The Seattle Seahawks drubbed the New England Patriots 29-13 to secure their second Super Bowl in franchise history on Sunday. But while Seattle’s stifling defense was the story of the game, the story of the evening was the halftime show from Puerto Rican rapper “Bad Bunny.”
When the NFL selected Bad Bunny, real name Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, to perform on the biggest stage in American sports, it drew plenty of eye rolling from conservatives who saw it as yet another instance of cringey virtue signaling from the league. Turning Point USA even put on a rival halftime show in protest headlined by Kid Rock, which nearly six million people watched instead of staying tuned to NBC for Bad Bunny.
But an estimated 125 million Americans still watched the NFL’s halftime show, and what they saw was more than just an insult and a disgrace. It was an attack on the unique American-ness of football, and by extension an assault on America itself. It was a political statement intended to discourage national pride at the very moment when it is beginning to reawaken.
Before dismissing that as hyperbole, consider how absurd it was for the NFL to ask Bad Bunny to perform in the first place. All of his songs are in Spanish, which most NFL fans and most Americans do not speak. As a viral video making the rounds online before the game showed, virtually none of the players in the Super Bowl could name even a single Bad Bunny song. His most popular demographic seems to be teenage Hispanic girls – not exactly the NFL’s target audience.
As commentator Allie Beth Stuckey put it in a post on X, “Doing an entire show at an iconic American event in a language most of the country does not understand is a humiliation ritual.”
That humiliation ritual started with Bad Bunny’s “resistance” moment at the Grammys earlier this month, when he declared “ICE Out” and “we’re not aliens” after winning an award. His outburst quickly put to rest any doubt that choosing a Hispanic artist to headline the Super Bowl at a time when hysterical opposition to enforcing immigration law is all the rage on the left was about politics and not entertainment.
(Notably, in a display of glaring hypocrisy, while he advocates for unrestricted mass immigration to the United States, Bad Bunny has passionately spoken out against the perceived “gentrification” of Puerto Rico and investors from off the island moving in to buy up property.)
The fact that the NFL chose Bad Bunny this year of all years was also an intentional choice to erode Americans’ sense of national identity. As the country approaches its 250th birthday, a league that actually cares about honoring its heritage as a uniquely American sport would have made every effort to choose a performer who reflects that. Instead, the NFL chose an artist who is most popular in foreign countries and sings in a foreign language.
The symbolism there should not be ignored. The message to Americans is this: “Your history is meaningless. Your country does not belong to you anymore, get over it.”
Then came the performance itself. While anyone who had been paying attention in the weeks leading up to the game should have known exactly what to expect, it was still jarring.
There was plenty of the usual left-wing debauchery, including a close-up shot of two men grinding on one another and dozens of scantily clad women performing dance routines that are more appropriate for a strip club rather than the biggest TV event of the year with tens of millions of wide-eyed children watching. Though most of those kids thankfully couldn’t understand a word that Bad Bunny was lip-syncing, his music is also notoriously explicit, sexualized, and violent. It is particularly demeaning toward women.
Just when it seemed like we might escape without any overt political statements, the “grand finale” of the show was Bad Bunny leading an army of backup dancers carrying foreign flags and saying “God bless America” – which he made clear means America the continent, not America the United States.
“But wait,” liberals will cry, “one of the dancers was carrying the American Flag!” Yes – and that makes it all the more denigrating. The message to Americans was that their own country’s flag is no more meaningful or important than any other country’s flag – just like citizens of any other country have an equal claim to America as someone whose family has been here for hundreds of years.
In other words, the NFL and Bad Bunny want us to believe, America does not belong to Americans alone, but to the entire world. Accordingly, the United States has no right to enforce its own borders or deport those who break its immigration laws.
The entire spectacle, from Bad Bunny’s Grammys incident through the final note of the halftime show over the weekend, was a massive middle finger from the NFL to its fans and, more than that, to the country as a whole. After years in which the right has made significant progress in shaming left-wing partisan politics out of American institutions, it was a reminder that woke ideology is still simmering beneath the surface, ready to burst out and continue its destructive path at the first opportunity.
Shane Harris is the Editor-in-Chief of AMAC Newsline. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.
