If we're losing, why is oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz? | Hour 3

You know me. I am your white pill pusher. I'm going to give you some I'm going to give you some good news, whether you want to hear it or not. All you doomers and black pillars and nihilists and, you know, Democrats in media, but I repeat myself, that want everybody to think everything is terrible. Everything is not terrible. For example, what have we been hearing? Well, I know what we've been hearing. We've been hearing that we lost the Iran war, right? About a month ago, I was getting text messages from the Black Pillars and Doomers that were saying, aha, this was all a mistake. We have lost the war. Iran is emerging as the new fourth global superpower or some such nonsense. They will emerge stronger than ever, right? They control the straight and all this. And I said, I've been saying this from the very beginning, that Iran can harass. They cannot control the straight. And that is born of, number one, confidence in the U.S. military and its ability to take control over the body of water after it sunk the entire Navy over there, right? And destroyed all of its air defenses, took out its air force, right? The only thing you're worried about is the harassment of or by the fast boats, right? These little speed boats that just drive all around and shoot up boats or launch drones, right? That's what you have to deal with. And it seems like we have dealt with that. That's what it seems like. Now, does that mean that Iran won't fling some more drones at some boats, at some ships in the Strait of Hormuz? No, of course not. In fact, I think it's probably likely that they will. Why? Well, they have stated that they would really like Democrats to win in November. And so they want to send this message to American voters to vote out the Republicans so Trump can be impeached and then Iran can then continue on its path to rebuild its military and pursue its nuclear weapons. They've said this. So I take them at their word. I believe them. All indications are that they want to proceed that direction. So I'm taking that promise at face value. But I also don't believe that they have the capacity to actually beat our military in the street. And everybody's complaining about the price of gas and that this is why Republicans need to be voted out. So we have to vote out the Republicans, vote in the Democrats, the very party that wants high gas prices, that has shuttered refineries around America for the policies that have driven up the price of gas, driven up the price of energy. We should put them in charge and that will bring the energy and gas prices down somehow or something. I'm not really sure what the logic is on that, but that's the argument, right? That's what they want. They're like, we have to punish the Republicans, get them out of office, empower the commies, and then gas prices come down or something. Again, not my argument, their argument. I think it's stupid, but that's their argument. Okay. All of this rests on what? The Strait of Hormuz, right? That's what all of the gas price argument, that's what this rests on. Because nobody wants to talk about the diesel prices being impacted by the Russia-Ukraine war, which is actually, that's driving the price of the diesel, mainly, is they're bombing each other's facilities and Russia and in Ukraine. And so that has a massive impact on the diesel production. But everybody's focusing on the Iran war. Trump shouldn't have done it. It's a forever war. Oh, you know, speaking of forever wars, I heard a very interesting stat the other day. I was watching a podcast, Jeremy Boring's podcast. He's the founder, former CEO of The Daily Wire. And he brought a stat up that said throughout all of essentially recorded human history, okay, 92% of all recorded human history, there have been wars. So that's the norm. Like that is the overwhelming majority of our existence is war. That's the norm. There have been relatively few periods of widespread peace, okay? And then if you look at American history and you do the math on that as to, you know, the wars and stuff that we've been involved in, and you count conflicts that aren't declared wars, you count all of that. And you know what the, you know what the status it's also 92%. So we're basically in line with world history. Nine out of every 10 years where we're at war. That's, that's the norm. Talk about forever wars. And by the way, uh, I saw another, uh, Stat that it was like something like the, who was it? The Romans, I believe, were fighting. They were fighting in the Middle East, and it was like for 600 years. Like, talk about a forever war. Like, that's a forever war. 600 years? Forever, right? Anyway, I bring that to you just for perspective. Sort of a zoom-out look. Okay, so this is about the Strait of Hormuz, right? Now, what would happen if, let's say, we found ways to not just protect ships that were going through the Strait, but also then