For the first time in the Super Bowl’s 60-year history, football fans could choose a different halftime show if they felt morally “offended” or personally “attacked” by the NFL’s decision to headline Bad Bunny this year.
One performance radiated infectious energy and universal positivity, deftly layering history, artistry, and advocacy. The live celebration was also an invitation: learn more, feel more, share more. Dance.
The other performance was a pre-recorded “All-American” wormhole funded by Erika King, et al. It pandered to all of the conservative tropes, bleating performative white “Christian” “patriotism” and stoking MAGA’s signature manufactured victim complex. Like a lift kit on a truck that’s never seen mud, the chest-puffing jingoism was predictably costume-y, but it ain’t new.
Like the public school kids yoinked out of Sex Ed by their hyper-religious parents in order to “protect” them from the soul-corrupting influence of … information, the poorly planned, slapped-together alternative show protected fragile Christian conservatives from a remarkably Christian message: love is more powerful than hate.
MAGA doesn’t want that world.
Voting with your viewership is currently easier in the U.S. than voting with your ballot. On Super Bowl Sunday, we got to “vote” for a halftime show that reflected what kind of “American” we want to be, and which kind of “America” we want to live in. We can party, learn, and grow together in a vibrant multicultural multilingual world. Or we can lick our self-inflicted wounds in a poorly lit food court that only serves mashed potatoes (no garlic) and potato salad.
Which party would you rather go to? The worldwide extravaganza where you might not understand a single word except that we’re better together? Or the aggrieved soundstage where you understand every word, and every dog whistle simultaneously warns you that you’re being marginalized while reassuring you that your way of life is morally and culturally superior?
It’s a false dichotomy, of course. You don’t have to choose. Unless your identity is human rights violations or eroding civil liberties, no one is attacking you, your core values, or your way of life.
Jason Pargin exposes this defensive phenomenon by dissecting a viral cartoon about ordering coffee. In the frequently reposted image, a barista cheerfully bulldozes a beleaguered Marine’s repeated requests for plain black coffee by trying to push various “fancy” coffees on him.
Pargin explains that even though it’s “just a joke”, it exaggerates a “phenomenon” that never actually happens. That this fabricated scenario resonates with enough people to stay evergreen-ish is the real problem. And it is the same imagined persecution that fueled Turning Point’s alternative show.
Pargin explains three important insights about human nature that make people imagine persecution.
When “the range of options for other people expands” some people “perceive that as persecution.” “Most people are not satisfied to simply have the option to live the way they want. They also want to feel normal.”
When someone perceives that an increased variety of anything renders their own preferences “basic” or “unsophisticated”, it threatens their sense of normalcy, of belonging. If the world moves on without you, you fear becoming the outcast.
“That is scary to someone who is suddenly remembering how they have always treated outcasts.”
Where this parallels the halftime shows is that the mere existence of different ethnicities, skin color, languages, nationalities, sexualities, flags, musical genres, and dance styles doesn’t threaten white Americans’ lives or lifestyle: it threatens their dominance. And monolingual English-speaking white people in the U.S. not only felt their dominance being threatened, they chose to feel personally persecuted because that diversity was platformed and elevated on a “traditional” “American” stage. So they treated Bad Bunny’s performance like a minority uprising.
For MAGA, it’s offensive enough that people speak Spanish in the U.S., and even worse that many people aren’t white or at least white-subordinate. But when they have the audacity to take center stage, to be exceptional at something unfamiliar, something “un-American”, it moves the needle too far. It makes English-only white people feel marginalized because their language of choice and musical styles are not being defaulted to as mainstream. That the world erupted in universal acclaim to reggaeton, rap, salsa, pop, plena, bomba, Latin trap, and Puerto Rican slang added insult to injury: Bad Bunny’s performance was just, inarguably, and significantly, cooler.
Even MAGA folks seemed unfamiliar with the lineup of “All-American Alternative” performers. A country rap/rocker started their show with rural-coded lyrics about beer and trucks, one guitar player had waist-length white-people dreads, and two guitar players randomly Angus Young-ed across the stage, imitating the Australian’s one-legged hop-scooting.
“It ain’t easy being country in this country nowadays,” the next guy kind of crooned about trucks and beer, guns and Jesus. Although we’ve grown used to the hypocrisy, it still bears mentioning that none of the MAGA doctrine aligns with being “red letter, Jesus raised.” It directly contradicts all of Christ’s teachings.
Alas.
And to be clear, you’re not a “downright hateful monster for backing the blue.” You are, perhaps, a monster if you’re not opposed to police brutality and impunity for murdering unarmed civilians. As many have pointed out, your inability or your decision not to differentiate between the police and police brutality says more about you than it does about the Black Lives Matter movement.
In a perhaps inadvertently honest line, leather-jacket guy admits that he just doesn’t want to “wake up to all this stuff I don't want to hear,” after which he makes a transgender dig and complains about cancel culture.
“I just wanna catch my fish,” he bemoans as if anyone besides the Department of Fish and Wildlife is stopping him. But the internet didn’t hear righteous patriotism. Everyone heard, “Kiss my fish.” The memes and merchandise immediately spawned across the web.
A Puerto Rican musician is dominating music charts that those TP performers aren’t even on. But he is not keeping anyone from fishing. The Department of Fish and Wildlife regulates permits so everyone hunt and angle. No one else is stopping you but the weather. And your own skill.
The MAGA base claims to suffer oppression and even potential extinction in a country where their guy took the presidency, their party controls the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court, and a police state is actively deporting everyone they can who doesn’t look or act “white” enough.
But one entertainment stage doesn’t center them for 15 minutes and they panic in outrage. When you’ve always been in power and are always represented, sharing one of many spotlights feels like oppression. And that “oppression” feels like erasure could be imminent.
Two weeks after the Super Bowl, Americans survived the affront of a Puerto Rican rapper singing in Spanish at a football game. And all anyone will remember from the alternative show is “Hillbilly Vanilli” badly lip-syncing in jorts and the “I just wanna kiss my fish” guy — the first great malapropism since “wrapped up like a ‘douche’” and “Excuse me while I kiss this guy.”
The heartbreaking reality is that the greatest ongoing threat to America is the American government.
This gets at something deeper than halftime shows.
When diversity is framed as an “attack,” what’s really being threatened isn’t identity — it’s dominance. And once you see that pattern, it shows up everywhere: in language, in outrage cycles, in the way normal inclusion gets recast as persecution.
The idea that someone else’s culture, language, or joy is a threat says more about insecurity than harm.
The world didn’t shrink. It expanded. And that’s not something to fear.