Energy News Beat
In Energy News Beat – Conversation in Energy, Stuart Turley speaks with Congressman Pat Harrigan of North Carolina’s 10th District about national security, energy independence, and government accountability. Harrigan shares his journey from the military to politics, expressing concerns over past administrations’ weak foreign policies and emphasizing the critical role of energy security in national security. He discusses efforts to cut regulations, support small businesses, and ensure strong leadership under President Trump. Harrigan also highlights the need for government transparency, encourages public engagement, and shares a personal note on balancing family life with political duties.
Thank you, Pat, for your leadership and service. I thoroughly enjoyed our time, and I look forward to helping you get your story to your constituents and the United States citizens informed about what you are doing! – Stu
Please follow and support Congressman Pat Harrigan on his X Account and Congressional Website Here:
X https://x.com/RepPatHarrigan
House Website:
https://harrigan.house.gov/
Highlights of the Podcast
00:00 – Intro
00:45 – Military Service & Leaving Due to Political Influence
01:59 – The Fall of Afghanistan & Running for Congress
04:08 – U.S. Foreign Policy & National Security Concerns
04:57 – Energy Independence as National Security
06:29 – Exposing Government Corruption & Deep State Issues
08:21 – The Shift to “America First” & GOP Challenges
09:22 – National Debt & Ukraine Aid Concerns
10:02 – Military Equipment, Border Security & Cartels
11:28 – Trump’s Leadership & Future Political Strategy
13:33 – Reducing Regulations & Supporting Small Businesses
14:51 – How the Public Can Engage & Influence Policy
16:05 – Balancing Politics & Family Life
17:34 – Final Thoughts & Call to Action
Full Automated Transcript, and may have been edited only for grammar.
Stuart Turley [00:00:07] Hello, everybody, welcome to the Energy Newsbeat Podcast. My name is Stu Turley, president and CEO of the Sandstone Group. We are living in an absolutely biblically crazy time when we’re sitting around what’s going on around the world. President Trump is delivering exactly what I voted for, and I’ll tell you what: we have some congressional members who are there to support him. Today I’ve got Pat Harrington from North Carolina’s District Number 10. He is a guy that has two bronze stars and a green beret. Thank you very much, Congressman Pat, for stopping by the podcast.
Congressman Pat Harrigan – North Carolina’s 10 District [00:00:43] Stu, thanks for having me, I really appreciate it.
Stuart Turley [00:00:45] I’ll tell you what, I just want to give you a hug. Thank you for your service in the military, and then thank you for signing back up because we need you in the house really, really badly right now.
Congressman Pat Harrigan – North Carolina’s 10 District [00:00:56] Well, Stu, thanks for paying your taxes because I couldn’t have done without you.
Stuart Turley [00:00:59] Thanks for bringing that painful moment up.
Congressman Pat Harrigan – North Carolina’s 10 District [00:01:01] We’re going to reduce those then, so relief is coming.
Stuart Turley [00:01:05] Oh man, how about our new Secretary of Defense, isn’t he cool?
Congressman Pat Harrigan – North Carolina’s 10 District [00:01:10] Oh my gosh, he’s exactly the recipe that the Department of Defense needs in order to fix itself. I wake up every day, Stu, you talk about what type of environment we live in. I wake up every single day with a smile on my face because I just know something’s going to come down the pipe that’s going to be awesome and amazing and continue to push this country right back on the tracks that it needs to be on. So it’s an exciting time up here in Washington.
Stuart Turley [00:01:34] You know, I’ll tell you what, I want to know what prompted you when you have been successful, you’ve got an education in nuclear, you went and served our country. What prompted you to run for office? Because that’s painful. Okay, you’ve been in Afghanistan, you’ve been overseas, you’ve been shot at, you’ve been blown up, all this kind of stuff, but you sit here and go, what prompted you to go to real torture and become a politician?
