transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Now, on 105.9 FM and streaming worldwide on the WMAL app, O'Connor & Company.

Speaker 2:
[00:11] Good morning, it's Thursday, 607 now, as we charge through the morning. Bethany Mandel's here, so I just wanna prepare yourselves because she's just, she's a marvel to behold. She's the publisher of the Mom Wars Obstack, as well as the accompanying podcast. Recent episode just dropped yesterday by Elise Stefanik, Bethany Mandel. Good morning to you, my friend.

Speaker 3:
[00:32] Good morning to you, my friend.

Speaker 2:
[00:34] Coming up later in the show at 7.05, we'll speak with Matt Schlapp of the American Conservative Union and CPAC. Talk about Virginia and the way forward. At 8.05, Katie McFarland talked about Iran and the surprise announcement yesterday afternoon that the Secretary of the Navy has resigned. 8.35 brings us Rich McCormick, congressman, wants to make DC square again. Said, enough of this. Let's bring the federal government back in and take back Arlington County and Alexandria and maybe that'll change. It is when you look at it, the difference in that vote. If those parts of Virginia were DC, the vote would have gone down on DC. Although one would argue that many of those people will just move into Fairfax. But who knows now, they're not going to leave their beautiful property in old town. Anyway, we'll get to all that later in the program. Last night, as we were all asleep around midnight our time, there was a big debate in the Golden State. This is the first major debate of all of the major candidates now who are left standing. Now that Eric Swalwell is out, as well as Judy Yee, who is pulling around 1%, she has dropped out as well. The top six candidates, including two Republicans, Chad Bianco, who is the Sheriff of Riverside County, and Steve Hilton, former Fox News host, who has been leading the pack for the most part, and recently got a big Donald Trump endorsement. He addressed that, by the way, and I think gave a very good response. Like, why should California and so forth for you if you got endorsed by President Trump? He actually gave a great answer to that. But all eyes were really on Katie Porter. Let me just give you the politics of this first. Katie Porter, former Congresswoman, she got famous, Bethany, because she would sit there in a hearing and really condescendingly pull out a little whiteboard. Because she was a teacher, don't you know? And she would do all these things with people who were testifying before her committee. And the left just loved her. And so they clicked on that act blue button, and she gained a pretty big war chest. The war chest was bigger than her actual political abilities because she tried to run for Senate, lost in the jungle primary there to not just Adam Schiff, who eventually became the senator, but also to Steve Garvey, a former baseball player who'd never run for office before. So people kind of thought, okay, this Katie Porter person, she just isn't ready for prime time. Well, that didn't stop her. Here she is two years later, now running statewide again, this time to be the governor. And well, a lot of stories came out about her. You've been in this town a while, and there's certain members of Congress, just like Eric Swalwell, you hear stories about them. We heard stories about Eric Swalwell. Well, there are other stories about Katie Porter and her interactions with her staff, not involving sexual assault, mind you, or some of the inappropriate behavior that Eric Swalwell seems to have engaged in. I mean, if someone said, hey, what do you know about Katie Porter and how she interacts with her staff? What would you immediately say, Bethany?

Speaker 3:
[03:24] I mean, this is one of those things that we don't just have to extrapolate or hypothesize or whisper. We have it on video. We have it on video. She is cruel. And I can say that with certainty because I've watched the videos. I've watched the super cuts of the videos. I love these videos because she is not shy about the fact that she was certainly the trunchbull when she was in the classroom.

Speaker 2:
[03:53] She's a monster. She's an absolute. I mean, here, just to remind you, here she is. This is cut seven. When she was doing a Zoom, this is during the pandemic, and she was engaged in a Zoom interview for political purposes. It wasn't actually for a journalist. I think it had to do with another politician, that she was pretending like she was answering questions of. And then one of her staffers, she had said something that was erroneous. So one of her staffers came in to try to correct her so she could do it properly and not get misinformation. Well, that staffer won't do that again. Listen.

Speaker 4:
[04:27] That we're going to lose more than half a million Californians dying prematurely to air pollution and other problems, and the state could lose f*****g out of my f*****g shot.

Speaker 3:
[04:39] I wanted to tell you that that's actually incorrect. It's not that it's electric vehicles. It's that if we don't meet the commitments under the Paris Climate Accord.

Speaker 4:
[04:47] Okay. You also were in my shot before that. Stay out of my shot.

