Now, as the Trumpians consolidate power, the MAGA-sphere is increasingly asserting cultural control; progressives, meanwhile, find themselves in a historically familiar position: that of the underdog. This resetting to an older pattern — the Right policing the culture, the Left in dissent — can be a gift to progressives. That is, provided they pick the right battles and wage them the correct way. 

Consider the Right-wing reaction to the NFL’s announcement that Bad Bunny, a massively popular Puerto Rican rapper, will be headlining the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show. “They [NFL officials] suck, and we’ll win, and God will bless us,” declared Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem with characteristic nuance in a podcast interview. The “X” (formerly Twitter) user known as the Redheaded Libertarian told her nearly 1 million followers that “Bad Bunny is a demonic Marxist who was been [sic] granted the largest stage with the greatest audience in the middle of a Christian revival.” The MAGA influencer Benny Johnson grumbled that the “NFL is self-destructing year after year.” The hard-Right pundit Jack Posobiec mused about staging an alternative halftime show headlined by the Christian rock band Creed.

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Info anarchy comes for the Left

By Dylan Partner

Americans who came of age in the post-9/11 era will recognize a replay of l’affaire Dixie Chicks. That was when, amid a different surge of evangelical-tinged jingoism, the country band faced a ferocious backlash, fanned by George W. Bush himself, after one of their number criticized the Iraq War on a London stage. It was an unceremonious cancellation before we had a name for cancel culture, with radio stations nationwide blacklisting the chicks’ music. And it formed part of a broader pattern of early-Aughts conservative repression (remember Attorney General John Ashcroft covering up two nude statues at the Department of Justice?). Such overreach was catnip to liberal comedians like Jon Stewart and fueled the dissent-is-patriotic Left that culminated in the Obama presidency.  

The Trumpians, in their overreach, are creating similar openings for the Left: from revoking green cards for pro-Palestinian students to placing entire academic departments under federal ideological supervision in the name of combating anti-Semitism, the second Trump administration is seemingly going out of its way to alienate many of the young people, especially young men, who rallied to it in backlash to the censoriousness of the Left. But the Bad Bunny episode threatens to take the trend to a much broader public.

Bad Bunny, whose birth name is Benito Ocasio, is an ample target for MAGA pitchforks. He has raised vocal opposition against the Trump administration, and in particular its immigration policies, going so far as to exclude the United States altogether from his upcoming tour due to concerns about ICE raids. Perhaps in retribution for these comments, Noem vowed that ICE would be “all over” his Super Bowl performance, which should only be attended by “law-abiding Americans who love this country.” (Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt walked back this overeager vow in a later news conference, noting that there is “no tangible plan” for an ICE raid at the Super Bowl.)

The ethnic and racial dimensions of the fracas are unmistakable. The easy response by many liberals has been to note that the MAGA haters don’t understand that Bad Bunny is himself American, since Puerto Rico has been part of the United States since the time of the Spanish-American War. Fox News host Tomi Lahren, for example, said that “he’s not an American artist.” 

It’s tempting for liberals to smugly take note of such ignorance. But the Left’s Puerto-Rico-Is-America correctives fail to address the actual reasons why conservatives are fuming. For many, it’s the fact that Ocasio is vocally anti-Trump. For others, it’s that he performs in Spanish. And some others simply don’t see him as American at all, no matter what the geography books say. 

Nativists in the United States have long faced a tough task of drawing the line between “real” and “fake” Americans, compared to nationalists in the rest of the West. Unlike many European countries that have only seen meaningful mass migration in the past few decades, immigration has fundamentally transformed the composition of the American ethnic stock for hundreds of years. The initial overwhelmingly English population was eclipsed — one might even say “replaced” — by successive waves of migrants, first from Ireland and Germany during the 19th century, then by “Ellis Islanders”: Italians, Jews, and other Eastern Europeans who came around the turn of the 20th. This makes it difficult to ascertain what, exactly, an ethnically ideal America would look like.

This is why the phrase “Heritage Americans” has gained ground among many on the online Right in recent months. Unsatisfied with merely drawing the line at the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which abolished the decades-old ethnic quota system and allowed the migration of a vastly greater number of Asians and Africans (mass migration from Latin America was largely driven by other factors, such as the abolition of the Bracero system for importing cheap agricultural labor), they have reached back further in American history to define their in-group and out-group. Ellis Islanders aren’t real Americans, they contend — only those descended from colonial-era stock have a valid claim to American identity. 

