Bad Bunny's Super Bowl LX Halftime Show: Lost in Translation, Found in Politics
Bad Bunny is the most popular artist globally... but the performance was literally lost in translation for most Americans.
What did I think of the Bad Bunny Super Bowl LX Halftime Show? My initial reaction was something like: brutal… this may have been a new low for Super Bowl halftime shows. A whole lotta “aye, aye, aye” some twerking near sugar cane (okay that’s too harsh).
Not even a Bad Bunny hater… just thought it wasn’t very enjoyable as an American. To ensure I wasn’t hallucinating or misjudging, I watched it again… and upon watching it a second time, I’ll concede that some moments had a legit “bop” or “vibe” (~2-3 songs)… and maybe my initial impression was overly critical.
Also thought both Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin were completely out of place and didn’t match the vibe… unnecessary to add them even if talented singers. Bad Bunny should’ve solo’d the entire thing.
This halftime performance reminded me of entertainment you’d get an all-inclusive resort in Mexico… and if I were fully fluent in Spanish, I’d probably rate the performance higher, but it was mostly lost in translation. Thought the sugar cane set was fairly wack.
I should also note that I agree with assessments: Who cares? The SB Halftime Show has always been mostly for women. Most women watch the Super Bowl for (1) the commercials and (2) the Halftime Show… not for the football.
My overall assessment of Bad Bunny:
If you’re an American (esp. older generation) who doesn’t know Spanish… complete brutality.
If you know Spanish and actually like Bad Bunny’s music… probably good vibes.
If you just like vibes… maybe you liked some of it.
If you hate Trump… you psyopped yourself into enthusiastically loving it… or at least you posted how much you loved it on social media (it might be your new favorite of all time).
Signaling that you loved the performance is a low friction way to gain “likes” and “hearts” on social media… followers/attention.
“It was really good… I didn’t understand anything!… but the vibes were immaculate.” ~ Some guy with 100k+ connections on Linkedin, prob
If you genuinely enjoyed it… that’s great… no hate… but I think many Americans found it linguistically jarring.
But what happened at Super Bowl LX was extremely predictable… we knew this was coming… it wasn’t like Bad Bunny was some sort of a surprise (they announced him well in advance).
Bad Bunny performed but most multi-generation Americans (i.e. U.S. citizens) just didn’t know what the fuck he was singing.
The halftime show was performed almost entirely in Spanish.
At the most American cultural event on the calendar, watched overwhelmingly by English-speaking Americans — the NFL handed the stage to a Puerto Rican artist who sang exclusively in a “lengua” most of the audience doesn’t speak or comprehend.
Lady Gaga injected a brief interlude with “Die With a Smile” — the only English words in the entire 13-minute set. Ricky Martin was the other featured guest and sang entirely en español.
Eventually the flags came out.
Every country in the Western Hemisphere, paraded across the field, from Chile to Can-a-daaa, while the words “Together, we are America” were displayed on a football in Bad Bunny’s hand.
A patriotic tradition is now a lecture about why borders are a suggestion.
Let’s just say it plainly:
For the vast majority of Americans who don’t speak Spanish (which is most of them — especially most of the older Americans who’ve watched the Super Bowl for decades) — the performance was objectively difficult to enjoy.
Not “controversial” awful or “I disagree with the politics” awful… Objectively bad as a viewing experience.
You’re sitting in your living room, watching an entire Super Bowl Halftime Show set in a language you don’t understand at an event everyone watches.
Even NFL players were saying as much:
Chris Harris Jr. tweeted “I didn’t know one song lol”
JJ Watt admitted he “Didn’t understand a single word of it” (though he said it was a “vibe”)
Then there was the Grammy moment.
Mid-performance, Bad Bunny walked into a living room set where a young Hispanic boy was watching his Grammy acceptance speech on TV.
He handed the kid a Grammy trophy and said “Cree siempre en ti”… Translation: “always believe in yourself.”
