Claiming Bad Bunny Isn’t Successful Is as Foolish As Claiming He Isn’t American

Over the past 20 years, the Super Bowl halftime show has featured performances by the Rolling Stones, the Who, Coldplay, Shakira, and Rihanna. Unlike Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican pop star who drew a record audience for his performance at Sunday’s Super Bowl LX, none of those performers are American citizens.

Yet the conservative outrage machine cranked itself into high gear on social media to denounce Bad Bunny, ostensibly because he is somehow undeserving or insufficiently American.

As is often the case, those efforts took their cues from the man at the top. President Donald Trump called the show “an affront to the Greatness of America” and claimed it “doesn’t represent our standards of Success, Creativity, or Excellence.”

Conservative influencer Jake Paul accused Bad Bunny of being “a fake American citizen.”

Others put a finer point on it: “This isn’t White enough for me,” wrote the right-wing activist Laura Loomer, who claimed she “can’t even watch a Super Bowl anymore because immigrants have literally ruined everything.”

Again: Bad Bunny is an American, unlike many past Super Bowl halftime show headliners.

And if Loomer can’t enjoy the Super Bowl if it isn’t white enough, she must be disappointed by most aspects of the game. Most of the guys on the field weren’t white. Last night’s Most Valuable Player was Kenneth Walker III, a black running back for the Seattle Seahawks.

That’s fine, because the Super Bowl is a color-blind celebration of excellence. It is the exact opposite of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts that the Trump coalition opposes. Walker did not win MVP because he’s black, and the Seahawks did not win the championship because they had a roster with a bureaucrat-approved mix of races. They won because they are very good at their jobs.

The same is true for Bad Bunny. He’s one of the biggest stars in the music industry! And he is wildly successful because people freely choose to spend their money streaming his music and going to his shows.

It makes as much sense to criticize Bad Bunny for being unsuccessful as it does to attack him for being un-American. Both are factually untrue and transparently ridiculous.

That doesn’t mean you have to like Bad Bunny’s music. I can barely name three of his songs. (Approaching 40 is rough.) You don’t have to applaud his halftime performance—although, c’mon, it was pretty cool and quite impressive on a production and technical level, and it told a story that a non-Spanish speaker could follow.

And you don’t have to like that he sings in Spanish, which seems to be the real root of most of the complaints about him headlining the Super Bowl. That’s a matter of personal taste.

But the right-wing outrage machine takes gripes based on personal taste and extrapolates them into questions of merit. And some, like Loomer, then try to add a racial element.

It’s exhausting. It’s weird. And outside of Twitter, I suspect it’s not very successful.

A political movement that is determined to create unnecessary grievances targeting America’s most successful homegrown artists is not upholding meritocracy or other American values. It is demanding conformity and its own version of political correctness. Most of us have had enough of that, and we don’t much care whether it is coming from the right or the left.