Someone like Bad Bunny, whether or not he identifies himself as American, falls outside of this and other definitions of “American” that have been raised in objection to the liberal notion of America as a “propositional nation” based on broadly defined civic commonalities. “America is not just an idea,” said JD Vance in his speech to the 2024 Republican National Convention. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.” While Vance’s conception of American identity includes “welcoming newcomers,” more hard-line proponents of “Heritage America” make no such concessions to immigration and demographic change. Yet neither is particularly hospitable to a figure like Ocasio.

Ocasio’s strong Puerto Rican and Latino identities conflict with a certain understanding of our national “shared history and common future,” at least in the eyes of MAGA influencers, who see his presence on perhaps the most quintessentially American stage of them all, the Super Bowl field, as not just a partisan offense, but a betrayal of the national identity. 

Some influential voices on the Left believe that this showdown could end up redounding to the advantage of Democrats and their more expansive conception of American identity. “The Democrats need to empower messengers that the establishment is scared of,” Molly Jong-Fast wrote in a New York Times op-ed, arguing that the party must take inspiration from Bad Bunny’s defiance of the Trump administration. “Democrats need to listen to the roar of the crowd.” 

Yet questions of identity, ethnicity, and belonging aren’t the most productive angle of attack here for the Left. Much more promising is focusing on the micromanagement of the country’s cultural life, which few Americans can tolerate in the long term, and many find contrary to their conception of freedom. 

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By Sohrab Ahmari

In the 2010s and 2020s, many Left-of-center institutions couldn’t grasp that they weren’t the underdogs. Progressive ideology is built around the defense of those perceived to be downtrodden, oppressed, and excluded from power — so their dominance of American culture created profound cognitive dissonance among the progressive cognoscenti. How could they have power if they were advocates of the powerless? How could they be cool if they were the establishment? How could they be rebels when the CIA ran recruitment ads in which an agency spy identified herself as “a cisgender millennial, who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder.”

Deep down, many progressives continued to think of themselves as akin to the Dixie Chicks. But this self-conception wasn’t shared by many others, who saw them for what they were: hopelessly uncool and central to the “new dialect of power.” Jong-Fast and others believe the Trump administration’s harsh criticism of Bad Bunny will position his progressive politics as both popular and anti-establishment — or, to put it simply, cool. 

Maybe. But it will take more than just a Trumpian crackdown for the Left to restock its currency of cool dissent. After all, Bad Bunny is still performing at the behest of a massive capitalist organization. Any musical act hosted by the NFL can’t be all that subversive. The Trump administration, from another perspective, can present itself as fighting another establishment — just one that happens to be temporarily excluded from the White House. 

A Left that wants to capitalize on the Trumpians’ Bush-like overreach will have to embrace a much more raucous style, learn to think and speak more freely within its own ranks, drop carefully workshopped rhetoric, and leave behind the dour managerial style that came to define it over the past decade. It will have to get uncomfortable once more with corporate America and the surveillance state, as its predecessors of an earlier age were. 

Nearly a year into the second Trump administration, MAGA has fumbled the ball on culture. It remains to be seen if progressives are ready to drive it to the end zone. 

It seems that Richardson bought into the theory circulating on the Left that Robinson was a Groyper — that is, a devotee of the far-Right provocateur Nick Fuentes — who killed Kirk for the sin of insufficient reactionary radicalism. Even in the fog of speculation and conjecture that necessarily follows such a shocking event, informed observers recognized that this theory was, generously, bereft of evidence. At the same time, evidence was already accumulating that Robinson had Left-wing motivations.

The evidence became too clear to deny after the release of court documents spelling out the broad contours of Robinson’s rationale, with his mother telling police that he had become “more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented” over the last year. But Richardson, rather than admitting she had misjudged, remained defiant, writing the day after the documents were released that Robinson’s motive “remains unclear.”

It may seem unfair to pick on a single blogger who twists the truth when American politicians and professional pundits crank out countless lies and distortions daily. But if you aren’t familiar with Richardson, you might know someone who is. Her Substack newsletter, Letters from an American, is the world’s most popular, boasting more than 2.6 million followers as of September 2025. That’s the equivalent of nearly a quarter of The New York Times’s combined digital and print subscribers — for a single person. There may be few other media outlets with more influence on liberal-leaning Americans.

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Letters from an American is difficult to place on the traditional establishment-anti-establishment axis, though. On the one hand, Richardson is a professor of history at Boston College with an enviable record of academic publications that receive laudatory coverage in legacy media outlets. On the other hand, the nature of Substack means that she is only accountable to her audience, not peers, fact-checkers, or big-money supporters. She’s a credentialed expert, yes, but she’s also a free agent.

