Super Bowl LIV:
America’s Death Rattle

2,420 wordsShakira and Bad Bunny performing at Super Bowl LIV halftime.

I know, the fifty-fourth Super Bowl is old news. Who cares about something that occurred more than 24 hours ago? We might as well discuss a Babylonian sporting event. However, this Super Bowl averaged 102 million viewers [1], which makes it the eleventh most-watched event in US history — the top 10 are nine other Super Bowls and the final episode of M*A*S*H — and it is the pinnacle of Americanism. All football games are one elongated advertisement to consume more product, but this particular commercial, Super Bowl LIV, was blatantly hostile to its own consumer base. This seems unique and warrants dissection.

Halftime Extravaganza

I did not get to my friend’s viewing party until late in the second quarter, but the halftime show is the main concern [2] of the whole spectacle. It began with Shakira shouting “Hola, Miami!” which was authentically pronounced O-la, Me-ah-me. Prior to this moment, I was unaware who was to headline, so when I saw her, I said “oh, Shakira. She was popular when I was. . . 12 years old?” I’ve been out of the loop for the better part of a decade, but it can’t possibly be the case that Shakira has a large American following today. It’s plausible that her popularity has been sustained now that there are about 85 million Hispanics in America [3].

Shortly after she finishes her opening tune and lets everyone know she can play the guitar, Shakira’s show breaks into “Kashmir” by Led Zeppelin for exactly eight seconds. Besides feeling misplaced, it’s appalling that the only good song of the night, and one of the most important rock songs of all time, was used solely as a transition from one trashy Hispanic pop song to another. I choose to interpret this as a subtle metaphor for the brief stint in which Europeans ruled the land known as America — about the late seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century. We were just a transition. The savages [4] who inhabited it prior to European colonization and the third world hordes [5] seizing it today are the beginning and end, respectively, and whites were a hurdle somewhere in the middle.

This is followed by Shakira’s nod to her Arabic heritage. She conveys this through belly dancing while playing with a knotted rope. The only way to interpret this is that the rope with which we’ll be hanged will also be flaunted by a 115-pound Colombian woman. Supposedly, this is a dance she has retained from her Oral Fixation tour, which is an unconscious reference to the elite group occupying America [6] and the reason politicians have allowed Hispanics to conquer the American Southwest [7], despite the fact that citizens want the border sealed shut.

After some other song from the mid-2000s which people vaguely recall, a guy comes out looking like a flamboyantly gay version of Ali G. I’ve thought about it, and this is the best way to describe him. I read online that his name is Bad Bunny. (I’m slipping into a depression. It doesn’t help that the sun was essentially invisible in the upper Midwest for the whole month of January [8].) The end of Bad Bunny’s rapping includes mentioning la Raza. I don’t speak Spanish, and it’s hard to understand the words, but looking at the song’s lyrics, we get, “Guerrero Como Eddie, Que viva la Raza,” which I’m confident translates to “Guerrero like Eddie, long live the race.”

It is worth mentioning that there is an aggressive conglomeration of lawyers [9] in the U.S. who champion “Hispanic rights” under the name La Raza Lawyers, which means they fight tooth and nail to prove Hispanics never do anything wrong. The FBI’s wanted list [10] begs to differ. To summarize thus far, we have a couple of Hispanics singing and vibrating to trashy pop music during America’s largest event of the year, saying directly to the camera long live the race, referring to a foreign population currently blitzkrieging our border. Is there anyone left who believes America is not a conquered nation?

At this point, Shakira falls back into a choreographed crowd surf to be carried to another part of the stage. We can hear her labored breathing as she shouts for about ten seconds — it sounds terrible and adds to my skepticism that her microphone was on before this moment. When she is hoisted back on stage, she makes a disgusting but hilariously awkward Arabic chant into the camera while wiggling her tongue. Supposedly, this is her directly channeling Lebanese custom. If that’s what we can expect of authentic Lebanese culture, put them on a ship back home — I don’t care if Nassim Taleb writes intriguing books.

