You hear about how bad San Francisco is. I was filming a shot of my father , Shelby Steele, and in the ten minutes we were gone our SUV was broken into and nearly $15k of cameras stolen. Called 911 & they hung up twice.
This is the video. Black Chevy Blazer with license plate #9AAZ318. Still no SF police.
Found more equipment missing. Now about $25k -$30k. Plus rental car damage. SF police doing nothing. It’s so bad that my friend is calling gang members for help.
At the police. Every single person here had their car broken into and we’ve been here 15 minutes!
While dealing with our situation we see more robbers pulling up in a Mercedes and looking into cars. We yelled at them. They pulled a gun on my friend. He’s filing his report now. Not one police officer showed up.
People asking where this was. On top of famous Lombard Street. One of richest neighborhoods in SF and America. I’ve worked dangerous neighborhoods for years and nothing like this.
We just left police station. The officer was kind and took down all info. She expressed sympathy and said nothing will likely happen: “The police have been defanged.”
On Monday, we attended San Francisco’s meeting on reparations — see my father in tan jacket in photo. Some of the committee members were arguing for more defunding of the police. Just crazy.
Just learned from a Good Samaritan that the license plate on the Blazer was stolen off a 2022 Mitsubishi owned by Enterprise. Just as SF locals told us would be the case.
Guy at Hertz car rental at SFO said they average 3O cars a day that have been broken into.
My father and I never thought we would be in the position of having a good friend ours set up a Go Fund Me for us. We lost even more than we realized and any support would truly be appreciated. It will allow us to continue making this film which is the filmic sequel to my… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
We are back out filming with our remaining equipment. The shot is the only thing that counts.
Talked to my insurance rep. I told her what happened & she says, “I’m not surprised.” & then tells me that her own car was stolen despite all her precautions.
Not only that, several San Franciscans stopped us today with their own crime stories.
We have to get off this bottom.
Here’s the video of the second 911 call after the first call was hung up/disconnected. Here we get disconnected again. (Above, I said hung up in heat of moment. Still, should not be two failed calls, especially in wealthy, high tech SF. What if it was a rape?)
Here's the SF reality: my father & I realized we can't even go out to dinner tonight after a crazy week of filming. Who's going to watch our SUV rental while we eat? Do we have to move the equipment into the hotel room to enjoy a meal? Criminals - not the law - run this city.
“You left $$$ of equipment out in broad daylight.”
“The police need to step up.”
Both are true. I take full responsibility. At the same time, police need to do real work. But there’s a third part: the people. Too many San Franciscans have surrendered. They need to retake power.
There’s been speculation on the race of the robbers. Many say black. However, I can’t tell the race of robbers who broke into my suv from the video. The robbers in the Mercedes were light skin. The robber that pulled gun was black. To default to all black is not accurate.
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Leon Bass was a nineteen-year-old African-American sergeant serving in a segregated army unit when he encountered the "walking dead" of Buchenwald. Like many others, he tried to repress his memories of the horrors that he saw there and "never talked about it all."
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But in the 1960s, while involved in the Civil Rights movement and teaching, he met a Holocaust survivor and felt moved to declare to his students that “I was there, I saw.”
Leon Bass: "Nobody ever talked about the things we did in the Battle of the Bulge. No one talked about the 761st Tank Battalion, which was black, who fought all the way through Europe with General Patton.
It has been 10 years since Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown. Shelby Steele and I made “What Killed Michael Brown?” & I am often asked what the lasting impact has been.
Answer: What happened in Ferguson split America into two & we have not recovered. 🧵 amazon.com/Killed-Michael…
One side believes that America is systemically racist and the other side believes that America has made much progress since the 1960s.
I remember watching the events of Ferguson unfold in real-time and was horrified that Brown’s body laid on the concrete for 4 1/2 hours. (When I filmed the 4th anniversary of his death, I could not keep my knee on the concrete for more than 30 seconds at a time.)
Yes, America is the nation that enslaved & segregated my family going back who knows how many centuries — I am the first male in my family to be born free of those historical oppressions.
Yet America also made my family today possible.
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My paternal grandfather, born in 1900 to parents who were born in slavery, marched for equal rights for all because he believed in the American principles despite being denied them.
He only had a third grade education, yet he read every book around and could have easily been a professor. Even how he fell in love and married was not conventional.
I was recently invited onto a podcast. Emails were exchanged, the date set. Then I mentioned my deafness and my need to lipread. What happened next was that I was ghosted.
A friend asked if I was angry. To my surprise, I said no and that I felt blessed.
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The one lesson I learned early in life due to my deafness is that life is unfair. It just is. Yet, at the same time, life is full of endless opportunities.
In today’s America where we argue over the ideological form of equity, equality of manufactured outcomes, manufactured fairness, my life has been blessed with the true form of equity, the kind that gifts me the equality of opportunities.
After enduring a week of unwarranted takedowns of the Killing America trailer on @Youtube and @Vimeo as well as receiving a baseless cease and desist letter that seeks to prevent my documentary from being shown in its original form, I’ve decided to release the full (38 min) version of Killing America on this platform.
Let’s be clear, @TheMAChronicle claims that this is a copyright issue, but it is not. Our work is fully protected by the Fair Use doctrine, which allows us to use even copyrighted footage under certain guidelines. (See explanation in comments section.)
These left-wing activists cannot stand dissent or opposition to the ideological order they seek to impose in our schools as well as our larger society. What you are witnessing here is the weaponization of the copyright law in these ugly culture wars to prevent my film from being shown in its full form. This is nothing less than suppression of free speech, which includes artistic expression and free thought.
The "crime" that Killing America commits is telling the truth during these ideological times. Watch the film and you’ll see why extremist ideologues are doing everything in their power to censor the film and why I decided not to play their game and go straight to you, The People.
Lastly, I have made the point to release this film as widely as possible for free because I want the word out. We've been too far timid and we've allowed ourselves to be intimidated for too long, so please share this film widely.
At the same time, people have asked if they can donate small fee for watching the film or make a contribution to cover the cost that I personally incurred during the making of the film as well as legal fees (lawyer consults). I truly appreciate this because this film was a labor of love for me, a continuation of my family’s legacy of civil rights activism that dates back to 1942:
What happens when you try to tell the truth in a world invested in ideological lies?
This AM, I received an email from @YouTube: “We received a copyright removal request for your video (#KillingAmerica). Based on applicable copyright law, we removed your video from YouTube.”
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The complainant was Menlo-Atherton High School’s newspaper, M-A Chronicle (@TheMAChronicle), and they objected to the inclusion of a two-second clip in the Killing America trailer. I checked the trailer’s @YouTube page and, indeed, it had been removed.
This unwarranted and unjustified removal hurts our attempts to market this film and I have no doubt that this is their intention.