The Victor Davis Hanson Show
Promises Made, Promises Kept: Executive Orders and Energy Dominance Unveiled
Thu, 27 Feb 2025
In this episode, Victor Davis Hanson and co-host Jack Fowler discuss the recent executive orders from President Trump, their implications, and the broader context of energy policies in America. He reflects on the challenges facing the Trump administration, including infrastructure failures and the political landscape in California.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What free courses does Hillsdale College offer?
History, economics, the great works of literature, the meaning of the U.S. Constitution. Did you study these things in school? Probably not. Or even if you did, maybe it's time for a refresher. Time and technology have changed a lot of things, but they've not changed the basic fundamental truths about the world and our place in it. Hillsdale College is offering more than 40 free online courses.
That's right, more than 40 free online courses. Learn about the works of C.S. Lewis, the stories in the book of Genesis, the meaning of the U.S. Constitution, the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, or the history of the ancient Christian church with Hillsdale College's free online courses.
Personally, I'm enjoying Hillsdale's course, The Second World Wars, taught by Victor Davis Hanson and Hillsdale's president, Larry P. Arnn. This free seven-lecture course will help you understand this massive and complex conflict
In a new way, it will give you a clear picture of why the war was fought and how the Allied powers ultimately triumphed in order to save the West from a new form of tyranny. The course is self-paced so that you can start whenever and wherever. Go right now to hillsdale.edu.
edu slash vdh to enroll there's no cost and it's easy to get started that's hillsdale.edu slash vdh to enroll for free hillsdale.edu slash vdh Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen. This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show. I'm Jack Fowler, the man lucky enough to be the host and to ask Victor the kind of questions I think you would want him to answer. We are recording on... Sunday, February 23rd.
And this particular episode will be up on Thursday, the 27th. Who is Victor Davis Hanson? He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, where I think he's going to be in a couple of days.
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Chapter 2: Who is Victor Davis Hanson?
Yes. Yes, I'm going to go to a military history conference. And on the 4th? Wait. 5th, 6th, 4th, I'm going to give a talk on Hollywood World War II movies. Oh! Yes, I am. Well, do talk about... My three favorite, I'm going to say, are George Patton and Das Boot. And then one that nobody likes, but I do like it, and that's The Bridge Too Far. That is a very good movie.
I would have picked Battleground, and they were expendable. But that's, you know, everyone to each their own. Well, okay. Well, Victor, you're here. We have so many topics to get your wisdom on. I think we'll start off with Democrat madness. Then there's a bunch of really important Trump executive orders and actions that are so heartening.
Chapter 3: Why are Trump's executive orders significant?
And maybe if we have time at the end, there's so much craziness going on in California. You happen to live there. So we will get to all this when we come back from these important messages. Running a small business means you're wearing a lot of hats. Your personal phone number becomes your business phone. And before you know it, you're juggling customer calls day and night.
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That's O-P-E-N-P-H-O-N-E dot com slash victor for 20% off six months. openphone.com slash victor. And if you have existing numbers with another service, Open Phone will port them over at no extra charge. Ready to optimize your nutrition this year? Factor has chef-made gourmet meals that make eating well easy.
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on your first box we're back with the victor davis hansen show i don't think i mentioned all my own babbling victor that you have a website the blade of perseus victor hansen.com later in this episode towards the end i will tell you especially you new listeners why you should be um checking that out and subscribing. So, Victor, I had hoped we had gotten to this in the last show.
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Chapter 4: How is California's political landscape affecting its residents?
Not that the Democrats ever followed through on all of them. And Clinton took, in the second term, he took the country to the left. But for a while... The idea of a closed border, legal-only immigration, strong support for defense, for the police, physical sobriety, that was a Democratic winning message. And that's why they won in 92 and 96 with a little help from Ross Perot.
