Bad Bunny and the Inescapable War Over American Identity
While conservatives may hate to admit it, the Super Bowl halftime show is an accurate reflection of our cultural trajectory. Bad Bunny’s prurient display was in line with today’s degraded popular culture and recent Super Bowls. Every good parent knows that when the halftime show comes on, children should be sent out of the room.
What was different this year, however, was the extraordinary frankness of the political message in this year’s show. The fact Bad Bunny’s all-Spanish performance was unintelligible to the majority of Americans was conscious choice of his promoters at the notoriously woke NFL to attack America’s founding as an English-speaking nation. The left loved the risqué, all-Spanish performance precisely because it made conservative, white Americans uncomfortable. Their discomfort was the point.
President Trump led the right-wing response, calling Bad Bunny’s audacious spectacle an “affront to the Greatness of America” and observing bluntly, “Nobody understands a word this guy is saying.” Of course, you weren’t supposed to understand his words because it was an open and boisterous celebration of the Great Replacement. One has to wonder how explicit the left needs to be about their agenda before we stop pretending it’s just a conspiracy theory.
Despite the profound strides the left continues to make in transforming the country, conservatives still fall into the trap of thinking that history is on their side. Somehow, they think that the left’s cultural power is a mere fabrication of the media—one that lacks any popular backing. Too many still believe that the right is only an election away from taking America back. Such complacency was evident in the self-congratulation surrounding Turning Point USA’s Super Bowl boycott, featuring Kid Rock, which was about as successful as any previous attempts of conservatives to upstage leftists on the cultural front … that is to say, not very.
The left’s iron grip on culture is a product of the same forces that flooded our borders with so many of Bad Bunny’s fans. The fact of the matter is that he is one of the top-selling musicians in the U.S., however unfamiliar he might be to Americans older than 25. His popularity is accompanied by real changes in the ethnic makeup of the country and its increasingly barbarous cultural tastes. Observe the crude patois of white Gen Z kids—even many who consider themselves on the right—to understand just how profound the change has been.
Recall that in 2004, the nation was scandalized by Janet Jackson’s halftime “Nipplegate” performance, which seems quaint when compared with the public licentiousness routinely accepted today as just another of the rich cultural offerings “diversity” brings us. Americans who dislike the new way of things, and who pay steeper housing costs to escape the boisterous, “vibrant” atmosphere of their foreign neighbors, delude themselves if they believe they can make it disappear by turning off the television. They cannot. And they cannot make the zeal of people who have decided that obstructing mass deportations is a righteous cause any less real.
Despite the much-hyped death of wokeness, the NFL decided that giving a middle finger to its millions of white viewers was a good idea and, so far, the league appears to be vindicated in that choice. The national transformation that made such an attack even conceivable also drives the violence in the streets of our large cities. Politics has become all-consuming. From the streets of Minneapolis to Facebook comment sections, from Christmastime browbeatings about the plight of refugees to Third World chauvinism during the top TV event of the year, the war over America’s identity is inescapable.
Until Trump arrived on the scene, conservatives tried to run from this new reality—reaching timidly for the illusory lifeboat of “assimilation.” But assimilation doesn’t work with the multitudes we are expected to absorb. Refusing to see this helped lead to the present cultural and political crisis. Trump’s rhetorical blast at Bad Bunny shows he has his finger on the real pulse of the culture. Unfortunately, he is under mounting pressure to compromise on his core immigration pledge in order to placate Hispanic voters, as well as a divided white base affected by the media’s narrative spin on deportations.
Those who think wokeness is dead should just consider the extraordinary controversy over removing illegal aliens, which ought to be the simplest thing imaginable, and the incredible power the Latino cultural bloc has acquired in a relatively short time. Social conservatives especially ought to consider carefully the lewdness of the modern mass media that they deplore and then consider whether the newly transplanted Hispanics who applauded Sunday night’s spectacle truly deserve their reputation as “natural conservatives” and stalwarts of “family values.”
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/bad-bunny-and-the-inescapable-war-over-american-identity