Latest news with #EndRacism
CBC
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Stratford filmmaker Keira Loughran on the impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act
The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed more than 100 years ago on July 1, 1923. That day was also known as Humiliation Day for many Chinese Canadians. It was a racist policy that stopped Chinese immigration, and forced Chinese people living in Canada to register with the government or risk deportation. Keira Loughran, a Stratford-based writer and director, wanted to tell the story of her own grandmother, who was one of those who fought to end the policy. Exclusion: Beyond the Silence is being screened on May 7 at Cineplex theatres across the country. It will also be showing at Galaxy Cinemas in Waterloo on the same day.
Yahoo
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Megyn Kelly Goes Off On The Eagles Over Trump White House Visit, Regrets Supporting The Super Bowl Champs
Megyn Kelly blasted the Philadelphia Eagles for seemingly skipping their scheduled White House visit after emerging NFL champions in the 2025 Super Bowl. Donald Trump notably attended the game, where he supported the Chiefs to win, although they eventually lost 22-40 to the Eagles. Amid the chaos over The Eagles' alleged decision to skip the traditional visit, a White House source has claimed that an invite has not yet been extended to the Super Bowl champions. Kelly regrets her decision to cheer on the Philadelphia Eagles to victory against the Kansas City Chiefs during the recent Super Bowl. Following their victory at the championship game, reports suggest that the Eagles chose to decline to visit the White House as NFL champions usually do. Kelly took to X to express her dissatisfaction with the Eagles, reacting strongly to a post from a user that cited a report about their snub. "Wish I had known this before the Super Bowl. I wouldn't have wasted my time rooting for them. Eagles fan? Your team sucks," the X user with the handle "Toxic Cowboy" wrote. Kelly concurred in her quote, writing, "SAME. GO F YOURSELVES EAGLES." She further explained that she "got on board" with the Eagles because her husband, author Doug Brunt, "is a fan." "But F this BS," the TV host added. Many fans took to the comment section of Kelly's post to share their reaction, as most slammed the Eagles for making things political. An X user wrote, "Why do these athletes have to make things political anymore? You might not like the guy, but show some respect and be the example to the young kids looking up to you." Another said, "I wish I could return all the Super Bowl gear I bought my boys. We watched and cheered and cried, and now I feel sick to my stomach. How can I encourage my boys to support such divisive and unpatriotic actions? I'm sad." "Sorry Eagles. You respect the office. No matter Republican or Democrat. Sad decision that you will regret," one user penned. Meanwhile, others seemingly supported the Eagle's decision to skip the trip. "When the NFL had to remove 'End Racism' from the field in order to appease Trump and then Trump still left early to avoid the halftime show I'm not quite sure why anyone would have expected the Eagles to attend," a fan wrote. "Sometimes you have to give respect before you can get it." Another user said, "Cry me a freaking river. Not everyone has to bow before King Trump and acquiesce to his every whim." It comes as reports suggest the Eagles' snub resulted from its management's disagreement with Trump's policies. According to The U.S. Sun, a "well-placed" insider shared that discussions between the players and the team's front office resulted in a "massive no" against going to the White House. "We focus on the game for now, but if we win the Super Bowl, we wouldn't go to the White House," a member of the ownership group said at the time. An Eagles player, who spoke anonymously, also shared the same sentiments, claiming that "pretty much everyone" decided they would refuse to meet the President. "We represent a city and a state that is pushing for equal rights, respect, and values that respect every human being," the Eagles star said. "We won't forget what happened and the criticism we received for taking a stand against racism, and we won't back down from our values of respect, integrity, and equality." Following The U.S. Sun's report, a White House source slammed the news that an invite was turned down by the Eagles. According to the Daily Mail, the source who spoke to Outkick founder Clay Travis revealed that the Eagles haven't turned down an invite as the White House is yet to send out an official invitation to the Super Bowl champions. While it seems the Eagles haven't rejected Trump's invite this year, they previously declined to see the President during his first term in 2018 following their Super Bowl victory against the New England Patriots. The issue stemmed from a national anthem controversy after then-49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt during the song in protest of policing tactics and racism. Many other athletes, including some Eagles players, joined in by taking a knee. However, critics, including Trump, insisted that it was disrespectful to the flag and military, prompting the NFL to implement policies aimed at discouraging on-field protests. At the time, the team released a statement saying it disagreed "with their President because he insists that they proudly stand for the National Anthem, hand on heart, in honor of the great men and women of our military and the people of our country."
