The entirety of the Super Bowl halftime show thing left a bad taste in my mouth, and I don't just mean from the side of the NFL. Bad Bunny's selection as the halftime show entertainment was, to me, an objectively bad decision on a cultural level, and despite that, he's the number one listened-to artist in the world according to the Spotify charts; he's clearly not the biggest artist among people who watch American football.
Maybe he would've been a decent selection for a European football halftime show (do soccer World Cup games even have halftime shows?) but for the average American family who is working class, drinking a beer and eating wings with their other working class friends and family as they watch the most American sport in the country, some guy getting up and mumble rapping in Spanish as he cruises through a Puerto Rican environment is probably not the play.
It doesn't help that the artist Bad Bunny is a radical leftist who refused to tour the USA over Donald Trump and the ICE raids, and just so happened to only play here once during one of the most-watched moments on television.
The guy being chosen to perform was dressed in many ways to look innocent, or like a logical choice given his international fame, but when you really peel back the layers, it just feels more and more like a spiteful performance.
I'm not going to go into the fact that Bad Bunny's label was founded with a man who was so deep into the Marxist government of Hugo Chávez that I bet he still reeks of the dictator's cologne. Just that fact alone is enough to activate the part of your brain that understands the nature of cultural change through subversive art, a tactic Marxists like to use. Bad Bunny's sudden meteoric rise to global attention out of nowhere only seems strange if you know nothing about industry plants.
This isn't a conspiracy theory. Industry plants happen all the time.
Bad Bunny's arrival out of the ether was perfect for just this moment. Donald Trump is in the White House, and the Left hates him more than they would hate Hitler if he suddenly arrived on the scene. The ICE raids are a central focus of the media who are consistently trying to paint them as cruel, racist, and bigoted as much as possible. This plant had what the legacy entertainment industry needed in terms of identity and cultural momentum.
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Months ago, they announced Bad Bunny was going to be the Super Bowl halftime show, where, during his promotional stint on SNL, he told everyone that if they wanted to understand his show, they had a few months to learn Spanish. This was only ever going to make people mad, especially Americans and especially conservative Americans. Right in the middle of a sensitive moment where ICE was doing the job Trump had been duly elected to carry out, throwing someone on stage who is vocally so against ICE that he refused to tour in America, and then telling everyone he was forcing everyone to press "two for Spanish" was absolutely going to cause backlash.
Sure enough, it happened. People immediately protested online, TPUSA started putting together their own halftime show, and all of it, from left to right, was a spiteful reaction on a big stage level.
Then the day was upon us, and more talked about than the game itself was the halftime shows. The internet was in a flame war between the Left and the Right as the TPUSA and NFL halftime shows commenced, but while the TPUSA halftime show was pretty nakedly a pro-American piece of entertainment brought on as a counter to what the NFL was delivering, the NFL was pretending it never wanted a fight. Yeah, they had this Marxist-friendly anti-ICE Puerto Rican mumbling his way through the performance, but it was through slice-of-life scenes.
Look, this is Puerto Rican culture. See how peaceful and friendly it is? Look at this man and woman getting married! How sweet and biblical! Look, he's handing a young boy his Grammy! It's so cute. Man, cultures from outside the U.S. sure are lovely, and it's so weird how we're so against people as sweet as this!
The icing on the cake was that a message was hovering over the proceedings as the performance went on. It was a literal bumper sticker-style text that read "THE ONLY THING MORE POWERFUL THAN HATE IS LOVE," shining down on the performance like a small-g god blessing the whole thing. Sure enough, people ate it up.
Imagine getting mad about this and still thinking you’re a good person pic.twitter.com/jWdNzJmCCE
— Wesley (@WesleyBout) February 9, 2026
In the words of Admiral Akbar, "IT'S A TRAP!"
They knew conservatives were mid-backlash. They knew the flame war was happening. They knew it because they purposefully engineered it. The goal was to put on a show that looked harmless and maybe even had elements of pro-American and traditional values in it. They wanted conservatives to look like they were raging purely out of bigotry and racism, and the underlying theme of it all was that these people represented love while the other side represented hate.
It was a finger wag dressed as a positive message. They knew what they were doing. This was entirely political, but they dressed it like a celebration.
Admittedly, it was good enough to fool a lot of people, but it's a veil to hide the fact that these people hate far more than they ever love. They hate Trump, they hate the policies he enacts, they hate you for voting him in, they hate the fact that you support ICE, they hate your American traditions and virtues, and they hate it all so much that they went out of their way to utilize one of the most-watched televized moments of the year to make you look like the hateful one in the room.
It was all political. Don't let anyone try to tell you differently.
