OConnor's Quick Strike

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Hey, what is up, Patriots? This is O'Connor's Quick Strike and I'm John O'Connor. Three stories the mainstream media won't cover or will completely twist beyond recognition, delivered in roughly 15 minutes or so. No fluff, no BS, no filler, just the unvarnished truth peppered with my own take on what's really going on. We do this every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. As always, if you haven't already, go ahead and just skillfully tap that like, subscribe, and or follow button.

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Every single one of your skillful taps helps get our message out there to more folks who need to hear it. Today is Wednesday, November 12th. I'm covering the chaos that erupted on Monday at UC Berkeley when Turning Point USA held the final tour stop. A Bernie Sanders-backed Senate candidate who just got caught scrubbing thousands of posts supporting Defund the Police. And Trump's 50-year mortgage proposal that sounds good until you run the numbers. Let's get into it.

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At UC Berkeley, the birthplace of the free speech movement, masked protesters turned violent trying to shut down Turning Point USA's final campus tour stop. And folks, this wasn't just your typical college protest. This was organized chaos. Here's what went down on Monday, November 10th. Turning Point USA held their American Comeback Tour finale at Zellerbach Hall featuring comedian Rob Schneider and Christian author Frank Turk.

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This was the first California campus event since Charlie Kirk was assassinated two months ago at Utah Valley University. The event was sold out, packed house, students inside chanting Charlie Kirk and holding up posters of his face. But outside, that's where things got ugly. Before the event even started, UC Berkeley police arrested four female students, ages 20 to 22.

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early Monday morning for felony vandalism. They were caught trying to hang a 5 foot cardboard bug off Sather Gate to protest the event. I tried to track a picture of this bug down and I could only find one picture and from what I can tell it's a combination of a brown flying ant, a cockroach, and some form of a wasp. I really don't know. But alright, the damage, over $400.

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which makes it a felony. Their bail? Between $10,000 and $20,000 each. They're being held at Santa Rita jail and face arraignment Thursday. But that was just the warm-up act. As attendees started arriving for the 6.30 p.m. hundreds of masked protesters showed up. And I mean masked and ready for a fight. The protest was organized by Students Organizing for Liberation.

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Cal Young, Democratic Socialist of America, Jewish Voice for Peace, and something called the By Any Means Necessary Coalition. By any means necessary? They're not even trying to hide it anymore. Around 4.30pm, a bloody brawl broke out between a TPUSA supporter and a protester. Video shows one man with blood just gushing from his face. Both were arrested. Then things escalated fast.

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Protesters threw smoke bombs, fireworks, and glass bottles at police and attendees. One rock hit a police officer's plastic face shield. UC Berkeley had to pull officers from their other UC campuses across the system just to maintain order. They had riot gear, zip ties, pepperball launchers pointed at the crowd. TPUSA spokesperson Andrew Colvet posted from inside, and I quote,

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Despite Antifa thugs blocking our campus tour stop with tear gas, fireworks, and glass bottles, we had a packed house in the heart of deep blue UC Berkeley. The protesters held signs reading, Down with Transphobes and Down with White Supremacists. One protester from By Any Means Necessary said, I quote, Charlie Kirk was not about promoting free speech and open debate.

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He was about trying to bully and intimidate people into silence and submission. Let me get this straight. The people throwing smoke bombs and fireworks at a peaceful event are accusing the attendees of bullying and intimidation. The people wearing masks and throwing rocks at police officers are the defenders of free speech? This is UC Berkeley we're talking about, home of the free speech movement in the 1960s.

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the place that fought for the right of students to speak freely on campus. And now they need riot police just to let conservative students hold an event. UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Magaloff tried to put a good spin on it, and I quote, we have an unwavering commitment to supporting any and every student group who wishes to meet on campus. It doesn't matter their perspectives.

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Our responsibility is to ensure they provide the resources necessary to keep people safe." Great, so it takes polling police officers from neighboring UC campuses, riot gear, and mass arrests just to exercise free speech at the Free Speech University. That's where we're at in 2025. Rob Schneider, who spoke at the event, criticized Berkeley's handling afterwards.

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But here's the thing, the event went on. The students who wanted to hear from Schneider and Turk got to hear them. The violence outside didn't stop the speech inside. That's the lesson here, patriots. They can throw their damned tampterums. They can put on their masks and throw their smoke bombs. But we're not backing down. Free speech isn't free when it requires riot police to protect it. But it's still worth fighting for.

