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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 four different country music singers – Brantley Gilbert, Gabby Barrett, Lee Brice and Kid Rock – who offered about 15 minutes of music as a tribute to Kirk, who was celebrated at the end of the show as a martyr for their cause.
Those who dare decry the lack of diversity on stage at the All-American show simply failed to look deeply. There was country music sung by a white guy with a beard, country music sung by a white guy with a shorter beard, country music sung by a woman with blond hair and Kid Rock. Diversity is our strength.
Erika Kirk, the current CEO and chair of TPUSA and Charlie Kirk’s widow, told Fox News days earlier that what’s “beautiful” about TPUSA is its ability to “provide an alternative that is pro-America, that is just pro-everything”. Meanwhile, some of the biggest applause of the night came when Brice trotted out a new song – Country Nowadays, in which he sang: “It ain’t easy being country, in this country nowadays.” Why, you ask? Brice will tell you: “The directions, the finger pointing, when everything goes up in flames.” Finger pointing. Right.
At every opportunity, including the All-American half-time show, the right tells us that they find it very upsetting if you hurt their feelings. We should stop that. Apparently, it’s un-American.
And this is what the right’s vitriol signaling ultimately comes down to. It’s long been the case that, to those who have power over others, equality looks a lot like oppression. The Maga world wants to elevate this moral hypocrisy into an angry talking point, then a meme, then a song, and then a veritable discourse on its own so it feels true, even when it’s not.
Contrast this, then, with Bad Bunny’s official half-time show. There was nothing maudlin or self-pitying about his performance. It was joyous and complex, intimate and historical, and it managed to do all of that all at once. It felt like a celebration of life, and you didn’t need to follow the words, because you just needed to feel the beat. (Asked if people must know Spanish to appreciate this show, Bad Bunny said: “It’s better they learn to dance. There’s no better dance than the one that comes from the heart.”) The performance concluded with a big banner that read “The only thing more powerful than hate is love” and with Bad Bunny holding a football (the USA kind) with text that read: “Together, we are America.”
That American conservatives saw that last line as “subversive” shows you the depths of the problem we face in this country. While some of us realize that we have and even like our neighbors, others seem to think we live, or should live, in a hermetically sealed-off land. The two positions are completely incommensurate, which is why, in this case, two halves – that is to say, two half-time shows – will never equal one.
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Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist
