[00:00:04] Broadcasting live from atop the Rocky Mountains, the crossroads of the West, you are listening to the Liberty Roundtable Radio Talk Show. It seems like since February the 28th, 2026, what's that, eight months ago now?
[00:00:24] It seems like there's nothing but talk of war and repercussions of war, and now the midterms and, well, wars hurting chances for Republicans. Happy to have you along, my fellow Americans. I'm Sam Bushman, hard-hitting news that networks refuse to use. It all starts now. Lowell Nelson, CampaignForLiberty.org with me. Welcome back, sir.
[00:00:47] Good to be back, Sam. That news at the top of the hour kind of sounds like men back, you know, preparing the Tower of Babel, right? They want to build something. You know, I'm talking about, you know, Trump's plans to defend and heavily arm and protect the capital. Yeah, it's the big arch that he wants to build, and now he wants to turn it into a big, massive military installation, right?
[00:01:14] Right, and if we would simply, you know, serve the gods of this land, he would protect us from our enemies. That's a simple fact right there, but we aren't doing that, so we're resorting to man-made methods to try to protect ourselves. It just reminds me of the power of Babel. We should trust in God Almighty, biblical reality, ladies and gentlemen, but we tend to turn to the arm of flesh over and over.
[00:01:43] And what's interesting to me about this is, you know, Donald Trump wants us to believe that we've got the upper hand around the world and everything else. But the fact that he really wants to put a military installation into this arch tells me that he believes, really, that we're going to be attacked or that we're going to need that. Now, I know at first glance, I'd say, oh, no, listen, that's just defense. I get it, but we haven't had that for a couple of hundred years, defense like that.
[00:02:06] Why up the defense now? Because the answer is they know and we know it's only a matter of time with all the illegals in the country and the terrorist cells and everything else. And if we continue to provoke the world as we've been doing, Donald Trump heading to the U.N., I think tomorrow to discuss some of these things, all kinds of side deal discussions are going to happen. But you know what? There are crippling effects to unnecessary war. This is merely one of them. Well, yeah, that's for sure. An unnecessary war.
[00:02:36] That's the topic of Ron Paul's column this past week. Talks about the price of gasoline, particularly diesel fuel. I mean, it's probably six or seven bucks a gallon average around the country. But certain stations there in California, they set the diesel fuel prices. They advertise them at nine dollars and ninety nine cents. Well, that's a kind of a weird number, but that's the biggest number they have. And they post that number because they don't have fuel to sell.
[00:03:06] And, you know, station signs are not built to exceed that maximum price. So what they're really signaling is they don't have fuel to sell. Now, expensive fuel is bad, but no fuel at all. That's even worse. A whole different kind of crisis. You know, he describes our freeways. They are filled with semis burning diesel fuel to haul product to market. They've got freight trains burning diesel fuel to transport whatever is not transported by truck.
[00:03:34] And when the price of diesel fuel increases, well, the cost of products in the marketplace also goes up. And that is why Ron Paul named this column the crippling effects of unnecessary war. Despite President Trump's bluster about controlling the Strait of Hormuz, that's a lie. The fact is that Iran is in control of the Strait and very little oil makes it out without Iranian approval.
[00:04:01] Well, last weekend, meaning September 12th and 13th, the Houthis in Yemen who are allied with Iran attacked the Saudi Arabia's bypass pipeline, taking even more oil off the market. Ron Paul writes, quote, the real problem here is not oil or diesel. The real problem is that wars of choice spin out of control and destroy the economies of those who launched them. Empires throughout history have been undone by endless overseas wars.
[00:04:31] No amount of bragging about the size and strength of our military can change this reality. And now we are seeing the chickens coming home to roost, end of quote. Well, as you know, Sam, Trump tries to justify his attack on Iran, or at least did so back earlier this year, by claiming that they were about to get a nuclear weapon. Our intelligence agencies disagreed, but he refused to listen to them.
[00:04:59] And, you know, even Tulsi Gabbard, he refused to listen and chose to listen instead to Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu. Well, it turns out that Iran has a weapon that might be as powerful as a new real nuclear weapon, and that's control of enough of the world's oil supply to cripple the economies of any country trying to conquer it, you know, Iran.
[00:05:23] Well, and sadly, we always worry about the threat of Iran getting or having a nuke. They didn't have one before this war. It was very clear. But by the time this war ends, they might end up with one. Because remember, North Korea, China, Russia, you know, people are assembling behind Iran. Trump wants you to believe that we've disabled them completely. But no, they're actually getting stronger, believe it or not. And the proof in the pudding is this headline for the mainstream press today.
[00:05:53] It says this. Strait of Hormuz shipping collapses amid U.S.-Iran conflict. So only 17 commodity vessels reportedly crossed the critical oil passage over the weekend, compared with about 125 vessels a day before the war. However, some tankers are still trying to move through the region with their tracking systems switched off.
