Jack Posobiec and Libby Emmons reveal how Jay-Z has destroyed the Super Bowl halftime show with woke messaging

Emmons kicked off the conversation by recalling how different the halftime show once was, pointing back to Super Bowl XX in 1986, when the New England Patriots faced the Chicago Bears. “That was the first year the NFL implemented pre-game entertainment, and it was very low-key,” Emmons said. The halftime performance honored Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and featured the group Up With People. “There were no big-name celebrities. It was just regular people from this troupe singing songs from that year.”

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She contrasted that with this year’s Super Bowl, which features Latin rapper Bad Bunny as the halftime show performer and Green Day performing at the opening ceremony: “He’s going to be wearing a dress. He’s singing in Spanish. He’s honoring queer icons,” Emmons said of the rapper. “That’s pretty long distance from where we’ve come.”

Posobiec argued that the shift is the result of deliberate decisions by the league: “People need to understand that the Super Bowl halftime show is controlled by Jay-Z and Roc Nation,” he said, noting that the NFL announced a long-term partnership with the company in 2019. Roc Nation has produced every halftime show since.

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He connected that partnership to earlier activism in the league, particularly the protests led by former quarterback Colin Kaepernick. “People forget that the Take a Knee stuff started years before George Floyd,” Posobiec said. “It was a movement in search of a cause, and then when George Floyd happened, they retconned it.”

Posobiec also slammed the NFL’s promotion of the so-called black National Anthem: “They abused the American National Anthem, and then they created this ethnic national anthem, which immediately raises the question, where’s the Asian National Anthem, where’s the Hispanic National Anthem?”

Emmons pushed back against the idea that fans should simply ignore the halftime show: “It’s not reasonable to say just don’t watch it,” she said. “It’s infiltrating our culture. It’s changing the baseline of what we find acceptable.”

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The two also discussed the absence of traditional rock music from recent halftime shows: “Rock music has basically been banned,” Posobiec said, adding that it has been more than a decade since a true rock act headlined. Artists like Bad Bunny are often described as globally popular, but Posobiec said that this reflects international streaming numbers rather than mainstream appeal in the US. “Ask someone who doesn’t speak Spanish to name a Bad Bunny song,” he said. “They’ve got nothing.”