to block the Iranian oil exports so now they're not getting any money? Well, that's what we've done. Yeah, that's what has occurred. And in fact, last month, I talked about this, that ships were getting through. CENTCOM was reporting this. This isn't like, super secret inside source knowledge that I have. I just, I saw the CENTCOM announcement. And they were saying, yeah, we're running this. Remember, they were running them at night and all of that. They would turn off their transponders and that would allow the ships to get through. So now we've got a report from Swiss energy analyst and investor Alexander Stahel, who does a Monday morning investment letter. Okay. Okay. And in this letter, he talks about, what does he call it here? He has a name for it that he calls it. That's not the name of it. No, no, no, pipe down. The Hormuz Shuttle is what he's calling it. The Hormuz Shuttle, okay? So Hugh Hewitt, and I've got his post on this as well that I will get to, but Hugh Hewitt writing at Fox News, Hugh Hewitt, the talk show host from California, He said, first, the United Arab Emirates, then its neighbors, developed an enormous system to shuttle oil out of the Gulf via a new shipping channel. This new channel hugs the coast of Oman, which is patrolled and protected by the U.S. military. Okay, so on one side you got Iran, on the other side you have Oman, and that's the side that these ships are going through. Okay? Okay? CENTCOM is not replicating the destroyer-heavy escort system that was done back in the 80s, right, when Iran threatened the street. But its new tactics are effective, and the September decline in the price of oil demonstrated that as October's anticipated decline will as well. According to this guy, Alexander Stachel, he says the key development over the past month was the UAE's refusal to to become hostage to Iran's regime. Instead, it established the Hormuz shuttle. This is what I said needed to happen. The Gulf nations needed to get on board, right? And it appears they have done so, and they've been doing this for weeks. The holidays will be here before you know it, and so now is the time to create precious and priceless family heirlooms that will last for generations. Take your old photos, slides, films, and tapes to create a video in Mint Hill. There, they'll turn those memories into the story of your lives, memories from past family events captured forever to pass down to future generations. Create-A-Video's skilled team will professionally transfer your family's stories onto easy-to-use USB drives or DVDs that won't deteriorate over time like the old photos and tapes are doing right now. They will create a keepsake video that you can share and copy and keep forever. I can see it now. You're gathered around the holiday table with your loved ones, watching all these memories and people of your lives. We'll be right back. They will tell others to come who you are. Visit createavideo.com. Back to the Hugh Hewitt piece at Fox News. So the Hormuz shuttle started back in May. It placed 11 hulls, mostly VLCCs, or as I call them, VLCCs, which stands for Very Large Crude Carriers, which... Guys, you're not even trying to name these things. Really? Very large, crude carriers? That's the name? Anyway. So the VLCCs, these were owned, leased, and operated by Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, or ADNOC. Thank you for having a good acronym. And so these 11 holes... got the risky job done of shuttling crude out of the Persian trap via the Oman lane into the Gulf of Oman. They unloaded it via ship-to-ship transfers, then re-entered the Persian trap to repeat the trade. The detailed assessment from this guy, Alexander Stahel, the Swiss energy analyst, The detailed assessment focuses on the key exporters. ADNOC has become very good at the Hormuz shuttle. Then there's Saudi Arabia's state-owned energy giant called Aramco, as well as Kuwait. They have all learned from the UAE model, and they have copied it. By now, he says, we have some 116 hulls. Remember, they started at 11. Now there's 116 hulls active in the shuttle trade around the Strait of Hormuz, most of them using the Oman Lane. The assessment is that Qatar and Iraq are also now using the Hormuz shuttle. Stahel concludes, quote, Iran has failed to shut the Strait. The shuttle system is scaling and time is increasingly working against Tehran. Hugh Hewitt, goes on to point out Iran is out of cards. And by the way, I said this when Iran first played the Strait of Hormuz card, right? When they first did it, they're like, oh my gosh, they got this card to play. And you had guys like Robert Pape saying there's the escalation trap and they played this card and checkmate to America and all of that. And I said, yeah, but now you played the card. Once you play the card, then it's played. And if you find a way to beat the card, then you got nothing else because they don't. They don't have anything else. Well, except for exporting terror. But