So, it’s real. Months after the October 2025 announcement/threat, Turning Point USA has, for real, scheduled counterprogramming for halftime at the Super Bowl. The unambiguously named All-American Halftime Show will take place February 8 as a virtual event to live stream across Turning Point’s socials and platforms like DailyWire+. The show will have Kid Rock as its headliner, with country acts Brantley Gilbert, Lee Brice, and Gabby Barrett scheduled to join. All of it, because the NFL had the gall to hire Bad Bunny.
Congratulations if you’re excited. I’m serious! May we all be so lucky as to get what we want if we yell about it loud enough. Maybe turning off the TV didn’t feel enough and you needed this to fill a black void in your heart. It’s just funny too, because Super Bowl halftime wasn’t always a big deal.
Before Michael Jackson left a stadium speechless in 1993, Super Bowl shows were swag-less affairs with uncoordinated dancers, plastic smiles, and karaoke covers of dated radio hits. Google “Up with People”—or queue up this dive on YouTube—and cringe-grit your teeth to dust over the halftime show’s deeply unsexy history. No amount of wardrobe malfunctions can out-embarrass 1989, when the halftime act was, and I’m serious here, “Elvis Presto,” an Elvis impersonator who did magic tricks in 3-D. To think years later the show would be Kendrick Lamar getting 80,000 people to sing “A-minorrrrr” in a way that should qualify him for the Nobel Peace Prize.
This year the stage is set for Bad Bunny, a Latin trap phenom behind Grammy-winning albums replete with Puerto Rican identity and anti-colonialist themes. On his world tour, Bad Bunny has excluded the U.S. as a symbolic act against the Trump regime and reasonable fears of ICE thugs targeting his audience. That Bad Bunny had the gall to be a Spanish-speaking artist whose music defies American propaganda pisses off exactly the folks you’d expect to be pissed. It’s why TPUSA’s show is called the All-American Halftime Show. It wants nothing more than to be an orgy of jingoism set to post-9/11 country rock, a genre grossly mutated from its origins as working-class expression into something far shallower and more sinister. It’s an ironic title too. You can’t forget that Puerto Ricans like Bad Bunny are American citizens; you have to know about something before you can forget.
But we’re an obtuse species, and we’ve now forgotten all about halftime’s bullshit purpose to break up four hours of football. In the years following MJ, the Super Bowl’s quenchless thirst for star power swelled halftime into the extravaganza it is now. But its relevance is currently at odds with its importance amid our eroding monoculture. It’s why there’s even kerfuffle at all; this is the last thing on our calendar for which Americans can congregate in a single time and place. To some, it matters who gets the spotlight and what they do with it. It says a lot about those who demand one for themselves.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.esquire.com ’
