While Bad Bunny threw a halftime party for everyone capable of feeling emotions other than outrage, TPUSA counterprogrammed with a jorts-clad Bob Ritchie phoning it in. This is how you lose a culture war, writes GQ columnist Chris Black.
February 13, 2026
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This is an edition of the newsletter Pulling Weeds With Chris Black, in which the columnist weighs in on hot topics in culture. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Thursday.
This week has been tougher than most on the World Wide Web. Most of my timeline is wide-ranging reports of Clavicular being “frame mogged” by an ASU frat boy, along with detailed accounts of his peptide stack and his professed love of GHB, ketamine, and meth. The rest is J-Lo gym thirst-traps, the frantic search for a news anchor's elderly mother who has been curiously kidnapped, pap shots of Rihanna shopping at Bristol Farms like a civilian, and bands fleeing manager Casey Wasserman’s roster after he turned up in the Epstein files. But the real winner is Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl LX halftime show performance in San Francisco. A timeline takeover so grand and far-reaching, it could only be the product of genuine excitement working hand in hand with performative outrage.
I am not a fan of Bad Bunny’s music, but I love the guy, because he’s true to himself and does whatever the fuck he wants. He’s clearly completely unbothered by the ridiculous takes from the right about his choice to perform at the Super Bowl in his first language; he was on national TV, popping it while 100 extras on the field were having the time of their lives dressed up like grass. Everything had a message, and everyone had fun. It was joyous and, at least for now, the most-watched halftime show in Super Bowl history.
To combat the made-up “issue” of the NFL daring to let a guy with four platinum albums headline the Big Game, the bozos over at Turning Point USA offered up an alternative: Kid Rock’s ‘All-American Halftime Show,’ a 35-minute Porta-Potty lock-in of a concert featuring only the whitest music you could imagine. The lineup was stacked with a who’s-who of baby-name-generator-sounding talent: Brantley Gilbert was up first, followed by fellow country artists Gabby Barrett and Lee Brice, before Kid Rock closed things out by poorly lip-syncing two entire songs for a crowd of what looked to be about a hundred fans stood cheering. The camera panned to photos of the late Charlie Kirk and his widow, Erika Kirk, who now heads TPUSA and dresses like a WWE Diva. The only people who possibly could have liked this were JD Vance and Jake Paul, and even they didn’t bother showing up.
The fact that a lot of Bad Bunny’s most vocal resisters still don’t know Puerto Rico has been part of the United States for 125 years makes this whole depressing debacle really funny. If you love this country so much, you should at least be able to name its unincorporated territories without consulting Grok or Google (shout out to the Northern Mariana Islands.) The day after the game, Megyn Kelly blew a fucking gasket talking to Piers Morgan (LOL) about the halftime show, calling it a “middle finger to America,” ranting about meat loaf and fried chicken, and insisting that “football—that kind of football—is ours.”
The whole thing is a study in contrasts. Bad Bunny is skipping the continental United States on his stadium tour because he’s concerned that immigration authorities could target Latino fans at his concerts. He is leaving millions and millions of dollars on the table because he actually cares about his people. I am not sure Kid Rock would do the same if given the choice.
You will not see me sashaying down Bowery in a Bad Bunny Zara football jersey anytime soon, but how can you not like and respect a global superstar who actually does the right thing? I don’t care what language he is singing in or what name and number is on the back of his jersey. If you hate something enough to make Meghan McCain—not traditionally a barometer of cutting-edge taste—like it, you have definitely gone too far.