Soon after this, Jennifer Lopez comes to the stage strapped to the pole atop a diorama Empire State Building, surrounded by a dozen mulattos wearing black leather jackets with colorful skirts. She then rips off a pink dress to thrust her groin in our faces, which is the first of many such moves. In addition to the profuse thrusting, she regularly has her hand basically grabbing her crotch, similar to what rappers do in music videos. Somebody probably told her this is a power move. Even the liberals surrounding me at the viewing party, who would normally applaud any feminist behavior like the Manchurian candidates they are, were all dumbfounded and appalled. Even they thought this half-naked brown woman throwing her groin at the camera was vulgar.

In Lopez’s defense, it appears that she actually sings for the few words she performs. At least, she’s far better at faking it than Shakira and I’ll give it a nod. Lopez finishes one of her songs that I remember being popular 10-15 years ago, then the lights cut and a bunch of black women begin crawling around the stage like animals. Lopez emerges again in a new outfit that must have been underneath the other. It leaves less to the imagination than most lingerie. Then, she hops onto a stripper pole for another routine. Not at the top of the Empire State Building — just a stripper pole. A bunch of black and Hispanic dancers join the animal mayhem on the stage, wearing some bizarre straps across their torsos that make them look like they came directly from the Pride Parade. Then, we’re hit with another Spanish-speaking rapper, whose name I refuse to learn.

The cherry on top follows: A young Hispanic girl begins singing from. . . inside of a cage. This is an obvious nod to Trump “throwing kids in cages,” as CNN types like to repeat, as if it’s utterly preposterous that we should arrest people breaking federal laws. The stage lights then form the shape of the ancient sign for female. There is an all-girls choir singing “Let’s Get Loud” by Jennifer Lopez, a song I did not know until I searched the lyrics because it was released in 1999. Oh, and the girls also have American flags on their chests. It would be a semi-wholesome part of the show if they weren’t peddling leftist ideology that they do not remotely understand or espouse, and wearing skirts above their mid-thigh.

They cut to Shakira playing the drums, which was nothing short of gratuitous at this point in the program. Lopez returns to the stage draped in a feathered American flag that hangs to her feet. She yells “Latinos” at the top of her lungs and spreads the flag from the bottom-up, only to reveal that the inside is a Puerto Rican flag. Again, this is the halftime show of the biggest American event of the year.

Lopez exposing the Puerto Rican flag is accompanied by “Born in the USA” by Bruce Springsteen. The two songs meld together and Lopez says “let’s get loud” one more time. Then, the young girl and Lopez simultaneously scream “‘cause I’m going to live my life!” At which point Shakira pops back in to add, “ain’t nobody gotta tell you, what you gotta do!” They say this because white Americans spend their entire lives thinking about how to suppress Hispanic behavior on a daily basis. Immediately after, for fear that they might leave out a continent, Shakira’s song Waka Waka (This Time for Africa) makes a cameo. You may remember this from the 2010 World Cup, which actually took place in Africa.

Thank God it’s over.

This whole spectacle begs a few questions. Are Hispanics the true Americans? How about Africans? How about Middle Easterners? If this were the first American event you saw, you’d probably assume the only people who aren’t true Americans are Europeans and East Asians. However, we know that Europeans are the true Americans [11].

Perhaps I’m reading too much into this. But, there was a telling, albeit minor, scandal during and after the event. Apparently, Jay-Z and Beyonce stayed seated during the national anthem [12]. This drew much attention, although he informed reporters that he was transfixed with the program, not protesting. He has partnered with the NFL and co-produced many of the Super Bowl LIV shows, so he was watching how his events were being executed:

The whole time, we’re sitting there, we’re talking about the performance and right after that, Demi comes out and we’re talking about how beautiful she looked and how she sounds and what she’s going through in her life for her to be on the stage, we’re so proud of her.

So, he was not paying close attention and the anthem caught him off guard. I accept this defense. However, he added: “I didn’t have to make a silent protest. If you look at the stage, the artists that we chose, Colombian [Shakira], Puerto Rican JLo. . . we were making the biggest loudest protest of all.”

