Here we are, living through democratic backsliding, open flirtations with authoritarianism, and a presidency that normalizes cruelty as policy—and the MAGA universe is melting down over a Bad Bunny halftime show while cheering a bargain‑basement “All‑American” knockoff headlined by Kid Rock.
The Manufactured Outrage Machine
Let’s start with the obvious: the Bad Bunny halftime show was big, messy, loud, multilingual, and unapologetically global. It was also, at its core, about connection, romance, joy, and a vision of America that actually looks like the people who live in it. Social media exploded with praise, celebrities gushed, and even Tom Brady could only manage “Amazing!!!!!!!!!” as his one-word review.
On the other side, Turning Point USA threw together an “All American Halftime Show” as a kind of cultural protest—an alternative for people who needed a safe space from Spanish lyrics and brown people dancing on the world’s biggest stage. It wasn’t a celebration; it was counter‑programming driven by resentment, created not because anyone needed more music, but because certain people couldn’t stand that the NFL gave the mic to a Puerto Rican artist performing primarily in Spanish.
The outrage didn’t come from any serious artistic critique. It came from the same reflex that sees diversity as a threat, empathy as weakness, and any deviation from a narrow, whitewashed nationalism as “an affront to America.”
What These Two Shows Really Represent
Bad Bunny’s performance was a reminder that the United States is not a museum of the 1950s, but a living, multilingual, multiethnic society. His set was full of cameos, cross‑genre collaborations, and a visual language that spoke to young people, immigrants, and anyone who understands that the American story now has accents, diaspora, and dual identities baked in.
The Turning Point halftime event, by contrast, felt like a live‑action Facebook comment section: more grievance than groove, more ideology than entertainment. Reviews called it dull, poorly attended, and strikingly low‑quality, with Kid Rock’s performance—lip‑synch and all—symbolizing how little effort went into making something genuinely engaging. It was less a show and more a statement that “real America” is white, nostalgic, and permanently angry at everything outside its comfort zone.
Bad Bunny’s halftime show and Turning Point’s “All American” event were not just different performances; they represented competing visions of the country. Bad Bunny’s set was designed to entertain a global audience and celebrate culture and connection, with a tone that was joyful, romantic, and collaborative. It sent a clear cultural message: America now includes Spanish, diaspora, and global pop as part of its core identity, backed by high production values, star cameos, and wide critical praise. The Turning Point show, by contrast, existed mainly as protest programming—a grievance‑driven alternative meant to reject that multicultural vision rather than offer anything new. Its tone was bitter and defensive, its message coded around a narrow, nostalgic idea of “real” America, and its execution was widely panned as low‑energy and low‑quality, right down to Kid Rock’s phoned‑in performance. One stage embodied inclusion and modern pluralism; the other tried to reassert a hard line about who counts as American at all.
The Racism Isn’t Subtext, It’s the Text
The MAGA panic about Bad Bunny isn’t happening in a vacuum. Conservatives online and in right‑wing media fumed that the NFL picked a “foreigner,” ignoring the basic fact that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens and that Puerto Rico is literally part of the United States. That “foreigner” line isn’t just factually wrong; it exposes a worldview where “American” still quietly means “white” and “English‑speaking.”
You can see the pattern clearly:
- Trump called the show “absolutely terrible,” accused it of not representing “our standards,” and complained that “nobody understands a word this guy is saying,” framing the Spanish language itself as a slap in the face to the country.
- MAGA influencers cast the performance as anti‑police, anti‑America, or “woke cultural rot,” because joy coming from the wrong kind of people is always labeled threatening.
- Turning Point positioned its event as the “All American Halftime Show,” implicitly suggesting that Bad Bunny—and by extension, millions of Latinos—are somehow less American.
This is not subtle. When you insist that a Puerto Rican artist singing in Spanish on the Super Bowl stage is an insult to the nation, you are not defending patriotism—you are defending a racial hierarchy. When you counter a multicultural celebration with a mostly white lineup, brand it “All American,” and fill it with coded jabs at immigrants and “globalism,” you are not protecting tradition—you are laundering white nationalism through country rock and flag graphics.
It’s not just that Turning Point has a long track record of platforming hard‑right, xenophobic rhetoric; it’s that this entire halftime stunt is consistent with that project. The show looked like a cultural rally for people who want their politics to validate their prejudice and their entertainment to mirror their echo chamber.
While the House Is on Fire
All of this would be infuriating enough if the stakes were low. But they’re not. We are living under a president who uses his office to vilify migrants, demonize political opponents, and treat pluralism as a problem to be solved rather than a promise to be kept. The erosion of democratic norms, the attacks on independent institutions, the casual cruelty toward vulnerable communities—these are not background noise. They are the story.
So when MAGA personalities and the current president himself spend their time raging about a halftime show in Spanish, what they are really doing is twofold:
- Distraction. Outrage at a pop performance is a smokescreen that keeps their base emotionally engaged without ever forcing them to confront policies that hurt real people.
- Normalization. Treating multicultural art as an “attack on America” normalizes the idea that anything non‑white, non‑English, non‑Christian is inherently suspect.
This is why the obsession with Bad Bunny matters. It’s not because halftime shows are sacred political texts. It’s because the same people willing to light their hair on fire over a bilingual set are eerily quiet when democracy is chipped away, when rights are rolled back, when violence and dehumanization are shrugged off as “toughness.”
We should be far less interested in whether Kid Rock managed to sync his vocals and far more alarmed that an entire political movement is so committed to turning cultural diversity into a battlefield that they staged a parallel halftime show as a protest against a Latino man singing love songs.
Choosing What Deserves Our Outrage
If I sound frustrated, it’s because I am. I’m tired of watching the same script play out: a non‑white, non‑English‑dominant artist gets a prominent platform, MAGA world cries that America is being “stolen,” and suddenly the national conversation is about whether joy, love, and representation are “too political.”
Bad Bunny’s show, for all its spectacle, was fundamentally about connection—about people seeing themselves reflected on a stage that has historically excluded them. Turning Point’s show, in contrast, was about grievance—about reassuring a shrinking audience that their narrow definition of America should still rule everyone else.
We don’t have to accept that framing. We can say:
- That art that includes more people is not a threat to the country; it’s a fulfillment of its promise.
- That a president who treats Spanish as an insult and diversity as a problem is far more dangerous than any dance move on a football field.
- That white supremacy dressed up in flags and “All American” branding is still white supremacy.
In a moment when the stakes for democracy, human rights, and basic decency could not be higher, staying fixated on which halftime show was more “patriotic” is a luxury we cannot afford. The real question isn’t which performance disrespected America—it’s which vision of America we’re going to fight for: the one where love and plurality take the stage, or the one where fear and resentment hold the mic.
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