Bad Bunny is a global sensation.
He is the most-streamed artist on Spotify. He just made history by winning Album of the Year, the first Spanish album to win the prestigious Grammy. He is about to perform during the Super Bowl halftime show, an American cultural institution and the most-watched TV event each year.
Bad Bunny (Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio) is not an immigrant, a foreigner, or from a Latin American country. He is a citizen born and raised in Puerto Rico, an unincorporated territory of the United States that the country has pillaged, colonized, and largely ignored for over a century.
Puerto Ricans serve and die in the U.S. military, but they can’t vote in our national elections unless they move to the mainland United States. Over 3,000 people died when Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017, and all they received from Donald Trump was contempt and a few paper towels. In 2024, the island was the butt of hack comedian Tony Hinchcliff’s racist jokes at Trump’s hate rally in Madison Square Garden, where he described it as a “floating island of garbage,” and joked that Latinos “love making babies…there’s no pulling out, they don’t do that, they come inside, just like they do to our country.”
Instead of embracing Bad Bunny and celebrating his success, MAGA has instead used him to fuel their never-ending culture war and distract from the Trump Administration’s numerous failures and the Epstein scandal. Turning Point USA has decided to protest his performance by holding a counter halftime show featuring Kid Rock, who once sang about his predilection for underage girls.
The racism is predictable.
However, according to writer and journalist Jean Guerrero, author of Hatemonger, the definitive book on white nationalist Stephen Miller, and editor of the fabulous new UNSILENCING substack, Bad Bunny’s confident embrace of his Puerto Rican heritage and rejection of colonization is why he has emerged as one of the biggest cultural threats to a transnational global regime of fascists. The pillaging of Honduras and Venezuela by Trump and his allies was first perfected in Puerto Rico. Bunny’s music, politics, and message are a direct call to resistance of this imperialist project.
At the Grammys, Bad Bunny began his acceptance speech by saying, “ICE out,” and urging people around the world to reject hate and embrace love. For many Puerto Ricans and people of color around the world, Bunny’s unapologetic celebration of his culture and language has inspired them to rediscover their roots and reject the toxic rigidity of assimilation and Whiteness.
Jean joins The Left Hook to explain why the joyful music and politics of Bad Bunny are revolutionary and a massive threat to the narrow, hateful vision of MAGA.
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Thank you Lisa Gonzalez, Caro Henry, Robin Payes, Social SLP, Lisa 🌿🔍🔎🌿, and many others for tuning into my live video with UNSILENCING by Jean Guerrero! Join me for my next live video in the app.
