Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Bunny, And Why?

When the NFL announced that Bad Bunny would headline this season’s Super Bowl halftime show, it made all the sense in the world, because Benito Martínez Ocasio is probably the single most versatile man in show business. He’s wrestled a match at WrestleMania, pulled double duty as host/musical guest on Saturday Night Live, and most recently had a featured role in a Darren Aronofsky movie. Moreover, his songs rack up billions of streams, his concerts spark outrageous demand, he’d already performed as a guest at the Shakira/J-Lo halftime show, and the NFL is pretty blatantly trying to make gains in the Latin market (see: the “Por La Cultura” campaign, whose ads run on Sundays).

This is apparently an outrage, according to top members of the Republican Party, who over the past several days have produced a series of incoherently upset quotes about Bad Bunny playing at halftime of the Super Bowl. The proliferation of vague, confused, and blandly belligerent statements framing Bad Bunny as someone who “hates America” indicates that conservatives should be mad, but they can’t agree on or even elucidate what exactly they’re supposed to be mad about.