Within seconds, social media exploded with speculation that the boy was Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old detained by ICE in Minnesota alongside his father — the same case Bad Bunny had invoked at the Grammys when he declared “ICE out.” He wasn’t… the boy was Lincoln Fox, a child actor from Costa Mesa.
But the symbolism was designed to land exactly where it did: Bad Bunny handing the American Dream to a Latino child one week after telling 20 million Grammy viewers that ICE (a group hired to enforce American immigration law) is the enemy.
Whether or not the kid was Liam, the message was unmistakable. Unless you’re (1) a partisan hack performing enthusiasm for the cameras of diversity, or (2) you’re already fluent in Spanish and a Bad Bunny fan — there is no world in which that was enjoyable for the average American.
What an American Halftime Show Can Look Like
For contrast, consider what a halftime show looks like when it’s built for an actual diverse U.S. audience.
Snoop Dogg’s Christmas Day performance during the Lions-Vikings game at U.S. Bank Stadium was exceptional. Martha Stewart opened with a comedic narration.
Gangsta rap: Snoop ran through “Nuthin’ but a G Thang,” “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” and “Who Am I” in a red fur-trimmed suit backed by a live orchestra and a 30-person choir; classic west coast rap bangers.
K-Pop: HUNTR/X — the singers behind Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters — added some K-pop flair with a bass-heavy rendition of “The 12 Days of Christmas.”
Country: Lainey Wilson rode in on a sleigh to belt out “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” for some country vibes.
Classical: And Andrea and Matteo Bocelli closed the whole thing with “White Christmas.”
It was fully “inclusive” without being political, multi-genre without being alienating, and the crowd + the internet — loved every second of it.
Fans were calling it better than the last several Super Bowl halftime shows combined.
I’d rank the Snoop set above Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl LIX performance last year, and it was far better than what we just got in LX.
Snoop proved you can showcase diversity without turning it into a culture war.
The Engagement Trap
Did the performance “work”? By the NFL’s calculus… 100%. Bad Bunny is a global superstar and was the most-streamed artist on the planet in 2025.
His Grammy AOTY win for Debí Tirar Más Fotos the week before the game boosted his streams by 240 percent overnight.
The controversy alone generated billions of impressions — every outraged tweet, every defensive reply, every think piece (including this one) feeds the algorithm. From a pure clicks-and-views perspective, the NFL got exactly what it wanted.
And that’s what many consider the problem. The NFL optimized for global engagement, not its core audience. Controversy is currency online.
A straightforward American (i.e. en ingles) halftime show would have been great television for the people actually watching, but it wouldn’t have trended globally.
It also wouldn’t have generated a week of breathless coverage about “What the halftime show means for America.” Bad Bunny’s global fanbase with American political outrage equals a content volcano that prints money for every platform it touches.
The NFL is trading long-term audience trust for short-term viral metrics. And from my perspective: it’s smart simply because many Whites prefer seeing non-Whites in the spotlight and it doesn’t really change their viewing or purchasing behavior.
Whites are the only group that self-hate for actions of their ancestors did and celebrates their own demise (even when others’ ancestors committed far worse atrocities)… some sort of pathological guilt complex being exploited in the Globalist Prisoner’s Dilemma (ethnocentrism for non-Whites, egalitarianism for Whites).
The Demographic Play
I understand the NFL’s business logic here: you must gain momentum and popularity with the younger American demographics or your sport may erode in popularity.
NFL Senior VP Marissa Solis said openly that league growth “is mathematically impossible without Latinos.”
Commissioner Goodell stated “It’s carefully thought through” and added “I’m not sure we’ve ever selected an artist where we didn’t get some blowback or criticism.”
TelevisaUnivision’s global president of sports told CNBC that “there’s very little growth that the NFL can actually achieve within the regular American U.S. English-speaking population.”
If you’re running the NFL and you see that the Hispanic population in the U.S. is the youngest, fastest-growing demographic in the country, you’d be an absolute fool not to court them.
You want the next generation watching, buying jerseys, learning the rules, picking teams, and filling stadiums. The “Por La Cultura” campaign, the Spanish-language broadcasts on Telemundo, the games in Mexico City and São Paulo — all makes sense as a long-term growth strategy.