Speaker 2:
[04:55] By the way, listen, members of Congress are under a lot of pressure and a lot of stress, and the whole process of even running for office is just, I'm learning this from my friend Chris DeGaul, who has now been in the arena for a couple of weeks, and he's like, this is surreal. It's not normal. Nothing about this is normal, and I get it. But they take stuff out of staffers often. But to me, what always bothered me about this is what she was angry about. You're in my shot. I mean, the narcissism. Stay out of my... This is a... The staffer was in the background trying to come in and say, oh, you got that wrong, guys. Let's not put that out there. What a... Just an egomaniac.

Speaker 3:
[05:38] That's a disorder. I'm sure we weren't seeing that, though, on display at the governor's debate, right? Like, she wouldn't put that face forward.

Speaker 2:
[05:48] She was asked about it, and well, you tell me if you believe her answer. This is cut eight.

Speaker 5:
[05:55] Ms. Porter, you've acknowledged that your interactions with an aide and with a reporter captured on videos which went viral were, in your words, a bad look, and that you could have done better. What have you done to address those concerns? And as a person who frequently speaks about being a parent on the campaign trail, what would you tell your own kids if they ever faced a boss like that? You have 60 seconds.

Speaker 4:
[06:19] I apologized that day to that staffer four years ago.

Speaker 2:
[06:24] That's it. That's pretty much it.

Speaker 3:
[06:27] It wasn't an isolated incident, Katie.

Speaker 2:
[06:29] No. It's also not addressing the larger issue at hand. In fact, she just displayed this in an interview a few months ago when she was asked, how are you going to appeal to Trump voters in the state? There's a lot of them. And she goes, I don't need to. Why should I care about them? I can win without them. Which is very revealing. She was also, oh, well, go ahead. You want to say something?

Speaker 3:
[06:50] No, I wanted to shift to her performance as well because she's not just an objectionable human. She's also bad at this.

Speaker 2:
[06:58] Well, anybody who thinks about California and the current state of life in the California, within the first 60 seconds, you're gonna say something about the horrendous criminal vagrancy and homeless problem that they have endured for years because of Gavin Newsom and before him, Jerry Brown's policies. There's no two ways to say. Even Newsom recognizes it because he's trying his damnedest right now to clean things up and sort of polish the turd, as people like to say in politics, to try to make it. So here's Katie Porter asked, how would you grade Gavin Newsom's performance? And let me just say, this is a perfect opportunity to say, listen, I like Gavin Newsom, I support Gavin Newsom. He's been a good guy, but on this, he has not solved the problem. It's gotten worse and here's what my solutions are. You know, sort of separate yourself from the lizard man. Well, here was Katie Porter's answer to the question.

Speaker 5:
[07:47] What grade would you give him on homelessness? And what, if anything, would you do differently? You have 60 seconds.

Speaker 4:
[07:53] I'm a notoriously tough grader, but I would probably give him a B on homelessness. I don't think this has been an easy problem to solve, but I do give him a lot of credit for calling attention to the problem. When he campaigned eight years ago, he was talking about housing when nobody else was.

Speaker 6:
[08:09] Well, by the way, I'd love to be in your class. Katie, if you get a B for what Gavin Newsom's done on homelessness, my goodness.

Speaker 2:
[08:17] Steve Hilton there, enjoy me. Honestly, he's raised awareness. We don't need the governor to raise awareness about homelessness. We see it the moment we step outside our door and have to dodge the feces on the sidewalk.

Speaker 3:
[08:29] But maybe as Governor Katie Porter would make official the poop maps in San Francisco, where you can figure out where there are piles of human feces, that could be an initiative. She could spearhead. She could really digitize and make it an app and have reporting. So that way you can avoid it in San Francisco.

Speaker 2:
[08:54] Google Map overlay. Yeah. You can just add that as a feature. Mandated, of course, because Democrats, they don't use that and then just make it optional. It must be mandated to have the poop maps. All right. A little bit more from the debates there, including Xavier Becerra, who is sort of the flavor of the week right now. He seems to be surging in that election after the Eric Swalwell debacle. And you'll hear from Steve Hilton as well in a moment. First, though, at 6.15. Xavier Becerra, the former Secretary of Health and Human Services under Joe Biden and sort of one of those people who sort of failed his way forward. What is it? The Peter Principle, I think. He's the perfect beneficiary of that in California. He is now suddenly surging in the polls. Nobody can really tell you what he's done or who he is. But I guess they like that he's a Democrat and he's not a multi-billionaire like Tom Steyer. So suddenly, he's seeing his numbers grow. He was asked the same question. Now, Katie Porter gave Gavin Newsom a B on homelessness, right? Bethany, and that's just like a political fumble, you would think. That's just, what do you think in woman, right?

Speaker 3:
[10:00] Yeah. I mean, she's in a tough spot because what would she do differently, first of all, but also they all have to pretend and keep up the charade that everything is okay, and that things need tweaking, but overall California is going in the right direction.

