Quotes of the week

“No man in the wrong can stand up against a fellow that’s in the right and keeps on a-comin’.” – Bill McDonald, Texas Ranger

Many people, regardless of their perspective, fear they might be cancelled in some way should they post comments to a blog. If you feel so, simply comment under a “secret identity.” Super heroes have such. You can, too. And all perspectives are welcome here.

Any Soap Box material written by Buddy may be copied and forwarded to family and friends. Material from other sources is usually copyrighted but can be shared so long as it is not changed or abridged and the publisher is properly credited, including a link to their site.

Buddy’s Soap Box

And now patriotic Texas howdy from Buddy,

According to Reuters, the cost to ship a 40-ft. container from China to the U.S. has sailed past $20,000 per container. A reader friend sent Soap Box the preceding info along with the following comment: “If people realized that we are at war with China, like you and I understand, maybe more of them would quit buying Chinese goods.”

Wiser words were never spoken.

And $20,000 per container—that’s just the cost to get the goods here. American companies make everything under the sun in China, a nation that is in a very real sense at war with us.

Wouldn’t we be better off making things here, saving the $20,000 per container shipping cost and creating millions of American jobs?

China is at war with us, not with bullets and bombs, at least not yet, but with other weapons equally lethal. The Chinese/Fauci funded virus is one weapon and, to our shame, our own Dr. Death helped fund it.   Now 114,000 Americans are dead and millions more worldwide.

China’s other weapons? Bribery, blackmail, and flattery (the latter reserved for the media and academia).

Hunter Biden’s paintings will be snapped up by you know who. And Mitch McConnell? Where did that old man get his attractive young wife who just happens to have family ties and millions in income from a shipping company owned by the Chinese military.

And take William Barr, Trump’s last attorney general who was supposed to go after corruption but instead mystified all by sitting on his hands. What happened there? Not bribery, but blackmail comes to mind. Did China or its American agents have something on the attorney general that kept him leashed like a dog?

And then there is Americas own Dr. Frankenstein or Dr. Death—either name suits—Dr. Anthony Fauci. He stands at the top of the federal government’s health management food chain, the highest paid of the lot by far. If money went from us to the Chinese Communists to fund gain-of-function viral studies, Fauci had to know. It did. And he knew. Here we have a case not of bribery or blackmail but of raw ego. Fauci wanted to see what a lab-created killer virus could do. Now he and we know.

The Chinese are more pragmatic.  

Fauci’s lethal toy was an unanticipated opportunity for a police state seeking world domination. Even so, the initial release was almost certainly an accident. An intentional release would have been carried out in New York or London, not next door to China’s Wuhan biological warfare lab.  Only later did the Chinese begin to see an opportunity to bring the nations of the world to their knees at little cost, the worst but wholly acceptable cost being the death of some of their own citizens.

A year and more has passed, time enough for China to craft new lab variants. Have they? Here we can only speculate. Is the much more transmissible new Covid variant a natural mutation or the newest iteration cooked up in Wuhan and then strategically released in other countries? Such

speculation is warranted given that a serious investigation of Covid’s origins is being blocked by, understandably, China. Less understandable is the reluctance of our own government to pursue the matter. One would think 114,000 and counting China Virus dead would matter to Washington.

116,000 American soldiers died in World War 1. And today, with funding from us(!), China will soon have killed even more Americans without firing a single shot or dropping a single bomb.

Surely something so vast, so lethal, so monstrous would excite laser-like attention in the hallowed halls of Congress. Yet what do we hear? Crickets.

While we don’t yet fully know who in government, industry, big tech, unions, the media, and academia are owned by the Chinese Communist Party, we do know the following.

If we care about freedom, not just our freedom but everywhere in the world, if we love our country, if we love our way of life, we will not buy anything produced in China.

That may be difficult to do at first and in every case. Corporate America has in large part sold us out, putting profit ahead of country, and in the process limiting our choices. Many companies, those without an ounce of patriotism, will continue making their goods in China. But we can stop buying. And by God, they will begin to notice.

