The Super Bowl has come and gone, but conservatives just can’t stop obsessing over Bad Bunny. They didn’t manage to stop him from performing, and they certainly didn’t manage to pull better ratings with their pathetic little alternative halftime show. So now, it’s time to try to get Bad Bunny and the NFL in trouble instead, by tattling to the Federal Communications Commission.
Come on, guys. This is just sad. You’ve been at this for months.
Shortly after Bad Bunny was announced as the 2026 Super Bowl halftime performer, conservatives figured they could flex their cultural might and derail the show entirely just by howling about it and also threatening to have Immigration and Customs Enforcement there to deport … Puerto Rican citizens?
When that didn’t work, they pivoted to hyping the amazing Turning Point USA alternative halftime show, but that turned out to be even more pathetic and low-rent than expected.
In contrast, Bad Bunny turned in a performance so good that even MAGA types had to admit it was great, a performance filled with devotion to family and community.
Conservatives spent Monday self-soothing, telling themselves that the alternative halftime show was a runaway ratings success. No matter how many ways they tried to spin it, though, they couldn’t get around the fact that Bad Bunny’s performance netted the highest halftime viewership ever. Even if tens of millions of Americans really did watch Kid Rock’s shambolic antics, they apparently did so while also keeping Bad Bunny on their television screens.
MAGA couldn’t stop Bad Bunny from performing. They couldn’t stop people from watching Bad Bunny perform. But maybe—just maybe—they can get the FCC to punish Bad Bunny and the NFL for daring to exist.
It’s such an obviously coordinated switch in tactics. As soon as it was clear that Kid Rock and friends weren’t even going to come within the same zip code, ratings-wise, Tuesday’s message became that it was time to investigate Bad Bunny et al., for the crime of being sexy and party rockin’.
So we’ve got GOP Rep. Mark Alford, who didn’t watch the whole thing and doesn’t speak Spanish, but is sure that everything was “much worse than the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction.”
We’ve got the reliably stupid Rep. Andy Ogles saying that the performance was “dominated by sexually explicit lyrical themes and suggestive choreography” and “explicit displays of gay sexual acts” and “openly glorified sodomy and countless other unspeakable depravities.”
The “gay sexual acts” of which Ogles speaks seem to be limited to a brief moment of two men grinding, which, despite this administration’s best efforts, is not actually illegal. Ogles’s concern about lyrics promoting “unspeakable depravities” seems to have been reached because he did a google of Mr. Bunny’s lyrics rather than paying attention to what parts of songs he actually performed and realizing it did not include the explicit parts that so terrified Ogles.
Ogles is just aping Rep. Randy Fine, who also did a google to find some Bad Bunny lyrics and then just insisted that is what was performed. Per Fine, he’s tattling to Brendan Carr, Trump’s reliable attack dog at the FCC, because “Puerto Ricans are Americans and we all live by the same rules.”
Apparently, Fine understands the citizenship status of Puerto Ricans only when he wants to bring the hammer down. He should likely touch base with Ogles, however, as the latter’s take is that since Bad Bunny might be saying naughty words sometimes, somewhere, that is “conclusive proof that Puerto Rico should never be a state.”
You’d think that conservatives wouldn’t want to rely on saying that Bad Bunny is problematic based on lyrics he didn’t even perform given that their TPUSA headliner, Kid Rock, has a song about liking underage girls.
Heck, Mr. Rock actually performed his biggest hit, “Bawitidaba,” for the alternative halftime show. That little ditty glorifies drug dealers, drug users, topless dancers, sex workers, crooked cops, and pornography, but somehow you don’t see liberals calling the FCC to whine about it. Perhaps Fine and Ogles should be looking into reporting TPUSA instead?
These people are all nitwits, but they are dangerous ones, and they are making their complaints to an utterly compromised FCC, where Carr is more than happy to use his position to improperly suppress speech Trump doesn’t like.
Notably, the conservative ire here is twofold: Bad Bunny was being sexxxxy, and he was doing it IN SECRET BECAUSE SPANISH. As if since these muttonheads don’t speak a language that over 40 million Americans do speak, the entire performance was a ruse, designed to smuggle in sodomy via a foreign language.
Without quite saying it, the message from people like Ogles and Fine is that the NFL shouldn’t even be allowed to have non-English-speaking entertainment.
Even if the FCC decides to rap the knuckles of the NFL or Bad Bunny, it isn’t going to matter. No one who is already listening to Bad Bunny is going to stop because some pasty conservative weirdos got him in trouble with the government. Nobody who isn’t already inclined to endure Kid Rock is going to start giving him a whirl because the FCC got mad at the NFL. The people have already voted with their eyeballs, and they love Bad Bunny. Stop trying to make fetch happen.
Lisa Needham February 11, 2026 at 01:00AM From Daily Kos
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