Speaker 2:
[10:20] I hear you, and they're obviously all sucking up for the Gavin Newsom endorsement too, right? He has not endorsed anybody in this campaign yet, so they're sucking up for that. But here's the irony here. Katie Porter says that Gavin Newsom gets a B. I bet if a reporter asked Gavin Newsom, how would you grade yourself on homelessness? Even Newsom wouldn't give himself a B. He'd probably be incomplete or a C, but we're striving for a B this next semester. Something stupid like that. But set it all aside. You want to talk about sucking up for the Gavin Newsom endorsement, take a listen to Xavier Becerra.

Speaker 5:
[10:58] What grade does he get on homelessness? What, if anything, would you do differently? You have 60 seconds.

Speaker 2:
[11:03] Frank, I would say that the governor has made efforts. We've seen him come down to Los Angeles, actually go out and try to clean some of these streets. On effort, I would give him an A.

Speaker 3:
[11:18] On effort. Effort. A for effort.

Speaker 2:
[11:21] He tried. He tried so hard. He came down here to LA. First of all, you're the governor of California. You should probably be in LA now and again. It's the largest city in the state. But he came down here and he participated in a photo op that made it look like he was cleaning up one of those encampments himself. Excuse me, Mr. Becerra, why did the encampment exist in the first place?

Speaker 3:
[11:42] This reminds me of that GIF where someone is holding a cake and it says, at least you tried as they're throwing it into the garbage. This is it.

Speaker 2:
[11:54] That's it. It's the Bart Simpson meme.

Speaker 3:
[11:57] Yep.

Speaker 2:
[11:58] All right. Steve Hilton is the leading Republican and he's been leading the polls forever, partly now that's not because California is a Republican state. It's because this jungle primary is such that there's eight candidates and you spread everybody's support out, especially amongst six Democrats. And it's easy for a Republican to lead the pack with like 19 percent of the vote. Steve Hilton though is in fact the top candidate based on all of the polls. And he was asked and challenged and confronted about the fact that he got an endorsement from the President of the United States who just won a sweeping election across the nation. Not in California mind you, but he was asked, you know, how are you going to win in California if you're a Trump guy? And everybody says this, like, oh, you, a Republican could win in California, but not if he's a Trump Republican. But that may be true. So how does Steve Hilton handle that? Take a listen and you be the judge.

Speaker 6:
[12:55] One of the proudest days of my life was the day I became an American citizen. It happened in a ceremony right here in San Francisco. So it is a deep honor for me to be endorsed by the President of the United States. And here's the thing that's going to help every Californian when I'm governor, is that we will have a constructive relationship and partnership with the federal government, which would be the case, I would hope, for any party in that situation, so that we can make things better in California, work with the President and his administration, to manage our forests better, to harvest the timber, so we can build the single-family homes we need for young families, to work to increase California energy production as he wants to do, so we can lower gas prices, to fight the fraud in our government, so we can cut spending and cut taxes, to work to enforce our immigration laws in all these areas and more. It will benefit every Californian to have a governor who is a partner on these issues with the president and his team.

Speaker 2:
[14:07] In other words, he's saying, yeah, I got endorsed by the president. Imagine having a governor who instead of spends millions of dollars of our tax money to fight the president of the United States and not get anything from the federal government and whine that the federal government isn't doing anything for us. How about having someone who will actually be a partner with the federal government and actually benefit the people of California? I don't think Californians are smart enough to follow that logic, but I think it was a great argument.

Speaker 3:
[14:32] Yeah, yeah, I agree. And what's interesting about the jungle primary is there could be very easily two Republicans running for governor against each other.

Speaker 2:
[14:43] There could be. Listen, the field is starting to thin and that benefits Democrats. Tom Steyer is starting to surge and he is a multi-billionaire. Xavier Becerra seems to be benefiting from Swalwell dropping out by getting some of the union endorsements. But as of now, Steve Hilton is still number one. And Chad Bianco, the sheriff of Riverside County, who is very tough on immigration and very law and order, obviously, he's running either tied for second or in third place. So let's see what happens. Their primary is in June. It's 623.

Speaker 1:
[15:16] Now on 105.9 FM and streaming worldwide on the WMAL app, O'Connor & Company.