We Cordially Invite You to Consume

It has been common for several years to hear people say they’re more excited about the commercials than the Super Bowl itself. This is because huge companies go all out, spending millions of dollars to write and air the funniest advertisements they can. However, this year was surprisingly humorless. If you have a good sense of humor, the vast majority of Super Bowl commercials were bad. This year’s ads, however, weren’t just unfunny. They were painfully sentimental and utterly devoid of comedic effect. It was the Year of Woke Capital. Dozens of multinational corporations spent $5.6 million per 30-second ad [13] to tell us how much they care about us, which is why we should consume more product.

I’ll discuss one example: Anquan Boldin’s advertisement for the NFL’s new brand of activism. Firstly, do you remember Colin Kaepernick? How could you forget? He’s the mulatto who was given up for adoption by his white mother [14] and whose black father had flown the coop before he was born. Imagine my shock.

Kaepernick was adopted by a generous, upper-middle-class family who had lost two sons to heart defects. He now has a gigantic afro and probably quotes Marcus Garvey. (Actually, if he did, I’d support him.) Anyway, the only reason we still talk about him is because of the bottomless can of worms he opened in 2016 after he first stayed seated during a national anthem [15] when he was already on his way out of the NFL. He did this because he didn’t want to “stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” despite the fact that blacks are not disproportionately killed by police [16], and they’ve squandered almost 60 years of anti-white affirmative action.

We all know Kaepernick’s story. It sparked deep-seated racial hostility throughout the country. The NFL was against the initial controversy and all the ensuing black players who knelt, but they did not know how to handle the situation. There were teams and players who were staying in the locker room to avoid the national anthem, and so on. It’s all a big thing.

However, and to my point, the NFL appears to have been simply holding out until they found a way to monetize the resentment blacks hold against whites.

After halftime, there was a serious advertisement with Anquan Boldin [17], a retired player. He regales how after he finished a game with the 49ers in 2015, his wife informed him that his cousin Corey Jones had been murdered. Cut to a reenactment: Jones’ car is broken down on the side of the road. Coming from the opposite direction, an SUV pulls up and a white officer in plain clothes gets out of the vehicle. Boldin says: “Then this guy starts screaming, all you hear from there is three shots.” Cut to the funeral, where the pallbearers wore Oakland Raiders jerseys.

I looked up the shooting of Corey Jones out of skepticism. It happened as Boldin described. For this, the officer was sentenced to 25 years in prison on April 25, 2019. Apparently, there was an audio recording that gave the murder away, which hurts Boldin’s line that “had it not been for the work that we do, Corey’s death would have been in vain.” I guess his rhetoric is extra ammunition for the narrative they’re blasting the Super Bowl’s viewership with. Boldin adds the mission statement of his new player’s coalition: “We focused on police/community relations, education and economic advancement, and criminal justice reform.” These are code words that mean blacks dindu nuffin wrong, never do, and they deserve pockets filled with cash.

The commercial left out an intriguing detail, though. The reenactment depicted a white officer — and anytime someone mentions police brutality, they are implicitly talking about whites oppressing blacks. That’s what all of this is about.

The officer who murdered Corey Jones was a Pakistani immigrant named Nouman K. Raja [18].

These lies are created and peddled to gaslight [19] the viewer into believing the oppression narrative: Whites are inherently evil and desire only to harm non-whites. This particular strain of The Big Lie was a commercial for the NFL’s Inspire Change movement [20], which the website claims has raised more than $25 million since April 2018 in grant money for social justice. How much of that do the NFL executives use for their $300 lunches?

Without white viewers, professional sports will die — and they fully deserve it. So let’s drop them. There are an infinite number of things you could do that would be more beneficial. Go to the gym, create a garden, build a nice stool. Almost everything you can do with 3.5 hours on a Sunday is more valuable than watching an NFL game.

On behalf of Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll, Jennifer Lynn Lopez, Bad Bunny, some other Hispanic rapper, Jay-Z, Anquan Boldin, and Colin Kaepernick, I would like to say: Give us your money, white man. Only then are you allowed to die.