Adidas has apologised to the model Bella Hadid after pulling adverts in which she was promoting a sport shoe first launched to coincide with the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Adidas last week said it was “revising” its campaign after criticism from Israel over Hadid’s involvement in the campaign for the retro SL72 trainers. Hadid is an American whose family has roots in Palestine.
The apology, issued on Instagram, said: “Connections continue to be made to the terrible tragedy that occurred at the Munich Olympics due to our recent SL72 campaign,” referring to the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre when Israeli athletes were taken hostage by the Black September Organization, a Palestinian militant group. Eleven Israelis, a German police officer and five of the attackers died.
The statement continued: “These connections are not meant, and we apologise for any upset or distress caused to communities around the world. We made an unintentional mistake. We also apologise to our partners, Bella Hadid, ASAP Nast, Jules Koundé, and others, for any negative impact on them and we are revising the campaign.”
On Friday, the German-based company had said in a statement it was “revising the remainder of the campaign” after criticism over Hadid’s involvement by Israel on X. “Guess who the face of their campaign is?” read a post on Israel’s official account. “Bella Hadid, a model who has a history of spreading antisemitism and calling for violence against Israelis and Jews.”
Hadid had previously been criticised by Israel for allegedly chanting: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,”on a march in 2021.
Adidas was condemned by some Jewish organisations, with the American Jewish Committee labelling its decision as either a “massive oversight or intentionally inflammatory”. Others came out in support of Hadid. One fellow Adidas ambassador, the Palestinian-American author and activist Amani al-Khatahtbeh, posted an email she sent to Adidas on X, in which she said: “Bella Hadid is a model of Palestinian origin that has been a much-needed outspoken advocate for human right.” She added: “Adidas’s disappointing response conflates our Palestinian identity with terrorism.”
Hadid, 27, whose father is the Palestinian businessman Mohamed Hadid, has been vocal in her support for Palestine. In May she expressed her solidarity by wearing a dress crafted out of red and white keffiyehs during the film festival in Cannes. In 2023 she denounced the far-right Israeli national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir for saying Jewish settlers had more rights than Palestinians in occupied territories.
When she appeared on the cover of Vogue magazine in 2021, she said on Instagram: “A Palestinian girl on the cover of Vogue. The joy it brings me to say that … I won’t stop talking about the systematic oppression, pain and humility that Palestinians face on a regular basis.”
Hadid, who recently launched her own wellness brand, has faced death threats for her outspoken support.
The apology to Hadid and her fellow Adidas partners comes amid reports that she is speaking to lawyers about her options.
On the second day of the Republican National Convention, I made my way back to Milwaukee’s symphony hall to attend a town hall hosted by the conservative parents’ rights group Moms for Liberty. This wasn’t my first Moms for Liberty event—I’ve attended the annual summits for the past two years. Back in 2022, Betsy DeVos, who served as former President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education, delivered the line that got the loudest applause. “While I know that everything we did was with the interest of kids in mind and policies that would really give as much power back to the states and local communities as we possibly could,” she said, “I personally think the Department of Education should not exist.”
At the time, that statement felt a little bit edgy—like DeVos was saying the quiet part out loud. But two years later at yesterday’s event, many of the panelists expressed that same sentiment as a a foregone conclusion. “The fundamental problem that we have in the United States was the creation of the federal Department of Education,” Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) told the crowd of maybe 400 or so mostly white women. In his remarks, erstwhile GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy said, “We’re not just going to reform the Department of Education, it means we’re going to get there and actually shut it down.”
Does that mean that a ragtag group of moms single handedly turned the abolition of a behemoth government agency into a run-of-the-mill conservative talking point? Not exactly. On that issue and many others, Moms for Liberty has had a major assist from powerful conservative groups that share their goals—and are shaping the Republican agenda for 2024.
Founded in 2021 by three former school board members in Florida, Moms for Liberty rode the rising tide of anti-mask sentiment in the tumultuous year after schools were closed during the pandemic. The group’s leaders capitalized on the backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement after the murder of George Floyd. In fact, Moms for Liberty was one of the most prominent early groups to criticize the teaching of ant-racist curriculum in schools, which they incorrectly referred to as “critical race theory.” The group also vociferously opposed LGBTQ-inclusive lessons, and its members led campaigns to rid classrooms and school libraries of books deemed inappropriate.
Over time, Moms for Liberty grew in both membership and influence. Today, the group counts 130,000 members across chapters in 48 states. The organization groomed some members to run for local school boards, gradually expanding their influence throughout communities. Last year, all of the Republican presidential candidates, including former president Donald Trump, spoke at their annual conference in Pennsylvania.