Speaker 2:
[15:28] It's 637. It's O'Connor & Company on this Thursday morning. It's April 23rd. Appreciate you letting us be your drive along, ride along here on your morning routine. Coming up at 7.05, Matt Schlapp of CPAC, American Conservative Union, reflect on where Virginia is headed. 8.05, Katie McFarland on the conflict in Iran, as well as the news about our Secretary of Navy that we're going to get to in a mere moment. And then at 8.35, Congressman Rich McCormick wants to make DC Square again, retrocede, bring back those parts of Virginia. Would that be retrocession though? I don't think that would be. That would be counter retrocession because Virginia retroceded back there. I don't know. We'll ask the Congressman. It's Larry O'Connor with Bethany Mandel. Good morning, Bethany.

Speaker 3:
[16:14] Good morning, Larry O'Connor.

Speaker 2:
[16:17] And it's a good morning for Hung Cao. Friend of this program, former candidate for Congress in Virginia 10, former candidate for Senate in the Commonwealth of Virginia, now your Deputy Secretary of the Navy, and as of about 6 p.m. last evening, the acting Secretary of the Navy because the secnav John Phelan was dismissed from his position, asked to resign, which he complied with the request Wednesday after months of feuding with higher-ups at the Pentagon, specifically Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, and apparently the president himself. This is based on reporting of the New York Post. Phelan is a Trump guy, as is Pete Hegseth, but there have been rumblings about some friction between the two for months, really for over a year now. According to the New York Post, tensions between Phelan and Hegseth and Deputy War Secretary Steven Feinberg had been simmering for months, according to the New York Times and a Republican source. Phelan didn't get along with Pentagon brass and his management leadership style was incongruent with Hegseth and Feinberg. One Republican source familiar with the fired Navy Secretary standing at the Pentagon told the Post. However, I just want to reiterate, he's a Trump guy. And all of this seems to be a personality conflict and management style conflicts, not with Trump and the White House, but with Hegseth who runs the Pentagon. But there's some other things at play here that we can get into in a moment. But we've seen a lot of personnel shake up all of a sudden. After going a year in Trump 2.0 without really any drama in the cabinet, we've had Kristi Noem, we've had Pam Bondi, earlier this week had the labor secretary, and now you've got the secretary of the Navy. I just want to point out the secretary of Navy asked to resign while we're in the middle of a conflict in the Middle East, that is probably 80 percent a Navy operation with this blockade enabled right now.

Speaker 3:
[18:19] You said that during the break and it stuck with me because it's not like, this is normal times and secretary of Navy, what he does is he smashes a bottle against a ship and says, mazel tov. This is actually a big job and it's a big job right now in the middle of this blockade and I hope that decisions of this nature are not made and this importance are not made purely on the basis of personality clashes because this is not the moment to get mad and fire someone in a huff.

Speaker 2:
[18:57] I agree and one would suspect that this didn't happen without the blessing if not outright approval of the White House and the Commander in Chief. I should say that there is no reporting at all that I can find about this dismissal that suggests that there was a disagreement or a conflict over the current military engagement or the strategy or anything like that. This is not about Iran and the use of the Navy in Iran, as the Secretary of Navy certainly is in the chain of command there, but that's not a question. Apparently, it had to do with the future growth of the Navy and shipbuilding. Here's a quote according to a source at the New York Post. The administration really wanted to accelerate the shipbuilding program because of the president's agenda and the secretary seemed incapable of accomplishing those goals and he wasn't well liked. When you combine incompetence with arrogance, it usually doesn't end well. I wonder who that source is for the New York Post.

Speaker 3:
[19:55] Sorry, that's ridiculous. This is not the moment in history to be talking about shipbuilding. There's a blockade right now in the Strait of Hormuz. This is a really serious moment right now.

Speaker 2:
[20:09] You're right, but the secretary of the Navy and the Pentagon for that matter, they have to multitask. Part of their duty certainly is to oversee and make sure that the operations that the Navy is currently engaged in is completed. No, forward thinking and making sure that the fleet is capable and that the ships are being built. That's a big part of the job, especially with this president's agenda.

Speaker 3:
[20:30] But not in the middle of the blockade. It did not happen to happen in late April 2026. If this is the real reason, it could have waited until May.

Speaker 2:
[20:40] According to the New York Post, the secretary has also butted heads with Hung Cao, the deputy secretary who is now set to replace him. Well, it certainly was announced that he is now the acting secretary of the Navy, friend of this program, Hung Cao. Whether that is a permanent replacement or not is yet to be seen. But I can tell you, I have heard that as well from various people at the Pentagon. Not Hung Cao, by the way, who I, full disclosure, do have a personal friendship with. But no, he has never said anything to me. We don't talk about work. But I have heard from people at the Pentagon that there was tension there in friction. And apparently, the deputy secretary, the undersecretary, I believe, was put in place without necessarily the secretary's blessing or approval. It was just future, you know.