they've been doing that for 50 years. So now you're out of cards. Every attempt that Iran has made to try to bully the Trump administration has brought a response, military responses from America. Iran has not tried that in a few weeks now, right? We haven't seen anything. from Iran in several weeks. Now again, I recognize and I expect some actions from Iran in the coming weeks before the election. And I will bring that information in a minute. They're banking on voters in America putting Democrats into the House and Senate. This is what Iran wants. It's what the IRGC needs. The mullahs need Democrats to control Congress because they think this will restrain Trump. When in fact, my, I mean, I like my assessment is like, you put Democrats into the house and Senate. Like, I don't think that actually restrains Trump at all. Like he, like, what are you going to do to him? You're going to impeach him again. You're going to do that anyway. So unless you actually follow through and can get him ousted in a Senate vote, like, He's going to keep doing what he's doing. Are you going to defund the military? We'll see. Iran has not tried any kind of action against America in several weeks. It is flat out afraid of Israel. And they have likely determined that Benjamin Netanyahu would love to be provoked right now. He's standing for election. If Iran were to go after Israel, then Bibi could go and bomb the bejeebus out of Iran. rally people to his candidacy, right? And by the way, overnight, you had thousands upon thousands of protesters back out into the streets of Iran. So that happened and has been happening. Every country that depends on the Strait of Hormuz has its oil export-driven cash flow up and running at about 80% to 90% of the January rate, except Iran, right? The Art of War by Don Su, right? Trump's, you know, I will block your blockade. I will blockade your blockade. That's what he's done. So now, okay, you want to blockade the straight? You've done it. You played your card. Now I will blockade your blockade. None of your stuff is getting out. And, oh, we found other ways around. The Mueller tax. Have you heard of this? We've been paying this for about 50 years. It is embedded in the cost of every barrel of oil for 50 years because of this card that the Iranian regime has always been able to play and now has played. It is built into the cost of oil, the risk of Iran, the mullah tax. It's been there for 50 years. Maybe it's going to go away. We'll see. All right, real quick. Every government number gets revised, right? Every projection gets walked back. Gold does not file corrections like GovCo. Revelation Gold Group helps families hold physical gold and silver, including in a tax-advantaged gold IRA. It's real. It's in your name. And 10 minutes tells you if your retirement account qualifies. If you want to learn more, go to calendarmetals.com. That's calendarmetals.com. There is a link in the podcast description. Or if you want to talk to somebody, you can call 888-465-3049. From the text line, Jeff says, Great show, Pete. Starting in late 1862, General U.S. Grant, or yeah, Ulysses S. Grant, tried six different plans to capture the city of Vicksburg, Mississippi. Five months later, after each of those six plans failed, Grant began a siege of the city which lasted 47 days. The entire campaign cost 37,000 casualties before the Union took control of Vicksburg and the Mississippi River on July 3rd, 1863. Modern day Americans have no concept of victory through patience. They want what they want for themselves when they want it. That's why we keep losing in the Middle East. Hopefully the president keeps strangling Iran because it will work. And that is what Trump is doing. He is slowly strangling Iran. Iran. They're losing like $ 500 million a day. The rial, their currency, is at a historic low. It has virtually no value. They can't afford to be paying their troops, their basij thugs, right? And when you can't pay soldiers, you can't pay the bureaucrats, you can't pay all of the people that make that thugocracy operate, then they're not going to go out and do this stuff for you. So, like, it's a multi-pronged approach. You got the military side of it, sure, but you also have the economic side of it. Hugh Hewitt talks about the mullah tax. Markets price every factor and possible factor into the cost of every good. The world has been paying a mullah tax since the Shah of Iran went into exile. and Ayatollah Khomeini returned from his. Once the nature of the regime was fully revealed to the world, the risk of what an irrational group of religious fanatics would do with Iran's incredible wealth of natural resources and an educated population has weighed on the world economy. Had Iran achieved a nuclear breakout, the cost of the Iran tax, the mullah tax, would have skyrocketed as the region's blackmailer became even more bold in its demands. Iran told the United Nations General Assembly that, you know, hey, we need to