for what somebody can say is like a traumatic sort of sensation that exists within their body is so loose. But and also they say that it's basically unfalsifiable. So they say EMDR proponents have come up with ad hoc hypotheses to explain away unfavorable results that do not support its theory, which is one of the hallmark indicators of pseudoscience.

And so anybody just go look at that book, look at the chapter on adult trauma. therapies that they're saying is rife with pseudoscientific nonsense. And that's my reference here. It's not just me sort of spitballing because I think I know better than everybody. I'm not, I've obviously a licensed or psychologist with a PhD. I'm looking at somebody who took like a very meticulous or, you know, two co-offers who took a very scrupulous sort of skeptical look at a lot of these prevailing treatments that just kind of have been allowed to flourish without anything like

sort of critical interrogation. And look, it certainly brings back repressed memory, right? Like, I had a friend in the early 90s who, who, you know, went down a very damaging Gitor in life because of therapy. And that's when I discovered the book, The Myth of Repressed Memory by Elizabeth Loftus, which, you know, is just a devastating book about the impact of, pseudoscience, especially when it's injected in the middle of a moral panic, right? It can just spread like wildfire.

In the middle of this thing, you know, the initial stories were, they were very damaging, right? And there were some things in there. Like there were boyfriends who talked about being told, you know, at the time, right? urging people to come forward, right? No, look, that's not proof positive, but it's still better. It could be proof of that she cheated on the boyfriend and then came up with the story. Yeah, well, look, I mean, that's a conversation that you wouldn't voluntarily want to have with your boyfriend, right? But, yeah, no, I see what you're saying.

I absolutely see what you're saying, but it's better than nothing.