It has now been several very long days since the Super Bowl and Bad Bunny’s raucous, joyous, extremely popular halftime show, stuffed with celebrities, heartfelt tributes to Puerto Rico and Latino culture, and a pointed listing of most countries in the Americas. Meanwhile, as one cannot help but be aware, at the same time on Sunday Turning Point USA sponsored a stream of Kid Rock in jorts and a fedora for an “alternative,” apparently pre-recorded half-time show. He performed from an echoing warehouse somewhere near Atlanta, alongside musicians who are best described as “names who might appear deep within your Spotify shuffle if you’ve ever listened to new country.” Post-show, Kid Rock has had to devote some time to insisting he did not lip sync, which is always a good sign.
The claim that Kid Rock achieved “cultural victory” over Bad Bunny is a salvo in a proxy war.
The battle, in other words, has been decided. And yet portions of the Trump administration and MAGA fight on, insisting that Bad Bunny has been humiliated, Kid Rock and his jorts have been vindicated, and the whole thing has in fact gone extremely well. In case that doesn’t work, Congressman Randy Fine (R-Florida) is also suggesting the FCC investigate Bad Bunny’s halftime show for vulgarity, as soon as someone in a position of power learns Spanish and can confirm what he said.
In many ways, the disingenuous—and seemingly endless—right-wing reaction to Bad Bunny’s half-time show is a study in the small-scale production of hamfisted disinformation. Take, for example, Trump-allied MAGA propagandist Benny Johnson, who once worked as Turning Point’s “chief creative officer” and who still seems to be allied with them professionally. By Wednesday morning, Johnson had produced a whopping 14 Instagram posts either about TPUSA’s half-time show or about Bad Bunny, along with sending an endless number of tweets and retweets on the subject. His thesis, if it could be called that, is best summarized by one of his tweets from Sunday night:
“The Bad Bunny halftime show was the worst entertainment performance in Super Bowl history,” he wrote. “Woke. Cringe. Unintelligible. Foreign. Boring. Derivative. Preachy. Creatively bankrupt. Worst of all: No songs you can even sing along to—because no songs were in *our* language.”
Johnson went on to declare, “This is an absolute humiliation for the NFL. In contrast, the TPUSA halftime show was just feel-good banger after banger from American artists who love this country and who football fans can relate with. It felt like America. Total cultural victory.” He also claimed that his slain former boss Charlie Kirk was “smiling from heaven” upon the whole affair, a sentiment echoed by Kirk’s wife, TPUSA CEO Erika Kirk. (Kirk didn’t appear to attend the show herself, and hasn’t shared any content from it on Instagram, where she’s usually fairly active.)
Johnson’s claims are, of course, racist and xenophobic, as well as very stupid: Bad Bunny is currently one of the most popular artists in the world, and one of his hit songs is about taking his large number of girlfriends to the VIP section of the club—meaning that “preachy” or “boring” are imprecise adjectives. It is also exceedingly possible to sing along to his songs even if you do not speak Spanish, as an unending procession of TikTok videos will attest. (Also: a lot of people in America do speak Spanish, including Latino Trump voters.)
Johnson’s claim that Kid Rock had achieved “cultural victory” over Bad Bunny is obviously a salvo in a proxy war, an insistence that the MAGA agenda is still popular with some kind of silent unseen majority, and one that invests conservatives with the pop culture relevance they’ve long chased. Alas, they still have a ways to go: Bad Bunny’s halftime show drew a record 135 million live viewers, while Kid Rock’s performance topped out at six million concurrent views; TPUSA’s YouTube channel now shows 21 million total views for the show.
Nonetheless, conservative commentator Glenn Beck called Kid Rock’s show a successful “proof of concept” and claimed it was possibly “the largest live audience” YouTube has ever had. Kid Rock himself shared a screenshot showing his new recording of the praise song “Til You Can’t” is currently in the No. 1 slot on iTunes, with Bad Bunny coming in second. (Meanwhile, on Wednesday, six of the top ten songs on Apple Music in the USA were Bad Bunny’s.)
“The halftime show and everything around it needs to stay quintessentially American.”
This culture war anxiety was made further clear when Megyn Kelly made an appearance on Piers Morgan’s TV show and promptly had a meltdown when Morgan suggested Bad Bunny’s performance hadn’t been all that bad. “This attitude that you have right here is why you and Great Britain have lost your culture,” she told Morgan. “You ceded your culture to a bunch of radical Muslims who came in and took over, and now it’s gone. We’re not allowing that here. Whether it’s Hispanic, whether it’s Muslim, it’s not happening in the United States of America—that’s why President Trump was elected.”
“Football,” Kelly added, “that kind of football, is ours. They call it American football. And the halftime show and everything around it needs to stay quintessentially American.”
The subtext is clear: it’s impossible to separate the right’s somewhat unhinged anxiety over Bad Bunny’s popularity with the country’s growing anger and distress over ICE brutality in Minnesota and elsewhere. Insisting that Kid Rock got the upper hand is an effort to claim that MAGA is, in some mostly invisible way, still winning, and that even the most distasteful parts of their anti-immigrant agenda are still popular. On Tuesday, the White House shared a video on TikTok of people in grass costumes from Bad Bunny’s performance, overlaid with racist text about “illegals” entering the United States. On Wednesday morning, the Department of Homeland Security followed that up with a tweet brushing off criticism of its agents’ violations of civil liberties by claiming that law enforcement in Latin American countries—the same ones that Bad Bunny listed in his performance—also “demand proof of identity under reasonable suspicion or during investigations.”
And yet despite this full-court press by some sectors of the Trump Administration and MAGA-aligned media, it doesn’t exactly seem like it worked with their target audience. By Johnson’s dozenth Instagram post about Bad Bunny, his commenters were almost uniformly begging him to cut it out his criticism of the halftime show.
“He was phenomenal,” one person wrote, “And if anyone is putting America last it’s you with this divisive post.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.