Bad Bunny Promoted Love and Unity -- MAGA Slapped Back With Hate and Racism

Ruben Navarrette
Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:21:54 -0800
Opinion

Introducing the Bad Bunny backlash. On Super Bowl Sunday, the real losers were the estimated five million Americans who were so sheltered, so entitled and so used to getting their way that they fled the halftime show and went to YouTube for a whole lot of white noise.

The game is over. But the national conversation about the show put on by 31-year-old Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio has gone into overtime. The haters are holding a pity party, where they're serving lots of whine.

Actually, I imagine the undocumented wait staff is doing the serving.
Updated: Tue Feb 10, 2026

Introducing the Bad Bunny backlash. On Super Bowl Sunday, the real losers were the estimated five million Americans who were so sheltered, so entitled and so used to getting their way that they fled the halftime show and went to YouTube for a whole lot of white noise.

The game is over. But the national conversation about the show put on by 31-year-old Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio has gone into overtime. The haters are holding a pity party, where they're serving lots of whine.

Actually, I imagine the undocumented wait staff is doing the serving.

Describing Bad Bunny's halftime show, which was almost entirely in Spanish, my friends used words like "fun" and "brilliant" and "beautiful." My fellow Latinos are over the luna with pride, saying this was exactly what they needed after nine months of being hunted down by masked outlaws posing as law enforcement agents.

Others saw it differently. America's No. 1 victim thought it was no bueno.

"The Super Bowl Halftime Show is absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER!" President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social. "Nobody understands a word this guy is saying, and the dancing is disgusting, especially for young children that are watching from throughout the U.S.A. and all over the World."

It takes Olympic level chutzpah for someone to claim he's worried about the welfare of "young children" when — according to a recent analysis by The New York Times — that someone's name appears more than 38,000 times in three million pages released by the Justice Department concerning convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The rest of MAGA also didn't hold back either.

Conservative influencer Benny Johnson described the performance as "Woke. Cringe. Unintelligible. Foreign. Boring. Derivative. Preachy. Creatively bankrupt."

"I can't understand a word of it but I just know it's foul, vulgar and demonic," Trump supporter Nick Adams wrote on X. "Cover your kids' ears. The NFL owes millions of Americans an apology."

And some let their hood slip and said the racist part out loud.

Far-right activist Laura Loomer, a Trump ally, wrote on X that there was "not a single white person or English translation at the Super Bowl." She lamented, "This isn't White enough for me."

In the same vein, the gold medal for Most Explicitly Racist Trolling goes to Matt Walsh. A podcast host for The Daily Wire, Walsh said this:

"In case you missed it, in the back there was a banner that read as follows, 'The only thing more powerful than hate is love.' Now, the implication, of course, is that if you don't want the Super Bowl halftime show to be conducted in a foreign language ... then you're a hateful person. You know, you're part of the problem."

" The people telling you this, the people who put that banner up and who organized this halftime show in the first place, have no shame whatsoever. I mean, they've been on a mission to exclude whites from the halftime show for seven years. They've supported a political party that exists at this point to replace whites at a demographic level. And now they're literally spiking the football to celebrate what they've accomplished."

I would guess that more than 68 million Latinos in the United States are all thinking the same thing: This is why we can't have nice things.

It's not us, it's you. A lot of Americans — especially those who are white — are so petty that they won't allow us to have nice things. And when we do have something nice, they have to try to dirty it up.

I'm not mad. I'm sad — for them. How cold and dark and empty must your life be if you cannot stand to see anyone else feel happy, uplifted and proud if only for 13 minutes?

This is how racism works. The phenomenon is built on the assumption that whites are superior to non-whites. So when a non-white person surpasses a white person, white people yell foul. The game must be rigged — to borrow a phrase.

I'm curious. When are white people are going to start acting in ways that could be described as superior? Right now, they're projecting the kind of fear, pain and weakness that plagues bullies. Not a good look.

Latinos have empathy to spare. Living in the United States, we know what it feels like to be maligned, marginalized and mistreated. We've endured disrespect for generations. Yet, we work hard and persevere and succeed — on the world's biggest stages.

Don't despair, MAGA. Give me your hands. I can get you through this.