Yahoo
12-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Tom Brady, TV's No 1 jaw, oozed stagnant charisma in Fox's Super Bowl broadcast
The weeks leading up to this Super Bowl saw a predictable swirl of questions about the on- and off-field direction of America's big game. Could the Philadelphia Eagles neutralize the golden arm of Patrick Mahomes? Would Travis Kelce commit elder abuse against Kansas City Chiefs coach Andy Reid again? How would the crowd react to the presence of the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl? Might half-time show headliner Kendrick Lamar use the big stage to provide further insight into the content of Drake's character? And would Sunday night cap the successful conclusion of Tom Brady's years-long search for a personality, or would he remain the same on-screen plank who's shout-talked his way through his first season as Fox's top football analyst? As ever, however, a bigger question hung over these small opportunities for speculation: would it be any good? As a game, as a spectacle, as a raw demonstration of American ingenuity and might, would Super Bowl LIX have the juice? Well, now we have the answer: it would not. A non-entity as a contest and a televisual flop, this Super Bowl will live long in the memory of no one but fans of the Eagles. This was a Super Bowl so galactically bad that even Donald Trump – whose appearance at the event took on the sheen of a victory lap after a years-long culture war with the NFL essentially ended with the league's surrender, and who drew cheers whenever he was shown on the screens inside Caesars Superdome – left early to beat the traffic. The president, perhaps embarrassed by his pre-game selection of the Chiefs as likeliest victors, exited the building on the stroke of half-time, conveniently missing the pointedly 'political' performance that Lamar dished up during the intermission. Related: Kendrick Lamar's Super Bowl half-time show review – game over for Drake This was no less than the NFL deserved for its abject decision to cave in on most of its differences with Trump. During the president's first administration, the league became an unlikely bulwark of resistance against the Maga tide of insensitivity and hate. Now there's been a reversal of course. Ahead of this game the NFL announced that the 'End Racism' sign that has adorned the end zones for the past four Super Bowls would be replaced by 'Choose Love' at one end and 'It Takes All of Us' at the other. While the 'End Racism' sign – a response to the post-George Floyd eruption of popular outrage across the US over police brutality and racial injustice – could be criticized as mere performance, its replacement by a sign preaching love seemed cynically hypocritical in light of the NFL's new embrace of a president hell-bent on doing the exact opposite. Choose love! Unless you happen to be trans, undocumented, foreign, liberal, progressive, a member of the left, a government worker, anyone relying on food stamps or Medicaid for their survival, anyone who supports diversity, equity and inclusion, anyone who believes the ethnic cleansing of Gaza is bad, or anyone who didn't vote for Trump, in which case: womp-womp, cry harder cuck, you are now an enemy of the nation. In this bumbling superpower all the pomp and trappings of empire now seem irredeemably tacky, and last night the Trump-NFL alliance did everything within its authority to demonstrate how quickly things in this country are deteriorating. The night got off to a fittingly shitty start with a pre-game flyover by US fighter jets that could not be seen by anyone inside the domed stadium: a charming metaphor for the blithe stupidity of an America in chronic decline. Jon Batiste sang the national anthem as a pleasantly slinky low-impact cabaret number, like he was a hotel lobby piano man setting the background mood for a bunch of afternoon business meetings. Trump, who actively avoided military service himself, gave the anthem a salute as if he was a veteran. The president's presence in the crowd was always going to bring a strange energy to this game, and a sense of something broken or torn or not quite right suffused events last night. A hellish mashup of Trumpism, the Super Bowl's traditional jingoism and fetishization of the military (the anthem, the super-abundance of flags and uniformed personnel, the pre-game flyover), and celebrity culture (Anne Hathaway bopping in the crowd, Paul McCartney chatting it up with Adam Sandler, Kevin Costner absorbed in conversation with Pete Davidson), this Super Bowl felt like a harbinger of the end times, a party to ring in the apocalypse. Royals (Serena Williams, Taylor Swift), tyrants (Trump, Gianni Infantino) and cheesesteak-flipping line cooks (Bradley Cooper) all get to let their hair down in pre-apocalyptic America: the new DEI in action. Lamar bravely attempted to infuse his half-time