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Readers! A November fund-raising drive!

 

It is unfortunately time for another November fund-raising campaign to support my work here at Behind the Black. I really dislike doing these, but 2025 is so far turning out to be a very poor year for donations and subscriptions, the worst since 2020. I very much need your support for this webpage to survive.

 

And I think I provide real value. Fifteen years ago I said SLS was garbage and should be cancelled. Almost a decade ago I said Orion was a lie and a bad idea. As early as 1998, long before almost anyone else, I predicted in my first book, Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, that private enterprise and freedom would conquer the solar system, not government. Very early in the COVID panic and continuing throughout I noted that every policy put forth by the government (masks, social distancing, lockdowns, jab mandates) was wrong, misguided, and did more harm than good. In planetary science, while everyone else in the media still thinks Mars has no water, I have been reporting the real results from the orbiters now for more than five years, that Mars is in fact a planet largely covered with ice.

 

I could continue with numerous other examples. If you want to know what others will discover a decade hence, read what I write here at Behind the Black. And if you read my most recent book, Conscious Choice, you will find out what is going to happen in space in the next century.

 

 

This last claim might sound like hubris on my part, but I base it on my overall track record.

 

So please consider donating or subscribing to Behind the Black, either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. I could really use the support at this time. There are five ways of doing so:

 

1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.

 

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You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.


Democratic Party voters fire Soros-backed DA in Portland


Looters in downtown Portland in 2021

In a non-partisan primary on May 21, 2024, Portland voters rejected in large numbers the Soros-backed district attorney they had voted for only four years previously.

On Tuesday night, voters in Multnomah County, Oregon fired one-term George Soros-backed incumbent District Attorney Mike Schmidt.

Fox 12 called the race at approximately 9:30 pm local time with Schmidt’s opponent Nathan Vasquez leading 58 percent to 42 percent. In a non-partisan primary, if a candidate garners over 50 percent of the vote, they are declared the winner of the election but don’t take office until January 2025.

Though the primary election in Portland was “non-partisan” (in that no party affiliation for any candidate was listed) in this wholly Democratic Party-controlled stronghold there was no doubt that both candidates were from that party, and the vast majority of the voters were leftist Democrats as well.

Unlike Republican voters or Republican politicians, who like to whine but rarely do anything to get rid of bad apples, the Democrats in Oregon decided that Schmidt’s reign of disaster these last four years required a change. Schmidt had followed the leftist anti-police agenda of numerous other Soros-backed DAs nationwide.

Schmidt won in a landslide election in 2020, winning over 76% of the vote while campaigning as a progressive prosecutor.

He joined a class of new leftist district attorneys — many whose campaigns were supported by George Soros’ money through various political action campaigns — who vowed to use their offices to further a left-wing agenda of not prosecuting crimes because of racial disparities among suspects and convicts.

The result was out-of-control crime, Antifa and BLM riots and looting, a drug epidemic, homeless encampments everywhere, and a bankrupt and shuttered downtown. No surprise Portland’s population dropped almost 3% from 2020 to 2022, a decline that still continues, reversing a previous growth trend that had lasted decades.

Vasquez had been Schmidt’s subordinate, but he had also worked in the DA office for years while Schmidt had little experience as a prosecutor. Vasquez was also closely tied to the Democratic Party machine that runs the city’s government, which almost certainly supported his candidacy. For example, the union that represents the city’s prosecutors endorsed Vasquez.

This election result moreover is not the first time Democratic Party voters had the courage to remove a bad Soros-backed DA. San Francisco voters did it two years ago when they recalled Chesa Boudin by overwhelming numbers.

Change can always happen. In fact, change will always happen. The difference is whether the citizenry will take positive action and choose the change they want, or sit back and allow others to choose for them, and likely do it badly.

Portland voters demonstrated that the former is always possible, and it is possible from both sides of the political aisle.

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 or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. 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

4 comments

  • Concerned

    Portland will still be a leftist hellhole.
    Just not quite as deep.

  • Edward

    Robert wrote: “Change can always happen. In fact, change will always happen. The difference is whether the citizenry will take positive action and choose the change they want, or sit back and allow others to choose for them, and likely do it badly.

    Concerned is correct. In addition, San Francisco isn’t any better without Boudin than with him. The difference only happens when there is a choice for the change that the citizenry want. Neither of America’s major parties presents such a choice for us to make. Both parties choose their candidates and nominees badly, and no matter the choice the rest of us make, we still end up with the same result, as demonstrated by the lack of change after San Francisco recalled its DA.

    Soros is not the problem. He may look like it, and he may be the change that Obama had hoped for, but it Soros isn’t the problem.

    The voters are the problem. They do not demand better candidates, so they don’t get them. The voters are still willing to vote for the candidates presented to them, whether they be bad candidates or worse candidates. There is no incentive for either two political party to present mediocre candidates, much less good ones, so they continue to give us bad candidates or worse candidates, people not worth voting for — yet the voters vote for them anyway. Thus, all we get is a bad ruling class, or worse.

    Only when enough voters revolt against these bad choices will the parties learn that they must change. Until then, change is only a hope.

  • Tom Billings

    I finished off a degree in 2003, at one core of Portland’s self-immolation into progressive politics, … Portland State University, … the other being Reed College. In that final year, my lack of progressive outlook at PSU resulted in 3 separate incidents of threat against me, for not “going with the flow”. Fortunately, no one proceeded to actual idiocy.

    The atmosphere, however, was indicative of what was developing. By 2007, Rose City Antifa was founded by a young lady I had met at PSU, intent on turning a class on Geopolitics into a seminar for revolution, … STASI-style. The 13 years after that only spilled more “activists” into the community from academia. The Schmidt years were all too predictable by the time I became a tax refugee north of the River in 2015. Too much of it leaked across the River since then, but fewer are willing to put up with it here than on the Oregon side.

    It accelerated with Hatfield being the great Senate Patron of universities in Oregon, and has yet to stop flowing. But at least they still have the brains of a flatworm, … that will turn away from enough pain.

  • pzatchok

    This just proves that most lefty voters do not think about how the lefts ideas would effect them over several years.
    They ‘just go with the flow’. Make it sound nice and that it could ‘help’ someone and their own self aggrandizing and self centered attitude kicks right in.

    Then after they do find out it hams themselves they try to blame other some how.
    The right would not let us spend enough money on our project. They never let us fully implement communism. They never put enough money into our drug programs. and so on and so on.

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