In its marketing, Moms for Liberty comes off as a group of like-minded people, mostly women, who all happened to come together because of a shared concern for children. Founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Deskovich, the website says, are just a couple of “moms on a mission to stoke the fires of liberty.” But as I’ve previously reported, the organization’s connections to the Republican party run deep. Its conferences have been sponsored by the GOP training group the Leadership Institute and the conservative powerhouse think tank the Heritage Foundation. Earlier this week, after the RNC Heritage Foundation event, Moms for Liberty national director Catalina Stubbe told me that her group is “very close friends” with Heritage, which was one of the sponsors of today’s event, and whose president Kevin Roberts spoke on one of the panels.
Considering the group’s cozy relationship with Heritage, the RNC town hall panelists’ focus on abolishing the US Department of Education shouldn’t be surprising. Project 2025, the 920-page conservative policy roadmap that Heritage spearheaded, calls for the complete elimination of the Department of Education, along with the codification of parents’ rights laws similar to those in Florida, which strictly limit teachers’ use of LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum and books.
After the event, I spoke to Lydia Dominguez, a Moms for Liberty member running for school board in Clark County, Nevada. Dominguez, the mother of two teenage boys, told me that she believed schools “are being oversaturated by national agendas.” What kinds of national agendas? I asked. “They’re having CNN in the classroom,” she said. “They’re pushing national topics such as the transgender topics, sexualized content.”
————— She believed schools “are being oversaturated by national agendas…They’re having CNN in the classroom,” she said. “They’re pushing national topics such as the transgender topics, sexualized content.” —————
Monica Kepes serves as the secretary of a Moms for Liberty chapter in Washington County, Wisconsin. “I think the big bureaucratic institutions are instituting a lot of stuff that comes down through the education system,” she said. “I think the bigger you get, the more power there is, the more chance corruption and all that kind of stuff.”
At Moms for Liberty’s upcoming 2024 summit, which will take place next month in Washington, DC, it seems unlikely that the group will be able to muster a repeat performance of the star-studded speaker roster from last year. So far, this year’s list appears to be a grab bag of not especially famous ultra-conservative pundits, C-list comedians, and culture warriors. One reason for this lackluster lineup could be the fallout from a series of scandals in 2023. A group from a chapter in Kentucky posedfor a photo with the white nationalist group the Proud Boys. (Those members were later removed from the group.) Last year, a chapter leader in Indiana quoted Hitler in a newsletter. On the last evening of the annual summit a few months later, Justice, the co-founder, said in a speech, “One of our moms in a newsletter quotes Hitler…I stand with that mom!”
Butthe most damaging setbackcame in late 2023, when Christian Ziegler, chair of the Florida GOP, was accused of raping and illegally filming a woman who had been involved in a sexual relationship with him and his wife, Bridget Ziegler, a founding member of Moms for Liberty. As I wrote at the time, the situation was especially awkward because Ziegler helped craft Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” parents’ rights law, which forbids teachers in the state from talking about same-sex relationships. “The irony is crazy because you have this woman and her husband who are so concerned with preventing children from hearing anything that doesn’t totally align with their values,” one Florida mom told me at the time. “And then it’s like, I’m having to explain a three-way to a 12-year-old this week.” (Christian Ziegler has been cleared of rape charges; in March, the Florida state attorney’s office declined to criminally charge him for illegally filming the sexual encounter because of insufficient evidence.)
Unsurprisingly, no one mentioned the sex scandal (or any of the other ones) at the town hall event. But on one panel, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis took a victory lap about a bill Ziegler helped to create. “It used to be…you didn’t have to worry about your kid going to kindergarten and being told that they should change their gender,” he said. “We put the kibosh on that in Florida—we said, ‘We are not going to be indulging in things like gender ideology in our schools.’” The crowd whooped with approval.
The Republican Party seems to agree. Its official platform, released last week, calls for funding cuts for schools that embrace “woke” policies like LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum. This serves as a reminder that even though Moms for Liberty’s star appears to have dimmed over the past year, the reverberations from its movement will be felt for years to come. Moms for Liberty, cofounder Tina Descovich told the crowd, “is here to fight, fight, fight, and win, win, win.” She paused. “And winning we are.”
Donald Trump has chosen J.D. Vance as his running mate, the former president announced on Monday.
Vance, a first-term Republican senator from Ohio, was widely expected to be Trump’s vice presidential pick as the pool of potential hopefuls narrowed earlier in the day. Just hours before the announcement, several outlets reported that Gov. Doug Burgum (R-N.D.) and U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) were informed by the Trump campaign that they would not be on the 2024 ticket. Others previously thought to be on Trump’s short list included Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), U.S. House Rep. Elise Stefanink (R-N.Y.), and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson.
