This post is dedicated to the memory of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and all the brave people of Minneapolis who came together day after day in the frigid winter temperatures to defend that most precious of treasures: Our democracy. And to the late, great civil rights activist, the Reverend Jessie Jackson who taught millions of children to say “I am SOMEBODY” and to believe its truth.

Time magazine called it “an exuberant act of resistance.”

Rolling Stone proclaimed “Super Bowl half-time performance draws in 128 million viewers.”

The Hill noted the show’s star had won a Grammy award just the week before and that he was the most-streamed artist on Spotify for 2025.

Unless you’ve been living on some remote, uninhabited island, you probably know who we’re talking about here: Puerto Rican singer-songwriter Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, popularly known as Bad Bunny, this year’s headline star for the NFL Super Bowl halftime show.

While millions were cheering what The Nation called “Bad Bunny’s Stunning Redefinition of ‘America’”—an all-inclusive America, an America stretching from the far north of Canada down to the U.S. and Mexico,  through all the countries of Central and South America to the southern tip of Chile—the dude in the White House was penning one of his endless Truth Social harangues. It is printed here as it appeared in The Hill. I’ve taken the liberty of inserting a few questions and facts in brackets in red where I felt they begged to be asked or noted.

Trump: “The Super Bowl Halftime Show is absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER! It makes no sense, is an affront to the Greatness of America, [How?] and doesn’t represent our standards of Success, Creativity, or Excellence [As defined by you?]. Nobody understands a word this guy is saying [And yet he’s the most streamed artist on Spotify], and the dancing is disgusting, especially for young children that are watching from throughout the U.S.A., and all over the World. [Here, I believe he’s referring to the 1.5 seconds where two men, fully-clothed, their lower torsos hidden behind a truck door, appear to be “grinding” on each other—part of a larger wedding dance scene that also briefly included a bridesmaid and groomsman “grinding” on each other. The BBC described the same scene this way: “Family also featured heavily – from a young couple getting married in a crowd full of Latino dancers…” Bad Bunny’s message? Everyone matters. Everyone is included.] This “Show” is just a “slap in the face” to our Country, which is setting new standards and records every single day — including the Best Stock Market and 401(k)s in History! [CNN cautions us to view this “best stock market” in a larger context: “US stocks had a stellar 2025, but global markets stole the show. A major index tracking stocks outside the US, the MSCI All Country World ex-USA, gained 29.2% in 2025, handily outpacing the S&P 500’s gain of 16.39%… The US dollar index, which measures the dollar’s strength against six major currencies, fell by roughly 9.4% in 2025, its worst year since 2017.” Gee, anyone recall who was in the White House then?] There is nothing inspirational about this mess of a Halftime Show and watch, it will get great reviews from the Fake News Media, because they haven’t got a clue of what is going on in the REAL WORLD — And, by the way, the NFL should immediately replace its ridiculous new Kickoff Rule. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Do you think any of that rant might have been influenced by the fact that Bad Bunny denounced the first Trump Admin’s response –or lack of—to Puerto Rico in the wake of 2017’s disastrous Hurricane Maria? Or maybe it was Bad Bunny’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in the 2024 elections? Or perhaps he just hated the central message of Bad Bunny’s show—the world belongs to ALL of us. A message that should have resonated with the grandson of immigrants.

It’s interesting to note here that Turning Point USA, the ultra-right non-profit org co-founded by the late Charlie Kirk, hosted a competing halftime show on its YouTube channel. “The All-American Halftime Show”, as it was billed, featured Trump buddy Kid Rock and had “no agenda other than to celebrate faith, family, and freedom,” according to a TPUSA spokesperson.

Whose faith? Whose family? Whose freedom? “The All-American Halftime Show” was dedicated to Charlie Kirk, a man who was fond of saying the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been a mistake.

Well, Americans voted with their eyeballs. As The Chicago Tribune headline noted: Bad Bunny nets 135M viewers to Kid Rock’s 6M. And Daily Kos deemed TPUSA’s Kid Rock “All-American” extravaganza “a bummer from start to finish.”

So, who are these “all-Americans” Trump and Turning Point USA are championing? Certainly not the many peoples of all the Americas Bad Bunny was celebrating. Not even all the people of the United States. Not the Black voters the GOP is trying to silence with their gerrymandered maps. Not the LGBTQ+ Americans—TPUSA performer Lee Brice complained of “wokeness” and lamented children learning about trans people in his song “Country Nowadays.” Not the Indigenous peoples who were here long before the first European immigrants arrived. No, the “all-Americans” of the All-American Halftime Show, the only Americans who count in our brave new world are straight, white men and to a lesser extent, white women, as long as they “know their place”, which is to service and support the straight, white, men.

What Racism Reveals About the Racist

What does racism tell us about the racist? Historically, it speaks to greed. For hundreds of years, wealthy White European and American investors oversaw the kidnapping of African peoples who were then transported to the Americas to do the heavy work of harvesting the sizeable tobacco, sugarcane, and later—after the invention of the cotton gin—cotton plantations. In the first days, these unfortunate hostages were treated as indentured servants, meaning they had some legal standing and a contract of service after which they might be freed. That lasted but a nanosecond in historical terms. Until the very wealthy human traffickers and plantation owners came up with the scheme of making the people they kidnapped the property of their masters. No more legal rights. No more chance of freedom somewhere far down the road. And all children born of slaves would automatically become the property of those masters.

