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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.

 

2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation. Takes about a 10% cut.
 

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Behind The Black
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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.


“You have no right to speak.”

The quote in the headline gives only a taste of the thuggery, bigotry, and hate expressed by the protesters at the University of Missouri last fall against whites and anyone who dared disagree with them. Go here to get the full flavor, which includes women being harassed and threatened merely because she happened to be white, protesters threatening to kill whites because they weren’t immediately getting what they wanted, and of course, at least one teacher, Melissa Click, threatening a student journalist with violence for reporting on the protests.

I am still only giving you a taste. The worst part of the story is that the fascists on all of today’s campuses were very well represented by the thugs who took over the University of Missouri last year. It isn’t any different elsewhere. Don’t dare express dissent to the left wing orthodoxy, or you might find yourself the target of violence and hate.

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

  • Joe

    Educators like Melissa Click and the Mizzou president are a blight and a cancer on society,they teach racism and hate, I am a bit young to remember SDS in the sixties and seventies, I wonder how these movements differ?

  • The SDS was similar, and even more violent (with an offshoot becoming the bomb-throwing Weatherman). However, in the 1960s college administrators and public officials were far less inclined to bow to their demands. And the general school population would have considered the idea of “safe spaces” and “microaggressions” to be absurd and fascist. Now, these fascists appear either to have the support of a majority of the college population or that population has been cowed into submission.

  • ken anthony

    Now you know the real reason for ‘free’ education. When are we going to stop the redistribution? The left couldn’t exist without it.

  • Tom Billings

    Unlike some others, I *am* old enough to remember the college demonstrators of the 1960s, and the results. As Robert Z. has said, most college administrators in 1965 would stand for nothing like this nonsense. However, by 1969, there were 2 examples of how far and how fast things had fallen.

    At the University of Washington, in the spring, there were mass demonstrations organized by people like Mario Savio and other self-described “red diaper babies”, the children of parents who had been communist party members by the 1930s. These “demonstrations” led to the “occupation” of the university’s administrative offices without substantive resistance, and the complete capitulation of the University to “red diaper baby” demands. The “red diaper babies” now moved East, to MIT. They began organizing massive demonstrations to target the Guidance Lab on the MIT campus, which developed the guidance systems for most of the US ICBM deterrent force.

    They did not anticipate “Doc Draper”. He had headed the guidance efforts at MIT since the mid-1930s. He now acted to secure his facility without the help of the spineless MIT administration. “Doc” went out and used his own funds to purchase enough AR-15s and ammunition to arm every staffer in the Guidance Lab, from the lowest janitor up to and including himself. He cleared some basement space in the large building to making a firing range, where he and others with the knowledge trained his staffers to shoot. He attracted them by providing food and drink in an adjoining room as well, and a party atmosphere at the after hours training sessions developed.

    He searched for and found a young grad student working at the Lab who had a girlfriend, who had just joined the “demo organizing committee”. When there were an impressive number of volunteers participating in the after hours shooting activity, he suggested to the young fellow that he invite her over to the party. She found “Doc” bent over a map of the building planning out shooting positions with his chief subordinates. As expected, she scampered back to “the demo committee” with word of what they would be facing.

    Not too surprisingly, the “demo committee” decided within 24 hours to change their target. Instead of the Guidance Lab, they would protest and occupy the activities of the group at MIT doing Ballistic Missile Defense work. The Guidance Lab barely heard a mummur throughout this circus, but MIT’s Administration still collapsed to the pressure, and BMD work was no longer welcome at MIT.

    The true problem for the Guidance Lab came in the aftermath. The MIT Administration found out, probably from organizers, about “Doc”‘s preparations, …and were horrified! Within weeks after the campus seemed to be back to normal, the MIT Administration announced that the Guidance Lab would no longer be part of MIT. Of course, the DoD contracts MIT had so willingly signed between 1939 and 1969 forbade them from giving the Guidance Lab the bum’s rush. It took several years before “Draper Labs” came formally into being as a separate entity, but it was a foregone conclusion for MIT’s administrators.

    This type of detachment began to multiply throughout the 1970s, and by now it is nearly complete. By 1975, at the latest, people who had been in those “student demos” began occupying administrative offices at campuses across the country. By 1995, they, and people prepared by a slanted view of recent history to believe them, were in the majority in meetings of administrators around the country.

    Thus, the transformation of US Universities began in violence, and is ending in violence, with those in charge never willing after the Republic of Vietnam’s defeat to defend their institutions, because it was politically incorrect to do so.

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