Video: House Dem Uses Minneapolis Riots to Scold Hegseth, and … Hoo Boy

Betty McCallum fooled around with Pete Hegseth. And then she found out why that was a very bad idea — especially while trying to paint the Minneapolis riots as some kind of success for local and state government. 

Hegseth appeared before a House panel to discuss the defense budget. Instead of asking Hegseth about spending, the Democrat from Minnesota’s Fourth District decided to use her time to unload on the Secretary of Defense about the deployment of Marines to Los Angeles for riot control. McCallum reminded Hegseth that they are both Minnesota natives, and that this administration should have considered how well Tim Walz handled riots in 2020.

And Hegseth then made clear to McCallum that that is precisely why Donald Trump sent in both the National Gaurd and the Marines, leaving McCallum sputtering:

FULL VIDEO: She was so flustered that she literally ended her questioning! pic.twitter.com/bi1FcMXCNf

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) June 10, 2025

This is a thing of beauty. Many people wondered whether Hegseth was up to this job. This should quiet the doubters, at least for a while. 

Note well that McCallum didn’t ask Hegseth about budgetary matters. She tried to lecture Hegseth instead about riot control and the need to refrain from doing anything effective, apparently. When Hegseth started ripping McCallum’s argument apart, suddenly McCallum wanted to limit the discussion to budgets, and then retreated rather than answer Hegseth’s argument. 

By the way, McCallum may be the only person not already named Walz that would dare put up a public defense of the response to the Minneapolis riots in 2020. I lived about 20 miles away from the riots at the time, and Walz failed at every step in the crisis. He barely showed up at first, then dithered for two days while the rioters burned a police precinct to the ground and looters sacked hundreds of businesses. He didn’t call out the National Guard until two days after the riots started, and then refused to allow the Guard units to fully deploy until three days after that. By that time, billions of dollars of damage had been done in both Minneapolis and St. Paul. 

And worse, the feckless response from Walz helped fuel the sense of impunity that touched off riots across the nation. Tom Cotton famously warned in a New York Times op-ed that Trump needed to use the Insurrection Act and/or Section 12406 to take control of National Guard and military units to restore order. Trump never did take that step, and went on to regret the impact that the summer-long chaos created, along with the pandemic. 

This time, Trump isn’t waiting around for weak and malicious governors and mayors to take control. And that is entirely due to the incompetence and stupidity of Tim Walz. It’s why Trump is arguing today that any delay in making these decisions would have resulted in Los Angeles getting burned out. We all saw that in Minneapolis five years ago. 

McCallum and other Democrats want to gaslight Americans about the nature of the riots in 2020 and the nature of the riots in 2025. They want to make incompetence virtuous and law enforcement the villain. That playbook won’t work this time around, and in this case, Hegseth made McCallum pay for her absurd mythology. And as someone who lived in the Twin Cities for more than twenty years, the hopelessly inept and dishonest McCallum has had this coming for a long, long time.