[00:06:20] But this just highlights what I'm talking about. We say that we've crippled this thing or that we have control of it or that we whatever, but it isn't true. And the proof is in the oil that's not moving anywhere in the world. The proof is they're getting stronger. And if we're not very careful at the end of this conflict, whenever that might be, seems like these conflicts are eternal. But whenever that might be, the point is they might end up with a nuke by the time we're done, even. And because here's why. Most of the world believes that America is acting belligerently, hegemony style, if you will.
[00:06:50] In other words, we control and dictate everything. And they're losing patience with that. And it won't be long until some of these other countries decide to back bricks. Bricks somehow gets involved with Iran. Before you know it, you would have a different world. And it's because of our continued blustering and pushing and lying about other nations and manipulating and invading and attacking and all that to where it's not going to be long. And other nations are going to hang up on us and say enough is enough. And we've basically taken the bit in the mouth from Israel.
[00:07:20] And that seems to be the only thing we listen to these days. And at some point, I'm telling you, it will backfire. And how fast and how far and what moves will be made when, I don't know. But I'm confident that if we keep this up, the world will assemble against us, Lowell. Well, and as Iran gets stronger, we get weaker because we're exploding our ordinance, right? We're sending our missiles and bombs. And, you know, Washington, D.C., they can print money, but they can't print bombs.
[00:07:48] And so we diminish in strength while they are gathering more and more strength. Now, Trump gets mad saying that anybody who speaks out and says that we're drawing down our munitions, they're kind of treasonous because it's not true we have unlimited supply. And I guess I would just simply say let's stop the treason headline. Let's find out the truth. Prove we have plenty of munitions. We can't even prove we have gold at this point, right? Yeah, right.
[00:08:18] But Saudi output drops to zero, Lowell. This is the next column, and it relates to the exact point we're making. That's right. There is an east-west pipeline that crosses Saudi Arabia. Basically, it's an east-west pipeline across the middle of Saudi Arabia. They call it the bypass pipeline because it takes oil from the Gulf Coast across Saudi Arabia
[00:08:44] to the west coast of Saudi Arabia to a port there on the Red Sea, and then from the Red Sea they can take it out. In other words, they don't go through the Strait of Hormuz this way. The oil goes through the pipeline to the Red Sea and then from there out to the ocean. And roughly it was descending between 4 million and 5 million barrels of oil per day
[00:09:11] through this pipeline to the Red Sea port. Well, guess what, folks? This pipeline was blown up in nine different locations on Thursday, September 10th, by Iraqi drones. Well, probably Yemen. Probably Iraq helped Yemen send these drones onto this pipeline. The Iraqis that were allied with Iran, right? Because Iran, they want to choke the United States.
[00:09:41] So quoting this Mike Whitney that wrote this column, he says, there's no doubt that we have reached a tipping point in the seven-month-long conflict of seeing U.S. military bases across the Gulf reduced to rubble while the Iranian military has asserted an iron grip on the Strait of Hormuz. The strategic pincer move by the Houthis increases the likelihood that the U.S. will be driven from the Middle East and that Iran will emerge as the guarantor of regional security.
[00:10:11] We are seeing changes to the geopolitical landscape that take place once in a century. End of quote, balance of power. So obviously Iran and its allies there in the Middle East, they want to stop the flow of oil from the Middle East to pressure the United States to back off, to end the war. And that's why Saudi output dropped to zero. So you're hurting the Saudis, that's true, but you're even worse, hurting the U.S. and the global economy.
[00:10:39] And they hope to end this war that the U.S. is waging on Iran. And I think they're going to be successful. But when you think about it, the Saudis are our friends. How does their output drop to zero, Lowell? Well, because they aren't getting any oil from the Gulf region. Oh, you mean so somebody else has got more control than even us and the Saudis put together, huh? Yeah, that's what it is. I'm just highlighting the truth, folks.
[00:11:07] They can play games and wordsmith all day long. But at the end of the day, when Saudi output drops to zero and the Saudis are supposedly our friends, right, something's making that happen. And it can't be Iran. They don't have any capabilities, remember? So it can't be Iran. Who is it then, Lowell? Well, that's not the same thing. Well, it's Yemen, right? I mean, we helped the Saudis bomb Yemen into yesterday from 2015 to 2021, right, those five, six, seven years.
[00:11:38] We helped the Saudis just bomb the heck out of Yemen. And now we're helping Israel bomb the heck out of Iran. All these chickens are going to come home to roost, folks. I wish it wasn't true. But I'm telling you, these groups are ganging up on America, and they have a lot more control of their region. Our supply lines are way, way, way too long, folks. And we can't control it. Now Trump's blaming someone else. He's blaming the diesel crisis on Ukraine.
