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Two Updates:
1. A beautiful observation about the Bad Bunny Show written by NC State Senator Michael Garrett
I watched Bad Bunny deliver the most American halftime show I have ever seen. Then I came home and watched it again. And I am not okay. In the best possible way.
He sang every single word in Spanish. Every. Single. Word. He danced through sugarcane fields built on a football field in California while the President of the United States sat somewhere calling it “disgusting.” Lady Gaga came out and did the salsa. Ricky Martin lit up the night. A couple got married on the field. He handed his Grammy, the one he won eight days ago for Album of the Year, to a little boy who looked up at him the way every child looks up when they dare to believe the world has a place for them.
And then this man, this son of a truck driver and a schoolteacher from Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, stood on the biggest stage on the planet and said “God bless America.”
And then he started naming them.
Chile. Argentina. Uruguay. Paraguay. Bolivia. Peru. Ecuador. Brazil. Colombia. Venezuela. Panama. Costa Rica. Nicaragua. Honduras. El Salvador. Guatemala. Mexico. Cuba. Dominican Republic. Jamaica. The United States. Canada. And then, his voice breaking with everything he carries, “Mi patria, Puerto Rico. Seguimos aquí.” My homeland, Puerto Rico. We are still here.
The flags came. Every single one of them. Carried across that field by dancers and musicians while the jumbotron lit up with the only words that mattered: “THE ONLY THING MORE POWERFUL THAN HATE IS LOVE.”
I teared up. I’m not ashamed to say it. I sat on my couch and I wept because THAT is the America I believe in. That is the American story, not the sanitized, gated, English-only version that small and frightened people try to sell us. The REAL one. The messy, beautiful, multilingual, multicolored, courageous one. The one that has always been built by hands that speak every language and pray in every tongue and come from every corner of this hemisphere.
That is the America I want Jack and Charlotte to know. That when the moment came, when the whole world was watching, a Puerto Rican kid who grew up to become the most-streamed artist on Earth stood in front of 100 million people, sang in his mother’s language, blessed every nation in the Americas, and spiked a football that read “Together, we are America” into the ground. Not with anger. With joy. With love so big it made hate look exactly as small as it is.
And what did the President do? He called it “absolutely terrible.” He said “nobody understands a word this guy is saying.” He called it “a slap in the face to our Country.” The leader of the free world watched a celebration of love, culture, and everything this hemisphere has given to the world, and all he could see was something foreign. Something threatening. Something disgusting.
Let that sink into your bones.
The man who is supposed to represent all of us looked at the flags of our neighbors, heard the language of 500 million Americans across this hemisphere, and felt attacked. That’s not strength. That’s not patriotism. That is poverty of the soul.
And then there was the Turning Point show. Kid Rock in a college arena in North Dakota. Three million viewers watching a man who once wrote a song about liking underage girls perform as the “family-friendly” alternative to a Puerto Rican artist celebrating love. They called it the “All-American Halftime Show”, as if America has a velvet rope. As if this country belongs to some of us and not all of us. As if you need to sing in English to count.
Here’s what I want to say to everyone who posted about that show tonight, who shared it proudly, who turned away from Bad Bunny’s celebration because it was in Spanish and the flags weren’t only red, white, and blue:
Your children will see those posts. Your grandchildren will find them. The internet doesn’t forget. And one day, when the history of this moment is written, when our kids and their kids look back at 2026 the way we look back at the people who stood on the wrong side of every bridge and every march and every moment that mattered, they will know exactly where you stood. They will see who chose Kid Rock over a hemisphere of flags. They will see who called love “disgusting.” And they will carry that knowledge the way all of us carry the knowledge of what our ancestors did when they were tested.
I don’t say that with anger. I say it with sadness. Because hate is an inheritance nobody asks for, and yet it gets passed down just the same. Bad Bunny didn’t say “ICE out” tonight. He didn’t need to. He just showed the whole world what America looks like when we are not afraid of each other. When culture is shared, not policed. When language is music, not a threat. When a flag from every nation in this hemisphere can walk across a football field together and the only words you need are the ones he gave us:
The only thing more powerful than hate is love.
Over 100 million people saw that tonight.
And no Truth Social post can take it away.
And:
~
For more (and better): 2 Words that Defined Resistance in Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show.
THE ONLY THING MORE POWERFUL THAN HATE IS LOVE
I didn’t understand much of the symbolism of Bad Bunny’s halftime romp, but I knew I was seeing symbolism. The power lines, the sugar cane, the flags and the recitation of Americas, coco frio vs Coca Cola, the lyrics…there was a lot going on.
So, if you’re curious, this one’s for you. I was curious. But don’t worry, haters and bots somehow dismissing all of this while missing all the meaning…this one’s for you, too, and your homophobia (two men together were on screen for, what, .5 seconds and hidden behind car door and hey it’s dancing and joy and sensuality and shame on you for hating on people and love, frankly). It’s not “entertainment nonsense,” it’s the people vs power, which if we actually care about, say, the Epstein Files coming out unredacted and there being real consequences, should track for US.
This show was about the cultural love and pride vs colonialism and cruel greed. Like all Super Bowl halftime shows, it was not football, it was art. But unlike all shows, it was art with meaning and brave love and pride.
Even if we don’t understand it, we can unpack it instead of dismissing it.
“Together we are America.”
Ricky, the breakthrough prior generation who (some say) assimilated more so Bunny didn’t have to, was invited on and sang Bunny’s “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii.” A beautiful, painful yet proud, poignant, powerful homage.
“They want to take the river away from me, and also the beach. They want my neighborhood and my grandma to leave. No, don’t let go of the flag, and don’t forget the lelolai (jibaro/taino expression of happiness). I don’t want them to do to you what they did to Hawaii.”
“A couple who invited Bad Bunny to their wedding were, in turn, invited by him to get married during his halftime show performance during Super Bowl LX.”
The below are a few highlights (click on the images to read and learn) getting into some of the details. Enjoy!
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