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The time has come for my annual short Thanksgiving/Christmas fund drive for Behind The Black. I must do this every year in order to make sure I have earned enough money to pay my bills.

 

For this two-week campaign, I am offering a special deal to encourage donations. Donations of $200 will get a free autographed copy of the new paperback edition of Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, while donations of $250 will get a free autographed copy of the new hardback edition. If you desire a copy, make sure you provide me your address with your donation.

 

As I noted in July, the support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.

 

In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.

 

Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.

 

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Pushback: Non-profit legal firm warns 200 law schools they will be sued if they defy the Supreme Court’s decision ending all racial quotas

AFL logo
Only one in an army of lawyers willing to
fight for freedom and the Bill of Rights

Bring a gun to a knife fight: One day after the Supreme Court ruled on June 29, 2023 [pdf] that affirmative action was nothing more than outright racial discrimination and that universities must stop using race as a criteria for admitting students or hiring faculty, the non-profit legal firm America’s First Legal (AFL) wasted no time and sent demand letters to the deans of every law school in the United States, numbering 200, warning them to stop these racist policies or it will sue them.

America First Legal’s letter demands that law schools immediately halt these discriminatory and unlawful practices. It further puts the deans of every law school on notice: if they do not stop, America First Legal will bring legal action against them.

The letter to the Harvard University Law School, found here [pdf], is a good sample. In it AFL makes very clear it will immediately take action if this or any other law school develops “an admissions scheme through pretext or proxy to achieve the same discriminatory outcome.”

Any such regime—for example, relying on biography over qualifications—to achieve desired racial outcomes is clearly illegal and unconstitutional, and you will face legal repercussions accordingly.

We will ensure that every faculty member, staff member, student, and applicant for admission can communicate with us about any efforts to use underhanded race, national origin, and sex preferences, and we will use any information obtained to ensure accountability.

That the AFL has put these schools on notice is not the only threat these schools face if they continue their racist policies. AFL is one of a host of new non-profit legal firms that have sprung up in the past two decades to continue the fight — abandoned by the ACLU — of defending the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights from government encroachment. Every single one of those other non-profits will be eager to sue as well, should anyone ask them for legal help because they were discriminated against because of their race or ethnicity.

And these law firms will win, based on the Supreme Court’s decision.

There is much partisan corruption in academia and in Washington and our federal government. In academia it has made it practically impossible for conservatives to get a job. In the executive branch of the federal government that partisan corruption is so dominant that it has felt free to use its power enthusiastically for the past few years to squelch freedom and impose blacklists.

The law however remains, and it appears that competition and freedom is spurring many in the legal community to use that law to fight this corruption. To change the bigoted and close-minded culture in academia will likely take decades at best. AFL’s action here suggests that this change is coming, even if it means some universities will be bankrupted because they refuse to change.

Winning that fight in the federal government remains more difficult, however, since there is ample evidence that those in control are now willing to fix elections to maintain their power, and have been honing their methods for the past few elections. Fixing this problem will require a complete overhaul of government, beginning at the local level where election boards are run, and slowly moving up to the national level. In the meantime, those in power will be working to stymie the legal fight elsewhere.

Who will win still remains unknown.

UPDATE: Today AFL sent out a similar letter to the nation’s medical schools. See:

America First Legal Sends Letters to 150 Medical Schools Across the United States, Demanding the End of All Race, Sex, and National Origin Preferences Following SCOTUS Ruling

Today, one week after the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, America First Legal (AFL) sent a demand letter to the deans of nearly every medical school in the United States, demanding that they cease discriminating based on race, sex, and national origin in admissions and faculty hiring.

The letter to Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine [pdf] is typical. The language however is even more forceful than the letter AFL sent to the law schools.

As lawyer William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection correctly noted on July 5th, “Anybody who thinks racial preferences are over is kidding themselves. The schools will do a workaround almost universally.”

As I said above, it will take decades to change the bigoted culture that has entrenched itself in American academia. The people who believe in it are still there, and they remain blindly passionate in defending their bigoted beliefs.

AFL’s actions are a simply the right and properly aggressive next step in winning that war.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

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