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Speaking of the radical left trying to hide who they really are, let's talk about Abdul Al-Sayed. CNN, yes CNN, just caught Bernie Sanders hand-picked Senate candidate in Michigan deleting thousands of social media posts, including at least a dozen tweets championing the defund the police movement. This dropped Monday, and it's a perfect example of Democrats running away from their own toxic policies.

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Abdul is running in Michigan's three-way Democratic Senate primary, and he's essentially tied with the other candidates right now. Bernie Sanders endorsed him back in April, saying, we need candidates who will stand up to Trump's authoritarianism, and calling Abdul the kind of leader who will do just that. But here's what CNN's Andrew Kaczynski found. Abdul deleted his entire ex-history before launching his Senate campaign.

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We're not talking about a few embarrassing tweets. We're talking about wholesale digital destruction. What was he trying to hide? Posts describing police as standing armies, tweets urging cities to divert money away from law enforcement to social services, multiple posts supporting the Defund the Police movement during the 2020 riots. This is the same movement that led to skyrocketing crime. Police departments in

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departments hemorrhaging officers, and communities begging for more police protection. Democrats know defund the police is political poison, so now they are pretending they never said it. But Abdul didn't just stop with scrubbing police posts. He also deleted posts about Palestine that were raising eyebrows. In October, he sent out a fundraising email that started, two years ago this month,

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Netanyahu's military launched a ground invasion of Gaza. Since then, the world has watched this tragedy unfold in real time. Notice how he frames it. Not Hamas launching terror attacks. Not Hamas massacring 1,200 Israelis. But Netanyahu launching an invasion. That's who Bernie Sanders is backing. And Abdul got some interesting endorsements. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who has a history of anti-Semitic statements,

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backs him. So does Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, another politician with well-documented anti-Semitic associations. This is Bernie's pick to represent Michigan in the Senate. A guy who has to scrub thousands of posts because his real positions are so toxic that even Democrats won't vote for them. Here's the pattern we keep seeing. Democrats embrace radical positions when they think it will help them with their base.

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defund the police, open borders, men and women's sports, but when election time comes, suddenly they're hitting the delete button and pretending they never said any of it. The problem is, we remember, the internet remembers, and CNN, credit where it's due, did actual journalism and caught him red-handed. El-Sayed joins Bernie's other Senate pick from Maine, Graham Plattner, who had his own problems.

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Platner got caught with Reddit posts bragging about being a communist, calling cops bastards, victims shaming sexual assault survivors, and sporting a Nazi-themed tattoo on his chest. But Bernie still backs him, saying, hey, he went through a dark period. This is who the Democrats want representing you in the United States Senate. People so radical, they have to delete their entire online history. People who hate police.

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embrace communism, and cover up Nazi tattoos. Michigan voters need to pay attention. When someone scrubs thousands of posts before running for office, ask yourself, what are they hiding? And more importantly, what will they do once they get power and don't have to hide anymore? One. All right, let's talk about Trump's 50-year mortgage proposal. And look.

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I covered the housing crisis extensively back in late July on O'Connor's Right Stand podcast, episode 7 if you want the deep dive. We talked about how the average first-time homebuyer is now 38-39 years old instead of 29. How corporate landlords like BlackRock are eating up neighborhoods. And real solutions like streamlining zoning and reining in Wall Street investors. Go back and listen to that if you haven't already. But this 50-year mortgage.

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This isn't solving any of those problems I laid out. In fact, it makes them worse. Let me go over the numbers because the math doesn't lie. First, here's what happened. Over the weekend, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pold announced on X that, thanks to President Trump, we are indeed working on the 50-year mortgage, a complete game changer. Trump then posted a graphic comparing himself to FDR.

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who championed the 30-year mortgage during the New Deal. The pitch sounds good at first. Lower monthly payments makes home ownership more affordable for young people. The average first-time buyer is roughly 40 years old, an all-time high. Something needs to change, right? But let's run the actual numbers. I'll use a real example. Take a $450,000 home, right around the current median price.

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Put 20 % down. So now you're financing $360,000. And I'll try not to make this too boring. With a 30-year mortgage at 6.25 % interest, your monthly payment would be $2,216 or so. Total interest paid over the life of the loan would be $438,000. Now, with a 50-year mortgage at an estimated $3,000,

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6.9 % interest and you're asking me, wait, why the difference in interest? Well, it's gonna be higher because lenders view 50-year loans as riskier. So to continue on, the monthly payment would be $2,139. Total interest paid over the life of the loan, $923,000. You're saving $77 per month.

