Why has Maga lost its mind over Bad Bunny?
In The Guardian, I ask the question why Maga has lost its mind over Bad Bunny. The answer? Vitriol signaling, which part of the right wing’s rage machine.
Can someone explain to me why Megyn Kelly is so angry? In an interview with Piers Morgan, the political commentator began ranting so hard about Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl half-time show that I was starting to worry about her health.
“I’m sorry Piers. To get up there and perform the whole show in Spanish is a middle finger to the rest of America!” she roared. “We don’t need a Spanish-speaking, non-English performing performer, and we don’t need an ICE- or America-hater featured as our primetime entertainment.”
When Morgan challenged her about English being the official language of the United States, she quickly shot back. “This attitude that you have here is why you in Great Britain have lost your culture. You have ceded your culture to a bunch of radical Muslims who came in and took over and now it’s gone,” she said. “We’re not allowing that here. It’s not happening in the United States of America. That’s why President Trump was elected.”
Naively, I had thought this interview was about the Super Bowl.
Lucky for me, Kelly did return to the game. “Football, that kind of football, is ours. They call it American football.” (I was glad for the clarification.) “And the half-time show, and everything around it, needs to stay quintessentially American. Not Spanish, not Muslim, not anything other than good old-fashioned American apple pie. There should be a meatloaf, maybe some fried chicken, and an English-speaking performer. That’s what the Super Bowl should be.”
Definitely no nachos found on football night at the Kelly house, I quickly surmised. (Seriously, who eats meatloaf on game night?)
Kelly wasn’t the only commentator whose reaction to Bad Bunny’s half-time show seemed outsized, if not just a little too extreme. The Federalist called the show “a humiliation”, even linking it to the Great Replacement Theory: “The audience was not invited into a shared civic experience. Instead, they were required to bear witness to the replacement of their own culture.”
Trump confidante Laura Loomer wrote on X: “There’s nothing American about any of this.” Conservative commentator Will Chamberlain opined that “yes the Bad Bunny trash was political and yes it’s about weakening and undermining the United States.” And Donald Trump called the show “a ‘slap in the face’ to our Country”, and said that “Nobody understands a word this guy is saying.”
Actually, Mr President, according to a 2025 report from the well-respected Instituto Cervantes, the United States currently has approximately 45 million native speakers of Spanish, and another 20 million non-native speakers, which the institute defines as those with “sufficient knowledge to communicate in Spanish with native and non-native speakers”. At 65 million Hispanophones, the United States has more Spanish speakers than Spain. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
This kind of vitriolic response blows back regularly from the right, with the force of an exhaust from a jetliner. It’s not virtue signaling. It’s vitriol signaling, and it’s part of the right’s attack arsenal. Even though it is now the party in power, holding both the executive and legislative branches of government along with a generally sympathetic US supreme court, the Maga-right believes that it is the one truly aggrieved population in the country. Not only does Maga believe this, Maga wallows in the idea of its own persecution. Maga sings songs to it. Maga celebrates it.
That was precisely the mood at the “alternative” half-time show organized by Turning Point USA (TPUSA), the conservative organization founded by Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated last year. Dubbed the “All-American Halftime Show”, this extravaganza hosted…
Read the rest here.