The Cancel Culture Comes to Mega-Rich Atherton, CA

by Roger L. Simon

When you hear something—a video, an article, a book, or whatever—is being threatened with cancelation or has been canceled, chances are it’s something very much worth reading or seeing.

That’s the way things are now in our left-dominated culture we could call “Socialism with American Characteristics,” which has become increasingly similar to, and in some ways worse than, communist China’s self-proclaimed “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.”

So when I received an email from Eli Steele on April 4 with the headline “School Newspaper Tries to Takedown ‘Killing America,’” I paid attention, not just because it was yet another cancellation attempt, but because I have known the filmmakers, Eli and his father, the esteemed Hoover Institute senior fellow and author of “White Guilt,” Shelby Steele, for some time.

This father-son duo has produced some impressive work in the past, notably “What Killed Michael Brown?” that put paid to the “Hands up, don’t shoot!” deliberately misleading racial propaganda so heavily exploited by then-president Barack Obama and his “wingman,” attorney general Eric Holder, after the 2014 events in Ferguson, Missouri.

Here’s what Eli had to say in that recent email about his new film “Killing America”:

“This morning, as I was driving my kids to school, I received an email from YouTube stating the following: ‘We received a copyright removal request for your video. Based on applicable copyright law, we removed your video from YouTube.’”

I will interrupt here to say the film was subsequently canceled by Vimeo. It is still available on Rumble and Twitter/X. And, yes, I have seen it. It’s riveting. But back to Eli’s email that expands on the problem and explains what the film is about:

“This unwarranted and unjustified removal hurts our attempts to market this film and I have no doubt that this is their intention. The video that I used in the trailer and the film was published online and to YouTube and was filmed at a school board meeting, a public forum. I should also mention that Menlo-Atherton High School is a public high school and its paper likely receives public funding.

“It would be an understatement to say that Menlo-Atherton High School does not come off looking good in our film. We went [to] great lengths to explain in a factual and dispassionate manner how one of their teachers, Chloe Gentile-Montgomery, an ethnic studies teacher, used ideological lies to teach the Hamas-Israeli conflict. Among her lies were the statements that the United Nations declared that the existence of Israel was “illegal,” that Hamas were a people from Palestine (as opposed to terrorists) who targeted soldiers (when civilians were, in fact, the main target).”

It’s worth noting at this point exactly where this is taking place—Atherton, California. Where’s that? Many of you may already know, but it is the priciest real estate in the country, possibly in the world with neighboring Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley and once home to Mark Zuckerberg, not far behind,

From The Hill: “Beverly Hills’ 90210 may be the most famous ZIP code in the country—thanks to the 1990s TV show—but’s actually not the priciest. That honor goes to Atherton, home to some of Silicon Valley’s wealthiest.”

As of this writing, Zillow lists 29 homes for sale in Atherton from a low of $5.5 million to $42 million. These are the people, some of them anyway, that are doing the canceling and are also being spoon-fed antisemitic lies.

Eli continues: “We also exposed that the Sequoia Union High School District, home to Menlo-Atherton High School, had been removing honors classes for the past eight years behind the backs of parents. Many of the classes were also being tainted with the teachings of liberated ethnic studies, the radical version that divides students into the oppressors and the oppressed.”

No wonder, as Eli also notes, they want to cancel the film.

What’s actually quite sad when viewing “Killing America” is the degree to which supposedly disadvantaged groups, often through the zealotry and obvious overweening ambitions of their leaders, are stabbing themselves in the back. They are making things worse for everybody in their fear of or disdain for the meritocracy that most of the rest of the world still adheres to for good reason. This augurs poorly for America’s future, to say the least.

I urge everyone to see this documentary while they can. You can do so at the Rumble and Twitter/X links above. The cancel culture—in essence an attack on the First Amendment guaranteed freedom of speech that was what, arguably above all else, made America unique—continues to hold sway via the usual reactionary leftwing suspects, not to mention, now of all things, a high school newspaper.

That the Atherton-based wealthy-beyond-words pillars of the Silicon Valley are acquiescing to this in their schools only give credence to the belief that High Tech, that seemed so promising and exciting not so long ago, has turned into our country’s dominant lever of thought control.

Luddite, anyone?

First published in the Epoch Times.