While the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865 abolished slavery throughout the United States, it did not end the exploitation of Black and Brown peoples by greedy Americans seeking ever more riches, as Bad Bunny brilliantly displayed in the NFL Halftime Show scene where he performs amidst a crowd of Puerto Rican men and women working the sugarcane fields.  

Spain may have introduced the crop to the island nation and the slave labor that harvested it some 500 years earlier, but it was the United States that seized Puerto Rico in 1898 and it was U.S. corporations who made millions off the labor of the Puerto Rican people. While Puerto Ricans were no longer slaves under U.S. rule—and indeed became U.S. citizens in 1917—the  “free labor” market they shifted to with its low pay and meagre living conditions was often compared to servitude. Even today, the disparity in income is striking—and telling. The per capita income of Puerto Ricans ($17,981) remains far below that of Americans as a whole ($44,673).

I wonder how many Puerto Ricans—U.S. citizens—have ended up in ICE raids and been dumped into prisons. After all, to the White racist, all non-White people look alike. Just last month, LatinoJustice highlighted a statement made by Power 4 Puerto Rico’s director, Erica González Martínez: “ICE’s targeting of Latinos—including Puerto Ricans— for mass deportation is racial profiling. Racial profiling does not make an exception for the U.S. citizenship of Puerto Ricans, a situation all the more alarming under this white supremacist, oligarch takeover. Whether Boricuas [a person from Puerto Rico by birth or descent] are stateside or in our Caribbean country, we must stand united for the rights of our people and those of vulnerable Black and Brown immigrants.” 

Fragile Egos

Another thing racism reveals about the racist is a deep insecurity. A truly secure person has no need to belittle others, to boast about their own “natural” superiority. To lie about the size of their inauguration crowd, for example, if they are a White president, in comparison to that of their predecessor, a Black president. But that’s exactly what Trump did during his first term, beginning on the very first morning of his presidency in 2017 when he became obsessed with the prior day’s inauguration photos, now making the rounds on social media. That great stretch of empty space on The Mall behind those who had come to watch him take his oath of office. A space that had been filled when Barack Obama was inaugurated. Something must be done! After all, his (Trump’s) inauguration crowd had been the largest! Ever! And certainly larger than Obama’s! A government photographer later admitted to investigators that, yes, he had cropped photos of Trump’s inauguration to remove empty space and make the audience look larger.

And who can forget the ceaseless quest for a Nobel Peace Prize for anything—anything—because that same Black president was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

And then there was the president’s recent racist AI-generated video of Michelle and Barack Obama as apes…

What’s Up Next: Massive Prison Camps

At a time when Medicaid is facing significant cuts and ACA premiums are skyrocketing, the Republican-controlled Congress allocated more than $170 billion in additional funding for the Department of Homeland Security, the bulk of it going to Customs and Border Protection and ICE. Forty-five billion of that has been allocated for detention expansion including eight new detention warehouses that would hold up to 10,000 detainees each.

Currently, the largest ICE detention facility in the country is Fort Bliss, a tent camp on an El Paso military base that holds about 3,000 people on any given day. Fort Bliss (oh, the irony of that name!) began detaining people six months ago and already it’s racked up an alarming number of violent incidents— violence committed by ICE overseers against the detainees. including the death of one detainee after he was choked by an officer. Indeed, violent assaults and sexual abuse by those in authority were reported in interviews with more than 45 detainees. Neglect, too, is a kind of violence. An immigrant from Guatemala, detained at Fort Bliss, died of kidney and liver failure after he was denied medical care at the camp.

Now, imagine this horror on a scale of 80,000 immigrants locked up in ICE’s proposed mega-facilities. And because so many humane and caring Americans can imagine it all too well, we are seeing protests wherever these massive detention centers and the smaller processing centers that serve them are planned. Protests that are achieving results.

We Say NO! 

When news of a proposed ICE detention center in Kansas City, Missouri went public, local residents took to the streets to say NO! In response, their elected officials quickly passed an ordinance to block it. Soon after, development company Platform Ventures announced it was cancelling the sale of its massive warehouse to ICE in that city.

Hundreds of people gathered for a public hearing held by the Hanover County Board of Supervisors to voice their strong disapproval of a proposed ICE facility near Richmond, Virginia. Heeding their citizens, the HC Board of Supervisors pushed back against the DHS plan to convert a local warehouse into an immigration detention processing center. 

When it was discovered that DHS was planning to open a 324,000-square-foot regional detention center for ICE detainees in Merrimack, New Hampshire, protestors lined the streets leading to the town hall. “NO ICE” their signs declared and numerous cars honked their agreement. Their voices were heard. On February 23, MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow announced that DHS abandoned its Merrimack mega-prison after so much kickback from protesters.

Mayors in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and Salt Lake City, Utah have vowed property owners in their city won’t be selling facilities to ICE after citizens in both locations made their opposition clear.

Across the U.S., the fight has taken on a greater goal: To shut down ICE altogether. Protests, walkouts and economic strikes occurred in more than 300 cities in late January, after the ICE murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti drew enormous crowds. “We’re here to say we want ICE out of all of our communities around the country,” University of Utah student Benji Park declared. To that, I can only add: Amen.

A recent email from the Massachusetts Teachers Association declared: “The more we show up for one another, the greater the power we generate for local and statewide campaigns.” And MS NOW’s Chris Hayes noted in his February 12 edition of All In with Chris Hayes, “The people with the better, more humane vision have the numbers on their side.”

We must never lose sight of that because what our government is doing, the horror ICE is unleashing, is inhumane in the extreme. It is wrong. IT MUST STOP NOW!