Quite honestly, I don’t follow sports. In fact, I was leading a church service during the Super Bowl. We all have different tastes, but when it comes to watching sports games on TV, I’m like the bank examiner in “It’s a Wonderful Life!” who said in a different context: “Well, they do those sort of things, I suppose.”
But even I couldn’t escape news of the anti-American halftime show at the Super Bowl with Bad Bunny versus a patriotic counterpart put on by Kid Rock et al. for the late Charlie Kirk’s group, Turning Point USA.
It was Bad Bunny versus Kid Rock, who thankfully got more than 20 million views from different platforms.
Listen to some of the critiques of the former:
- President Trump wrote: "The Super Bowl Halftime Show is absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER!....This ‘Show’ is just a ‘slap in the face’ to our Country, which is setting new standards and records every single day.”
- Nick Adams posted: “Was a single word of English spoken during the Super Bowl Halftime Show? Someone needs to tell Bad Bunny he’s in America. This is an abomination.”
- Benny Johnson writes: “Bad Bunny closed his performance flanked by foreign flags standing in front of a billboard that says: ‘The only thing more powerful than hate is love.’”
“Love”? Who says hatred for America is motivated by love?
Yet NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell stood behind the choice of Bad Bunny to perform because the singer “understood the platform he was on and this platform is used to unite people.”
Unite people? What to hate the country and its current administration?
Good for Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA to provide a pro-American alternative featuring Kid Rock and other pro-American performers.
I’m sick of all the America-bashing. No nation is perfect. But all the controversy surrounding the borders —including the attempts to oust those who entered here illegally — and especially those who did so and committed crimes here — gets down to this: People want to be here — in America.
So why all the hate America stuff? Maybe it was just as well that much of the Super Bowl halftime show was not in English. Perhaps fewer people could understand the anti-American messages. I understand that Bad Bunny’s lyrics were quite smutty. Phew. Doubly glad it was not in English.
America is not perfect. Far from it. But, boy, am I glad I live here and not in some lawless hellscape, like Haiti, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.
Or what about a communist hellscape? (Is there any other kind?) They still exist, although many of them have collapsed because of their bad ideas.
Ronald Reagan once warned us: “Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance, it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.”
I wish the likes of Bad Bunny and all his supporters would just ask the people of Cuba, of Venezuela, of China about what it’s like to live without true freedom.
But in the American experience, because our founders said our rights come from God, there is a sense in which love of God and of country (when in the right) go hand in hand. To paraphrase George Washington in his Farewell Address, you have no right to call yourself a patriot if you subvert two key “pillars of human happiness.” Which were? “Religion and morality.”
It’s a free country, so protesters of our nation can protest all they want, even when highly paid and when viewed by tens of millions, without repercussion. But, personally, I think we should thank God for those who sacrificed to give us that freedom.
I heard that the Patriots (the football team) lost. Maybe it’s also true that at halftime, other types of patriots lost. The historical ones---like those who sacrificed in places like Lexington, Bunker Hill, and Valley Forge, where the soldiers defending America often left bloody footprints in the snow because of inadequate footwear. They gave us our freedom at great cost to themselves.
I agree with this tweet about the NFL half-time from Jon Root, who posted on X: “America deserved better for its 250th birthday.” During this special anniversary for our nation, we should take time to learn about all those brave men and women who paid “the last measure of devotion” to our country that we might be free, to quote Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address.
Bashing American patriotism may be cool for the elites, but it sure smacks of ingratitude to me.
Jerry Newcombe, D.Min., is the executive director of the Providence Forum, an outreach of Coral Ridge Ministries. He has written/co-written 33 books, including George Washington’s Sacred Fire (with Providence Forum founder Peter Lillback, Ph.D.) and What If Jesus Had Never Been Born? (with D. James Kennedy, Ph.D.).
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