politics

Nothing Real Can Emerge From The American Right's Unreality

The idea that the US is split exactly down the middle politically and culturally infiltrates everything

The idea that a huge swath of the United States populace wants and needs the right wing’s unreality – their alternative reality – is a giant farce, a big, fake, neon, festering artifice constructed and maintained by people who need it to be real for financial and political and cultural purposes.

And it was on full horrifying display Sunday night during Super Bowl XL in San Francisco, where Bad Bunny sang his catchy Spanish-language pop tunes at halftime intermingled with some inoffensive and rather hopeful political messaging. This, naturally, was preemptively attacked by the American right as an all-out assault on the country itself, a Spanish-speaking Latino man doing Latin music before an international audience during a time of revanchist white supremacy led by a president who posts on social media exactly like a Klansman.

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As the president’s personal paramilitary maims and kills American citizens and threatens to shut down elections, the real threat, per the internet’s right-wing influencers and the right-wing politicians who take their lead, was the Bunny Guy playing his songs during the Super Bowl halftime show.

So they fled, as they always do, to an alternative venue, an all-American halftime show – if you know what I mean – hosted by Turning Point USA. The show featured people I have never heard of, including Brantley Gilbert, Lee Brice, and Gabby Barrett, all of whom sound like AI-generated country singer names. Kid Rock, universally reviled by baby boomers until he expressed his support for America’s first tyrant, was there too. They all pretended it was 1955 because in the right-wing unreality, the civil rights era never happened, or shouldn't have happened, or if it did happen, it was a stain on the republic.

(I watched a little bit of the fashy halftime show because part of my self-torment regiment is consuming right-wing content; one particularly odious country song was sung by a man who claims all he wants to do is live his life – catch his fish, drink his beer, feed his dog, wear his boots – while denying the existence of transgender people and wondering why people who don't look like him are always talking about their rights)

The idea here – the one that sits at the puss-filled center of the right’s unreality – is that exactly half the country could not possibly tolerate Bad Bunny’s halftime show. We are split precisely down the middle: The right's causes are as popular as the left's causes, as good and bad things are the same. So there had to be a halftime show for the Rest of Us, for the exact half of the country that loves the flag and Jesus and wouldn’t support a halftime show with messages of love for one’s neighbor or our shared humanity.

Viewership estimates for the Republican Super Bowl halftime show range from 12 million to 20 million, with somewhere between 4-6 million concurrent viewers on YouTube. This, of course, paled in comparison to the 185 million to watched Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show (a performance that foreshadowed Woke 2, I think).

Here's the thing though: The estimates for the halftime display for right wingers with little to no emotional regulation and a massive victimization complex were almost certainly exaggerated. The show itself was reportedly prerecorded days before the Big Game, with hundreds of people being paid to pose as audience members for the slate of no-name musicians introduced by online engagement addict Pete Hegseth.

While the internet's most detestable and craven far-right influencers on the X platform formerly known as Twitter urged their followers to watch the fashy halftime show on multiple devices (in order to juice the view totals), computer knowers on social media couldn't help but notice the total lack of active people in the broadcast's YouTube chat amid many millions of supposedly concurrent viewers. None of it looked right. None of it appeared to be organic, or what one might call "real."

It raises a terribly inconvenient question for those so heavily invested in the creation and maintenance of this kind of cultural spectacle: How could anything real emerge from unreality?

My day job as a football bro has put me on quite a few live streams over the years, some of which have a few thousand concurrent watchers and others that have creeped over the 10,000 mark (usually at the beginning of the NFL season, before people's dreams are crushed by their team's ineptitude). I can tell you anecdotally that any stream with even a couple thousands concurrent viewers will get flooded with too many comments to track. Watching the steady stream of questions and insults and jokes and replies can be overwhelming. I can't imagine what sort of comment generation would come from a stream with millions and millions of folks watching at the same time. I can tell you for certain that it would be more than zero.