Speaker 3:
[21:31] And to be clear, any fight between Hung Cao and anyone else, I'm team Hung Cao. So it all worked out, whatever. But I don't think that we're getting the real story here, because the future of shipbuilding is not, that's not it, friends.

Speaker 2:
[21:49] There's probably more to it. The senior administration official told The Post that Trump and Hegseth both agreed it was time to replace Phelan. President Trump and Secretary Hegseth agreed new leadership of the Navy is needed. Secretary Hegseth informed John Phelan of this news prior to being made public. So there you go. Phelan addressed the Navy's annual conference in DC on Tuesday and spoke to reporters about his plans to ramp up shipbuilding in the service. But that was his last public statement. And now, by the way, and just so you know, Mr. Phelan was a huge Republican donor, a huge donor to President Trump's campaign. They were tight, but he is now out. Hung Cao is in for now. And watch that space. We'll talk to Katie McFarland about this and the impact on the current military objectives in the Middle East. That conversation will occur at 8.05. Right now it is 6.44. I'm intrigued by this idea. We often hear about no taxation without representation. DC needs to be made a state. Oh, what are we going to do? And a lot of people say, we'll retrocede the Maryland part of DC back to Maryland and make DC just that federal corridor along the mall. And that'll allow people to have representation. And they'll go back to Maryland and be their problem and just get rid of the district altogether for the most part. That's one solution. But now the pendulum is swinging in an even further direction. Congressman Rich McCormick is saying, oh, no, no, no, you keep DC right where it is and then add to it and bring back the original concept where DC, instead of that, you know, looks like a square cookie with a bite taken out of it because Virginia took their territory back back in the 19th century. No, no, no, no. The federal government should reacquire that territory. And as he puts it, make DC square again. Here's what he said on social media and then we'll talk about it.

Speaker 7:
[23:40] So in 1846, Washington DC was ceded Arlington and Alexandria over to Virginia. That has warped the system since then. If you think about it, that's what's caused all this consternation right now in the recent law that was passed. That's going to allow them to reapportion themselves 10 to 1 from 6 to 5. What we want to do is make DC square again. It's a simple concept. Square. We repeal that unconstitutional law, give back Virginia exactly what it should have, give DC what it should have, and get this thing right.

Speaker 2:
[24:20] Well, so first of all, just to technicality, I think DC is actually a diamond, not a square. You have to turn it on its corners. I mean, it is a square diamond, but it's still... Anyway, I don't want to quibble about that. What do you think of this idea that all of those people who work in the federal government or get paid to influence the federal government, who would normally have lived in DC because of the proximity, they actually now live in Virginia, but because they're voting... And I think you could make this argument that their votes are fueled by and informed by their own self-interest in their work in the federal government, it ends up influencing the direction of Virginia itself.

Speaker 3:
[25:00] I am never a fan of when we use gimmicks as like lawmaking. This is not really one of those things. This is not a gimmicky. This is a real question of, do the residents of Alexandria and Fairfax, all of these places, they are much more DC minded than they are Virginia minded.

Speaker 2:
[25:25] They vote based on what's going on in DC, not necessarily what's going on in Virginia.

Speaker 3:
[25:29] Yes, which is what made this gerrymandering, which by the way, I was on Hugh Hewitt's show yesterday and he says gerrymandering.

Speaker 2:
[25:38] Yeah, technically it is gerrymandering. But I don't want to be one of those guys who's like, actually, it should be pronounced gerrymandering. Because everyone for the last 100 years has called it gerrymandering, so I'm just going to stick with how we actually talk in this country. But yes, the politician it's named after was actually pronounced Gary. I'm torn by this, frankly, because I think all it does is delay the problem, and what the real problem is, which is winning the hearts and minds of people and convincing them. But there's no doubt. I'll give you a perfect example. When Elon Musk was heading up the Doge Initiative, and trimming the federal government, and trying to bring accountability, and actually firing people who weren't doing anything, Virginia politicians implored President Trump, Republicans said, please stop this, because you're going to kill us in Virginia. And a lot of those people who were going to kill Republicans in Virginia because of the Doge Cuts are people who live right there. And they were angry at Doge Cuts because it was affecting them. Well, they should live in DC, because originally that was the concept that they would live in DC. And by the way, now that those Republican congressmen have lost their districts to the referendum, are they going to call the president up and say, you know what, I don't care, go ahead and fire as many people as you want. It isn't going to affect me in the election because they just ripped my district from me. That would be a nice thing to listen. We're going to talk to Rich McCormick, the man who wants to make DC square again and see how feasible that is. That's at 8.35 and Matt Schlapp has some opinions on it. He's joining us in just 10 minutes. It's 6.54.