If you’re reading this, there’s a very good chance that, last Sunday, you watched Super Bowl LX. But unless you’re a Seahawks fan or a dyed-in-the-wool Patriots hater such as myself, there’s also a good chance you remember little of what wound up being a very boring game and were probably more interested in what was happening during the commercials and the halftime show instead. 

The halftime show, it turns out, has also become quite the topic of conversation on social media and even among politicians who, you would think, should have better things to do. Once it was announced that Bad Bunny, “The King of Latin Trap” and, by any measure, one of the biggest musicians in the world right now, would be the headliner, a who’s who of the right let it be known that they were unhappy that someone who performs primarily in Spanish and declined to schedule tour dates in the continental United States this year due to his fear that they could become a hotspot of ICE activity would take center stage on one of the most watched television events of the year. The president himself called it “absolutely ridiculous.” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and her senior advisor (and rumored lover) Corey Lewandowski threatened to send ICE agents to the Super Bowl. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said that he had never heard of Bad Bunny, but that the NFL should’ve booked Lee Greenwood, the 82-year-old country singer who was recently seen hawking Bibles with Trump himself.

Perhaps the most notable response came from Turning Point USA, who decided that they would counterprogram Bad Bunny’s performance with what they ended up calling the “All-American Halftime Show.” Featuring performances from the seemingly ubiquitous Kid Rock and the anonymous-to-me country singers Lee Brice, Brantley Gilbert, and Gabby Barrett, the All-American Halftime Show was billed as a celebration of “American culture, faith, and freedom” and broadcast on TPUSA’s YouTube and Rumble accounts as well as sympathetic streaming platforms run by organizations like Sinclair Broadcast Group, The Daily Wire, Real America’s Voice, and OANN. 

I don’t know that I have very much to say about the content of the TPUSA show itself – there were moments where it looked like some of the performers were miming, and Brice performed a song with embarrassing lyrics that played into every trope about corporate country music you could imagine. Judging whether or not the show was a “success” from a business perspective is hard to gauge, because the metrics used to measure the viewership of a livestream and those used to measure viewership of a television event are different. The TPUSA show was streamed on at least 6 million devices via YouTube (it’s difficult to ascertain how many were streaming on other platforms; how many people were watching the show on each device, we’ll never know) while the official halftime show drew an estimated 128.2 million viewers in the United States, enough to make it the fourth most-watched Super Bowl halftime show in history. 4.8 million of those viewers tuned into the Spanish-language network Telemundo alone, a record for that channel in particular. 

In other words, if both conservatives and the NFL want to spike the football, they can. TPUSA got a lot of viewers for an event that seemed like it was organized in a pretty slapdash way, but Bad Bunny did exactly what the NFL wanted him to do by (presumably) expanding the show’s Latino viewership while still retaining a significant portion of its English-speaking viewers. 

Conservative-Approved Culture

What’s much more interesting to me, though, is what this whole episode says about the ongoing attempts by the right to create a conservative culture meant to compete with, and, hopefully from their eyes, overtake, the mainstream (in their mind, “liberal”) culture that they believe dominates American airwaves. As a freelancer for a site that specialized in covering conservative media and business ventures, I’ve written a lot about this phenomenon, and spoken to creators, executives, audiences, and skeptics associated with that space. If I had to come up with a rough taxonomy of this alternative market, I’d say you could divide it into three different sectors. There’s what I’ll call the news and commentary space, which has clearly been the most successful, and ranges from Fox News down to independent podcasters and influencers who’ve arguably supplanted the establishment pundit class (and most traditional news sources) for a generation of viewers and listeners. Then you have consumer products, like Black Rifle Coffee or Republican Red Winery, who use patriotic and conservative coded advertising, rhetoric, product themes, and business practices to draw in consumers who disapprove of mainstream brands’ donations to Democratic politicians, overtures to the LGBTQ community, or whatever else people on the right decide they don’t like on a given day. 

But most relevant to the Super Bowl brouhaha are conservative attempts to create their own pop culture – namely, films and television shows (and to a lesser extent music) that cut against what they view as an entertainment industry captured by godless liberals. This is different, in my mind, from faith-based films and television series, which have a long history that’s almost as old as the medium itself and have proven to be quite lucrative over the years. Instead, I’m thinking more of fiction based on primarily secular topics that is framed by its creators as a reaction or correction to what they see as an impermissibly progressive mainstream. The vanguard of these kinds of productions is arguably The Daily Wire, the conservative publisher-turned-media network founded by commentator Ben Shapiro and frustrated film director Jeremy Boreing. While perhaps best known as the podcasting home of Shapiro, Matt Walsh, and Jordan Peterson, The Daily Wire has also produced ten feature films. Some of these films, like Walsh’s documentaries What Is a Woman? and Am I Racist? and the anti-trans satire Lady Ballers, have an explicitly conservative message. Others, like the Gina Carano vehicle Terror on the Prairie, act as safe havens for conservative actors “canceled” by mainstream Hollywood, while the thrillers Run Hide Fight and Shut In, aren’t quite as overtly political. 