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$77. That's less than one trip to the grocery store nowadays. But you're paying an extra $485,000 in interest, more than double the interest of a 30-year loan. Let's look at equity building, because this is where it gets really ugly. Alright, so after 5 years or 60 payments, 30-year mortgage, you paid down $23,986 of principal.

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For a 50-year mortgage, you have paid down only $4,896 of principal. So, let's continue on. After 10 years, or 120 payments, for the 30-year mortgage, you've paid down $56,744 of principal. Compare that to the 50-year mortgage, you've only paid down $11,862. Big difference there.

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After 30 years, you own your home outright free and clear. You've paid the full $360,000 and you're done. Your 50-year mortgage, you still owe another $277,986. Think about that. You make payments for 30 years and you're not even halfway done paying off your house.

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UBS analysts put it bluntly, extending a mortgage from 30 to 50 years would double the dollar amount of interest paid by the homebuyer on a medium-price home over the life of the loan. This isn't a mortgage, it's basically a lifetime rental where you're building equity at the speed of a glacier. And there's more bad news. The Dodd-Frank Act, passed after the 2008 housing crisis, limits loan terms to 30 years.

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So Trump would need congressional approval to make this happen. That could take a year or more. Even the White House is reportedly unhappy with how this rolled out. CBS News reported that Trump was lukewarm about the suggestion and approved the Truth Social Post just to get Ploot to shut up about it. Other sources say the proposal wasn't fully vetted by top administration officials. Trump defended it on Fox News Monday night.

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telling Laura Ingraham, it's not even a big deal. All it means is you pay less per month. You pay it over a longer period of time. But, Mr. President, with all due respect, it is a big deal when you're asking Americans to pay double the interest and take 50 years to own their home. Look, I get what they're trying to do. Housing affordability is a crisis.

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The typical homeowner now spends 39 % of their income on housing, well above the 30 % affordability threshold. Home prices are up 25 % since 2020. Mortgage rates are stuck above 6%, double what they were during the pandemic. But a 50-year mortgage is a bandaid on a gunshot wound. Actually, it's worse than that.

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It's pouring salt in the wound while banks laugh all the way to their vaults with your doubled interest payments. You want to actually fix housing affordability? Here's what needs to happen. First, build more housing. Streamline zoning laws to allow duplexes, triplexes, and townhomes. Cut permit delays. Fast track construction, supply, and demand still works. Second,

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Stop corporate landlords. BlackRock and other Wall Street firms are buying up single-family homes in bulk, converting neighborhoods into rental portfolios. Place limits or taxes on bulk purchases. Prioritize actual residents over hedge fund investors. Third, deport illegal aliens. We've got tens of millions of people here illegally putting strain on housing supply and driving up costs.

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Secure the border, enforce deportations, and watch housing pressure ease. Fourth, lower interest rates. This is Fed policy. When rates were 3%, home ownership was achievable. At 7%, it's crushing. The Fed needs to stop keeping rates artificially high, as Pult himself said. Fifth, stop foreign buyers.

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Tax or regulate oversees money flowing into residential real estate. Too many properties are being bought up by foreign investors as assets, sitting empty while Americans can't find homes. These are real solutions. A 50-year mortgage just enriches banks and chains Americans to debt for life. Even some Trump supporters are pushing back. The MAGA base is calling it a giveaway to banks and forever debt. They're not wrong.

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When you're paying more in interest than the house is actually worth, somebody's getting rich and it's not you. My fiance and I are looking for our first house right now. I'm living this crisis. I see the prices. I see the competition from cash buyers. I see how hard it is for regular working people to achieve the American dream of home ownership. But the answer isn't to give up and accept lifetime debt slavery. The answer is to fix the broken system.

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Stop Wall Street from gobbling up homes, build more supply, secure our borders, and create policies that help Americans, not hedge funds and banks. A 50-year mortgage isn't making home ownership more accessible. It's making it more expensive while creating the illusion of affordability. Don't fall for it. And that's going to wrap it up for today's Quick Strike.

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Three stories the establishment doesn't want you thinking about too hard. Berkeley, proving once again that the left's tolerance extends only to people who agree with them. Bernie's Senate candidate scrubbing evidence of his radical past because even Democrats know their policies are toxic. And Trump's 50-year mortgage that doubles your interest payments while saving you less than $100 a month. If you haven't already, follow me on X at O'Connor's Podcast.

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Check out my other podcast, O'Connor's Right Stand, for deep dives on the issues that matter. We drop every Tuesday and Thursday. And remember, when the mainstream media won't tell you the truth, I will. I'm John O'Connor. Stay informed, stay skeptical, and keep fighting for what's right. I will see you on Friday, Patriots.