[00:12:08] Larry Johnson, with his column, puts a finer point on this subject. In his column, which also is posted at ronpaulinstitute.org, Johnson cites Trump's post on social media, quote, the world's diesel price rises mostly caused by the Russian-Ukraine war, not Iran, end of quote. And then he tells Zelensky to, quote, stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia because the strikes are hurting the world, end of quote.
[00:12:38] Well, by saying this, Trump is blaming Biden for the fuel shortage, not his attack on Iran. And Johnson gets at the truth of this matter. He asks whether we have a shortage of crude oil or do we have a shortage of refining capacity to turn that crude oil into fuel? Well, the answer to this question may surprise you. We do not have a shortage of crude oil, folks. We have a shortage of refining capacity.
[00:13:06] Now this is getting into the detail a little bit here, but it's instructive. Current refineries in the United States are running above 97% utilization, and yet they cannot keep up with the demand. And therefore that's why we're seeing no fuel in California. Certain places in California, they just don't have any fuel to sell because the refineries are emptying their reserves, and they can't keep up with the demand.
[00:13:34] And so U.S. distillate inventories in August sat at their lowest end-a-month level since 1951. Talk about, I mean, that's like 75 years ago. Global refinery runs have fallen by roughly 5.1 million barrels a day. This is a refining crisis sitting on top of a decade of closed refineries and under an investment. It is structural. It is global. And most of it has nothing to do with Russia, end of quote.
[00:14:04] Well, the price of crude oil in January, Sam, which is about $67 a barrel, went up to $117 a barrel in April after the first strikes on Iran, dropped to the low 80s during the ceasefire, and then climbed back towards $108 a barrel as fighting resumed this fall. In other words, the price of Brent crude oil is indexed to the war in Iran, not to the war in Ukraine. It's as plain as day. You just connect the dots.
[00:14:34] This disruption caused by the closing of the Strait of Hormuz keeps the crude oil from reaching refiners downstream. There are numerous refineries in the Gulf region, you know, outside of the Strait of Hormuz that export diesel to the rest of the world. So what Trump said was not wrong, but it wasn't the whole truth. In other words, if Zelensky did stop hitting diesel fuel in Russia, then diesel fuel shortage would not be so severe.
[00:15:00] But the part Trump is not saying is that the choke on the Strait of Hormuz and on the Red Sea is causing a much tighter shortage of diesel fuel because the Gulf refineries are not being supplied amply with crude oil from Iran. So a very interesting point that Johnson is making here, Sam, that the crisis now, I mean, once they bombed,
[00:15:28] the Hooties bombed that east-west pipeline so that Saudi can put out nothing, I mean, there is a real choke point, chokehold on the rest of the world. The economies of the rest of the world are in big trouble. The other question is how many other choke points can be tapped by these people as well, whether they're all in cahoots against the United States or whether they're all in cahoots against Israel or both of us or whether we're causing it because we're the ones escalating things, we're the one going on the, quote, offensive. Anyway, you look at it at the end of the day,
[00:15:58] what other choke points do they have and how will it affect the world? And interest rates are going up, all commodities are going up, and I don't see an end in sight at all, lull. And some people are wondering if this is World War III or bordering even on Armageddon, for crying out loud. That's what Paul Craig Roberts alludes to in the title of his column, The Road to Armageddon. This column is posted at lewrockwell.com, and basically he's just taking a step back
[00:16:26] and looking at the situation in the world. He's saying, okay, we've got two wars going on, major wars, both of which are broadening or widening. Either of them could spin out of control. In other words, he's talking about the war in Ukraine and the war in Iran. The one in Ukraine is interesting.
[00:16:49] Basically, it's a war against Russia being fought by a proxy for the United States. And Ukraine is that proxy. So basically it's the U.S. against Russia, but Ukraine is the proxy. Well, Germany and Great Britain are openly involved in that conflict. And it's under the guise of Ukraine being attacked by Russia, and therefore we've got to protect the poor Ukraine, right? Yeah, that's right.
[00:17:19] And if the U.S. were not backing Ukraine, there wouldn't be a war going on there right now. And in other words, we invited that war. We provoked that war. Scott Horton has a great book called Provoked. And in that book, he describes how our, you know, inviting Ukraine to join NATO and other countries over there to join NATO,
[00:17:43] putting NATO on Russia's doorstep, putting nuclear weapons on NATO's doorstep, just like Russia did in Cuba in the early 1960s, right? Putting it on our doorstep, nuclear weapons, right? We thought that was such a big threat that we warned them to get out of there, and we agreed to pull our nukes out of, I guess it was Turkey? I can't remember, one of those nations over there, so that Russia would pull their nukes out of Cuba.