This is also true of their television offerings. I covered the launch of Bentkey, The Daily Wire’s foray into children’s content, for The Righting. In a video announcing the platform’s launch, Boreing specifically framed Bentkey as an alternative and competitor to Disney, which he criticized for opposing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill and “push[ing] all the worst excesses of the woke left” through their political donations and corporate practices. But this messaging didn’t necessarily translate into its content. If you didn’t know that Rob Schneider and anti-vax Broadway star Laura Osnes voiced the parents in the animated series Chip Chilla, you would’ve assumed it was just a bad attempt at a Bluey rip off, albeit centered on a family that homeschools their kids and operates more in line with “traditional” gender roles. You’d also have to dive into the production notes of A Wonderful Day with Mabel Maclay to find out that the creators were devout Christians, but you’d also probably be confused by their endorsement of “social emotional learning,” a form of pedagogy that was targeted by conservatives during the critical race theory panics of the early 2020s. As of today, it’s unclear if The Daily Wire intends to produce more Bentkey content – the last original series on the platform was launched in 2025, and that same year also saw social media rumors that Daily Wire’s layoffs were focused on their children’s content.

Anyway, I rehash all of this past reporting because I think the lesson of both Bentkey and TPUSA’s Super Bowl halftime show is that, no matter how hard you try, you can’t build a culture out of politics. As Rebecca Hains, a professor of communication I interviewed for my original Bentkey piece, told me, Disney and other mainstream companies “are not in the business of being progressive. They’re in the business of making money, and to stay relevant, they have to keep up with the times.” If the content that they produce contains more diverse characters, it’s not because they’re pushing a political agenda – it’s because they recognize that there are segments of the population who they can make money off of, and one of the easiest ways to do that is to appeal to their cultures and identities in the work that these companies produce. 

How Big Can a Niche Be?

That’s almost certainly what happened with this year’s Super Bowl halftime show. Bad Bunny was the most streamed artist in four of the last six years on Spotify and, a weekend before the show, won the Grammy for Album of the Year. The NFL’s aspirations to become a global brand have never been secret, and if they can find a way to build off of the Spanish-speaking audience they’ve been trying to cultivate by playing games in Mexico City and Madrid, they’re going to do it. Football may be an American sport, but the Super Bowl is now a global event – complaints that the NFL is alienating a core segment of its audience by booking a Spanish-speaking performer, or neglecting to book a country singer as the genre reaches a new found mainstream popularity, is simply not borne out in the numbers, and ignorant about what the goal of the Super Bowl halftime show is. That many right-wing commentators and politicians had to resort to prudish complaints about Bad Bunny’s dancing and lyrics after his performance wound up not including any overt anti-ICE or anti-Trump messaging just reinforces how substanceless their initial critiques were in the first place.

It’s also why there’s a ceiling on how effective something like TPUSA’s programming can be. The All-American Halftime Show was sold as the show for people who don’t like Bad Bunny, just like Bentkey was sold as the platform for people who don’t like Disney. It is an inherently operational and tribal stance that, in a counterintuitive way, insists on the same kind of litmus tests that they accuse their mainstream opponents of engaging in. Is somebody who likes Bad Bunny also welcome to the TPUSA show? Is somebody who likes Disney also encouraged to sign up for Bentkey? More to the point, why would a fan of either of those entities, let alone someone with no opinion at all, care to take the conservative side in this fight? Both TPUSA and The Daily Wire have undoubtedly been successful in carving out their own niche audience, but their attempts to cultivate a popular culture will always be limited because to create a popular culture with any real influence, you can’t draw any of the clear battle lines that political content demands. You have to be aiming for the broadest, most diverse audience possible, which is exactly what the pop stars and film studios that they so revile aim to do.

Are conservatives wrong that most mainstream American popular culture has a leftward bent to it? Probably not. But their insistence that mainstream film, television, and music are political projects meant to brainwash audiences into voting for Democrats mistakes the relationship between company and customer. Art is a reaction, not a prescription. It reflects the lives and attitudes of its audience, and despite the recent electoral success of Republicans, American society is more diverse and progressive than it’s ever been. Insisting that film, television, and music be stuck in a sort of cultural amber by only depicting America as conservatives think it ought to be, or appealing to the only kind of people they think ought to be Americans, is to constrain both artistic and commercial success, a proposition that is appealing to neither creative types or the corporations who bankroll them.

The notion that politics can drive culture and help lead one’s side to victory is not just a problem for the right. After Donald Trump’s reelection, there was a concerted effort by Democrats to find the liberal answer to Joe Rogan, the wildly popular podcaster whose platforming of conservative conspiracy theorists and Trump-friendly figures (as well as Trump himself) has at least been partially credited with the recent rightward shift among young men. But Rogan did not set out to be a political commentator, and his show is not funded by the Republican Party. It organically evolved into the problematic phenomenon that it is now, and liberals are unlikely to recreate that magic through someone on the party payroll who has to worry about upsetting a wide array of behind the scenes stakeholders. You simply can’t manufacture the kind of trust and familiarity that Rogan and his many analogues have developed with their fans, especially if it’s clear that they have an ulterior motive beyond making money.

But perhaps the biggest issue those seeking to create a politics-driven culture run into is the unclear way they would measure success. If all you’re looking to do is make some money, then that’s clearly possible. But if you’re trying to supplant corporations with a global reach and bankable IP for the purpose of changing the attitudes and voting behavior of American citizens, you’re probably out of luck. Not only is it difficult to measure, but it seeks to control something that has always developed organically and unpredictably. Much like electorates, political parties can only be successful if they work with the pop culture landscape they have, not the one that they wished existed instead.