Photo via NBC
It comes as no surprise that the far-right didn’t take kindly to Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny taking up nearly 15 minutes of their time on a day when American football is treated as a holiday. It comes as even less of a surprise that conservative non-profit organization, Turning Point USA, sought an opportunity for another overzealous event laden with pyrotechnics and meat heads wearing red. Instead, this time it wasn’t a funeral. It was a discursive space for white people.
Roughly a week before Super Bowl LX, Turning Point USA, founded by the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk, announced their production of a livestream event as a replacement for Bad Bunny’s halftime show. The event included performances from Gabby Barrett, Lee Brice, Brantley Gilbert, and Donald Trump’s royal jester, Kid Rock. If this alternative sounds appetizing to you, your Facebook profile picture already made that clear.
Around the time of the announcement, Bad Bunny, born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, received a Grammy for Album of the Year for his sixth studio album, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos”. The 2025 album became the first Spanish-language album to win the award in Grammy history. If you do the painstaking work of searching for English translations of the lyrics, you will find that a common theme in the album is his raw admiration for his homeland, Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory.
In true American fashion, Turning Point USA relatively dichotomized the Super Bowl, because we can’t have anything these days. However, this wasn’t just another “anti-woke” initiative, though I think that is an arbitrary term conservatives use liberally. No, it was about white centralization. Whiteness lacks its own culture until it defines others, and Turning Point USA’s attempt to preserve white ubiquity was just pitiful in every single way.
I know this isn’t a novel realization. I don’t know what gave it away: The ICE agents brutalizing the city of Minneapolis and murdering its citizens, or the picture Trump posted of the Obamas depicted as monkeys. Maybe it was 250 years of history. Either way, calling a spade a spade doesn’t make it less of a spade; it just reminds you that it’s a spade. And the more you think about the spade, the more likely you are to remember that the spade is absurdly racist and should always be contested.
Before his passing, Charlie Kirk said, “When you have the most televised event for the entire year, that should be a reflection of the virtue that hopefully you want society to embody.” Kirk envisioned a society where whiteness, Christianity, capitalism, and heteronormativity are all under attack. His mission was to regain the center, not just sustain it. Among many other bigoted ideals, this was his lifeline.
Some may skew the narrative that the purpose of the Turning Point USA show was merely to provide an alternative to the Super Bowl. However, even the most moronic of the land knows that’s delusional.
Florida resident and Alabama senator, Tommy Tuberville, stated, “Unfortunately, we’ve got the Woke Bowl, because we’re getting more and more woke. We got Bad Bunny or Bad Rabbit at halftime. I’ll be watching the [Turning Point USA] halftime show. It’s just unfortunate we’ve gotten to this point.” Something tells me that Tuberville gets a shooting pain in his left arm when he thinks about people of color. People like him reject what pressurizes the white space.
Sure, this wasn’t entirely meant for people who weren’t already sold on the Turning Point USA agenda. It was a “safe place” for them, which positions itself as the minority, as if the real depiction of America is being silenced by what they probably label “DEI.” That was Charlie’s schtick.
Nevertheless, the victimhood narrative is severely dangerous because it is a false promise that warrants total justification. It’s the type of claim that allows white guys like Lee Brice the grand stage to lay his convictions bare as he sings, “I just wanna catch my fish / Drive my truck / Drink my beer”. It goes without saying that these were the first lyrics of the song, seconds after he said, “Charlie gave people microphones so they could say what’s on their minds. This is what’s on mine.”
Turning Point USA platformed artists with a whole lot of nothing to say if it wasn’t classic far-right pandering. It was just noise. Brice debuted a new song where the hook sings, “It ain’t easy being country nowadays.” He mentioned that the evening news urges him to “tell my own daughter, that little boys ain’t little girls”, and the crowd roared.
Finally, he refrained as he said, “Because I have my morals and a small town point of view. You assume that you don’t like me means that I don’t like you, too.” Well, Lee, you just ruled out one demographic, so yeah. It doesn’t look promising for the others.
Kid Rock, born Robert Rithchie, finally arrived. Ironically, a common complaint for Bad Bunny was the language barrier, but down comes the gargantuan American flag when Kid Rock lip syncs the following poetry:
Bawitdaba, da-bang, da-bang, diggy-diggy-diggy
Said the boogie, said up jump the boogie
Bawitdaba, da-bang, da-bang, diggy-diggy-diggy
Said the boogie, said up drop the boogie (Get ready)
My name is Kid
Kid Rock
The rest of the song is sort of just that and a few lines about big breasts and drugs, whereas the next song he sings, “There’s a book in your house somewhere that could use some dusting off”. I looked directly behind him to see the kick drum covered with a graphic reading “We the People.” Now, that is what I call a man who values faith, family, and freedom with no contradictions.
Bad Bunny’s performance was vibrant, energetic, and tasteful. The set design mimicked a Puerto Rican landscape as he swaggered about, dancing with young Latin people. He was joyous and confident. There was salsa dancing and, somehow, Lady Gaga. He handed a small child one of his Grammy trophies as a slight nod to his credentials. A parade of dancers appeared with flags of various countries in the Americas, as Bad Bunny gave a roll call, beginning with a chest-filled “God Bless America” and ending with Puerto Rico.
What’s funny is that MAGA’s expectations were not fulfilled. There was no protest, at least in the conventional sense. His message was covert and clever. The wondrous display of what brings Bad Bunny to life was showing MAGA who he is, what they are not, and that his Latin joy will illuminate into oblivion.
Popular culture and politics share an inextricable relationship that is often unnoticed but occasionally unavoidable. It is a transactional relationship – as they mutually function as reactions to each other and construct their messages accordingly. The tension lies in one’s exclusive ability to enact policy and the other’s ability to influence it across the entire spectrum.
Here we are. ICE has terrorized the country this past year, and now it’s Black History Month. We must be vigilant in reserving space for people of color and amplifying the voices that recalibrate social equity. White centralization pollutes our social, cultural, and universal ecosystem and corrupts the way we coexist. Humanity is inevitably and indisputably diverse.
It’s quite an ambitious task for the white population to take on every other form of person surrounding them, especially without expecting resistance. If there is no resistance, then how will they be truly challenged to demonstrate the force and power that plagues Stephen Miller’s obsessive delusions?
It posits that the center of society can only be functional when it is colorless. But the center is just a blank circle on a canvas, whose only defining trait is that it isn’t the same color as the ones beyond the margins. It is because of what it is not, and it desperately attempts to sustain its self-proclaimed purity. But we can all see the blood of those on the fringes seeping through the frail bulwarks, and the blood is from the artist’s hands.
cole manasco 