And that's why they won the popular vote in 2000. That's why they won the popular vote in 2008. And then after that, they went and Obama, as soon as he got elected, he took the party to the left. And even Obama ran in 2008 that he was opposed to gay marriage. Remember that? Yes, it was Joe Biden who... It was Joe Biden who leaked it. Unprompted. Yeah. Joe Biden, everybody's nemesis.
I mean, he has done more damage to the country and to his party than any living Democrat. He really has. He really almost destroyed this country for four years and he's destroyed the Democratic Party.
Well, I don't know if it was you saying it or I heard somebody else that Jimmy Carter must be smiling somewhere that he's not in the last place.
Yeah, he makes Carter look like Churchill.
Victor, it's really a little too personal, but Worcester, where this insanity happened, was, as you know, where Holy Cross was. A great institution.
Sorry, Jack.
Anthony Fauci is located. So, and Mrs. Fowler and I spent our wedding night there.
But not in a way that you would... Anthony Fauci isn't... He's now, you know, he started... He didn't need a pardon. He didn't need a pardon. Well, I'll take it if you ram it down my throat. And now, thank God I got that pardon. Because... my fingerprints are likely over $40 million going to Wuhan when I claimed it was only 600,000.
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Chapter 5: What are Trump's actions on illegal immigration?
we've got to stop this in california they we passed 187 there's a big myth jack that pete wilson who was that he was just he and he suffered terrible uh popularity problems because he backed 187 that passed by over 60 percent of the california population and that led uh to a democratic renaissance under Jerry Brown. That's not true, actually.
There was, after we passed 187, Pete Wilson still enjoyed favorable, always did favorable popularity ratings. The courts will say, if you're here, then you're an American, basically, and you get everything. And that's not legally apt. And so, I'd mentioned that very controversial period. In 187, I was a professor at Cal State Fresno, and we had just demonstration after demonstration.
It was really, and they were burning the American flag, and some of my own students were doing it. And I ventured out there and said, do not wave the Mexican flag if you don't want to go back there, and don't burn the American flag if you want to stay here. It's incoherent. And we saw that again with those, when they shut down 101, the protesters were doing just that.
That's not a good thing for the Democratic Party, everybody. If you're here illegally, do not protest against immigration, your immigration status by burning the American flag and do not wave the Mexican flag, because that suggests to an outsider, whether that is a fair impression or not, that you love Mexico so much that you don't want to go back.
And you hate the United States so much you have to stay here. And that's incoherent. Incoherent.
Now, another action Donald Trump has taken was the unleashing of the America First investment policy. And this has a broad agenda to it. But one of the aspects of it is... I don't know, an international middle finger of sorts to China. I just want to read one section of it. Folks will indulge me because it incorporates a lot of the anxieties and anger that many Americans had over China.
the lack of fairness between how China operates in the U.S. and how, of course, you can't operate in China. Here's what is in this policy, which anyone can find on the whitehouse.gov website. The United States will use all necessary legal instruments, including the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, CFIUS, to restrict PRC, that's Red China, PRC-affiliated persons
From investing in United States technology, critical infrastructure, healthcare, agriculture, energy, raw materials, or other strategic sectors, my administration will protect United States farmland and real estate near sensitive facilities. It will also seek...
including in consultation with Congress to strengthen CFIUS authority over Greenfield investments to restrict foreign adversary access to United States talent and operations in sensitive technologies, especially artificial intelligence, and to expand the remit of emerging and foundational technologies addressable by CFIUS. Victor, that's just one part of this. This is really an important document.
