When Shared Culture Breaks
525: Halftime Shows, Culture, and A Massive Global Shift
Morning.
On the heels of what I would describe as a pretty anticlimactic Super Bowl LX game, the internet is exploding with debate about the halftime show.
Some of the critique is merited, some maybe not but one thing is for certain: people are riled up.
But the debate highlights how polarizing our world is becoming.
It’s about how cultural institutions signal power, values, and legitimacy and how those signals have changed dramatically over the last decade.
The halftime show just made the shift impossible to ignore and it highlighted the two distinct “realities” people identify with in the modern age.
I’ve said it dozens and dozens of times but more recently I described these two in realities below, in our most read post of Fall 2025.
A tectonic shift is underway globally.
Across Europe, political gravity continues moving rightward and not in fringe ways, but through mainstream elections and governing coalitions.
Countries that once treated national identity, borders, and cultural cohesion as uncomfortable/extremist topics are now openly revisiting them under immense voter pressure. Immigration caps, stricter citizenship standards, and law and order politics are no longer taboo they are THE winning platforms.
Japan delivered one of the most shocking signals of all.
In a country defined for decades by post war restraint and cucking, voters handed a decisive mandate to leadership promising military expansion, constitutional revision, zero tolerance immigration policy, and a re centering of traditional norms. That kind of shift does not happen unless the public feels something fundamental is at risk.
Based Japan!
The United States is experiencing its own version of this fracture, though in a more chaotic form. The country is no longer arguing over policy, it is arguing over national identity, legitimacy, and who the nation is actually for.
Immigration dominates the social debate right now.
Some, like the protestors across the country and in Minneapolis are ardently against the existing administration’s efforts to deport illegal aliens and migrants, while others are not happy with the progress made so far. As of right now it is projected that Trump will deport 300,000 to 400,000 by year end.
Two opposing forces are actively going at it.
Cultural institutions that once reinforced shared (key word) norms now openly reflect one side of that divide, while the other retreats into parallel spaces of its own making.
The result is not unity, but two Americas operating with entirely different assumptions about reality!
The United Kingdom sits somewhere in between, politically unstable, and entirely Orwellian, increasingly blunt about the costs of mass immigration, social fragmentation, and declining institutional trust as the rape gang saga escalates (though there’s almost ZERO coverage from British media).
Protests, policing controversies, speech restrictions, and demographic anxiety are no longer edge cases. They are becoming routine features of British life.
A British child this week was being called a racist (and put on a bad behavior list) by his own school for refusing to take part in a Ramadan assembly.
These are not isolated developments. They are connected.
When cultural symbols stop unifying people, politics get more extreme. When politics gets more extreme, you get borders and national identity re entering the conversation. When those conversations are suppressed for too long, they return with force that unsettles most normies who prefer to avoid them entirely.
The Super Bowl halftime show wasn’t the cause of any of this obviously. It was a signal, one of many, that the center is virtually non existent now. It is an environment in which you pick a side or it gets picked for you.
You might say “well who cares?”
YOU should care lol.
This stuff cares about you.
It is going to have (and is already having) enormous impacts on the future of the US and the world. These will be the defining political issues of the next 20 years, it’s not even close.
Cultural shifts do not remain just about culture, they spawn all kinds of implications that impact all of our lives.
They will eventually harden into law, rewire institutions, change your neighborhood, and eventually show up in capital flows, labor markets, and national competitiveness/longevity.
If you care about where the U.S. or any Western country is heading economically, politically, and socially this conversation isn’t optional.
How Halftime Shows Highlighted the Growing Cultural Divide
I knew absolutely nothing about Bad Bunny before the Super Bowl (that I watched parts of throughout the night).
Took 30 minutes to get the run down. Bad Bunny whose name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio has a global identity, absurd listening numbers, and a recent voice rooted in:
Post-colonial critique (especially Puerto Rico’s and Hawaii’s status)
Immigrant/migrant rights
Cultural affirmation
Anti ICE Anti Trump Administration positions
His show is drawing immense critique online this week from those on the right.
For starters it was entirely in Spanish. Even one of uncles (who was born in LATAM) mentioned he had a hard time understanding any of what was being said lol.