“My fellow Americans. They tell you that four-dollar gasoline is the end of the world. They tell you six-dollar diesel means we have to fold. And the same voices that want you poorer in the name of theory want you quieter in the face of a regime that has been at war with this country since 1979.

I don’t buy it. And you shouldn’t buy it either.

Let me tell you what Americans used to do when the stakes were real. In World War II, most people didn’t get a full tank. They got a sticker on the windshield. An “A” sticker. Three gallons. Four gallons. Sometimes two. That was the week. Not the day. The week. Speed limit: thirty-five miles an hour. No new cars. Tires rationed. Sugar rationed. Meat rationed. Coffee rationed. Shoes rationed. Factories stopped making refrigerators and started making tanks. Four hundred thousand of our people never came home.

They did it because they understood something very simple. If you lose to people who want to run the world, you don’t get a discount later. You get a different country. A different world. They paid the price on purpose.

And then — this is the part the decliners never mention — they won. And when they won, the country did not stay on rations as a lifestyle. The plants switched back. The cars came back. The houses went up. Wages rose. Families formed. Children were born into a world of plenty their parents had only dreamed about in the Depression and the war.

That was not an accident. That was what victory looks like when a serious people finish the job.

Now look at us. Regular gas is about four dollars and forty-six cents. Diesel is about six-forty. Up a dollar and change from last year. That’s real money for a trucker. That’s real money for a farmer. I get it. I grew up around people who work. But let’s have some proportion. You can still fill the tank. You can still drive to work. You can still take the trip. Nobody is punching a ration coupon and sending you home after four gallons.

That’s not sacrifice. That’s a bill. And a lot of that bill exists because a regime in Tehran still thinks it can put a gun to the world’s oil.

Iran seized our embassy. They backed the bombing that killed two hundred and forty-one of our people in Beirut. Khobar Towers. Iranian-made bombs in Iraq — the Pentagon said hundreds of our troops. Missiles at our bases. Drones. Proxies.

For forty-seven years they’ve been hitting Americans and calling it “resistance.” Now they sit on the Strait of Hormuz and try to charge rent on the industrial world’s bloodstream. And they want the weapon that makes all of that permanent.

If they get nuclear warheads and the missiles to carry them, they do not become a normal country. They become a nuclear protection racket. They can close the Strait and dare you to open it. They can arm every militia from Baghdad to Beirut and say: touch our proxies and a city burns. They can put a nuclear shadow over our bases, over Israel, over the partners who keep the oil moving.

One warhead does not have to land in New York to change your life. It only has to sit on a missile and make every President calculate whether four-dollar gas today is worth a mushroom cloud tomorrow.

That is the foreign problem. Here is the domestic one. For years you’ve been told that American strength is the disease. That cheap energy is a sin. That the country that beat the Depression and the Axis should feel guilty for producing, drilling, building, and winning. That’s not compassion. That’s a theory of decline. Call it Marxism, call it managed poverty with better branding — the result is the same.

They will ration your life for an ideology. They will not ask you to stand up to a theocracy with missiles. Notice the switch. When the subject is climate paperwork and central planning, scarcity is noble. When the subject is a government that chants “Death to America,” scarcity is a reason to quit. That is not peace. That is a country talking itself out of the will its grandparents had in a ration line.

Iran is not a Marxist republic. Don’t insult your own intelligence. It is a revolutionary clerical state. The overlap is this: both treat the West as the obstacle, and both need you tired, divided, and ashamed of the power that keeps the lights on.

So here is the hope. And it is not a fairy tale. We have already lived it. After World War II, Americans did not become a smaller people. They became a bigger one. The same generation that saved grease and scrap metal built the interstate, filled the suburbs, started companies, and raised the Baby Boom — kids who grew up with full plates, full tanks, and the assumption that tomorrow would be larger than yesterday.

That boom did not come from surrender. It came from ending the thing that was eating the future. When the Tehran regime is finished — not managed, not subsidized, not endlessly negotiated into another decade of drones and blackmail — the same door opens. Oil moves without a revolutionary tax. The Strait is a waterway again, not a weapon. Our troops stop absorbing rockets from militias on a retainer. Capital comes back to building instead of hedging against the next shock. Prices come down because the risk premium comes down. And a generation that has been told to expect less can start expecting more: work, families, homes, cheap energy, and a country that is not permanently on the edge of someone else’s holy war.

That is the deal. Pay a price now that your grandparents would have recognized as light. Finish the regime that has been waging war on us since 1979. Then cash the peace the way they did — not in slogans, but in plenty.

The Greatest Generation took a ration book to stop empires and then gave their children the most prosperous civilization in history. Four-fifty gasoline is a weak excuse for leaving your children a nuclear blackmailer on the world’s energy tap.

I don’t accept that. You shouldn’t accept that. A dollar at the pump is lower than a nuclear gun at the throat of the West. And on the other side of this is not endless emergency. On the other side is the thing America does best when it wins: growth, babies, full shelves, and a future that feels like it belongs to us again.

Thank you. And God bless America.”