[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
Latin music, at least most contemporary pop versions, tends to be for Puerto Ricans only. Unlike ‘black rap’ which has found its way into billions of white wedding receptions, Latin music has had no such cultural expansion.
As the saying goes, “You have to be Puerto Rican to appreciate it.”
That’s why when it was announced that a rap singer named Bad Bunny (Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio) would be the star entertainer at the February 2026 NFL Super Bowl 60 Halftime show in Santa Clara, California, like many others I said, “Who?”
After the announcement, Bad Bunny’s promoters were quick to fill in biographical details, stating how this 31 year-old actor and fashion runway icon (Ru Paul with a mustache) has drawn more than 500,000 attendees at his concerts in Puerto Rico.
That high number makes him just as popular (yet considerably lesser known) than the Beatles, they said.
But Puerto Rico, however overcrowded, is still an isolated bubble. The “average” American sports fan has never even heard of…Bad Bunny.
I asked one of my ‘underworld’ music fiend friends in his 30s if he’d ever heard of him and he told me, “Bad Bunny?! He’s corny.”
Yet the rapper was Jay Z’s pick for Super Bowl 60’s chief entertainment slot when negotiations with Taylor Swift fell through. Jay Z, of course, happens to be the NFL’s entertainment promoter, so he gets his way. (Jay Z used to host horrendous annual Benjamin Franklin Parkway concerts in Philadelphia that were so raucous nearby neighbors would make it a point to leave town until the concert was over).
Jay Z, who is said to be friends with race-baiter Barrack Obama, wanted Bad Bunny because he said he was “relevant,” as in anti-Trump and anti-ICE.
Bunny, meanwhile, who says he’s heterosexual, plays with gender roles the way Kamala Harris plays with ‘word salads.’ He’s a diehard leftist who calls the crackdown on illegal immigration an attack on all immigrants. In a way he is no worse than Pope Leo, who recently attacked the Trump Administration for its inhumane “treatment of immigrants.”
Now, you’d think a Villanova grad pretending to be holy because he is the Pope of Rome would understand the difference between legal and illegal, but like many “humane empathizers” Leo refuses to make a distinction which then marks him as an agenda-driven leftist.
This should scare the living daylights out of every good Catholic on the planet, but for some reason it doesn’t.
The inability to tell the difference between legal and illegal has become a trademark of the globalist Left.
Bad Bunny’s hatred of Trump quadrupled after a Trump 2024 election rally where an unknown comedian, Tom Hinchiffe, made disparaging remarks about Puerto Rico, calling it an island of garbage. While Trump had nothing to do with the selection of Hinchiffe or his “gotcha material,” the “corny” rapper assumed there was a correlation.
The rapper began to boycott mainland USA for concerts after Trump was elected and gave ICE the kick start it needed to fix the disaster Biden had created: getting rid of the millions of illegal border crashers who were turning the United States into a third world country.
News that Bad Bunny had been selected to headline Super Bowl 60 hit media outlets like a hydrogen bomb.
MSNBC philosophized that while Republicans may have won the White House, where they may not be ‘winning’ is in the pop culture space, an observation that-sadly-carries considerable weight.
While many football and sports audiences in stadiums across the country were engaged in spontaneous chants mourning the assassination of Charlie Kirk, here was the NFL employing a leftist, ICE Trump hater to perform all his songs in Spanish-songs the average NFL fan has never heard of in a language other than English-on the world’s biggest stage.
More shocking still was the NFL’s disconnect from the values and rhythm of the American heartland when it comes to Super Bowl entertainment. After all, ICE protesters-and this includes you, Pope Leo-who do not know the difference between legal and illegal and cheer on lawbreakers as if they were saints and victims, should not be celebrated on a world stage.
Coming on the heels of the Kirk assassination and the Jimmy Kimmel debacle, the easy endorsement of Bunny by the NFL can only be seen as an attack on MAGA and the Trump presidency.
It’s also, in a way, an example of woke “pop culture” fighting back, an opportunity to stick its tongue out at ICE and give it two middle fingers. Though some conservative commentators dismiss Bad Bunny’s alliance with the NFL as nothing to get too concerned about, we have to ask ourselves: what impact will this massive “f-you’ to the president have on future entertainment spectacles?
Will it inspire even greater (and far more dangerous) anti-American messaging?
Of course it will.
The day Bad Bunny was announced as the NFL’s chief entertainer for Super Bowl 60, Trump haters celebrated the way they did when Jimmy Kimmel was brought back on the air and when Charlie Kirk died. They saw it as a Paul Revere moment, a rustic cry to “save democracy.”
“Trump will have his day,” they said, referring to Super Bowl 60. “Bad Bunny will bury him.”
MSNBC’s contention that pop culture remains unaffected by the Trump counter-revolution in Washington should be both a warning to conservatives as well as an incentive to work harder to change the larger, deeper culture.
No counter-revolution can be complete without the overturning of the “messages” and propaganda coming out of Hollywood. This includes putting entertainment types like Jay Z into positions of power and influence. The shape-shifting revolution taking place in President Trump’s Washington will ultimately prove temporary and ineffective as long as the culture continues to embrace figures like Jay Z, Bad Bunny, Jimmy Kimmel and the women on The View.
How do you change the culture? Slowly and incrementally, one “pop culture” space at a time.
A good starting point: Remove Jay Z from his NFL power position; make it so that wannabe Kimmel’s and Colbert’s can never rise to the top in late night television; diffuse the Leftist threads from cancerous TV shows like TMZ.
As long as the Left “owns” these cultural forces they will always act as a parallel presidency whenever there’s a conservative in the White House.
“What I’m feeling goes beyond myself,” Bad Bunny said about his Super Bowl 60 gig. “It’s for those who came before me and ran countless yards so I could come in and score a touchdown… this is for my people, my culture, and our history. Ve y dile a tu abuela, que seremos el HALFTIME SHOW DEL SUPER BOWL.”
This is precisely the problem.
America is bigger than your people, your culture, and your history. That stuff is parochial and belongs where it came from-on an island. If you can’t assimilate, its best that your whole Super Bowl 60 act be put on ICE.
But I’ll leave the last part to Tom Holman.
