America, he is not worth this.

This unrelenting chaos that we find ourselves emotionally drowning in: the manufactured emergencies, fabricated culture wars, and conjured crises that hound us from the moment we rise exhausted, until the second our besieged nervous systems finally allow us a brief, though uneasy respite.

He is not worth this prolific corruption, the boundless breach of ethics and legality that is enabling a tiny cadre of billionaires to gorge themselves on the lunch money of hungry schoolchildren, the salaries of public school teachers, and the insurance subsidies of sick seniors.

He is not worth this incomparable political malpractice; a kleptocratic Cabinet filled with the grossly unqualified, the morally compromised, the emotionally ill-equipped, and the unrepentantly cruel.

He is not worth this division; the billions of relational fractures he has, if not created, then purposefully exacerbated with a decade-long verbal torrent of incendiary war rhetoric, bottom-feeding dehumanization, and all-or-nothing tribal demands.

He is not worth this bloodshed; Good Samaritans assassinated in their neighborhoods, immigrant fathers dying alone in glorified dog kennels, young women expiring on hospital gurneys, cancer patients denied sustaining medication, Iranian schoolchildren buried beneath a senseless war of distraction.

He is not worth the end of our Republic, an imperfect but two-hundred-and-fifty-year experiment in Democracy having its life and liberty choked out by a sneering, narcissistic, intellectually fetal, morally bankrupt bottom feeder.

It could have been so easily avoided if, for a day two Novembers ago, we had simply come to our collective senses and chosen a steady, empathetic prosecutor and public servant instead of inexplicably embracing a felonious, predatory carnival barker with a lengthy resume of filth and fraudulence.

Had we done so, we’d have avoided having our military weaponized against our citizens, being illegally taxed for a year on nearly every expense, and battling an Attorney General who is harboring sexual predators. Hungry kids would have food support, our allies wouldn’t be abandoning us, and women would have body autonomy.

Most of all, had we spoken wisely at the polls in 2024, we wouldn’t have to spend nearly every waking hour defending ourselves from an authoritarian regime we alone coronated.

And yet, despite how far afield we’ve found ourselves from the nation our founders dreamed of and our forebears fought for, we could still course correct.

We could be delivered from this preventable, seemingly permanent hell scape in this very day, if our representatives in both chambers of Congress weren’t afflicted with fearful spirits, stilled tongues, and feet of clay.

We could be immediately emancipated from the clutches of a heartless, joyless, dementia-brutalized sociopath if our elected leaders had the courage to abandon their unwavering tribalism, to stop worrying about saving their own political asses, and to do what the entire world knows they should do, and is waiting for them to do.

We could be delivered today if he were simply removed as our Constitution and the consciences of good people demand.

And if our leaders still refuse to bravely and righteously meet this moment, as they seem determined to do, what are We The People going to do?

How are we, as the shared heirs to this place, as beneficiaries of the activism, sacrifice, and bloodshed of billions, going to respond?

When our systems and safeguards and representatives have all failed, what are we willing to do together in order to pull ourselves from the abyss?

We will need to respond to these unprecedented existential threats in a way the people who have called this place home for a quarter of a millenium have never had to.

He is not worth being the hateful, bloated, spray-tanned hill this beautiful nation dies on.

How are we going to make sure that he isn’t?

---

Sometimes you can forget the point of it all.

It’s easy when the horrors have become commonplace to become so beaten down and disheartened by the fight that you can lose sight of why you’re doing it.

The repeated brutality and the relentless sorrows and the never-ending crises can squeeze out and suffocate your imagination, gradually rendering you unable to see a future worth walking into anymore.

And then suddenly, when you least expect it, there it is.

Suddenly, you find those long-dried-up reservoirs of hope bursting open once more.

Caught up in the throes of a stirring rhythm that you cannot resist, you find your way back.

For thirteen minutes on a football field in San Francisco, from thousands of miles away, we could see it again.

This America: diverse, creative, joyful, colorful, unified.

This America, where fear is banished, where fierce embraces find each of us, where no one is left outside.

This is it.

This is what we’re fighting like hell for.

This is why giving up isn’t an option.

And this is why centering something other than Love is the only way we lose.

Bad Bunny reminded us that in this war for the nation we’re still renovating, it is not might, or force, or eye-for-an-eye violence that will cause us to prevail; it will be our refusal to become as miserable and hateful as those we oppose.

He, a man faced for months with the undeserved scorn of tens of millions of strangers, the target of the worst poison human beings are capable of, chose not to stand upon the largest platform and fly some bitter, middle finger contempt.

He simply showed his humanity and reminded us of our own.

He refused to allow his enemies to defeat him by becoming them.

Love wins.

Words can easily feel like hollow platitudes, like empty cliches, until they aren’t.

Until they are the truest truth there is in this life.

Until we can feel them in the marrow of our bones.

Until those words towering above a beleagured multitude that has been starved of Love.

That love is what those grim-faced, joyless exclusionists are afraid of, what they are working so tirelessly to eliminate.

That’s why this was more than just entertainment, more than songs and set pieces, more than pop music and sentiment.

We cannot lose sight of who we are.

Our compassion is what makes us different.

We do wield those open, bleeding hearts they ridicule us for.

We are a people who believe that the open hand is greater than the clenched fist.

Now, I’m not so naive to believe that a 13-minute show is magic: that violent mobs of masked men are going to suddenly disappear from our streets, that the cruel and calloused hearts all around us are going to soften, that the people so addled by racism that they needed an alternative to this celebration of our commonalities are going to be moved to alter their allegiance to a monster.

