MAGAs Hate Bad Bunny Because He Reminds Them That They're Losing

MAGA Americans have a Bunny living rent-free in their heads.

(We’ll just call it BDS: Bunny Derangement Syndrome.)

Their president has posted late-night, untethered, rambling word salads about him.

Their media surrogates have gone on racist tirades against him, seeking to reclaim football for oppressed white people.

Their lawmakers have demanded investigations and deportations, clutching their pearls about the terrifying moral dangers of Latino twerking.

And they are currently frantically saturation-bombing social media in an effort to convince us (and themselves) that no one liked the most-watched Super Bowl Halftime Show in history.

Bad Bunny didn’t just break the Internet and viewership records; he broke MAGA in a way that is deeply personal, and they hate him for it.

But they don’t hate him because he doesn’t sing in English, or because he’s been critical of the masked thugs they beat immigrants vicariously through, or because his pigmentation is problematic—at least those aren’t the primary reasons.

They hate him because he is a symbol of their greatest fears coming to life: a nation that is outgrowing them, a culture that is evolving past them, a war against progress that they know they’re losing.

They despise Bad Bunny because, over the course of a thirteen-minute halftime show that they swore they wouldn’t watch but couldn’t look away from, they were forced to see what’s happening outside of the insular, white nationalist, MAGA echo chamber they spend their lives in, and it terrified them.

They watched it all play out on the green hallowed ground of their holiest of national holidays: pulsating, syncopated rhythms that transcended their four-on-the-floor white classic rock safe spaces;
a joyous, swirling assembly of brown-skinned people unapologetically celebrating a collective story that these sheltered supremacists know nothing about;
messages of unity and hope that defy the hateful, nihilistic, tribal poison that they have been weaned on.

It all felt foreign and disorienting and threatening.

And even if they can’t make sense of it in their heads right now (or admit it to the rest of us if they can), they can feel it on a visceral level; an internal panic raising their heart rates, turning their white cheeks flush with fury, and filling them with existential dread. Something is terribly wrong, and they know it.

And the more they throw tantrums and the louder they carry on, the more obvious it is that they’re losing, and a Puerto Rican pop star was the public prophet of their demise, which is why they hate him.

Bad Bunny interrupted the sanctity of the Super Bowl and slammed a loud, radiant Reggaeton wrecking ball into the fictional story that Trump supporters spend every day telling themselves about their prominence and power. Now, they need to figure out a way to make that narrative still be true: he isn’t really that popular, those viewership numbers can’t be accurate, the crowd didn’t really enjoy it. They will do anything to explain it all away as some godless, radical Leftist woke fever dream.

But the truth is the truth: The landscape is being renovated, the climate is changing, and America is becoming the diverse, enlightened, culturally-expansive place that they are fighting so hard to prevent it from becoming.

Despite their violent opposition and their relentless posturing and their raw-throated protestations, this nation is becoming too big for them to constrain or suppress. Time and progress are going to swallow up the prejudices and phobias they traffic in. The phony patriotism and hollow religion they peddle in tired dudebro country songs about trucks and Bibles is going to be fully exposed as simply white supremacy with a shitty soundtrack.

The Super Bowl Halftime show was a bold and glorious microcosm of the America that we are becoming, whether MAGAs like it or not.

This is a game they ultimately cannot win, and so they'd better just take the L.