show with political critique, but the energy in the stadium seemed low, and the 'message' may have been lost amid the Trumpy myopia of the night. Was this a sly comment on America's descent into fascism, or Lamar ambling up and down the stage in dad jeans? Possibly it was both. On the field, Kansas City's hopes cracked almost as quickly as Jon Hamm's voice did when he was introducing the team to the stadium before kickoff. Fox did its best to match the Chiefs' on-field woes by getting most of the big broadcasting calls wrong. The network's panel of sideline elders and wiseheads seemed almost bored by their obligation to comment on the game, and rules guru Mike Pereira frequently appeared to be asleep when called on to offer insight into various contentious officiating decisions, such was his delay in replying. Meanwhile the Fox scorebug – which displays the score, game time, and the offensive team's progress up the field – was the 'graphic design is my passion' meme come to life, a distressingly ugly collection of jumbo-font boxes and chaotically assembled data points that looked like it was produced by someone whose entire knowledge of visual culture came from a single afternoon 'learning Photoshop' in 1998. But this night, whatever the impact of Trump or Mahomes or Lamar, was always going to be about one man: Brady. Fox's No 1 jaw popped up next to Kevin Burkhardt on Fox's Bourbon Street set, beaming vacantly in a shiny suit like a man about to sell you a sofa. Throughout the evening the star Fox gameday duo, who've had six months to work together but still seem like they're strangers waiting in the line for coffee whenever they have to exchange words, kept taking their jackets off then putting them back on again: the jackets were on for the pregame bits, off for most of the second quarter, back on for half-time analysis, off again for some reason, then back in place for the home stretch once the Eagles' victory seemed assured. What fun! This frantic series of pointless costume changes visualized some of the despair that must now be gripping the Fox C-suite over their decision to spend $375m and lock Brady in as the network's main game analyst for the next decade. This was the biggest test yet in Brady's fledgling TV career, and the results were not pretty. Brady's early stylings here bore all his emerging signatures as a broadcaster: the weird absence of volume control; the unconvincing attempts at jocularity ('$8m for 30 seconds of advertising time, you'd need to save a lot of pennies for that!'); the statements of the obvious ('The question the Chiefs will be asking themselves is, 'How can we find enough time for Patrick to make some throws downfield?''); the sentences that begin with great confidence then trail off once it becomes clear to their creator that they do not contain sufficiently compelling intellectual content to justify their conclusion ('Patrick has that fear factor, everybody in this building knows it, everybody who watches football knows it, I'm really interested to see …'). Many of Brady's throws to Pereira, prompted by dissatisfaction with some on-field call, were delivered with the deflationary intonation of a man who just missed out on the last slice of his favorite pizza at the local slice joint: 'Oh, I don't like that one bit. What do you think Mike?' As the night wore on Fox's star boy became increasingly squeaky, resorting in the game's final quarter to a volley of desperately uninteresting anecdotes about his own career as a champion player. It was impossible not to feel a little sorry for the guy: though richly talented as a player, Brady has all the on-screen charisma of stagnant water and is clearly never going to rise beyond the mundane as a broadcaster. But more sympathy should be reserved for America's viewers, who will be forced to mute Brady's games for nine more seasons. And the most should go to Burkhardt, who used last night to debut what is, I believe, a new weapon in his game-calling armory: a strangled, hybrid sob-laugh that served the dual purpose of responding to Brady's on-air inanities and signaling to viewers at home his deep distress at the next nine years. After two Eagles players, with the championship assured, drenched Nick Sirianni in the ritual Gatorade shower administered to all victorious Super Bowl coaches, Brady monotoned, 'That's got to be a slimy, sticky shower. But who cares?' This had all of the big man's customary head-scratching vacuity (what exactly does this comment add to the viewer's appreciation of the action?) but was unintentionally a neat summary of the night. In the end, 'Who cares?' may be the most fitting epitaph for the most forgettable Super Bowl in recent history. If the point of televised sports is to make the viewer at home feel as if they're at the game, Fox last night pulled off a masterclass. But hey, at least we got to see Seal as a seal.