Congressman Pat Harrigan – North Carolina’s 10 District [00:01:59] You know, I actually left the military because, during President Obama’s time in office, he made the military so political, and that impacted our rules of engagement, that directly impacted operations that we were having on the ground. And I just said, you know what, I don’t want to be a part of this. I saw that infused down through our general’s leadership style and thought process and was like, see ya, I’m out. And my wife and I, we started a company, we started in our little Hawaii trailer in the middle of the woods outside of Fort Bragg and we grew that into a 120 ,000 square foot manufacturing plant that’s about an hour northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, on the side of the state from Fort Bragg. And, you know, I just assumed I was going to just continue on the business track for the rest of my life. And then the fall of Afghanistan happened and it was all this mix of emotions and just honest to goodness. There was anger and frustration, but it was really disappointment and the deepest sense of disappointment that I could possibly convey because I knew that the way that we left that conflict, that we had just condemned the next generation of Americans to war. And if you want to be weak, you will have war. That’s the bottom line. And when you draw that straight line all the way back to President Bush and Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 and we did nothing about it, Obama did nothing when Putin and al -Assad in Syria crossed a red line. And then the following year, 2014, when Putin invaded Crimea, did nothing about it. And then President Biden’s unbelievably weak stance on Ukraine. Right. We all say and we all know this, that President Trump was in office. Russia never would have gone into Ukraine at the first place, right? And just showing all of our cards and saying, well, if you go in there, we’re not going to do anything about it. I mean, just historic weakness. And when you tally all of that up, you have created and put America in a position where we have never been weaker on the global stage. And President Trump, Secretary Hicks, and all of us up here in Congress are working as hard as we possibly can to arrest that and correct that.
Stuart Turley [00:04:08] Isn’t that cool? I’ll tell you, you know, President Reagan and Gorbachev agreed no more NATO and I mean, no more folks going into NATO and getting closer to Russia. And Putin invaded Crimea because I believe it was eight countries had been added into NATO and he finally had enough. And if President Trump had been in office, he would not have invaded in Crimea. I mean, it is not it was not on his thing to do that. This is important. You are such a friend. You’re making me feel I’m all I’m sorry. I’m getting all excited again and getting all excited about having this refreshing conversation. And you also signed the House bill for our declaration of energy importance.
Congressman Pat Harrigan – North Carolina’s 10 District [00:04:58] Yes. Rep. Fluter signed a he introduced a bill that made it illegal for a future administration, right? Not a future Trump administration or a future Vance administration or Republican administration, but a Democratic administration. That’s the idea here to come in and just executive order fracking out of existence. And so that’s something that is so incredibly important to us, because at the end of the day, everything that we know and love about our way of life, about our freedoms, our ability to secure our freedoms, our national security is predicated upon energy security. Energy security is national security, and it’s the foundation for our entire market economy. It’s the foundation for much of our research and development. And it is the singular most important thing. Cheap energy prices that needs America to being as successful and as capable as we are. And we have to protect that.
Stuart Turley [00:05:59] You know, you are spot on in people that don’t realize that energy security is national security. It’s kind of refreshing. Now, I want to ask a couple of questions. We have not asked these questions back and forth. But what’s it like being in Congress right now when you have the Democrats over here that are that are protesting, actually protesting the uncovering of corruption and graft and and money laundering? What is that like?
Congressman Pat Harrigan – North Carolina’s 10 District [00:06:29] It’s fundamentally incredible to be a part of. And it’s also incredibly disconcerting to watch unfold. And there’s a couple of different pieces to this, right? Number one, it’s it’s great to be a part of it because we’re actually peeling back the onion of the federal government, of the deep state bureaucracy of all of these agencies and the rot that they have developed. And we’re exposing this to the American people. And what’s really disconcerting about it is that there are the folks on the other side and there’s some, you know, in our party, on the legacy portion of our party that are seemingly astounded that this is happening because I don’t think anybody on their side ever thought that this would be exposed to the people and that that there would be attention or light shown on what they were doing. And that this has opened the people’s eyes like I’ve never seen before. Right. I mean, we’ve seen, I think, these slow awakening of the American populace to opening their eyes as to see, hey, you know, government’s really not on my side. Right. I mean, we come from a place in this country. Our founding fathers created a system of governance that should reflect the people and it very clearly does not. It is its own class. It is doing its own thing. It is running in its own direction that it decides to chart that is totally separate, not in parallel with the direction that the executive branch sets. It has been unaccountable to the American people. It has obscured evidence that Congress has requested of it for the last decade and a half in it. And at some point, and this is the really scary thing, right. You’ve got to step back and you’ve got to say, if all this is happening now, what have people up here been doing for the last 30 years? It’s a great question. Right.