Other Items of Interest

If you haven’t watched the Gutfeld Show on FOX News, you might want to give it a try. There has long been a need for TV humor delivered from a conservative perspective. In the Gutfeld Show, we get it, and it can be pretty funny. Soap Box’s only complaint is that the humor is too often excessively crude, beginning with bleeped f-words aplenty. The reason for that, we assume, is that it represents a kind of outreach to the younger part of the audience, one that Hollywood and pop culture in general has trained to expect potty humor and worse.  Even so, for those of us with more character than that, the Gutfeld Show is still worth watching. We hope it gives rise to more of the like. In the meantime, if you’d like to see a sampling from the show, go to Gutfeld Show on Bing.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo Announces Resignation Over Harassment Allegations As Gomer Pile would say, “Surprise! Surprise!” In days of yore, such a man would have been called a cad and a bounder and after being tarred and feathered, run out of town on a rail.

Andrew Cuomo was indeed a cad and a bounder, but he was much more than a detestable creep who couldn’t keep his hands to himself when it came to women. Cuomo, as revealed by fresh revelations, was also little better than a Boss Tweed, benefiting in various ways from cronies with their hands in the public till. And when attempts were made to investigate graft, Cuomo threatened to destroy the careers of the investigators.

But as bad as being a cad and a grafter may be, that’s actually the “pleasant” side of the now former Governor of New York state. Andrew Cuomo sent thousands of elderly people to the worst place they could be sent—to nursing homes that were wholly unprepared to protect these elderly arrivals. And so, they died terribly and needlessly, even as an entire Navy hospital ship sent by President Trump sat wharf side and empty. To Andrew Cuomo, denying credit to Trump for a good deed done, mattered more than the lives of the citizens of his state.

Rand Paul, a United States Senator AND a medical doctor has been banned from YouTube for expressing Covid-related views the neckless wonders at YouTube’s Censorship Central found contrary to their own expertise. Who would have ever imagined that a bunch of computer geeks would deem themselves wiser than a U.S. Senator who is also a doctor? But there’s an answer to this. Join Rand Paul on Rumble and Libertytree.com if you’re sick of geek censorship. These sites do not censor.

Restrictions on Unvaccinated People See Explosion of Fake Vaccination Cards By Jack Phillips, The Epoch Times  August 10, 2021. Amid a bevy of COVID-19 vaccine mandates being handed down by governments and businesses, there has been an explosion of fabricated vaccination cards, according to researchers.

“As a segment of the population tries to avoid the new measures, the darknet reacts to the real market and thus demand gives birth to offers,” Dmitry Galov, a researcher at cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, said in interview with The Wall Street Journal, referring to the fake vaccine cards.

Forged vaccine cards that claim to be issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been proliferating on Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and other online marketplaces, according to reports.

This week’s Aesop’s The Blind Man and the Whelp

A Blind Man was accustomed to distinguishing different animals by touching them with his hands.  The whelp of a Wolf was brought to him, with a request that he feel it and say what it was.  He felt it, and being in doubt, said:  “I do not quite know whether it is the cub of a Fox, or the whelp of a Wolf, but this I know full well.  It would not be safe to admit him to the sheepfold.” 

Moral of the Fable: Evil tendencies show up early. The communist form of government has been with us for over 100 years and for each of those years communism resulted in the death of a million people. It is no different today.

Highly Recommended

The following are excellent resources for those of us (way more than 75 million strong) who want full and honest news reporting. We’ll be adding to this list as we go along. Those who prefer filtered news—only the news deemed safe for them to know—can stay with the legacy media, such as it is.

Sites where free speech thrives, no censorship. Freetalk45 from OAN (One America News) is one of several new alternatives to the big tech censoring sites.  They bill themselves as, “The next generation of social networking and community! No shadow banning or censorship—just freedom of expression, pure and simple.” More info at OAN launches FreeTalk45: Freedom of Speech Online. A second free speech site to watch is Frankspeech.com from Mike Lindell, the My Pillow Guy, a true patriot.

Need a free nonpartisan site that can make you a well-informed voter in elections at the local level as well as state and national? We recommend Ballotpedia.

Here’s a great way to join thousands—and eventually millions—of others who are letting their government representatives know their thoughts on pending legislation.  Heritage Action for America from the Heritage Foundation makes doing so super EASY! They do the research. They inform you. Then in almost the blink of an eye, you contact your federal or state representatives regarding pending legislation expressing your support or opposition.

Association of Mature American Citizens (AMAC) AARP is a shill for big government, AMAC isn’t.

