Fakery Is the Key to the Right’s Cultural and Political Dominance

The idea that there are huge swaths of the United States populace who want and need the right wing’s unreality—their alternative reality—is a farce: a gaudy, festering artifice constructed and maintained by a million people who need it to be real for financial, political, and cultural purposes. 

And it was on full horrifying display during Super Bowl LX  in Santa Clara, where Bad Bunny sang his catchy Spanish-language pop tunes at halftime, intermingled with some nonoffensive and rather hopeful political messaging. This was preemptively framed by the American right as an assault on the country itself: a Spanish-speaking Latino man doing Latin music during the nation’s biggest sporting event. During a time of revanchist white supremacy, this would simply not do. 

As the president’s most militant supporters intimidate American citizens and threaten to undermine 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 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 Trump, was there too. They all pretended it was 1955, because in the right-wing imagination, it often is.

The idea here—the one that sits at the rotten center of the right’s unreality—is that, for a large segment of the country that sees itself as the true home of flag-and-Jesus patriotism, Bad Bunny’s halftime show could not possibly be tolerated. So there had to be a halftime show for the Rest of Us.

While far-right influencers on X urged their followers to watch the halftime show on multiple devices to inflate the view totals, social media users quickly noticed the mismatch between the purported audience and the near-total absence of activity in the YouTube chat. None of it looked organic.

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 in football media has put me on quite a few live streams over the years, some of which had 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 thousand concurrent viewers will get flooded with too many comments to track. Watching the steady stream of questions, insults, jokes, and replies can be overwhelming. I can't imagine what sort of comment generation would come from a stream with millions of people watching at the same time.

But it was all fake. Even the president, who both creates and resides deep within the right's all-encompassing unreality, appeared to be watching Bad Bunny’s performance rather than the Republican halftime show. My own 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 it.

A quick Monday morning perusing of the media showed some right-wing influencers trying (and failing) to legitimize the 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 is 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 fabrication, with this unabashed, unreality creation. Don't hedge. Use the shamelessness and go all the way.

The media ecosystem, including enemies of Turning Point USA, largely dismissed the alternate reality halftime show. Nick Fuentes mocked the ridiculous spectacle before an audience of alienated young men drawn to grievance politics. "It's literally fake outrage, self-ghettoizing, being overly-political, pretending to like the things—we have become the far left," said Fuentes.

The 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 clumsily written, heavily manufactured books—the sheen of mass appeal and national popularity.

They did something similar with tickets to the "Melania" movie, a transparently political project tied to Trump-world interests. 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 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 average person turning on the news on Monday morning saw a headline about "Melania" doing quite well—better than anyone could have predicted—and either consciously or unconsciously believed there was a significant audience for such propaganda, that there was an appetite for the right wing's unreality, when of course there was not.

We saw this unfold in the weeks after the May 2023 release of the movie, "Sound of Freedom," a slick piece of right-wing political messaging about efforts to save children from a cabal of pedophiles. "Sound of Freedom" was embraced and promoted by QAnon adherents with an unsubtle message: Those who oppose us are part of the cabal and pose an existential threat to the nation and its children. The theaters showing "Sound of Freedom" were entirely or mostly empty during its first weekend in theaters and the film somehow grossed almost $20 million in ticket sales. As with "Melania,” 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 matters. This unreality is beamed into the eyeballs of mainstream editors, reporters, and various online media personalities via social media, leading them to believe that the Kid Rock halftime show, "Melania," and all sorts of miserable books written by grifting conservative authors are indeed quite popular.

These influential people 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 figures 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 the left's cultural and political popularity.

In reality, enjoying a talented performer singing upbeat songs for a global audience is not some uniquely “left-wing” trait. It is what normal people enjoy. The real divide is not between the left and the rest of the country, but between people grounded in reality and people who have immersed themselves in the American right’s warped, extremist media universe.

Featured image is Kid Rock, by Larry Philpot