Stuart Turley [00:08:21] I think, oh, it is making me air sick because I’ve always considered myself a Republican, but I’m no longer a Republican. I am an American first person. Sure. And if and if you’re not voting for America first, you’re not a Republican either. It’s the Republican Party has been rebranded.
Congressman Pat Harrigan – North Carolina’s 10 District [00:08:41] It’s definitely moving in the right direction. No pun intended. But there is an awful lot of work to do. And as we say back in North Carolina, a hurt dog and a bark. And, oh, they’re they are barking right now. They’re barking. My office is getting 200 phone calls a day and emails. And people just have their hair on fire over this. You know, basically, the country is going to collapse over these issues. No, the country is going to collapse if we don’t do this, because it’s thirty six point three trillion dollars in debt. We’re running a one point eight trillion dollar a year deficit. And we will spend ourselves into the oblivion of the Soviet Union if we keep shipping two million dollar missiles over to Ukraine to shoot down fifty thousand dollar Russian drones. That’s country.
Stuart Turley [00:09:23] And the rumors are I can’t prove it. I don’t have a thing on it, but rumors are saying that even our weapons, not only were they left in Afghanistan, they got you all fired up on leaving there that the Mexican cartels have been buying our equipment from Ukraine. Go figure this out. I have not.
Congressman Pat Harrigan – North Carolina’s 10 District [00:09:41] And why would they be buying them from Afghanistan, too? Right. I mean, we saw what happened when the Soviet Union collapsed and there was an arms diaspora across the entire globe. What do you think is happening in Ukraine? And what do you think is happening in Afghanistan? It’s not good. It compromises our national security. Thank heavens we have some reasonable folks in leadership right now.
Stuart Turley [00:10:02] Holy smokes. Now, for our podcast listeners, because this goes out on all forms of podcast, we have video, we have our transcripts and a shout out because we had last year, our staff, we had eight point two million transcripts read of our podcast. And this year, it looks like we’re on track to do 15 million reads of our transcript. That’s not including downloads, videos or anything else. Your sign behind your desk is a hoot. For those people need to see this on video. Your sign says absolutely no discharging of firearms in this area. And it is all shot up. And it looks like a sign in Alaska. I love all my trips to Alaska. And you go by any Alaskan sign, it says, please don’t shoot the signs. They’re all shot up.
Congressman Pat Harrigan – North Carolina’s 10 District [00:10:51] You know, it’s a great foil for the spirit of America. Right. Don’t put constraints and boundaries on us. We will buck them. Right. And I think it’s just a great out of the spirit of the people.
Stuart Turley [00:11:03] Well, I’ll tell you what, as as a member of Congress, you are truly doing what we’ve elected you to do. And that is you’re protecting your constituents and and you’re doing what I’ve asked for, and that is to protect our president and his cabinet members. I mean, we’ve got an all star cabinet forming for President Trump. Holy smokes, Batman.
Congressman Pat Harrigan – North Carolina’s 10 District [00:11:29] There’s no question about it. I mean, look, if you want to reform government, you pick the people that President Trump has nominated for his cabinet. And I’m just so excited to see what they’re going to do to Washington, DC. I mean, everybody up here. And look, I’m not one of these folks that has moved up here to Washington, DC. My wife and my kids are in North Carolina. I travel home on the weekends. This is not where I want to live. This is a temporary place where I’ve come to do the will the will of the people of the 10th District of North Carolina. But watching the folks that do live up here squirm, it’s a little bit gratifying because it’s just been so wrong for so long. And it’s now about to change. And it’s about to change in a unbelievable type of fashion. And that change, I don’t think, is is going to go backwards. I really think that we’re going to be able to get the permanence of what President Trump is doing in the law over these next several months with unified government and and and fully take advantage of the opportunity that, you know, happens, you know, once in a generation, if that, which is having the presidency, having the Senate, having the House and having the Supreme Court. That that is what we just cannot. We we just can’t fail with what we have right now. And I don’t think that we will know.
Stuart Turley [00:12:44] And President Trump delivered, he is delivering on all of his campaign promises, and he’s doing fantastic. But one of the toughest campaign promises that he he did give a congressman is that he did say, I’m going to cut consumer energy costs in half. Holy smokes. That is a huge issue to tackle. And he’s got Doug Burgum in the interior. He’s got Lee Zeldin. And I go figure this out. Lee Zeldin, if you’re going to be in the EPA and you’re going to have a regulation, you’re going to issue you got to destroy 10. I did not have that on my bingo card. How can you in Congress help our great Chris Wright, who is now I’ve interviewed him four times. He is a great man. How can you help him?