In fact, witnessing such a bold and beautiful declaration of diverse coexistence will likely make those threatened by such things double down in their attacks, but that doesn’t matter.

But what I do know is that for thirteen minutes, it all became clear again.

For thirteen minutes, we could see the future.

We have had our attentions redirected, our spirits lifted, and our strength returned.

We have been reminded of the place that we might still be if we refuse to stop doing the hard work; if we continue to make sure that everyone has a place here, that everyone finds welcome, that everyone gets a chance to dance.

Over the span of thirteen minutes, Bad Bunny gave his detractors lessons in empathy, diversity, unity, and geography.

He gave the rest of us the eyes to see what we may have forgotten.

He, Love, and America won.

---

Sometimes you don’t have to work to figure out where the racists are. Sometimes they out themselves.

Back in the Fall, within nanoseconds of the NFL announcing that Latin rapper Bad Bunny would be performing the Super Bowl Halftime Show, the Trump cult tore itself away from Charlie Kirk martyrdom, MAGA church shooter retcons, restaurant logo crusades, and pro-ICE posturing to launch into a full-on frenzy of performative histrionics in protest.

Since then, they’ve continued their tortured pearl-clutching unabated, with the white supremacist stalwarts at Turning Point USA recently announcing an “alternative” halftime show (called, of course, The All-American Halftime Show), featuring Olympic-level cultural appropriator-turned MAGA bootlicker Kid Rock and an undercard of similarly pigmented, patriotism-peddling, Bible-brandishing, shameless deep South virtue signalers.

You see the “alternative” they’re offering here, right?

If you’re over 25 and, like many older white folks, have remained permanently trapped in the amber of Classic Rock radio, you may have never even heard of Bad Bunny, whose birth name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio. (I’d be willing to bet my house that 90 percent of the Conservatives who are currently rending their garments online hadn’t, either.)

Born and raised in Puerto Rico (which a terrifying number of MAGAs don’t seem to know is an American territory), his father was a truck driver and his mother a school teacher. He spent his formative years singing in the choir in a Roman Catholic Church his family attended, and began writing his own music at the age of 14. Bunny was signed to a record label at the age of 20 after being discovered online.

Today, Bad Bunny is an international superstar, the second most-streamed artist of all time, with 100 billion streamed songs. He is a multiple Grammy winner, has crossed over into professional wrestling and acting, is a coveted brand ambassador, and does millions of dollars in philanthropic work through his Good Bunny Foundation (Fundación el Buen Conejo), which he started in 2018.

Ocasio is the literal embodiment of the American Dream that the GOP has spent decades waving in our faces and flying up the flagpole.

So, what’s the problem?

Let’s just say it’s primarily a melanin issue, with a side order of MAGA cultism, a heaping portion of Christian nationalism, and a healthy dash of homophobia thrown in.

As a self-described gender-fluid Latin musician who sings predominantly in Spanish, has previously criticized Donald Trump, and repeatedly lamented the inhumanity of ICE as recently as during his Grammy acceptance speech last week, Ocasio must be condemned, vilified, and eradicated because membership in the mindless death cult of white American intolerance they now call home requires it. This asinine mob mentality vitriol is what Trump’s movement has fostered and fomented, and what it demands.

Ocasio opened his recent Grammy speech with these words:

“Before I say thanks to God, I’m going to say: ICE out,” he said. “We’re not savages. We’re not animals. We’re not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans.”

This is supposed to be what America stands for: decency, diversity, humanity, and yet it is precisely the message MAGA is burdened to shout down and suffocate.

The fact that the Right feels compelled to create an “alternative” to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl appearance speaks eloquently about their desire to secede from a culturally and racially diverse nation, how committed they are to perpetuating the myth of oppressed white Christians, and how determined they are to manipulate every event into a racist holy war in order to keep their rank-and-file foaming at the mouth.

Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet said in a statement that the show “is an opportunity for all Americans to enjoy a halftime show with no agenda other than to celebrate faith, family, and freedom.”

But whose faith are they celebrating?

Not the spiritual beliefs of Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs, Unitarians, or non-MAGA Evangelical Christians.

Whose family are they talking about?

Not Latino families, or black families, or immigrant families, or LGBTQ families, that’s for damn sure.

And exactly whose freedom will take center stage on Sunday?

Not the people with brown skin being relentlessly terrorized by ICE, not the thousands of sexual assault survivors brutalized by Jeffrey Epstein and his collaborators, not the tens of millions of women who deserve autonomy over their own bodies, and not the migrants and refugees being persecuted by these cosplaying Christians.

The Turning Point halftime show, like every venture in the MAGA/Trump ecosystem, is a grim, sinister, mean-spirited fight against progress, evolution, and diversity disguised as sincere virtue.

This isn’t about Bad Bunny.
This isn’t about a halftime show.
It’s about who we collectively want to be, the kind of nation we dream of living in, and the future we want those who follow us to inherit.
It’s about the cost of standing up to the bullies, of rejecting racism, of being intolerant of intolerance.
This is about what we will demand and what we will not accept when it comes to the rights and voices of people of color.

Trump and his supporters don’t want an alternative halftime show; they want an alternative white, gated community nation where only they benefit.

In these days, we are in a brutal battle for an America where everyone will find opportunity, safety, and welcome.

It’s time we all got in the game.