Greetings, Dear Reader,
You know the thing, euphemisms, misdirection and how I’m the enemy of those things.
Let’s get after it.
CALL ME A BIGOT THEN
John Kasich loved the Bad Bunny halftime show. So did Meghan McCain. A host of other conservatives praised the show. The chorus was a calorie-free parade of fake intellectual independence. Just as predictable as it was sad and shameless.
They felt compelled to do so in part because a loud, perpetually aggrieved coalition to their right declared war on the Super Bowl when it announced Bad Bunny would be this year’s halftime show.
I find both sides annoying in some regards, although the former much more than the latter. I can stomach reflexive whining from my right flank more than the Kasichs of the world auditioning for MSNBC audiences.
Needless to say I have about as much regard for Kasich and McCain as I did in my childhood for that tweaking little rat that cackled beside Jabba the Hutt.
It wasn’t for political reasons that I opted not to watch the Bad Bunny show. I didn’t watch it because he told me not to. A few months before the show, he flatly said I’d have to learn Spanish if I wanted to watch it. The statement was a response to public criticism that he’d been selected for the honor.
While I’m not a daily consumer of Telemundo, I definitely do have a series of Spanish hits saved as favorites in my music list. I didn’t interpret Bunny’s response as a friendly or constructive appeal. No, he was basically telling me the show wasn’t for me.
So I didn’t watch it. In fact, 39% fewer people watched it than the year before, according to Samba TV data.
Before I get into more data and the economics of the whole thing, I want to say one thing clearly: If you explicitly tell me your movement isn’t for me, or is outright hostile to me, it’s not some profound moral failure of mine not to partake in your movement.
You can go ahead and call me a bigot, if it makes you happy.
We’ve seen this trend pretty much everywhere on the political left. Both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris ran campaigns in which the approaches to white people, masculinity and Western values ranged from disdain to outright, explicit hostility.
When the results of that posture delivered stunning losses, they blamed those exact cohorts they’d previously targeted for destruction, expulsion and castration. Stupid black and Hispanic men. Stupid white women. Racist white people in general. And so on.
Like the movement to provide sex changes for minors, it’s not enough that you want to castrate me and my future, but I must be more than willing to participate. I must, like Kasich and McCain, be an enthusiastic cheerleader in my own culture’s dismemberment.
So they called us all bigots. Good, fine, whatever, I’m a bigot then.
I do believe, however, that I represent an unsung and misrepresented cohort in this mess. I shut off Bad Bunny and watched the TPUSA halftime show; that much I can admit. I didn’t do so as an act of rebellion.
As anyone who has attempted to talk politics with a junior in the gender studies department can tell you, the schizophrenic approach to language and consistency is exhausting. The rules of the game change with such rapidity that it’s a labor to keep up. Compounding matters is that even if you do, what you find in the end is just as calorie-free as John Kasich’s praise.
There is no binding moral framework. The rules, like the language, are apt to change from one hour to the next. Liberal influencer Will Stancil discovered as much when he got booted out of ICE Watch for telling protesters not to start conflagrations in public. Now he’s being accused of “mansplaining.”
I guess that’s really underpinned my optimism about the state of American politics. Political movements unmoored from anything real just end up consuming themselves.
My pessimism, if there is any, wonders just how much collateral it’ll take before the whole thing flames out.
I believe many young people who have not had a chance to form hardened views on culture and politics reflexively know something is up. The kids are not alright. The “woke left” as we call it, the mind virus, is chaotic and self-consuming.
That’s what is driving so much of the youth to the Catholic Church. It hasn’t substantively changed in 2,000 years. The message, the gospels, the translations, they’ve been 99.9% retained from the moment they were written.
There’s something compelling about a brand that knows what it is and what it represents and refuses to bend to outside influences, especially when it seems like all the other brands around you are bending. Bud Light cut an ad about woman-run hop farms (as if that’s really a thing) in which they made fun of old Bud Light bikini campaigns. They offered to buy all the vintage bikini posters back and make compost out of them so actual real women farmers (again, not even remotely a thing) could use the minced-up swag to grow crops.
The ad campaign, like the one they later cut for trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney, was meant to attract new drinkers, a sentiment their doomed marketing exec was dumb enough to say out loud during an appearance on a random podcast.
Do we really think cross-dressing femboys like Mulvaney and girl-power feminists will ever fall over themselves to guzzle cheaply made swill that Bud is known for producing?
The response was as resounding as the rebuke was for Kamala in 2024. People flocked to brands that hadn’t changed at all: Modelo, Dos Equis, Yuengling, the last of which suffered a cancellation attempt over an executive’s donations to Trump.
Young people, and people in general, want to be led, but they are not going to choose a leader who doesn’t know with resolute certainty who he is or what he represents. Who changes his mind the moment something else seems popular.
Put bluntly: The NFL has a problem.
In its attempt to “attract more diverse audiences,” the NFL is more likely to achieve the exact opposite. Just like no native American English speaker pauses to watch the buxom Mexican weather bunny because she’s suddenly speaking English. What she’s saying isn’t remotely as interesting as what she is, unapologetically and, moreover, consistently.
Just look at how dumbfounded the in-person crowd was watching Bad Bunny’s display. It’s as still as the crowd at a funeral procession.
The sagging numbers for the halftime show are compounded by the fact that TPUSA’s YouTube stream was record-breaking. Sure, the 6.1 million concurrent viewers TPUSA got is not much compared to the likely 100 million the Super Bowl drew.
But it is, in fact, a record in the United States. No livestream in the history of YouTube has put up those numbers in the US. Globally, TPUSA tied for second with a World Cup match in the history of global YouTube livestreams.
The production might have been a bit corny and thrown together at the eleventh hour, but that’s not even all that relevant to potential sponsors, and therefore future competition. All that matters is proof of concept and eyeballs.
There lies the self-inflicted crack in the NFL’s armor.
People are more likely to tune into the NFL if it unabashedly plays the hits its own audience loves for the same reason people are flocking back to the Catholic Church. There’s something compelling about an unapologetic declaration of values. It has gravitas. Its confidence is attractive. The signals it blares are also steady and predictable.
We’ll see if the NFL learns its lesson, a lesson many brands before it didn’t and paid the price.
In the meantime, I’d expect the competition over halftime eyeballs to heat up. TPUSA proved the concept.
Let’s see what happens next year, fellow bigots.
That’s it for the free portion of today’s State of the Day.
The full subscriber edition continues below with my forbidden takes.