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Chapter 6: How is Trump addressing U.S.-China relations?
fact sheet put out by Donald Trump and you know drill baby drill but we want American energy dominance well this spells it out and it's like wow I voted for this guy and he's really intending on coming through on these broad range of promises any any yeah I mean they were they've been working on the executive orders for a long long time so they were all written uh before he was even elected they were ready to go on on day one and uh
Exactly. Promise is made, promise is kept. And remember what happened with energy. He vastly increased by two or three million barrels. Biden came in and he canceled Keystone. He canceled new liquid natural gas terminals. He did it at the end of his term. He put ANWR off. He started lecturing fracking. He made an EV mandate. And then the 2008
22 midterms came up and prices hit the ceiling during the inflationary period. Here in California, it was in the San Joaquin Valley, I paid $5.50 a gallon. And then suddenly, he started draining the petroleum reserve to get reelected. And he went from about 90% all the way down to 50%. And then they came to Joe Biden and said, you are not going to get elected. So here's what you're going to do.
You're going to tell everybody that you're a new green dealer and you're you're going to talk up EVs, but you're going to drill. So they went back and they started to drill like Trump and they got it back to Trump and even a little above. Now, Trump comes in and says. that wasn't what I really wanted. That's where I was before I lost that election.
And now I'm going to go back to what I had originally planned. And that's 20 million, 22. He's going to go full blast. The only problem he's going to have is he's going to have to produce the, he's going to have to convince these oil companies who have very sophisticated measuring, uh,
capabilities of what their reserves are to go out and start producing a lot of oil and a lot more work with the price dropping and make the same amount of profits where they drain their long-term reserves. So how is he going to get around that? He's going to have to give them some kind of tax concession or he's going to have to open new fields and find vast new reserves. Gavin Newsom is...
Theoretically, sitting on the Monterey Shale formation along the coast range, it has apparently a lot of natural gas, but we don't use it. And we could easily do that instead of we're outlawing national gas in new homes, you know? Yeah.
New York has the same issue. Mario, excuse me, Andrew Cuomo, when he was governor, banned fracking.
There's a huge, huge gas reserves there on the shale. Yeah, he's become a, I can't figure him out. It's kind of like mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Now I want to get elected, so I'll say anything that is contrary to what I actually did when I was governor.
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Chapter 7: What is the impact of Trump's energy policies?
The price tag for the whole enchilada originally was like 15 billion. Yeah, 15. And it's already spent that. You just said 300 billion?
That's what people are talking about with the eventual Los Angeles all the way to Sacramento with laterals into the Bay Area. That's what they're talking about. But they'll never do it. everybody says, you know, I don't think they have the skill to do it. That's what's really frightening about this state.
When I see the roads, if you look at the people that we all hate from our past, that we're told to hate them, that generation, and you look at the San Luis Dam, or you look at the California Aqueduct, or you look at Folsom or or Orville Dam.
You look at any of the things these guys built, or the PG substation, main power plant up, or you look at Hetch Hetchy, built in, I think, 1910 or 12, or Huntington Lake, the Big Creek project. They were so far ahead of their time. They were so brilliant. And we're just pygmies compared to those people. We don't have the expertise to do it.
I'm not saying that people coming out of Caltech or engineering programs at UCLA or Stanford are not good. I'm just saying that generally we do not have the skilled labor and we don't have the skilled engineering numbers to create these things anymore. If you disagree, then you ask why we couldn't have built high-speed rail or ask yourself what's going to happen in Los Angeles.
When you look at all of those burned out homes and you tell me how they're going to rebuild that. Yeah.
Well, you have to have a public spirit for a thing, right? And if your spirit is to adopt DEI laws and affirmative action, et cetera, that's the priority.
Does anybody think that? Karen Bass is going to go into Pacific Palisades like right now, like Donald Trump did when he built the Manhattan Central Park skating rink? Does anybody believe that she's going to go in there and say, look, I got a contract to get out all of the Crap. The bidding will open today. It'll be done next week. And it has an incentive clause. This is the date we want it.
30 days. Anybody who can do it in 25 gets an extra multi-million. That's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. What is she doing, Victor? Well, you know what? She just fired the police chief. She fired the fire chief who was famous for bragging that as a gay woman, she was going to get... 30, 40 percent, or I don't know what their percentage was of DEI employees.
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