I have no issue with any of that. Get them hooked and grow the sport. Smart business.
The NFL views its existing English-speaking American fanbase as a mature market.
The growth play is converting (A) fútbol fans into (B) football fans.
The issue many have here is timing. You can build toward the future without torching the present.
The core audience right now (the people who actually watch every week, buy season tickets, who fund the entire $200 billion operation) is mostly English-speaking Americans.
According to Nielsen, NFL viewing among Latinos is still dominated by consumers who speak mostly English, or only English. Soccer dominates among Spanish-speaking Hispanics.
Sidebar: I’ve noted that while Cable Cutting is a trend that accounts for viewership changes across popular TV and sports (e.g. NBA decline)… demographic shift is a variable that shouldn’t be discounted (Hispanics have different viewing preferences than Whites).
Run the Spanish-language broadcasts in parallel and develop Hispanic stars within the league… play some games in Latin America.
Do all of that while keeping the flagship event reflective of the audience that’s actually paying for it right now.
Handing your biggest cultural moment of the year to an artist who performs entirely in a language your core audience doesn’t speak or comprehend — and tells them their country belongs to everyone is a massive mistake.
It’s premature capitulation. Catering to a demographic that isn’t your primary audience at the direct expense of the one that is. The Super Bowl halftime show should reflect who’s watching now, not who you hope will be watching in 2075.
Who the Bad Bunny Halftime Show Targeted
Let’s be precise about what “Together, we are America” actually means when you follow the logic to its conclusion:
If everyone from Chile to Canada is equally “American,” then:
There is no meaningful distinction between the United States and any other country in the hemisphere.
Borders are theater and sovereignty is sentiment.
The nation your grandparents built and bled for is just a line on a map that polite people are supposed to pretend doesn’t exist.
But here’s the contradiction Bad Bunny and his supporters never address:
If we’re all already American and there’s no real difference between the U.S. and Honduras or Venezuela: Why are millions of people risking their lives to get to the U.S. specifically?
You can’t simultaneously argue that (1) America is nothing special (“We are all America”) and that (2) everyone deserves to be in it.
Bad Bunny defenders keep emphasizing that he’s “technically” a U.S. citizen because he was born in Puerto Rico.
Bad Bunny was waving Puerto Rico’s flag (not the U.S. flag) in his Super Bowl LX performance.
Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory… not a state, not the same country. It has its own: Olympic team, Miss Universe contestant, national identity, language, and culture.
Puerto Ricans compete internationally as Puerto Rico, not as the United States.
Critics who called him a “foreigner” weren’t wrong. There is a clear distinction between (A) being from a U.S. territory and (B) being from the United States.
The issue many have with Bad Bunny is what he did with the biggest American stage in existence:
Used it to blur the line between (A) legal U.S. citizens and (B) those who aren’t; people who (A) earned their place legally and (B) people who gamed the system.
The show catered directly to illegal immigrants: (1) those who crossed the border without permission, (2) had children on U.S. soil to lock in birthright citizenship, and (3) are now being told by the NFL that they’re the audience that matters.
A week earlier, Bad Bunny leveraged his Grammy speech to declare “ICE out” and tell the world “We are Americans” — implying that: (A) enforcement of United States border security and immigration law — (B) is unjust, hateful, and that the U.S. should have open borders.
Then he brought that exact message to the Super Bowl.
The NFL gave him a 13-minute infomercial for open borders.
The legal immigrants who played by the rules and the veterans who fought to defend the borders that Bad Bunny wants dissolved felt betrayed.
The descendants of the people who literally built this country up from wilderness to highly-developed present-day status (cleared the land, laid the roads, fought the wars, and created the institutions that make the United States the place everyone else wants to get into) — got to sit in their living rooms and watch a man they couldn’t understand tell them their country belongs to everyone.
The Californication of America
This is the gradual erosion of the U.S. in real time.