[00:18:12] Well, it's getting worse because now we've got, you know, Ukraine threatening to become a NATO country and putting nukes there, and right on their doorstep. And the problem with putting NATO on their doorstep is you touch one, you touch us all is the problem, right? That's another up the ante that's beyond discussion. Also, Cuba right now in big discussions, too. Their power went out again. They're suffering. They don't have oil. They don't have power. They're really in a, pardon the pun, bad situation.
[00:18:40] Tie that to Venezuela, another communist holding venue. If we're not very careful, it's going to ride up through Venezuela and Cuba to us and create a third war if we're not careful, Lowell. Hmm, yikes. Well, Sam, this, and the way Germany and Britain are getting involved makes them a target as well.
[00:19:04] They're the ones making these long-range drones that Ukraine is using to strike Russian oil production facilities deep in Russia. They use U.S. targeting systems to find these places to bomb, and they're blowing up oil production facilities, oil refineries, energy depots inside of Russia, as well as airports, civilian housing schools, and vacationers.
[00:19:30] Well, and other countries, two more countries have joined NATO against Russia, and NATO is talking openly about preparing for a war against Russia in three years. So we've got war talking about everywhere, unfortunately. We should be talking about peace. We should have learned our lessons from the past decades, but we haven't, because somebody always wants the power and the money associated with war. Well, then Paul Craig Roberts says something that should not surprise anybody who listens to Liberty Roundtable. Quote,
[00:20:00] Every weapon system that Washington and NATO members said would not be sent to Ukraine were sent to Ukraine. End of quote. I mean, that's pretty bold. Yeah, that comes along the lines that I used to hear from Jerry Hughes, my old mentor in media. He used to run a program called Washington on Trial. But one of the things he said is nothing is official until it's been denied. Yeah, interesting. And doesn't that relate very well to this idea?
[00:20:29] Yeah, every weapon system that we promised wouldn't be sent is sent now. Right? Yeah, that's right. And all along, we've also been promising we wouldn't deploy troops there, either in Ukraine or in Iran. Well, turns out, guess what, folks? Yeah, we've got troops certainly in Ukraine, and we've probably got them in Iran by now, too.
[00:20:55] Well, obviously, Sam, Russia faces an existential threat, just like the U.S. did when Russian missiles were getting into Cuba. And Roberts believes that if we continue down this path, we continue poking the bear, the Russian bear, Putin will have to push back, and he may do so with nukes. Putin is downplaying this right now, Sam. He calls it a terrorist activity, not a war with Ukraine.
[00:21:23] But one of these days, he's going to have to call it what it is. It is an all-out war, and he's going to be pushing back however he can to assert Russia's dominance there in Asia. Well, that's the war in Ukraine. Let's look at the war in Iran. Now, Iran is not fighting Israel, who is the real enemy. Iran is fighting the United States because the United States is the proxy for Israel.
[00:21:52] So you've got Ukraine as the proxy for the United States fighting Russia, and you've got U.S. as a proxy for Israel fighting Iran. And so the two countries under attack are not fighting their real enemies. They're fighting their proxies, which is just an interesting situation. Now, so you ask the question, why is the United States fighting Russia via Ukraine?
[00:22:18] Well, it's because of the U.S. foreign policy doctrine, the Wolfowitz Doctrine, which says we must, quote, quote, prevent the rise of any country that can serve as a constraint on Washington's unilateralism, end of quote. Basically, this hegemonic exercise of power by the United States, right?
[00:22:42] That's the Wolfowitz Doctrine, and we can't have anybody challenging our authority and being the big policeman of the world. So then you ask the question, why is Israel fighting Iran with U.S. muscle? Well, that's because Iran is, quote, in the way of the Israeli Zionist agenda of greater Israel, which defines the territory of the Israeli state to be from the Nile to Pakistan, end of quote.
[00:23:11] That is one big stretch of country. In other words, it's all about Israel wanting expansion and the United States kind of leading the way by promoting expansion. And there's headlines. Canada, ours. Cuba, ours. Venezuela, ours. Ukraine, ours. Greenland, ours. I mean, we just go on and on where it's like, are you kidding me right now?
[00:23:37] But the expansionist Zionist agenda of Benjamin Netanyahu, we seem to be taking a page out of that playbook as well. Trump and Netanyahu both have this agenda. Trump's just more vocal about it. That's right. And so that really was the purpose of 9-1, 9-11, Sam.
[00:24:09] The answer, ladies and gentlemen, pray for peace. Elect those who will advocate for peace. The House has tried to stop Trump three times. We need the Senate aboard, and we need to stand by the Constitution when it comes to war and pray and advocate for peace. Turning to our God and repenting as a nation is the key. Thank you, Lowell. You're welcome, Sam. Thank you. Lowell, ladies and gentlemen, Lowell Nelson does a phenomenal job. Just think.
[00:24:39] Ron Paul Institute. God over. God save our constitutional republic.