‘Crazy Spectacle’: Megyn Kelly’s Behavior In Her Super Bowl Rant Is Actually Disturbing
Megyn Kelly’s recent rant about Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show has garnered a lot of attention from people online who think her behavior was “unhinged.” One professor in American studies called her reaction to the performance a “crazy spectacle.”
During an appearance on Monday on “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” Kelly unleashed on Bad Bunny’s electrifying performance at the big game on Sunday, expressing her extreme frustration that the Puerto Rican global superstar was chosen to headline the show in the first place. She told host Piers Morgan that Bad Bunny performing in Spanish was a “middle finger to the rest of America.”
“This is supposed to be a unifying event for the country. Not for the Latinos,” Kelly said, while emphasizing the word “Latinos” in a derogatory and mocking tone. “Not for one small group, but for the country. We don’t need a Black national anthem. We don’t need a Spanish-speaking, non-English performer, and we don’t need an ICE or America-hater featured as our primetime entertainment.”
Kelly and Morgan then engaged in a back-and-forth over whether English is the official national language of America, with Kelly eventually acknowledging that there’s only been efforts to “make it an official documented thing.” (Last year, Trump signed an executive order to designate English as the country’s official language, though experts have viewed this order as being largely symbolic. Spanish is the most commonly spoken non-English language in America.)
“This attitude that you have right here is why you and Great Britain have lost your culture,” she fired back at Morgan, before spewing Islamophobic and xenophobic rhetoric. “You ceded your culture to a bunch of radical Muslims who came in and took over, and now it’s gone.”
“We’re not allowing that here. Whether it’s Hispanic, whether it’s Muslim, it’s not happening in the United States of America — that’s why President [Donald] Trump was elected,” she said, before later adding: “Football, that kind of football, is ours. They call it American football. And the halftime show and everything around it needs to stay quintessentially American.”
Kelly, of course, is not the first right-wing commentator to express outrage over Bad Bunny’s halftime performance since Sunday. MAGA supporters have been furious about the show, which featured surprise guest performances by Ricky Martin and Lady Gaga.
But many social media users on X, formerly Twitter, found Kelly’s level of rage over Bad Bunny to be… odd.
Kari J. Winter, a professor of American studies at the University at Buffalo whose expertise includes gender, feminism, race and class, said it’s not clear what’s really behind Kelly’s “unhinged rage.”
“In a media ecosystem that rewards unhinged rage, it is impossible to know if podcasters like Megyn Kelly are psychologically unraveling or are simply ramping up the volume of their offensive performances,” she told HuffPost.
“Watching Kelly wildly spin through a hurricane of racist, xenophobic, bigoted and absurd claims is like watching a B-movie melodrama starring an overwrought actor who is desperate to impress,” she later continued. “Every rant was a crazy spectacle. Does she lack the capacity to care about real issues like climate change and a new nuclear arms race? Or is she just another distracting sideshow intended to immobilize us in a disgusting mire of hate?”
Overall, Winter emphasized that “love is stronger than hate” — a message Bad Bunny has advocated for amid the Trump administration’s violent immigration crackdown.
“That is what Bad Bunny explicitly stated and that message is what his performance enacted,” she said. “While he sings in the beautiful, sensual language of Spanish, his meaning is universal, profound, and exuberantly joyful. Regardless of their native language, everyone can understand and embrace his music.”
As for Kelly and others in the MAGA movement who have been angry over Bad Bunny’s performance, Winter has one theory for why they have been so fixated on the Super Bowl halftime show: “If Megyn Kelly and other MAGA folks gave up their rage and fear, what would they have left?”
“I suspect that the prospect of looking into the emptiness of their own souls is too terrifying for them to contemplate,” she said.
The original version of this story was published on HuffPost at an earlier date.