Open borders policies driven by Whites’ suicidal empathy have fundamentally altered the demographic composition of the country. An entirely different genetic stock and cultural ethos enters, settles, reproduces, and within a generation the character of a place is unrecognizable. We’ve already watched this movie. It’s called California.
California was once the jewel of American dynamism — aerospace, agriculture, innovation, the frontier spirit distilled into a single state.
Now it’s a one-party regime with a homeless crisis, high crime, borderline-socialism, wealth taxes, high rates of gangs, stray dogs (Pitbulls), reparations for slavery, an exodus of its native middle class, and a political culture so detached from the rest of the country that it functions as a separate nation.
Businesses are fleeing to escape absurd wealth tax. The state wants to take more of your hard earned money and give it away to those who didn’t earn it (socialism) or spend it inefficiently (e.g. California “high speed rail”).
The mechanism is obvious: Mass immigration changes the genetics and cognitive-behavioral preferences of the electorate, the electorate changes the policy, the policy changes the culture, and the culture changes everything. Every state is now on the same trajectory.
The Super Bowl halftime show is a symptom, not the disease.
The disease is a country that has been convinced — by its own institutions, no less — that maintaining its identity and founding ethos is bigotry.
Expecting your national sporting event to be conducted in your national language is exclusionary.
Descendants of the people who built the country have no more claim to its character than the people who arrived illegally last Tuesday.
The Counterfactual Thought Experiment
Run the thought experiment.
Imagine the Copa América final in Mexico City. Estadio Azteca, 85,000 screaming Mexican fans, peak national pride.
The halftime performer sings exclusively in English. Every word, song, etc. — the entire set. Not a single syllable en español.
Then waves the U.S. flag and a bunch of other flags from countries in Central and South America.
Maybe throws in some symbolism about how American expats gentrifying Mexico City neighborhoods and pricing out locals are just “neighbors” who shouldn’t be kept out by borders.
The reaction might be volcanic. Mexican media would call it imperialismo cultural — the gringos coming into their house, refusing to speak their language, and telling them their country is just an extension of the United States.
Politicians would denounce it as an act of cultural aggression. Every progressive commentator who called the Bad Bunny performance “historic” and “beautiful” would agree that the hypothetical counterfactual performance was offensive, tone-deaf, and a disgrace to Mexican sovereignty.
And you don’t even need the hypothetical. We already know exactly how Mexico reacts when Americans show up uninvited. Since the pandemic, American remote workers flooded Mexico City’s Roma and Condesa neighborhoods, earning in dollars and driving up rents.
The response?
Thousands took to the streets in July 2025 chanting “¡Fuera gringos!” — “Gringos out!”
Protesters smashed windows at a Starbucks, spray-painted “Kill the Gringos” on storefronts, burned an effigy of Donald Trump, and chanted “Mátenlo! Mátenlo!” (“Kill him! Kill him!”) at foreigners on the street.
Signs read “Gentrification = Colonization” and “Speak Spanish or die.”
One group of protesters nearly beat a blond foreigner to death for sitting in a park.
That’s how Mexico, a country whose citizens have emigrated to the U.S. by the millions, reacts to a few thousand Americans renting apartments in a couple of neighborhoods.
Not performing a halftime show or waving American flags… Renting apartments (and actually paying… not getting free housing like illegals in the U.S.) and buying coffee. And the woke global media treated Mexico’s grievances as legitimate.
Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum said at her daily news conference:
“Xenophobic displays of this kind must be condemned” and that “Mexico is a country open to the world.”
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security responded on X:
"If you are in the United States illegally and wish to join the next protest in Mexico City, use the CBP Home app to facilitate your departure."
The double standard is the point.
The United States is the only country on earth that is expected to celebrate the erosion of its own identity on its own stage, at its own event, with its own money.
The Political Fracture Was Immediate and Literal
The political divide wasn’t remotely subtle.
Turning Point USA, honoring the mission of its late founder Charlie Kirk, organized a parallel broadcast called the “All-American Halftime Show.”