In his 2021 book The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch portrayed institutions like academia and mass media as epistemic (knowledge-generating) machines. At their best, such institutions use checks and balances to keep their participants honest and trustworthy. Yet public confidence in these systems continues to wane, with many believing their self-regulatory mechanisms have broken down.

“Liberals read, conservatives watch TV,” asserted the UnHerd columnist Richard Hanania in an influential 2021 essay that explores why, in his view, Democrats are more resistant to mendacity and petty misinformation than Republicans. Conservatives in the MAGA era derive their beliefs directly from President Trump or grassroots sources, while liberal opinion comes from “an intermediate class of activists, lawyers, journalists, professors, and bureaucrats,” avers Hanania.

This intermediate class, which in many cases is synonymous with “the experts,” is epistemically regulated by institutions, and operates with an institutional halo, even if it also propagates its own crop of partisan distortions. At their best, mediating institutions on the Left suppress the spread of misinformation among the grassroots of their own side; at their worst, they legitimize unfounded rumors and conspiracies. One of numerous examples: the notion, promoted by some 50 former intelligence officials and parroted uncritically by mainstream outlets, that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation.

For years and even decades, such incidents have led most Republicans to conclude that “expert” regulatory mechanisms are hopelessly broken. Now, some Democrats are now joining forces with them. Before Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race in 2024, many Democratic partisans claimed that The New York Times and other mainstream organs were waging a vindictive campaign against him, sabotaging the party’s chances by insufficiently lauding the strength of the economy or reporting on allegations that the 46th president was in mental decline. If in 2020 the calls for “moral clarity” in journalism (that is, explicitly biased reporting) failed to take full root, the demand for institutions to cater directly to progressive biases remains persistent among many of the most avid consumers of Left news media.

For some time, the centrifugal force of audience preference on the Left has been counteracted by inertia and the deference given to those with legacy credentials. But with the rise of Substack and Bluesky, Left-wing partisans have more tools than ever to isolate themselves in like-minded informational bubbles. This means that the same forces that have turned many Right-wing institutions into obsequious Trumpist organs over the last decade are now working their evil magic on the Left.

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Some traditional informational gatekeepers have also spread misinformation about Kirk’s assassin. Joan Donovan, a Boston University professor and “nationally recognized online disinformation researcher,” told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times that the messages Robinson carved into the bullets indicated he was a Groyper. Even more ludicrously, an article in the Left-wing Byline Times claimed that the “Slav squat” costume Robinson donned for Halloween in 2018 indicated he had been “radicalized by far-Right online movements,” an insight probably derived from a now partially-deleted Twitter thread written by a random video editor. As someone who was, like Robinson, a 15-year-old boy immersed in online culture in 2018, the “Slav squat” is  instantly recognizable as a wildly popular apolitical meme. But most have stuck — perhaps grudgingly — to the facts of the case.

In this context, it becomes easier to understand the role that Richardson’s Substack is playing. Avid consumers of political news may playfully characterize themselves as masochists, but they also fall victim to the powerful lure of reinforcing one’s own beliefs. Where The New York Times hesitates because of its reporters’ adherence to institutional standards, a dozen independent outlets will compete to capitalize on the gap in demand for affirmative party-line narratives. Richardson has seen the most success among the lot by combining her legitimate credentials and level-headed language with a post-truth appreciation for catharsis over factuality.

But it’s not just Richardson who has worked to subvert the authority of traditional informational gatekeepers on the Left in the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination. On Bluesky, where many influential progressive commentators now make their home, friendly pushback against the Groyper theory by the intellectually honest is greeted with derision. And the fallacies of online bullshitters have already “trickled up” to infotainment purveyors like Jimmy Kimmel, who asserted in a Sept. 15 monologue that “the MAGA gang” is “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”

According to a Sept. 14 poll from YouGov, 40% of Democrats believe that Tyler Robinson was a Republican. Hopefully, this number will decrease as information about the case disseminates more widely, and the American Left will avert, at least for now, the great informational crack-up that has already struck the Right. But there is no guarantee the faltering influence of fact-based institutions will hold forever. While ABC suspended Kimmel’s show in response to his remarks and pressure from the Trump administration, such coercion will only help to build his image as a martyr for the truth.

So, a cautionary word to conservatives: if you dislike the liberal mainstream media, just wait until you meet the liberal post-mainstream media.