It was all fake. Not even the president, who both creates and resides deep within the right's all-encompassing unreality, watched the Republican halftime show. How do we know? Because the Big Boy was filmed watching Bad Bunny's performance at his fortress of 80s tackiness in Florida. I can tell the Bad Faith Times faithful that my dad – the guy who was stunned to see his grandkids singing the National Anthem because the TV told him the anthem had been banned in woke public schools – was not even aware of the Republican halftime show. A baby boomer steeped in nonstop culture war madness didn't even know about the fucking thing.

A quick Monday morning perusing of fascist media showed some right-wing influencers trying (and failing) to legitimize the pathetic Republican halftime show. Those scrambling to save face included Turning Point USA mouthpiece Andrew Kolvet, who claimed without any evidence whatsoever that upwards of 50 million people logged on to YouTube to consume the anti-Bad Bunny bonanza.

My question to Kolvet would be this: Why not say 100 million people watched it? Why not say 200 million, a few million more than Bad Bunny's audience? Why not simply say the Kid Rock halftime extravaganza was the first stream in internet history to have one billion concurrent viewers? Just go all out with this childlike lie, with this unabashed unreality creation. Don't hedge. Use your superpower (shamelessness) and go all the way.

Not Even The Chuds Are Buying This

The fascist media ecosystem, including avowed enemies of Turning Point USA, largely dismissed the alternate reality halftime show. King of the Incels Nick Fuentes on Monday mocked the whole ridiculous spectacle before his audience of young men who want the whole world to burn because they got turned down by a lady. "It's literally fake outrage, self-ghettoizing, being overly-political, pretending to like the things—we have become the far left," said Fuentes, a Holocaust denier and self-styled neo-nazi.

Sunday's Republican halftime show is just the latest in a never-ending string of unreality creation. For decades right-wing organizations have goosed the book sales of conservative authors who have no real audience, buying tens or even hundreds of thousands of copies to catapult those books onto the New York Times bestseller list, giving the books – often unreadable ghost-written dreck – the sheen of mass appeal and national popularity.

They did the same shit with tickets to the "Melania" movie, Jeff Bezos' public bribe to our sundowning tyrant. Conservative groups reportedly bought out entire theaters for the movie's opening weekend to ensure the final opening box office numbers would not prove humiliating to the president and his eternally scowling wife. These groups also paid people fifty bucks to sit in the theaters and watch "Melania" as part of a coordinated campaign to fake public support for the First Lady.

The total first-weekend haul – around $7 million – was then reported both in right-wing media and mainstream outlets as a legitimate number. The normie turning on the news on that Monday morning sees a headline about "Melania" doing quite well – better than anyone could have predicted – and either consciously or unconsciously believes there is a significant audience for such fascistic propaganda, that there is an appetite for the right wing's unreality, when of course there is not.

We saw this unfold in the weeks after the May 2023 release of the movie, "Sound of Freedom," a slick right-wing psy-op dressed up as a film about efforts to save children from a cabal of pedophiles. "Sound of Freedom" was a QAnon propaganda project with an unsubtle message: Those who oppose us are part of the cabal and pose an existential threat to the nation and its children. Theaters showing "Sound of Freedom" were entirely or mostly empty during its first couple weekends in theaters and the film somehow grossed $90 million in ticket sales. As with the "Melania" farce, these numbers were juiced by conservative organizations buying thousands of tickets that were distributed to no one.

Unfortunately the make-believe cultural relevance of the right's media productions matter, and sometimes matter a lot. This unreality is pumped into the eyeballs of mainstream editors and reporters and various online media personalities via social media, primarily Elon Musk's weaponized X algorithm, and they are made to believe that the Kid Rock halftime show and "Melania" and all sorts of miserable books written by grifting conservative authors are indeed quite popular.

These influential folks then use their platforms to blast out that message to you and me and our parents and grandparents and coworkers. The message is always clear: The US is split down the middle in every way. This allows these media members and the outlets they control to base their election coverage on the (false) concept that conservative policies and ideas are precisely as popular and legitimate as those coming from the left. The right's cultural and political popularity, the thinking goes, is always exactly on par with what might be called the left's cultural and political popularity.

In fact, it's not the "left" that enjoys a talented singer singing his upbeat songs before a worldwide audience. It's normal folks, it's those who have not poisoned themselves with brain-warping fascist online content. It's everyone who exists outside the American right's universe of fakery.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.