Kid Rock headlined, joined by Brantley Gilbert, Gabby Barrett, and Lee Brice. It opened with a guitar solo of the Star-Spangled Banner. Over 4 million people streamed it live on YouTube.
Some pointed out that streaming numbers paled in comparison to the Bad Bunny Halftime Show… but all things considered, I think it was a relatively big success given it was packaged separately from the Super Bowl (Bad Bunny’s halftime show was played on autopilot — people generally don’t turn it off… so of course views will be high… high views are a lock.)
I eventually got around to watching the “All-American Halftime Show.”
What did I think? If you are a country music fan, you’ll like it. It’s something you’d get at a CMA show… and it was cool as an alternative. All artists had solid performances.
I like some country music, but am not a massive country music fan… so for me I thought it was alright. Skilled and soulful, but the vibes were just too melancholic for my liking. Definitely worth a watch if you haven’t checked it out.
But anyways… we ended up with: 2 Americas… 2 halftime shows.
One celebrated globalism and diversity.
The other celebrated the U.S.A., waving American flags with rock and country.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters the President:
“Would much prefer a Kid Rock performance over Bad Bunny.”
Trump himself, posting on Truth Social during the show, called it
“Absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER!” and “a slap in the face to our Country.”
Democrats loved the Bad Bunny show.
Not necessarily because they loved the music (though some did) but because they knew the other side hated it. I refuse to believe that most liberals genuinely, organically enjoyed watching 13 minutes of Spanish-language reggaeton at a football game.
I think they mostly enjoyed the backlash. Watching Trump melt down on Truth Social and the intoxication of a cultural “F-U” to the right. The performance was ammunition for the left and the dopamine hit came from firing it, not from the music itself.
If you could hook these people up to a brain scanner and: strip away the political context (no Trump tweets, conservative outrage, culture war framing)… I’m not sure how much they’d have actually liked it.
Or imagine some world where Bad Bunny is somehow extremely pro-Trump, pro-ICE, and in favor of American nationalism. You then play a 13-minute Bad Bunny Super Bowl LX set in Spanish… I think most would’ve verbally eviscerated it in left-wing news reviews… especially if Trump would’ve said how much he liked it!
So I suspect most left-wingers like what the halftime show represented more than the actual music… and the fact that it triggered right-wingers.
In the process, they convinced themselves (with performative enthusiasm on social media, embellished reactions, and the gravitational pull of tribal signaling) that they really enjoyed something they may have otherwise found mostly mediocre.
This is where we’ve arrived in 2026: cultural events are no longer experienced as shared moments but as ammunition. The halftime show was a political statement, and everyone understood it as one.
And here’s the irony the left completely missed: the only message this sent to right-wingers and Trump supporters was confirmation of everything they’d been saying for years.
Biden had the border wide open for four years →
Democrats do not enforce immigration laws →
Your heritage and culture is being replaced and you should accept it →
There’s also the whole weird posting by left-wingers about how “Biden deported more immigrants than Trump” or some variation of “Biden detained more at the border” or whatever… these appeal to very low IQ people.
If you let in really high numbers of immigrants, you can end up deporting high numbers (even more) and the net figure remaining can still be absurdly high.
If more are flooding the border (entering the U.S.)… it makes logical sense that you will end up with a lot more “encounters” and “detentions” than if they don’t try in the first place (knowing Trump is there).
Anyways, the demographic transformation is real, accelerating, and the institutions (from the Grammys to the NFL) are openly celebrating it.
Every flag on that field is the byproduct of Trojan Horsing the foundational ethos of the United States of America.
How did this all happen?
The EU keeps Trojan Horsing itself hard too, but may be starting to course correct… and there’s still some hope… sadly there is zero hope in the U.K. (too far gone).
Thankfully while Eastern Europeans may lack a bit in intellect, they aren’t fully suicidal… and are still fighting for sovereignty against woke virtue signaling EU bureaucrats.
If you wanted to design a 13-minute advertisement for why Trump won in 2024, you couldn’t do much better than what the NFL just aired for free.
