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Late-night hosts addressed the performative Maga outrage over Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl half-time show.
Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart returned to his Monday night Daily Show post fired up about the Super Bowl, and particularly the outrage from conservative pundits such as Megyn Kelly and Benny Johnson over Bad Bunny’s half-time show, which he performed, as usual entirely in Spanish.
Stewart played numerous clips of Fox News hosts et al complaining that they couldn’t understand the Spanish, then cut to a clip of Turning Point USA “All-American Halftime Show” headliner, Kid Rock, singing his hit Bawitdaba, with its gibberish chorus.
The host then tore into the rightwing talking point that Bad Bunny’s half-time show, whose overarching theme was pan-American unity, was not “unifying” because it was in Spanish. “Why the fuck is it the Super Bowl Halftime entertainer’s job to unify the country? Is that their job?” he fumed. “Isn’t there another person whose job description is much more along those lines?”
He cut to Donald Trump’s attempts to “unify” the country this weekend by posting a racist video depicting the Obama family as apes, then refusing to back down, apologize or even acknowledge the offensiveness of the post. “Another unifying tip might be to tell your guy to stop tweeting out racist slop during Black History Month,” Stewart joked.
Then there was the rightwing meltdown over the Olympian freestyle skier Hunter Hess, who said that representing the US brought up “mixed emotions” because “there’s obviously a lot going on that I’m not the biggest fan of and I think a lot of people aren’t”. Trump called Hess “a real loser”, among other things.
It all led Stewart to ask: “When did the right become such fucking pussies?”
“Remember 2017?” he continued. “Remember what you hated about liberals? Perpetually offended, safe spaces, censoring free speech, culture of victimhood. Remind you of anyone? ‘Oh, I can’t go 15 minutes without listening to country music. I need a separate show.’ ‘Oh, that skier triggered me. I can’t sleep.’ Not the best imitation, but you know what I’m going for.
“This whole culture war this weekend has really demonstrated one thing: it’s that for all of Maga’s triumphalism, it’s not a movement that seems confident in its position,” he added. “These people who control every branch of government are so triggered by someone singing in Spanish for 20 minutes, they need to create their own safe space alternative half-time show, where Trad Bunny over here is singing songs about how he can’t even enjoy sitting in a truck and drinking beer because he knows that somewhere out there, there’s a trans person.
“It’s actually fucking pathetic,” he concluded. “The gap between the power you all wield and the victimhood you all claim is the real offense. If you didn’t actually have the power to do so much damage in our country, I think we’d all dismiss it as a weak and pathetic pity party.”
Jimmy Kimmel
And in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel also mocked Trump’s claim that he was offended by the Bad Bunny half-time show, which Kimmel called “a tribute to the Spanish-speaking world and to culture”.
“This is a man who paid off a porn star who spanked him with his own face on a magazine,” said Kimmel. “And he’s offended by the half-time show.
“It really is amazing how differently people can see the same thing,” he continued. “Half of us saw a heartwarming story about immigrants who have dreams, who come to America, who work hard, get married, grow up, raise families, sing, dance, play backgammon. The other half? It was like the movie 28 Days Later.”
The Turning Point USA “All-American Halftime Show” put on as an exclusionary alternative might as well have been called “the Kristi Noem Shoots Her Puppy Bowl”, joked Kimmel, “because this was not a good program”, beset by technical glitches and Kid Rock egregiously missing his lip sync cues. “This is it in a nutshell,” said Kimmel. “This what they do: they complain about how bad everything is, and then they do it worse. And not only do they do it worse, they do it in jorts.
“It’s all so performative,” he added. “Number one, if Bad Bunny had stopped by the White House to make nice with Trump like Nicki Minaj did, or Kanye West or the Village People, Maga would have no problem with Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl. They’d pretend to love him too. But since Bad Bunny isn’t a fan of Trump, since they knew that at half-time there would be a bunch of confused white people sitting on their couches being like ‘what the hell is this,’ they decided to make it a thing. You know the things they always make to try to get us to forget about all the redacted names in the Epstein files? Like trans Budweiser and gay M&Ms? They made it one of those.
“All the snowflakes are so upset they have to listen to Spanish for eight minutes, they decided to make their own half-time show,” he concluded. “And of course, like everything they do, it was a disaster.”