Congressman Pat Harrigan – North Carolina’s 10 District [00:13:33] Look, I think Congress just simply has to pursue pro-growth business policies that overall reduce regulation. Right. The regulatory burden that Washington, D .C. has placed on the ordinary business makes it really impossible for the ordinary business to become the extraordinary business. Right. And this is what I think a lot of folks on the main street don’t don’t fully comprehend is that they look at these really burdensome regulations and those benefit the largest companies in the country. Right. Because they have the people to be able to deal with them. It’s just a sum of costs for them. But smaller businesses, they don’t have the revenue. They don’t have the profit margins that develop with that type of scale. And it just prices them out of growth. We have to stop that. We’ve got to set the conditions for small businesses to be successful. And that’s the greatest advantage that we can possibly give as we work alongside of President Trump’s cabinet to the American people.
Stuart Turley [00:14:30] You know, you are so refreshing. And I just I want people to have an opportunity. Your website is Harrigan dot house dot gov. And is there other things that people can do to help you in your mission, helping your constituents and selfishly me as a taxpaying citizen? How do we help you?
Congressman Pat Harrigan – North Carolina’s 10 District [00:14:51] Yeah, continue to reach out to my office. We get, as I was saying earlier, hundreds of calls and emails per day. And we want that type of interaction with our constituents, both from the 10th District and across the country, because we want to know what people are thinking. And if somebody takes the time to write us an email, it’s not a form email. We take that into consideration. And as an example of, you know, far more than one person just writing into us in terms of what the overall sentiment is. And so we love those words of encouragement. We would love great ideas that you all have that you want to see implemented here into sound policy in Washington, D .C. And then the only other thing that I’d ask for in your viewership is pray for my kids. When I was in the Special Forces, my wife and I decided not to have kids until I was out because I didn’t want to be an absentee father. You’re either deployed or training to be deployed and you’re not home hardly ever in the Special Forces. And so this type of deployment here to Washington, D .C. is old hat for my wife. She doesn’t think it’s hard at all because she’s like, look, this is a deployment. I get to see my husband on the weekends. This is nothing. But this is new for my girls. And I’ve got two girls at five and seven. Reagan and McKinley are their names, two very solid Republican names. And if you all could pray for them because this is new for them, that would just be fantastic.
Stuart Turley [00:16:06] And as a dad, your involvement is very important. Excuse me. My dad retired as chief of staff of the Eighth Air Force. And I did not understand what my mom had to go through while he was in Vietnam being shot at for several tours.
Congressman Pat Harrigan – North Carolina’s 10 District [00:16:22] And so, yeah, absolutely. And every night we’re reading a new chapter from Nancy Drew. It’s one of the commitments I’ve made to my girls. And I will step out of whatever meeting or dinner that on that at eight o ‘clock and I will take that 15 minutes, read that chapter. And we keep moving the ball to Nancy Drew’s series. So that’s our day.
Stuart Turley [00:16:41] How cool is that? Because when my dad was in Vietnam and I was growing up, we’d get a tape in the mail about a week after we saw that an F -4 was shot down. So, you know, and you don’t know if that was your last words you were hearing from your dad. Communications back then were not nearly what they are now.
Congressman Pat Harrigan – North Carolina’s 10 District [00:17:01] Yeah, no, we have lost in our culture the understanding of what sacrifice used to mean for our people. And that has in many ways cheapened our experience and understanding of how precious freedom truly is. And so it’s great to have people that have your background and knowledge, too. And look, I’m just I’m so excited for the future of this country right now and want all of your listeners to understand that, you know, God’s given us a great chance. We cannot screw it up. So keep all of your representatives accountable, communicate with them regularly and pray for them often.
Stuart Turley [00:17:34] And Congressman Herring, we really want to be a resource for you. If you need something gotten out either live, if you need it out as a news podcast quickly and you can’t get anywhere else, call me. I will make sure to get you live on X on LinkedIn, YouTube and anywhere else I can to get your story out. So we just appreciate you.
Congressman Pat Harrigan – North Carolina’s 10 District [00:18:00] Stu, you’re awesome. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. It’s been fun.
Stuart Turley [00:18:03] Thanks.
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