When the NFL announced that Bad Bunny would headline this season's Super Bowl halftime show, it made all the sense in the world, because Benito Martínez Ocasio is probably the single most versatile man in show business. He's wrestled a match at WrestleMania, pulled double duty as host/musical guest on Saturday Night Live, and most recently had a featured role in a Darren Aronofsky movie. Moreover, his songs rack up billions of streams, his concerts spark outrageous demand, he'd already performed as a guest at the Shakira/J-Lo halftime show, and the NFL is pretty blatantly trying to make gains in the Latin market (see: the "Por La Cultura" campaign, whose ads run on Sundays).
This is apparently an outrage, according to top members of the Republican Party, who over the past several days have produced a series of incoherently upset quotes about Bad Bunny playing at halftime of the Super Bowl. The proliferation of vague, confused, and blandly belligerent statements framing Bad Bunny as someone who "hates America" indicates that conservatives should be mad, but they can’t agree on or even elucidate what exactly they're supposed to be mad about.
Here's Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, sounding like she's declaring war on the NFL: “They suck, and we’ll win, and God will bless us, and we’ll stand and be proud of ourselves at the end of the day, and they won’t be able to sleep at night because they don’t know what they believe, and they’re so weak. We’ll fix it.”
Here's President Trump, mumbling some half-formed grievance after he was teed up by a TV guy's question: “I never heard of him. I don’t know who he is. I don’t know why they’re doing it. It’s, like, crazy. And then they blame it on some promoter they hired to pick up entertainment. I think it’s absolutely ridiculous.” (Trump then immediately segued into a complaint about how he doesn't like the NFL's new style of kickoffs.)
Here's House Speaker Mike Johnson, looking more clueless than anybody as he racked his brains for a popular musical artist who should be playing halftime instead and came up with a guy who had a novelty hit 41 years ago: "I didn't even know who Bad Bunny was, but it sounds like a terrible decision. It sounds like he's not someone who appeals to a broader audience, and you know, there's so many eyes on the Super Bowl, a lot of young, impressionable children, and in my view, you would have Lee Greenwood, or role models doing that, not somebody like this."
Those last three words stand out the most to me—"somebody like this." In the absence of any meaningful criticism, Johnson can only dogwhistle the ways in which Bad Bunny is different from past halftime performers like Elvis Presto or Indiana Jones. It's not exactly a mystery. But what comes out, if you're listening just to the actual words, is muddled and confusing.
This is culture war by rote, mindless instinct. They know they're mad, but they can't or won't quite articulate why. Still, their base hears them perfectly. You can see how the swirl of "Bad Bunny and the NFL are anti-American" rhetoric trickles down to low-info dudes like, for example, Eric Dickerson, who absorbed the output of the outrage machine and, in his search for a criticism, forgot that Puerto Rico is part of the U.S.: "If Bad Bunny said something about the U.S., don't come here and perform. You know, don't come here. Stay in your country."
Leave it to Marjorie Taylor Greene to blow the dogwhistle loud enough for everyone to hear. In response to a throwaway joke Martínez made about performing in Spanish, she tweeted, "Bad Bunny says America has 4 months to learn Spanish before his perverse unwanted performance at the Super Bowl halftime. It would be a good time to pass my bill to make English the official language of America. And the NFL needs to stop having demonic sexual performances during its halftime shows."
Never have I felt more like there are two Americas. In mine, we demand the NFL start having demonic sexual halftime shows.