Final Thoughts
To reiterate: I like (some of) Bad Bunny’s music. When I rewatched the halftime show… I thought it had some vibe-type-moments.
And from a global “mass appeal” perspective, “Benito” was an idyllic choice for the 2026 Super Bowl Halftime Show. (Jay-Z was behind the selection and the decision was clearly pragmatic.)
But many Americans just didn’t like it… you can’t please everyone… and should never try to… no matter who the selection there will always be some backlash (Goodell is correct here)… but this added an extra layer of rage via the show in a foreign language + Bad Bunny being highly political (left-wing).
To sum it up:
Spanish is not the primary language for most Americans (entire show = foreign; lost in translation)
Some felt insulted that the biggest event in the U.S. each year featured a non-American who is anti-American (i.e. anti-U.S. laws) and highly politicized
Many don’t like the style of music and when they translated Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl lyrics thought they were mostly pure degeneracy (I can handle it… but others can’t… and it adds even more rage)
You should understand why a large swath of Americans thought it was trash.
The NFL is the most visible sports institution in the U.S. and revealed that potential global engagement and viewership metrics are more important than catering to its core audience.
Older generations (descendants of those who built the U.S. up from nada into a highly developed country) didn’t intend for the Super Bowl to become a pan-American border dissolution rally. Dying in World Wars so the grandkids can feel like they don’t even belong in their own country.
It’s all very bizarre.
The U.S. can’t decide whether: (1) it’s a nation with borders, history, culture, and distinct people — or (2) a geographic destination that belongs to whoever gains citizenship (even if unethically or illegally).
Millions of Americans turned off the TV or changed the channel… others (allegedly) loved it.
Something to keep in mind: You can like an artist’s music and still refuse to accept that artist’s politics. (Well maybe you can’t… but thankfully I can.) I think Bad Bunny is obviously a popular artist and has some skill in maintaining that popularity… but the Super Bowl LX Halftime Show wasn’t very good.
I’m trying to stay hopeful for the future of America, as I don’t want it devolving into a socialist, balkanized, high-crime, corrupt, Brazilified, hellscape before achieving abundance via:
Biological super-enhancement (age reversal, IQ upgrades, any mods — such that “race” and “ethnicity” are rendered mostly irrelevant because you can customize your own character)
AGI/ASI (AI/robotics): Robots making robots that can help us solve humanity’s biggest problems.
Currently (not just in the U.S.) we are in a race against demographic change (slightly lower IQ, higher crime, less criminal punishment, more socialist impulses, etc.) mostly downstream from changes in genetic demographics.
Low fertility is causing a human capital crisis. The only way to prevent the U.S. and world from spiraling into chaos is e/acc for bioenhancement and/or AGI/robotics.
Humanity needs to win because the alternative is a potential Dark Age dystopia (e.g. AI stagnation or reversion, dysgenic trends, bioenhancements never realized, etc.); it will cause a lot more pain/suffering for all of humanity.
We need to build so much momentum that things like “race,” “ethnicity,” and “culture” are rendered intellectually stimulating from an evo-historical perspective, but mostly irrelevant; we can transcend all this but we need to be honest/real about evolution and genetics and distribution differences.
We should want to prevent a slow death of the U.S. — it’s bad for everyone worldwide whether they realize why or not.
In 2050 when the Census Bureau projects non-Hispanic Whites as a majority-minority for the first time in American history… maybe Bad Bunny makes sense… but we’re still living in 2026.
The NFL knows and this was likely a “one-off” calculated risk (at least for 5-10 years) to generate a specific global moment, not really a shift in halftime show strategy… and if your goal is max clicks, views, and engagement — it’s hard to blame Jay-Z for the selection.
Some might even argue that it’s a massive flex the U.S. was able to attract the top global artist in the world for their biggest sporting event — but let’s not act like Bad Bunny didn’t gain a lot from this moment; it was symbiotic self-interest.
Within a few news cycles this will be memory-holed… as some newer, more pressing “culture war” moment emerges. Most will have forgotten who performed at Super Bowl LX by the time Super Bowl LXI rolls around in 2027.