Fox News and One America News (OAN) Cable channel

The Epoch Times print newspaper and web site/email updates

Dennis Prager  This man will help you find the mainstream conservative hiding inside you.

President Donald Trump’s Great America PAC is now up and running.  Give to this PAC or to individual candidates you know to be truly conservative. Money given to the Republican Party is money down a RINO hole.

Texas Score Card https://texasscorecard.com/state/legislative-priorities-tracker/

Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute. Doing an outstanding job training the next generation of young conservatives. Very active on college campuses.

Project Veritas, Fun and informative hidden camera videos exposing the secret agendas of the left in their own words.

Columns worth reading

Each week under this heading, Soap Box will feature columns or intros to columns you can read in full elsewhere on the internet. Each of these columns pretty much express Soap Box’s views, else we’d not be sharing them with you.

GUEST COLUMN #1: Disband the FBI by Chris Farrell writing for theGatestone Institute. While Soap Box views askance the suggestion that the FBI be disbanded, we have to say that if that agency continues on its current partisan path, better that it be disbanded than it become the KGB of the Democrat Party. Where, oh where, are Elliot Ness and his Untouchables when we need them?

GUEST COLUMN #2: How we take back our colleges and universities. Morton Blackwell, President and founder of the Leadership Institute, is a man I admire as much as any man in this country. In this brief letter Morton explains how, over time, sane thought will erode the nonsense that is today so much the college and university experience.

I have been a generous supporter of the Leadership Institute for more than two decades. Please consider joining me in that effort!

GUEST COLUMN #1: Disband the FBI

by Chris Farrell writing atGatestone Institute July 28, 2021 at 5:00 am

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) continues its downward spiral into terminal corruption. Sadly, the scandals, criminality and ethical abuses of the organization are largely ignored by the American public and by the institutions of government charged with oversight and correction. Outrage after outrage is reported, hearings are held, Inspector General reports are issued — but the systemic corruption is never really tackled and dirty cops skate away virtually unscathed.

This situation is constitutionally unacceptable, corrosive to public trust in law enforcement, and a threat to the survival of the republic.

In the past few days alone, we have learned that the October 2020 Michigan governor kidnap plot was largely a creation of the FBI; a “senior FBI official” was on the take from media organizations; and another assistant director was in a “romantic relationship with a subordinate” and involved in “other misconduct.” The leadership failures documented by the Office of the Inspector General are now almost standard and part of a tiresome media drip-torture for the public to endure.

Meanwhile, the FBI had the audacity to issue a Stasi-like tweet urging “monitoring of ‘family members and peers’ for extremism.”

Remember: what we learn about the FBI in the press are only the stories that are SO outrageous that the FBI cannot keep a lid on them and is forced to make disclosures via a toothless Inspector General report — but never anything that results in a criminal indictment. Imagine what the ordinary day-to-day misconduct in FBI offices across the country could be. And these scandals don’t just amount to “bad press” – in several of these, federal courts scourge the FBI for lawbreaking. Additionally, Inspector General report after report details FBI abuses such as whistleblowers being retaliated against and ignoring “high-risk” employees who fail polygraph tests.

There are still apologists for the FBI. Some seek to defend the organization with the rationalization that “it’s always been that way.” That sort of thinking is a cynical effort to inoculate and immunize real criminality as something normal and regular. “Get used to it kid, that’s the way of the world,” they offer with a shrug and a grin. Others, like Sean Hannity, cling to the “just a few bad apples” excuse. That sort of FBI cheerleading flies in the face of a litany of systemic abuses and pervasive abusers. The FBI ran a coup against President Trump. It failed.

The following got away: Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Clinesmith, Pientka, Brower, Baker, et al. Any real consequences for attempting to overthrow the government of the United States? No.

In May 2018, veteran reporter Eric Lichtblau of Time magazine wrote an article titled, “The FBI Is in Crisis. It’s Worse Than You Think,” wherein he detailed:

“The bureau, which is used to making headlines for nabbing crooks, has been grabbing the spotlight for unwanted reasons: fired leaders, texts between lovers and, most of all, attacks by President Trump … internal and external reports have found lapses throughout the agency, and longtime observers, looking past the partisan haze, see a troubling picture: something really is wrong at the FBI… other painful, more public failures as well: missed opportunities to prevent mass shootings that go beyond the much-publicized overlooked warnings in the Parkland, Fla., school killings; an anguishing delay in the sexual-molestation probe into Olympic gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar; and evidence of misconduct by agents in the aftermath of standoffs with armed militias in Nevada and Oregon. FBI agents are facing criminal charges ranging from obstruction to leaking classified material.”

