I wasted 30 minutes of my life watching the Turning Point USA halftime show so you don’t have to

It’s hard to mount a culture war when your big counteroffensive looks like a youth-group lock-in made up of kids who found God in a megachurch but lost their personality somewhere in suburban Atlanta.​

By Casey Epstein-Gross  |  February 9, 2026 | 2:45pm
Photo courtesy of TPUSA/YouTube
Music Features Super Bowl Halftime Show
I wasted 30 minutes of my life watching the Turning Point USA halftime show so you don’t have to

When Turning Point USA announced it was staging an “All‑American Halftime Show” to protest Bad Bunny’s performance, I braced for a fascist clown rodeo: a flags-and-Jesus spectacular for people who think Spanish lyrics are a globalist psy-op and dancing is a gateway drug to drag brunch (which is itself, of course, a gateway to hell). What we ended up receiving last night was arguably worse: a fascist clown snoozefest. Really, calling that thing a “halftime show” is like calling your tween’s self-serious piano recital a music festival.

For those lucky enough to be out of the know, the All‑American Halftime Show was billed as a “patriotic” alternative for those easily triggered viewers that simply could not stomach a beloved Puerto Rican superstar singing in Spanish at the Super Bowl. Turning Point wrapped it all in language about “faith, family, and freedom,” slapped Charlie Kirk’s ghost on the poster, and sold it as a pure, wholesome counterpoint to the degenerate spectacle of… a straight couple getting married in real time on the field. Kid Rock popped up on Fox to promise a “classic rock in-your-face opener” for “people who love America, love football, love Jesus,” because nothing says moral clarity like the guy who once recorded a song about liking underage girls now moonlighting as a guardian of family‑friendly decorum. But as he put it, “We’re approaching this show like David and Goliath. Competing with the pro football machine and a global pop superstar is almost impossible…or is it?” As it turns out: Yes. It is. And unless I’m wildly misremembering scripture, David’s big move was hitting Goliath, not standing in a field slingshotting rocks directly into his own skull—which is more or less what Kid Rock and co did for half an hour last night.

By kickoff, the plan was simple: as tens of millions watched Super Bowl LX, a parallel America would log onto X or YouTube to watch Kid Rock, Brantley Gilbert, Gabby Barrett, and Lee Brice defend the culture with guitars, thinly veiled trans panic, and completely transparent xenophobia. The execution, however, was less so. The show was sold as a big cross‑platform event, with Turning Point promising a stream on X, only for the app to pull the plug hours before kickoff with a hand‑wave about licensing issues. I guess not even Elon wanted a part in this debacle. The YouTube page then briefly told people to “join us live tomorrow evening,” which definitely got some intern fired. A countdown clock ran out, nothing started, and the chat filled with people spamming American and Israeli flags and Jesus emojis while the organization tried to make its own event exist. Bad Bunny, somewhere in Santa Clara, was busy preparing an actual halftime performance.

Once the feed finally cooperated, the show opened with a brief tribute to the late Charlie Kirk (of course), a guitar‑hero version of the national anthem, and some cheap pyrotechnics. Brantley Gilbert staggered out first, yelling “this is real America” into a mic stand shaped like brass knuckles (that’s his thing, apparently), because what is evangelical conservatism if not singing about freedom through a tiny metal fist? Gabby Barrett wandered the runway barefoot in a crumpled pantsuit that looked like it was pressed by TSA, gamely belting “I Hope” to a laughably small crowd. Lee Brice, sweating under a leather jacket, debuted “Country Nowadays,” a song about how impossible it is to be a guy who wants to hunt and mow his lawn without being yelled at by the evening news. Patriotism: an under-attended showcase of a handful of aging country acts pacing around an LED runway in an undisclosed hanger.

The headliner, Kid Rock, couldn’t even be bothered to actually sing his own song. He stormed in wearing cut‑offs and a fur coat, launched into “Bawitdaba,” and immediately became just far enough out of sync with the backing track that the word “lip‑sync” started trending on X. Let’s just say that if he was on Drag Race, RuPaul would surely have stopped him mid-number to tell him to sashay the fuck away already. Best of all, Variety confirmed later that the entire performance was pre‑taped in Atlanta—which means this wasn’t even a live trainwreck, it was a canned one. They had time to fix it and simply chose not to. And, hell, if that’s not symbolic of the state of American politics, I don’t know what is.

About six million people tuned in, which is quite the paltry sum next to Bad Bunny’s roughly 136 million. Hilariously, it seems Trump himself was part of the latter; despite raging against the rapper’s “affront to the Greatness of America” on Truth Social, the president never once mentioned the protest show implicitly mounted in his name. Rough going for TPUSA, that. Bad Bunny, meanwhile, spent his 12 minutes turning the field into a Spanish-language block party of joy, community, and love for the real America (not the United States, but both continents) in the face of overwhelming state violence—exactly the kind of unapologetic, globally broadcast masterwork that made this clumsy little counter‑program feel even smaller by comparison. I suppose it’s hard to mount a culture war when your big counteroffensive looks like a youth-group lock-in made up of kids who found God in a megachurch but lost their personality somewhere in suburban Atlanta.​

And yet, for all the manufactured grievance that birthed the All-American Halftime Show, almost none of it made it onto the stage. Bad Bunny wasn’t mentioned once. There was no on‑stage argument with the NFL, no attempt to articulate why, exactly, an American citizen singing in Spanish at halftime was so offensive that this alternate universe needed to exist. The hatred that inspired the show was kept mostly off camera, replaced by soft‑focus patriotism, one gender‑panic chorus, and a “We Are Charlie Kirk”-style montage tribute to the alt-right’s favorite martyr. Right‑wing pundits dutifully declared it a triumph; sympathetic reviewers, reaching for compliments, mostly landed on “professional” and “safe.” In other words, it was utterly forgettable—which, given Bad Bunny’s history-making showing last night, is probably the very last thing Turning Point USA wanted the event to be.

Look, all I’m saying is that if you’re going to be xenophobic enough to stage an entire fake halftime in protest of a Puerto Rican headliner, you should at least have the decency to stick to your guns and make some bold, terrible statement, or at least have a memorable meltdown. Instead, Turning Point USA flinched: all that outrage and marketing just to produce an anemic little church‑camp concert in a mysterious warehouse that could’ve aired on a fourth‑tier cable channel at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday. It’s the lowest circle of the culture war: not just bigoted, but bigoted and terminally dull. Worst of all worlds.

Casey Epstein-Gross is Associate Editor at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].

 
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