Bad Bunny Won the Super Bowl

Conservatives took the bait once again. Here's how we should respond instead.

Last weekend’s Super Bowl may have been a contest between the Seahawks and the Patriots, but the real debate that has consumed the discourse has been over the halftime show, which featured the Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny, who sang exclusively in Spanish and wove together his music with scenes from sugarcane plantations and Puerto Rican street culture.

The Bad Bunny performance was the perfect bait for the Right, with enough subversive material to work conservatives into a frenzy and enough of a family-friendly veneer to give the Left plausible deniability. The show combined imagery that was, at least for non-Spanish speakers unable to understand his songs’ lyrics, compatible with family-oriented conservatism—for example, the heterosexual wedding ceremony that took place during the show—but also included subtle but intense left-wing messaging pushing mass immigration and large-scale demographic change, such as the closing sequence of foreign flag-bearers marching under an Orwellian billboard declaring that “the only thing more powerful than hate is love.”

Conservatives reacted in a predictable manner, lashing out at the performance. The truth, which many on the Right would like to deny, is that conservatives have been placed in such a position of cultural subordination that they are forced to replay the same cycle year after year. Every year, the Super Bowl halftime act is announced, which is followed by the predictable conservative criticisms, which are, it should be noted, mostly true—but totally ineffective.