How about that Super Bowl halftime show? Amazing, right? Bad Bunny managed to create a microcosm of Puerto Rico right there on the football field complete with a sugar cane farm, faltering electric lines, replicas of traditional Puerto Rican homes and businesses, Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin (not to mention a couple of hot guys grinding on each other).
Billboard called it “a joyous celebration of identity, history and unity.”
Donald Trump called it, “Absolutely terrible,” claiming that the show made “no sense.”
“Nobody understands a word this guy is saying,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Note he didn’t say “I don’t understand.” He said “nobody understands,” because his brain has been rotted away by racism and, to him, nobody who understands Spanish is worth any kind of recognition or consideration at all.
“And the dancing is disgusting,” Trump continued, “especially for young children that are watching from throughout the U.S.A., and all over the World.”
Ah, yes. Won’t someone think of the children. We wouldn’t want them to see something terrible on TV. Like moms and ICU nurses being murdered in the street by Trump’s personal fascist army. We wouldn’t want kids to see other kids tear gassed by their government, or locked up in measles-ridden concentration camps.
But, of course, those are things that Trump wants everyone to see. Because he’s very proud of these things.
But Puerto Ricans telling their stories and expressing joy? Absolutely not.
Conservatives are very mad about the whole thing. (The Bad Bunny thing, not the people being murdered on the street by the government or kids being locked up. That they love.) They’re basically screaming that the NFL hates the U.S. and has betrayed its loyal fan base of white racists (ha, “racists” just auto-corrected to “rapists.” Also an acceptable answer, TBH).
But as my wife, who is fluent in Spanish and a big fan of Bad Bunny, pointed out: Why wouldn’t the NFL want one of the biggest musical stars in the world to play the Super Bowl? Isn’t the Super Bowl halftime show supposed to be a BFD?
It is, indeed.
But something that conservatives, who worship capitalism, are not willing to acknowledge is that the NFL is a business. And U.S. businesses are supposed to do two things: Make money, and make more money.
“The NFL looked at its audience data, saw that its fastest-growing demographic is Latino, saw that the most-streamed artist on the planet sings in Spanish, and made the obvious business decision,” writes journalist Parker Molloy. “Money. Growth. New markets.”
You know, the Holy Trinity of capitalism.
But even that doesn’t trump racism.
See, conservatives claim to love the United States, but they hate the whole “united” part. To the fascist weirdos running the country right now, one group of people can be united against another group. And there are plenty of groups that conservatives hate. If you’re not white, cis gender, heterosexual and male, well, you’re in for at least some degree of hurt. And yes, this includes white women who are hurt by misogyny and sexism even though they continually vote to uphold the very power structure that oppresses them.
Trump and his supporters simply cannot fathom the idea that people might be united in ways that seek to protect and heal. Especially not white people uniting to protect the immigrants in their communities. This is, quite simply, seen by Trump as colluding with the enemy. And anyone who colludes with the enemy is a traitor. And you know what happens to traitors.
The fact is, most people do not want to live surrounded by trigger happy fascists. Most people do not want to live in fear. Most people don’t want their neighbors to be thrown to the ground, handcuffed, and disappeared.
And a lot of those “most people” are white.
White people have, historically, been pretty bad at being allies. White people were pretty content to pretend that racism was generally understood to be a bad thing, but also easy to spot: a man in a white hood saying the n-word, for example. Racism couldn’t possibly be the undergirding of an entire nation built on genocide and slave labor and anyone making such a claim was hysterical.
But fascism, eventually, eats its own. They’re starting with the people they consider most disposable: transgender people and immigrants. But anyone with even a hazy recollection of history knows how this story goes.
In the words of Bad Bunny, “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”