Before last night, I didn’t much care that the Puerto Rican rapper Benito Ocasio, who goes by “Bad Bunny,” would headline the Super Bowl’s halftime show.
The right’s annoyance over his plans to sing in Spanish seemed manufactured. He’s a huge star, and parsing rap lyrics is next-to-impossible anyway. And though his views on immigration are clear — “ICE out,” he said at the Grammy awards last week — I figured the National Football League would keep the show apolitical.
After all, the NFL is still smarting from its embrace of woke politics a decade ago, when quarterback Colin Kaepernick and other players began kneeling during the national anthem to support the Black Lives Matter movement. NFL television ratings ticked down notably, a rare hit for the league.
But Ocasio proved me wrong, in the worst possible way. He went much further last night than Kaepernick ever did.
Yet the legacy media was either too dumb or too biased to realize what it was seeing. (I know, I know, shock.) “Bad Bunny Uses Joy to Put Out Political Firestorm at Super Bowl Halftime,” the Wall Street Journal wrote, in a typical headline.
That take is exactly backwards. Ocasio’s intentionally offensive spectacle will only fuel the immigration fire — and may backfire on advocates of open borders.
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