Yahoo
10-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Donald Trump becomes first sitting president to attend Super Bowl
Marking his first three weeks in office, Trump flew into New Orleans to attend the NFL's title game between the Philadelphia Eagles and two-time defending championship winners, the Kansas City Chiefs. The US president arrived at the Caesars Superdome at around 4pm local time, according to the White House, and was joined by House speaker Mike Johnson and New Orleans Saints owner Gayle Benson. At around 4.30pm, he was seen walking out of the tunnel at the Superdome. Trump arrived amid some controversy as it was revealed that the NFL had elected to replace the End Racism message written into the end zone.
The Guardian
09-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Trump heads to New Orleans as first sitting president to attend Super Bowl
Donald Trump is due to give himself a term report on his contentious first three weeks in office at tonight's Super Bowl while becoming the first sitting president to attend the NFL's title game between the Philadelphia Eagles and two-time defending championship winning Kansas City Chiefs. The US president was expected to arrive at the Caesars Superdome where the game will be held in New Orleans at 3.50pm, according to the White House, and appear on the field about 4pm when he will be joined by House speaker Mike Johnson and New Orleans Saints owner Gayle Benson. Trump arrives in New Orleans as the NFL replaced 'End Racism' with 'Choose Love' written into the end zone. The inscription had been in place since the racial justice protests that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a white police officer. Trump had campaigned against NFL players 'taking the knee' before kick-off in a symbolic gesture against to racism, a practice that has been discontinued. Alvin Tillery, a politics professor and diversity expert at Northwestern University, told the Associated Press that the NFL's decision to remove 'End Racism' slogans was 'shameful' given that the league 'makes tens of billions of dollars largely on the bodies of Black men'. Tillery said the league should explain who it was aiming to please. In a statement before heading to New Orleans from his home in Florida, Trump said he was looking forward to joining fans for a sense of national unity and patriotism. 'The coaches, players, and team staff on the field tonight represent the best of the best in professional football, but they also embody the best of the American dream,' he said. Trump also noted the 14 deaths and 35 injuries from the truck attack in New Orleans on New Year's Day: 'We remember that 14 families will be missing a loved one who was tragically murdered during a senseless terrorist attack while celebrating the New Year on Bourbon Street.' A White House official said Trump will meet with family members of the attack who will be honorary coin toss participants just before the big game. Trump added that the game was an annual opportunity to transcend differences, saying that the Chiefs and Eagles' coaches, players and staff 'represent the hopes and dreams of our Nation's young athletes as we restore safety and fairness in sports and equal opportunities among their teams'. Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce told reporters it is 'pretty cool' that Trump would attend the game on Sunday, but it is not known how pop star Taylor Swift, also attending the game, may interpret her beau's endorsement. Trump battled Swift's perceived Democratic leanings throughout the 2024 presidential campaign. Two months before the vote, Swift said she planned to vote for Kamala Harris 'because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them'. Trump retorted with: 'I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!' in a post on his Truth Social platform.
