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When Donald Trump won re-election in 2024, it looked like a permanent vibe shift in American culture. Banished to the hinterlands of conferences and policy papers were the Democrats and progressive values, replaced by a perpetually aggrieved digital brawler who promised a utopia of free speech and free stuff. Trump’s vision of America wasn’t just one of prosperity and safety, but it was a place where everyone was able to say what they wanted and do what they wanted.
After all, Trump could get away with the crassest of jokes, the cruelest of reactions, and the most callous disregard for feelings and empathy that anyone in public life had ever displayed. Since Trump’s entire shtick remains “if you vote for me, you’ll become like me,” so too did millions of people embrace perpetual transgression and not giving a fuck. And given much of the discourse around the “groups” and “microaggressions” of 2024, you could see why. Progressive culture entailed being scolded by woke moralists for using the wrong words, or canceled for telling a joke that nobody had ever been offended by until five minutes ago.
To MAGA, the left was a self-replicating minefield of offense and hurt feelings, of having to abandon long-held social mores and beliefs just in case they bothered someone. Of women deciding they were men, of diversity shoved in our faces, and of miserable language policing.
In contrast, MAGA culture allowed you to say whatever you wanted, and if someone had a problem with it, you settle it with a vigorous debate. Freedom of speech would be absolute, and consequences nonexistent. No cancel culture, no offensive. You can say the “R” word as much as you want. Conservatism was now cool, edgy, transgressive, and unafraid.
Obviously, that wasn’t real. And it’s not what happened. Instead of offering intellectual and social freedom, MAGA turned into a North Korean style cult of personality, with even the most mild criticism of the leader and his acolytes or the conduct of federal authorities met with devastating consequences. Ritual humiliation was paramount, deviation from the norm was harshly punished, and the only thing that mattered was adherence to the doctrine that Trump is always right. Instead of destroying cancel culture, MAGA became cancel culture. There was no “vigorous debate,” only online dogpiles leading to offline threats, ruined careers, destroyed lives, and a chilling effect on speech that could in no way be considered “free.”
That’s not cool. It’s not edgy or transgressive, it’s deeply authoritarian. And it’s not actually what most people want out of cultural discourse. Polling of the GOP and Trump prove that the erratic and cruel abuses of the administration are driving Americans away from Trump, away from the GOP, and away from the “vibe shift” that characterized the first year of Trump’s second term.
But part of what’s made MAGA so rancid to so many people is the endless moralistic fussing of Trump’s biggest fans who want to control what we eat, what we watch, and what we wear. And so we now have what’s shaping up to be the Waterloo of the culture war: the Super Bowl halftime show.
The NFL, in a nod to its growing international base, gave us Bad Bunny. The massively-popular Puerto Rican rapper would be delivering the Super Bowl’s first non-English halftime show, likely a medley of his many hits, reinforcing his global dominance, and the culture’s shift away from programming for boomers.
Immediately, and despite having ostensibly been boycotting the NFL for reasons nobody seems to remember, the far-right went into outrage overdrive. How dare the NFL foist this non-American on the most American of sporting events (despite Bad Bunny being Puerto Rican and therefore American, and also many foreign acts having played the Big Game). This politically correct virtue signaling can’t stand.
So we had an alternative halftime show, put together by the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, featuring what turned out to be several no-name country acts opening for a haggard and clearly lip-synching Kid Rock playing on tape in a warehouse in Atlanta for a few hundred fans. Yes, the people obsessed with their enemies needing safe spaces in fact needed a safe space.
And they felt compelled to tell us how much they needed it. Every single major conservative influencer went out of their way to declare how they’d be turning off the Woke DEI show and turning on Good Old American Entertainment, and several claimed the TPUSA show was so popular that the NFL was freaking out and losing millions of dollars every minute. Americans wanted classic and wholesome songs about drinking beer and the joys of cutting grass.
As turns out, Americans did not actually want that. While the numbers of streams it got are hard to pin down, the TPUSA show got a small fraction of the viewers that Bad Bunny’s ode to love and Latino culture received, probably around six million views on YouTube, as opposed to the 120 million or so TV’s and screens tuned to the NFL.
What those viewers got definitely was not edgy, transgressive, or cool. Instead, it was sweaty and desperate. It insisted on its own importance, while actually having none. And it might have been the worst thing you can possibly be in a culture war fight – it was boring. Everything about it was boring. The music, the vibe, the dull boasts from Twitter personalities that Kid Rock had “broken the internet” and “changed the game forever.” It was just lame. And counterprogramming a Spanish-language show with a song about mowing your lawn is an irony so dense that light can’t escape from it.
Bad Bunny offered a show that many viewers couldn’t understand, but also understood perfectly. A couple actually got married on stage – countering the idea that conservatives are the party dedicated to traditional values and marriage. It was fun and breezy, but also a deeply meaningful examination of the way Puerto Rico has been left behind and abused by the mainland. It was about unity and the combination of cultures that makes America the place people want to run away to. And while many conservatives whined relentlessly about Bunny’s “filthy” lyrics and the sexy gyrations of the various dancers, given that the show was actually about as titillating as the average 80’s hair metal video, it’s pretty clear that the only objection was that non-white people were being sexy.
Can’t have that now, can we?
Obviously, it’s impossible to talk about a seminal event in Latino culture without talking about the administration’s demented drive to destroy it through ICE raids and demonizing. And in that light, it becomes clear that the “alternative halftime show” was just a vector for raising money and getting clicks from the far right’s ongoing anti-immigrant moral panic. Again, Bad Bunny is not actually an immigrant, but they don’t see the distinction.
The halftime show didn’t reference ICE or the raids directly, and it didn’t have to. Instead, it did what the right has spent years failing to do: it insisted upon itself. It showed us a culture and a people who are not all that different from anyone else, full of people who want the same things we do: love, dancing, tacos, freedom. To be understood and respected and left alone and embraced. It was a party where everyone was welcome, as opposed to a joyless struggle session where speaking out runs the risk of getting you crushed like a bug. Who wants to go to that party?
Even now, days after the Super Bowl, they are still whining. They are whining because well over 100 million Americans and millions more across the world chose a Puerto Rican rapper’s show about how love is stronger than hate over their hacky attempt to claim dominion over popular entertainment. They’re whining because nobody wants them in our face anymore telling us what invisible transgression we’re supposed to be boycotting this time. And they are whining because they were seen through. They are losing the culture war. The vibe shift is dead. Conservatism under Trump is not cool or cutting edge, it is dictatorial and smug and hateful and stupid.
MAGA culture revealed itself once and for all as annoying and scolding. It is everything it claimed to be fighting against. And it will not leave us the hell alone.
With that as the alternative, it’s no wonder Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl show was a hit.
Mike Rothschild 