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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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I have a general political theory on the current Democratic Party that no matter what gift Trump gives them they will find a way to mess it up.

ICE has had a lot of bad vibes lately. Enter the Bad Bunny Super Bowl show. I had never heard of him before Trumps rants on the Bad Bunny being in the Super Bowl. I don’t know if he was picked by the wokes or simply the NFL trying to find away to grow the game outside the US.

I think a general view of the center-left is to be nice to immigrants (empathy) even if they are closer to economic migrants than asylum/desperate. This feels like a cooking the frog too fast type moment where the message seems to be we will replace your culture and you will like it moment. The Super Bowl to me is perhaps the American Holiday most linked to Americana and they did the event completely in Spanish. The performance was trashy with some sort of sugar plantation theme (which were never in America and most of Spanish-Speaking Americans are not sugar plantation culture).

My hope is that this has gone too far and even my liberal mother will have an issue with explicit replacement.

sugar plantation sex

I was also starting to consider Americans thoughts on what is generally referred to as LATAM which is basically anything south of the Rio Grande. Most Americans probably group them into one group even though they are distinct economically and in their ethnic makeup. I don’t think the other south of the border types would be happy with their presentation when we could have found other groups with positive cultural traits if the goal was marketing to LATAM. Maybe I am missing a group but when I think of south of the border I think there are a few broad groups.

  1. Bad Bunnies Caribbean plantation culture. Cubans though seem to have classier elements.
  2. Mostly Mexico and some other Central America. A combination of conquistadors and Amerindian mostly Aztec
  3. Brazil and the Portuguese culture.
  4. Southern Cone. Least “Latino” and as much Italian as Spanish.

If the NFL goal is to grow the game I don’t see how highlighting sugar cane field sex would be viewed as a good way to reach out. Groups from these regions only have significant presence in Miami and Puerto Rico within US territories. From what I can tell southern cone twitter hates the performance.

After viewing the performance I will rate it worse than my fears. Politically I will rate it as good for my side in the category of the wokes always find a way to ruin electoral chances for the Democrats.

Edit: Empire which America is should never degrade itself especially on the big stages. It’s actually one reason the stupid amount of money we spent on the new Fed I can understand. When Milei comes to Washington (any Leader) and signs some currency swap the building he meets with Bessent or Powell needs to loudly say Empire. In Dunk and Egg show the bad Targaryen gets it right the dragon never dies even in a puppet show. The Super Bowl is one of those stages for the US.

The main thing I've learned from the half time show discourse is that a significant number of people still do not seem to fully comprehend that Puerto Rico is a part of the US and has been for over a hundred years.

Even your linked comment seems to fail at this. "Hispanic people should be more outraged than Americans". These Hispanic people are Americans because Puerto Ricans are American! They are not a different group.

This feels like a cooking the frog too fast type moment where the message seems to be we will replace your culture and you will like it moment. The Super Bowl to me is perhaps the American Holiday most linked to Americana and they did the event completely in Spanish.

My hope is that this has gone too far and even my liberal mother will have an issue with explicit replacement.

He is a famous Puerto Rican celebrity, Puerto Rico is a part of the US, he is an American celebrity. And they've been part of the country since 1898, if there's some "replacement" of Puerto Ricans it was planned long long ago since McKinley.

This is also of course the result of acquiring new territories and not fully incorporating them into the rest of the system. If the US wants an expansive empire that takes over parts of South America, Greenland and Canada, which Trump seems to constantly be posturing towards, then we're gonna end up with spanish speakers, greenlandic and danish speakers, French speakers, and etc etc other languages within our borders. If Puerto Rico is part of the replacement then you should be really really worried about the president's plans with Venezuela and Gaza

Sorry Bad Bunny is not American. He has zero American values. He does not speak English. A technicality of a treaty giving you citizenship does not make you American.

Though as Puerto Rican he has no duty to assimilate since it was acquired land.

Sorry, he is. From the State Department website:

Puerto Rico comes within the definition of "United States" given in section 101(a)(38) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). A person born in Puerto Rico acquires U.S. citizenship in the same way as one born in any of the 50 States.

Puerto Ricans weren't granted citizenship by treaty but through the Jones Act in 1917. You can make the argument that gaining citizenship by statute isn't the same as being entitled to citizenship under the Constitution, but by that logic you'd have to concede that John McCain and Ted Cruz aren't Americans either. McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, which was under US jurisdiction at the time but not an incorporated territory, and Cruz was born in Canada, a foreign country. Both rely on statutes outlining the circumstances under which children of US citizens born abroad can claim US citizenship.

You are reducing American Citizenship down to the equivalent of a Costco membership.

If America isn’t a people by race then we must be a people by creed. An idea. But BB rejected all that.

What’s left is just like a membership card to Costco.

I do agree we have at a minimum a few million people today where America is neither blood nor creed. I have friends in this bucket.

I will give you the benefit of the doubt that you didn’t think thru the argument before going legalistic. A legal argument of being American reduces American to a Costco Membership.

No, I'm reducing American citizenship to the terms outlined in the Constitution and US law, which is the only definition that matters. What you're trying to do is introduce additional criteria that doesn't come from anywhere accept your own imagination to define American as that which conforms to your own biases of what Americans are supposed to be. Well, two can play at that game; for that matter, 200 million can play at that game, and you don't have any authority to make that determination over them. The only authority that matters in this case is that of the US government, and that is who I'll defer to on definitions of who counts as an American. You can't just invent your own definitions for things that are already well-defined because the implications make you uncomfortable.

No, I'm reducing American citizenship to the terms outlined in the Constitution and US law, which is the only definition that matters.

You're the one who brought up citizenship, which is irrelevant. OP was not talking about citizenship but affinity.