Megyn Kelly’s Crashout Over Bad Bunny Halftime Show Perfectly Illustrates What White Nationalism Is

On Monday, we reported on the cultural and visual brilliance of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl LX halftime show, as well as the MAGA crashout that both preceded the event and followed it, with much of white conservative America trying to convince us that Bunny, born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, singing all his songs in Spanish was the core issue. But here’s the real question: Was the language barrier the problem, or was a Super Bowl halftime show sung almost entirely in Spanish indicative of a much larger problem for MAGA? Are these people ultimately mad about Spanish, or are they upset because the show was an indicator that white nationalism is slowly but surely losing its grip on American culture?

Well, if you ask me, Megyn Kelly’s rant during her Monday appearance on Piers Morgan Uncensored seems to perfectly illustrate that the latter is at the heart of why they’re so angry about the Puerto Rican pop star’s widely praised and widely viewed extravaganza.

“I’m sorry, Piers, but to get up there and perform the whole show in Spanish is a middle finger to the rest of America!” Kelly fumed. “Who gives a damn that we have 40 million Spanish speakers? We have 310 million who don’t speak a lick of Spanish! This is supposed to be a unifying event for the country. Not for the Latinos,” she said. “Not for one small group but for the country. We don’t need a Black National Anthem, we don’t need a Spanish-speaking non-English performer, and we don’t need an ICE or America-hater featured as our half-time entertainment!”

Here’s another question: Who TF is “we”?

First off, one mistake conservatives consistently make is assuming their opinion reflects popular opinion, despite polls consistently suggesting otherwise, and, for that matter, the fact that Republican presidents seldom win the popular vote. (Only twice in more than three decades. Chew on that for a bit.)

More to the point, though, when Kelly says “we,” we already know off the top that she has excluded the U.S.’s 40 million Spanish speakers, because she said as much. And she certainly doesn’t have Black people in mind as part of her collective “we,” because the white woman — who hates the very existence of HBCUs, has vehemently defended blackface, and has stated with her whole chest that Jesus and Santa Claus are white and should only be depicted as white — went out of her way to denounce the Black National Anthem, which white conservatives have been crashing out over every year since it’s been featured during the Super Bowl, this year being no exception.

So, that’s roughly a quarter of the U.S. population — notably, an exclusively Black and Latino portion — that Kelly has simply decided doesn’t count. Add on the millions of liberal-minded Americans of all races who have been lauding Bad Bunny’s performance, and you have to start to wonder who, besides the roughly 77 million people who voted for President Donald Trump, Kelly is even speaking for.

At some point during the interview, Morgan sort of laughed off Kelly’s rant and her visible anger, to which Kelly responded by including Muslims among the Americans she excludes from “we,” while also denouncing Bunny’s nod to any cuisine that isn’t an American staple, lecturing Morgan about how his attitude is why the UK is becoming less white as well, and, of course, suggesting that Trump is in office again because “we” object multiculturalism.

“This attitude that we have right here is why you in Great Britain have lost your culture! You ceded your culture to a bunch of radical Muslims who came in and took over, and now it’s gone,” Kelly said, indicating that she is now a white nationalist on two continents. “We’re not allowing that here! Whether it’s Hispanic, whether it’s Muslim — it’s not happening in the United States of America. That’s why President Trump was elected.

“And whether it’s Bad Bunny, who is American but refuses to speak English in his performances, or anybody else, we have to keep the Super Bowl, which is a quintessential American event,” she added. “Football, that kind of football, is ours! They call it American football. And the halftime show and everything around it must stay quintessentially American. Not Spanish, not Muslim, not anything other than good old-fashioned American apple pie! There should be a meat loaf, maybe some fried chicken, and an English-speaking performer. That’s what the Super Bowl should be!”

Kelly indicated in a tweet on Monday that she didn’t even watch the halftime show that she is so passionately whining about, because “I like my half time shows in English from ppl who love America.”

Here’s the thing: I would argue that it’s Kelly who doesn’t “love America.” In fact, I’d argue that no MAGA supporters do. What they love is the idea of America that they have in their heads: the traditional, oppressive version of America. The America that is of the white people, by the white people, and for the white people. The version of America that they seek to make great again. What they don’t love is the version of America that currently exists.

Actually, I already wrote about this a few years ago, when Kelly declared that Michelle Obama doesn’t “like America” and “has no faith in the goodness of Americans,” or more specifically, Republicans.

Here’s what I wrote about that at the time:

Just about every single prominent Republican politician and pundit, including Kelly herself, has expressed negative views of Democrats, “leftists,” immigrants, Black Lives Matter advocates (and/or Black lives in general), Muslims, the LGBTQ community, feminists, critical race theorists, pro-choice advocates, and, of course, the ubiquitous “woke.”

These are also Americans that hard-right conservatives have “no faith in the goodness of.” Is Kelly ready to acknowledge that neither she nor the rest of her ideological ilk honestly like America either? Is she essentially saying that no one really likes America?

Nah—because I would respect that. At least that notion would apply the same logic to everyone, flawed though the “logic” may be. But what Kelly is doing is what has become conservative America’s favorite tactic: She’s complaining about America being divided—and the “divisive” liberal Democrats—while pretending conservatives aren’t just as much part of the divide as everyone else. 

So, basically, Kelly hasn’t changed her shtick since 2023. Imagine declaring that “football is ours,” excluding all but one particular racial and ideological demographic from what constitutes “ours,” voicing your support for the most aggressively divisive president in recent history, and, during the same rant, declaring that it was the Super Bowl halftime show’s job to “be a unifying event for the country.”

Kelly and her ilk don’t want unity; they want unity under the condition of white conservative control over the political landscape and American culture.

Again, the lack of English was never the core issue; it was always all about the lack of white nationalism. It’s not on the NFL, Bad Bunny, Michelle Obama, or any of us to unpack that for MAGA America.

James Baldwin once famously said, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

We love America more than you do, Kelly. Try unpacking that.

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