Four years later and the situation has not improved.

Let us go back to the Michigan governor “kidnap plot” for a moment. The entire operation was an anti-Trump political smear job — and was called into question for being exactly that back when the story broke in October 2020. Now we find out that the FBI was running at least a dozen paid “confidential informants” in the plot. It was a plot they dreamed up. It was actually a rehash of an Obama-era 2010 FBI plot by the so-called “Hutarees” that fell apart in court.

The FBI worries about “entrapment” in these cases because the FBI must demonstrate that there is reasonable suspicion that the subject in a case is about to be or is engaging in criminal activity. The government then allows the criminal/terrorist the opportunity to commit the act. In these cases, the FBI has good reason to worry.

More disturbingly, this is nothing new. Look at the “Herald Square Bomber” case as another instance in which the FBI identifies, recruits, trains, dispatches and then arrests the very informant they recruited in the first place. The FBI appears to have fabricated plots and terrorists to advance their own agenda and statistics. It looks, walks, and talks like “entrapment.” Are there really no other bad guys out there for the FBI to go after? They need to focus on this modus operandi?

Questions are now being raised as to whether the FBI had a role in the Capitol Hill protests of January 6, 2021. When one examines the FBI’s involvement in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax; Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) abuses; standing by idly while in possession of Hunter Biden’s Ukraine and Burisma-laden laptops, while President Trump endured a second phony impeachment; and the frame-up of Trump’s National Security Advisor, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn – it is not too difficult to imagine. And that is just the problem: It is not difficult to imagine. It should be an “impossibility.”

The FBI needs to go away. It should happen in an orderly and thoughtful process, over a period of months. Congress should authorize and create an investigative division in the U.S. Marshals Service and open applications for law enforcement officer seeking to be rigorously screened, vetted and then accessed into the new organization. Similar action was taken before in the very creation of the FBI. It is now time to clean house and restore the public’s trust in the “premier investigative agency” of federal law enforcement.

Chris Farrell is Director of Investigations at Judicial Watch and Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.

© 2021 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute.

GUEST COLUMN #2: How we take back our colleges and universities

By Morton C. Blackwell, President and founder of the Leadership Institute. 8/10/2021

Friends,

You and I both know the appalling state of America’s colleges and universities.

Leftist professors indoctrinate students and intimidate conservatives who push back.

However, conservative students often stand up successfully to leftist bullies when they have strength in numbers.

That’s why this fall, I’m sending out a highly-trained team of Leadership Institute field representatives to lead the charge against the campus left.

Brave conservative students face aggressive opposition from the left. LI’s field representatives help them stand strong for freedom.

Earlier this month, 43 candidates from an impressive pool of applicants arrived at Leadership Institute headquarters to attend field representative training.

After this rigorous training program, my team selected the best 25 applicants as this year’s field representatives.

Serving as an LI field representative marks an exciting opportunity for any young conservative. One of my current staff members, Andrew Greene, started as a field representative. He tells us:

“When I was a field representative back in 2019 what I will never forget is how much it meant to students to have someone there to support them.

So many young people feel alone on college campuses and it was always uplifting to me to see their faces when I would tell them that we are starting a conservative club on their campus. Thankfully, in one semester I was able to help start 19 student groups on campuses all over North Carolina.”

These top-notch field representatives will follow Andrew’s example. They’ll travel to college campuses across the country to organize, train, and inspire students to start conservative campus groups.

Over the course of the fall semester, my field reps will set up recruitment tables and use social media outreach to identify and recruit tens of thousands of conservative students.

When conservative students have a group on campus where they meet like-minded peers, they become more confident and more willing to stand up against the campus left.

With this new-found confidence they educate other students about their principles, invite conservative speakers to campus, and much more.

Thank you for so generously supporting this crucial project. Together, you and I will take back America’s colleges and universities from the left.

Cordially,

Morton C. Blackwell

President, Leadership Institute The Leadership Institute, 1101 N. Highland St., Steven P.J. Wood Building, Arlington, VA 22201, United States, (703) 247-2000