Far-right pundit Megyn Kelly had people shaking their heads after she threw a bonkers tantrum over Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show performance, declaring that "football is ours!" and that the Puerto Rican rapper performing in Spanish was “a middle finger to the rest of America.”
The rapper, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, delivered a largely Spanish-language show that has been hailed as a "love letter to Puerto Rico" and that drew from his latest album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos, which won the Grammy for Album of the Year just a week ago.
While Kelly acknowledged that Bad Bunny is American—Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory and Puerto Ricans have been U.S. citizens since 1917 and can move freely between the island and the mainland—she nonetheless complained that the halftime show was supposed to be "a unifying event for the country."
She said the following while speaking to Piers Morgan on his show, Piers Morgan Uncensored:
"I'm sorry, Piers, but to get up there and perform the whole show in Spanish is a middle finger to the rest of America. “Who gives a damn that we have 40 million Spanish speakers in the United States? We have 310 million who don’t speak a lick of Spanish.”
"This is supposed to be a unifying event for the country, not for the Latinos, 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.”
When the British Morgan pointed out that the U.S. does not have an official language, Kelly replied:
"This attitude is why you in Great Britain have lost your culture. 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 Trump was elected. And whether it’s Bad Bunny, who is American but refuses to speak English in his performances, or anybody else, we have to keep the Super Bowl, which is a quintessential American event.”
“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, not Spanish, not Muslim, not anything other than good old-fashioned American apple pie."
"There should be a meatloaf. Maybe some fried chicken, and an English-speaking performer. That’s what the Super Bowl should be.”
You can hear what she said in the video below.
Kelly was swiftly criticized for her racist rant.
Add this to the list of Kelly's latest offensive and ill-informed takes, such as her recent claim that ongoing protests in Minneapolis are the brainchild of "organized agitators," her support for the Trump administration's killings of individuals aboard alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean, and her decision to downplay the pedophilia of the late Jeffrey Epstein.
Someone might want to cut her mic.