negotiate again, right? They went on to American news stations. We need to negotiate. Trump rejected these appeals, saying only that Iran had overplayed its hand. At the same time as the Hormuz shuttle scaled up and brought relief to the world's oil markets, you got Treasury Secretary Scott Besson taking the lead in part two of Trump's drive to collapse the ability of the Islamic Republic to threaten anyone in the region. Hugh Hewitt says the junta running Iran, remember all of their leadership was whacked, So then they had to bring in the not-so-talented retirees of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, maybe half a Supreme Leader, counted on the domestic pressure on Trump as a result of the imminent midterm elections to force him to the negotiating table. The president, you'll recall, agreed to that memorandum of misunderstanding, as I call it, back in June, signed it, and did it as a test of Iran's new leadership. They flunked the test. They resumed attacks on shipping in the street. Trump has since stayed the course and refused to blink, even as polls show a growing Democratic advantage in November. Trump knows history will not long remember the results of an off-year election. It will, however, never forget the collapse of the Islamic Revolution if the president sees his strategy through to its inevitable end. You know, this got me thinking. You know, we want elected leaders, right, who make decisions not based on political calculations or personal political advantage, right? We don't want them reading the polls to determine what to do, right? We want them to make decisions even if it costs them their office or their elections, right? Well, isn't that what Trump has done? I mean, he has said this. He said, like, His decision on this, he did not care one whit about the midterms. Now, I don't know if that's true, but he's like, I'm not paying any attention to that. Obviously, he wants Republicans to win. He's campaigning for them. However, isn't this what, dare I say it, I do, I dare, isn't this what a statesman would do? Somebody who says, yes, I know that there is political damage to and I'm going to lose a governing majority. But this is more important to the future of America and global stability. Isn't that choosing country over party? Isn't that the thing that we say we want in our elected officials? Both Democrats and Republicans say this. Country over party. Isn't that what Trump has done? From the text line, 704 number says, I'm not as confident confident as you to declare we are winning the war, I think we are in a stalemate. What is your metric for that? How do you determine who is winning a war? Is it military assets that have been destroyed? Because we've won that. That's not even close. What's the metric? That they're still in power? Okay, well, If you don't want to put boots on the ground, because everybody said we don't want to do that, so then isn't this the way that you force the surrender of a nation or a city or a people is to put them under siege, which is what we've done. Not a new tactic. It's one of the oldest in the world, right? Isn't that what we're doing? Putting them under siege with the sanctions. We banned all travel in and out of the country, right? All the... We got secondary sanctions that are hitting everybody else that does any kind of dealings with Iran. So they're cut off. They can't get their oil out. They can't pump their oil. They can't pay their soldiers. Their people are taking to the streets again. Their currency is collapsing. I just, I feel like, again, like I know patience isn't our national strong suit here, but I kind of feel like there isn't a metric by which we are losing. So wouldn't that by default mean we're winning? I don't know if it's a stalemate. Because at any point, if we wanted to, we could do more. So like, whatever the status quo is that's allowing Iran to just crumble from inside, if you're calling that the stalemate, that is of our choosing. Because We're not interested in expending any more munitions. We're not interested in expending any lives. We're not going to do anything else. We got you on lockdown. You're under siege. And you'll eventually fall. You can hang on as long as you want, but at some point it will happen. That's the strategy it looks like, right? So is any siege a stalemate? Like, think in old, like, you know, you got the old medieval city and you got the walls all around and You know, the enemy army comes and they close up all the gates. And so then they just lay siege to the city and they just wait them out. Is that a stalemate? Or is that a siege? The texter says, since March, the strategic petroleum reserve has been reduced by 131,000 barrels. This is publicly available data from the government that is released weekly every Wednesday. Until I see that number stay steady for a week and begin to rise, I won't think differently. Right. So this, and I have this, I'm not going to have time to get to it, but this gets