Bad Bunny and the Super Bowl Remind Conservative Media They Did Not Win the Culture in the 2024 Election

By Jacob Weindling | October 8, 2025 | 1:24pm

Screenshot via SNL

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Bad Bunny and the Super Bowl Remind Conservative Media They Did Not Win the Culture in the 2024 Election

One of the best ways to understand the complete and total unhinged reaction of the Republican Party to the 2024 election is that it was a genuine surprise to everyone, including them. While betting markets and right-leaning pollsters did see a clear path for Trump’s victory going into election night, no one had him winning the popular vote. This supposed mandate reverberated throughout the right, as they reacted like the dog that finally caught the car and could not believe their luck. All those appeals to the podcast bros and purchases of key media like Twitter and deliberate attempts to shape the culture had supposedly worked out, and now conservatives believed they had claimed the one thing they clearly want more than political power: cultural power.

But the sexual revolution continues to march forward despite their attempts to make tradwives a thing, and in no less than a year of implementing their best ideas, polls prove that most of America has realized why they voted these bums out of office in the first place, including the podcast bros the GOP thought helped them conquer the culture. The Trump project is failing even as his unhinged fascism escalates, and everyone can see it. Even Rep. Jewish space lasers is more tethered to the realities of GOP unpopularity than your average Republican congressperson is at this point.

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So when the Super Bowl, America’s national holiday, was slated to announce its halftime show musical guest, the Megyn Kellys of the world waited with bated breath. Finally, conservatives like her thought, they had conquered the culture, and Ted Nugent was going to take his rightful place at the 50-yard line in Santa Clara this February. Unfortunately, their shock and revulsion at the selection of one of the most famous humans alive is another great example of how conservative media routinely violates Biggie’s fourth Crack Commandment: don’t get high on your own supply.

“I don’t know who he is, I don’t know why they’re doing it — it’s, like, crazy,” said President Trump to Newsmax in the wake of Bad Bunny’s selection to perform at the Super Bowl. “I didn’t even know who Bad Bunny was” said Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. The Speaker completed the ‘how do you do fellow kids’ meme by suggesting that “Lee Greenwood or role models” would perform at his Super Bowl, and that by far the most popular entity in America, the NFL, “is self-destructing.” Countless conservative media personalities like Megyn Kelly soiled their diapers, claiming that the NFL’s selection of one of the most widely beloved musical artists is “a middle finger to MAGA and conservatives in this country.” (Side note: I thought MAGA stopped watching the NFL when players like Colin Kaepernick started kneeling in protest? Or perhaps they were totally full of shit?)

If Spotify’s most streamed artist in 2020, 2021, 2022 and second most in 2023 and third most in 2024 is supposedly alienating to conservatives, that’s just you saying that mainstream American culture is alienating to you. Which is kind of what American conservatism has been all about the last 75 years or so. This freakout over Bad Bunny is a tacit admission from conservative media that they did not conquer the culture like they thought last November, or how they claimed they did when they cynically used their colleague’s murder last month to try to further their own careers.

The Benny Johnsons of the world are mainly slamming the selection of Bad Bunny because he is not white and gutter racism is par for the course as far logic goes these days in most conservative media, but also because Bad Bunny said he would not tour in the United States. This is not a boycott or any symbolic stand, but was done out of a very real concern for his fans. Someone as provably popular as Bad Bunny or Taylor Swift is going to pull people from all over the world, and Bad Bunny said that “ICE could be outside (my concert venue). And it’s something that we were talking about and very concerned about.”

Given that ICE is so depraved they show up at schools and use children as leverage to pursue their gestapo mission, Bad Bunny is right to be concerned that his concerts could serve as honeypots for ICE operations in a United States where Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh has declared it legal for ICE to racially profile people who look like Bad Bunny. His revulsion to and distrust of the Trump regime is being treated as some extraordinary assault on the American character, when poll after poll demonstrates how he’s simply expressing pretty normie American views that even Trump-voting farmers are echoing. That Bad Bunny and an old conservative white man in rural Pennsylvania who is likely to have never heard of Bad Bunny have landed on the same conclusion that ICE is harming America is just further proof of how broad Bad Bunny’s appeal is.

Bad Bunny is a major professional wrestler too (and an incredible one to boot, he could absolutely pull off being WWE Champion if he wanted to). He just had a prominent role in Happy Gilmore 2 and hosted Saturday Night Live and trolled conservatives freaking out over his selection to perform at the Super Bowl. He is one of the most globally famous people to ever live, and conservatives like Trump and Johnson and Kelly acting as if he is something wholly unamerican just proves how unamerican they are. You don’t know who Bad Bunny is? Do you live under a rock? Is Gutfeld! the only cultural entertainment you consume? On a certain level, this is kind of sad, as lonely and isolated people are openly telling on themselves.

Conservative media crying foul over one of America’s most beloved artists being invited to our most famous event are just demonstrating how conservative media intentionally ostracizes its consumers from the broader culture. It doesn’t matter what the particular grievance of the day is, so long as there is a grievance to keep angry people coming back for another hit and away from the things most other people like. Everything must be reverse engineered from the notion that conservatives are being persecuted against by mainstream culture, and there was a fleeting moment after last November when a lot of them thought they were past this narrative.

They thought we lived in a world where more people knew the name Charlie Kirk than Bad Bunny, and the past month has proven that winning an election where an estimated 19 million 2020 Biden voters just didn’t show up was not the cultural mandate they believed it to be. Bad Bunny represents America far more than Donald Trump or Mike Johnson or Megyn Kelly does, and having that proven to them each and every day clearly enrages them to no end.