In a post on his own tech platform, Truth Social, Trump lauded Vance as the “person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States.”
“J.D. honorably served our Country in the Marine Corps, graduated from Ohio State University in two years, Summa Cum Laude, and is a Yale Law School Graduate, where he was Editor of The Yale Law Journal, and President of the Yale Law Veterans Association,” he said, adding that he “will be strongly focused on the people he fought so brilliantly for, the American Workers and Farmers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, and far beyond.”
The choice of Vance, who rose to fame as the author of the controversial memoir Hillbilly Elegy, was likely intended to help Trump shore up support among white, lower-income voters in the Midwest, where President Joe Biden is considered vulnerable in the 2024 race. According to poll averages from FiveThirtyEight, Trump leads Biden by more than nine points in Vance’s home state of Ohio, and Biden also trails in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Biden would likely need to win all three of the latter states to stave off a second Trump term, with swing states like Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada also looking vulnerable in 2024.
A former critic of Trump who recast himself as a politician in the MAGA model, Vance’s LGBTQ+ record differs very little from the man at the top of his ticket. During his two years in the U.S. Senate, Vance opposed the Respect for Marriage Act, which codified federal same-sex marriage rights in the event that Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2004 ruling legalizing marriage equality, is repealed by the Supreme Court. He also authored the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, which would make it a class C felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison, to provide gender-affirming surgery to trans minors. (This despite the fact that transition surgeries are rarely offered to patients under the age of 18 and only in cases of extreme medical need.)
Additionally, Vance is a supporter of the so-called “parent’s rights” movement, which advocates that LGBTQ+ students be outed to their parents and seeks to remove queer-affirming resources from classrooms. He has repeatedly referred to opponents of those actions as “groomers,” such as in an April 2022 post on X. “I’ll stop calling people ‘groomers’ when they stop freaking out about bills that prevent the sexualization of my children,” he wrote at the time.
The 39-year-old politician has also opposed diversity and inclusion in the U.S. armed forces, suggesting that he is likely to support re-banning trans servicemembers from the military should Trump be elected. “American political leaders should stop using America’s military as a social justice side project,” his 2022 campaign site reads. “Troops don’t need to focus on diversity or equity or any other progressive buzzword; they need to focus on fighting and winning America’s wars.” The removal of trans troops from the military is a major component of Project 2025, a set of far-right policy proposals shaped and promoted by the anti-LGBTQ+ Heritage Foundation, which Trump has sought to distance himself from in recent days.
Vance’s anti-LGBTQ+ background also includes claiming that Biden supports Ukraine because Russian President Vladimir Putin is anti-trans and blaming the “childless left” for America’s decline, specifically citing U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. Furthermore, he once accused U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) of making up the term “Two-Spirit,” which is broadly embraced by LGBTQ+ Native Americans to describe their identities. “Would love if progressives just stopped inventing words,” Vance posted on X in February 2021.
In repeatedly opposing LGBTQ+ equality, Vance has found a perfect match in Trump, whose administration was responsible for more than 200 attacks on queer rights in four years, according to GLAAD. These assaults included repealing protections for trans students, removing resources for LGBTQ+ Americans from federal websites, decimating funding for global HIV/AIDS prevention, and appointing a record-number of judges opposed to LGBTQ+ equality. His administration also made it harder for marginally housed people to find safe shelter and opposed workplace protections for LGBTQ+ employees.
Trump, whose own supporters threatened to kill his last vice president for refusing to support Trump’s 2020 bid to remain in office, is likely to resume many of those policies if reelected in November.
While a lot of the people that follow Mock Paper Sissors follow me, I still loved this post so much and the way TG wrote it, I am reposting it here. Hugs. Scottie
A tRump appointed judge in a case filed by maga republicans and anti-LGBTQ+ bigots / haters to try to strip the gay and trans kids of rights and protections. Notice some places I highlighted, these groups and the Judge used misinformation and republican talking points to make their case. It comes down to hate and bigotry, also the unwillingness to allow society to progress adding more equality. There are no proven cases of any trans person assaulting a straight person in a bathroom, in fact there are many cases that are just the opposite, where trans kids / people have been attacked and even died from assaults by cis people. These people claim that boys will just claim to be trans, that is not how it works. No boy is going to with stand the harassment to change his name, his hair, his mode of dress just to peek in the girl’s locker room or bathroom. What they hell would they see in a girl’s bathroom people, there are no urinals just stalls. Unless the girls like to undress in the sink area, WTF is the boys to see? Again simply hate and bigotry wanting to stop society from change, they want their 1950s society back, not the 2010s. Hugs. Scottie
Republicans have argued that the rule is a ruse by the Biden administration to allow transgender females to play on girls’ and women’s sports teams.