to refinery capacity because we have closed down somewhere in the neighborhood of like a dozen refineries over the last, I want to say five years or so, six years, and maybe even as high as 20. So we're now the number one producer of oil, but we don't have the refining capacity. Why? Well, you can thank the Democrats for that. A couple of more texts. Well, just this one, I guess, because the Internet is pretty spotty out here. So it just takes a long time to load them. Russ says most people I talk with who think we're at a stalemate or losing in Iran have no idea what had been accomplished militarily and economically or how much the neighboring countries have turned on Iran. Yeah, so, I mean, I guess if you think that this is now a stalemate against Iran, I guess that's an improvement if you thought we were losing last month. We were losing, we're losing, and now it's like, it was a stalemate. I guess that, okay, well, that's better, right? That's an improvement. And so now Iran is pleading with Democrats to save them. Okay? So basically, this is Iran going like, hey, you know, remember that whole half-century... When we said we wanted to kill you all. Man, that was crazy. So, anyways, please vote Democrat. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps put out a 25-page letter addressed to Americans urging us to oppose Trump during the upcoming midterm elections. Now, my assessment of this is you guys... You IRGC people, you don't know nothing about Americans because we ain't going to be reading a 25 page anything. Okay. Like, what are you thinking? Like maybe you could do a TikTok video, right? I mean, if you really, really, really want to make us vote for Trump to save you, then I feel like 25 pages of written word is not the way to reach Americans. Okay. Okay. The IRGC, which has repeatedly tried to sway the November 3rd elections, claimed that the president and his support of Israel were the cause of the war. You've got to blame the Jews, right? Going for that horseshoe right and the left and the Democrats, right? Got to go with the anti-Semitic vote. They urged voters to reject both in the voting booth. America's national security and the lives of its service members are entrusted to someone who is not only an inveterate liar. Okay. Guys, you're the IRGC. You are in no position to be calling anybody else a liar, okay? Just glass houses and all. They also called Trump an insanely avaricious man whose only motivation in life is the accumulation of greater wealth. Um, look, I don't have any doubt that that is a motivation of Trump's, no doubt, but that would not explain what he's doing to you guys. I don't think he's making any money off of that. Maybe he is, I don't know, playing the poly market or whatever, calci markets, right? I don't know. But this, I don't know, this looks eerily similar to Baghdad Bob. And I know I'm dating myself. Baghdad Bob. This was the guy. Bob was not his real name. okay, just for the record, this was the spokesperson for Saddam Hussein's government. And this guy was appearing like every single day on TV telling everybody that they were whipping our tails in the Gulf War I, Desert Storm. That they had repelled us, they were killing our soldiers, they were shooting down our airplanes, they were destroying our tanks, right? And you could see in the background, Baghdad, in flames, smoke all over the place, right? They're being panicked. And he's in front of the camera saying, this is the mother of all wars. We are launching this jihad. We're decimating America. And so he got this reputation. People started calling him Baghdad Bob because it was so over the top stupid. misinformation, lies. That's what the IRGC is sounding like. But then again, this is pretty common over in that part of the world. Their spokespeople tend to speak like this. Their leaders tend to speak like this. The letter goes on to accuse Trump of concealing the peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear program. See, we've been lied to by Trump. They were doing a peaceful program. Even though the International Atomic Energy Agency watchdog said, no, actually, Tehran was enriching uranium beyond what's needed for peaceful purposes. So it's the IAEA that said that. But Trump has been hiding all of this from us. We don't know this. See? The IRGC also lashed out against the U.S. government, designated the IRGC as a terrorist group, claiming there's not, quote, A single verifiable instance where the IRGC has committed an act of violence against civilians. Aside from the massacres, of course. Aside from the massacres. No other instance of the IRGC doing any violence against civilians. Okay. Okay, Baghdad Bob. We hear you. Again, might want to do a TikTok video. We ain't going to read 25 pages. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them, too, and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to the Pete Kaliner show dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone.