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“World’s Second-Biggest Pop Star to Play Super Bowl Halftime Show” is not the kind of headline you’d think would make a political faction explode in outrage. But because that artist is Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican superstar who sings almost exclusively in Spanish and endorsed Kamala Harris in last year’s election, conservatives have cranked up the Wurlitzer of aggrievement.
It’s a familiar routine: An element of pop culture becomes slightly less exclusively white, male, straight, or some combination of the above; right-wing media figures tell their audiences that the America that used to belong to them is being stolen; then they advocate boycotts, legal action, or performative displays of anger. Eventually it peters out and a new reason to be indignant must be found, renewing the cycle over and over.
But it has a darker cast this time, because the Bad Bunny situation comes at a moment when the Trump administration is using the power it has and the power it has assumed for itself in what is nothing less than a white nationalist crusade to cleanse the country of immigrants.
While ICE is invading immigrant neighborhoods and kidnapping people by the thousands, the fact that a hugely popular artist would sing in Spanish at the Super Bowl is a sign that America is still a polyglot nation. And that is unacceptable.
Can’t we all just get mad?
The NFL tries to get big stars to perform in the Super Bowl halftime show, and they don’t come much bigger than Bad Bunny. The Grammy winner was the most-streamed artist on Spotify for three years running through 2022, and last weekend he hosted Saturday Night Live for the second time. If you haven’t heard of him, it’s only because you don’t pay any attention to pop culture.
Booking Bad Bunny is a savvy business decision in many ways, and not just because of his huge American fan base. The NFL claims it has 39 million Latino fans in the US; Latinos are its fastest-growing audience. According to the census, well over 40 million people in America speak Spanish at home, which doesn’t account for the millions more who don’t speak it at home but know the language to one degree or another. The league has also been working to broaden its appeal outside the US.
But it isn’t just about how many viewers can understand Bad Bunny’s lyrics (or are happy to bop along even if they can’t). The Super Bowl has a symbolic value that makes it all the more important for the right that it remain a bastion of the kind of America they want America to be. It is arguably the last, closest thing we have to a national communal experience. The fragmentation of media means that there are almost no other occasions in which the vast majority of us watch the same thing at the same time. The Super Bowl is it.
Which is why it made conservatives just so damn mad to hear that a Puerto Rican would be headlining the halftime show — and worse, one who has said he’s worried about touring the mainland US because ICE might show up to harass his fans.
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When the news broke, MAGA influencer Benny Johnson raged on his podcast that “the NFL leadership has decided to hire a cross dressing, America-hating, ICE-hating Puerto Rican dude whose music I haven’t heard any of, but his name’s Bad Bunny.”
Johnson’s guest, Homeland Security official Cory Lewandowski, issued what sounded a lot like a threat to send ICE to the Super Bowl: “Benny, there is nowhere that you can provide safe haven to people who are in this country illegally, not the Super Bowl and nowhere else. We will find you. We will apprehend you. We will put you in a detention facility, and we