Kansas high school students, family members and advocates rally for transgender rights in Topeka on Jan. 31.John Hanna / AP file
TOPEKA, Kan. — Enforcement of a federal rule expanding anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ students has been blocked in four states and a patchwork of places elsewhere by a federal judge in Kansas.
U.S. District Judge John Broomes suggested in his ruling Tuesday that the Biden administration must now consider whether forcing compliance remains “worth the effort.”
Broomes’ decision was the third against the rule from a federal judge in less than three weeks but more sweeping than the others. It applies in Alaska, Kansas, Utah and Wyoming, which sued over the new rule. It also applies to a Stillwater, Oklahoma, middle school that has a student suing over the rule and to members of three groups backing Republican efforts nationwide to roll back LGBTQ rights. All of them are involved in one lawsuit.
Broomes, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, directed the three groups — Moms for Liberty, Young America’s Foundation and Female Athletes United — to file a list of schools in which their members’ children are students so that their schools also do not comply with the rule. Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, a Republican who argued the states’ case before Broomes last month, said that could be thousands of schools.
The Biden administration rule is set to take effect in August under the Title IX civil rights law passed in 1972, barring sex discrimination in education. Broomes’ order is to remain in effect through a trial of the lawsuit in Kansas, though the judge concluded that the states and three groups are likely to win.
Republicans have argued that the rule represents a ruse by the Biden administration to allow transgender females to play on girls’ and women’s sports teams, something banned or restricted in Kansas and at least 24 other states. The administration has said it does not apply to athletics. Opponents of the rule have also framed the issue as protecting women and girls’ privacy and safety in bathrooms and locker rooms.
“Gender ideology does not belong in public schools and we are glad the courts made the correct call to support parental rights,” Moms for Liberty co-founders Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice said in a statement.
LGBTQ youth, their parents, health care providers and others say restrictions on transgender youth harms their mental health and makes an often marginalized group even more vulnerable. The Department of Education has previously stood by its rule and President Joe Biden has promised to protect LGBTQ rights.
The Department of Education did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment Tuesday.
Besides Broomes, two other federal judges issued rulings in mid-June blocking the new rule in 10 other states. The rule would protect LGBTQ students by expanding the definition of sexual harassment at schools and colleges and adding safeguards for victims.
Like the other judges, Broomes called the rule arbitrary and concluded that the Department of Education and its secretary, Miguel Cardona, exceeded the authority granted by Title IX. He also concluded that the rule violated the free speech and religious freedom rights of parents and students who reject transgender students’ gender identities and want to espouse those views at school or elsewhere in public.
Broomes said his 47-page order leaves it to the Biden administration “to determine in the first instance whether continued enforcement in compliance with this decision is worth the effort.”
Broomes also said nontransgender students’ privacy and safety could be harmed by the rule. He cited the statement of the Oklahoma middle school student that “on some occasions” cisgender boys used a girls’ bathroom “because they knew they could get away with it.”
“It is not hard to imagine that, under the Final Rule, an industrious older teenage boy may simply claim to identify as female to gain access to the girls’ showers, dressing rooms, or locker rooms, so that he can observe female peers disrobe and shower,” Broomes wrote, echoing a common but largely false narrative from anti-trans activists about gender identity and how schools accommodate transgender students.
U.S. District Judge John Broomes’ decision was the third against the rule from a federal judge in less than three weeks but more sweeping than the others.James L. Greenlee2 days ago
They really seem to believe that LGBTQ kids don’t exist, unless they’ve been convinced by someone to “turn.” It’s so ludicrous.
WTF is wrong with these people? Nobody, never in the history of everything, never has someone decided to be Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or Trans. It’s how a person is born. Not protecting the rights of LGBT human beings is like denying rights to a person because of the color of their eyes, or their skin. Yeah, we used to do the skin thing and that was a gigantic mistake that these motherfuckers want to make a reality again.
Also, why do this? How someone lives their life has exactly zero impact on your life. You’re just being a dick.
Like I keep saying, I am dead. This is purgatory. I need to find the light to pass on.
They continue to believe the lie that sexual orientation is freely chosen and that if you choose to be gay you’re sinning, because Jesus said so – only he didn’t.
Christians think people “choosing” to be gay presents an existential threat to humanity that must be eradicated, as though LGBT people haven’t existed throughout time.
Well, they lost all the arguments to that effect so they’re legislating and ruling as if the arguments never took place and as if their lies are facts.
There is too much on the line in our next election to let the main stream media dictate the terms of who should be POTUS. All of us with skin in the game should put our nose to the grindstone and reelect Biden/Harris 2024!
Moms for Liberty co-founders Tina Descovich and Tiffany JusticePhoto: YouTube clip
Scottie's Playtime 