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. 

This isn’t the first time the Harlem-born rapper and the Queens-raised President have crossed paths. When Mayers was detained in Sweden in 2019, facing assault charges after a street brawl in Stockholm, help came from an unexpected quarter. At the urging of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, Trump, then in the midst of his first term, dispatched his hostage affairs envoy to attend the trial and publicly pressured the Swedish government for the musician’s release. This curious episode exemplifies the complex, often contradictory relationship between the President and African-American pop culture, particularly the strange world of the “rap game”.

Never was this clearer than earlier this month, when Donald Trump became the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl. The headline act for the coveted half-time show was West Coast rapper and Pulitzer Prize-winning wordsmith Kendrick Lamar. Playing to a US TV audience of 127 million, Lamar mixed jabs at rap rival Drake with political commentary in the form of a mocking cameo by Samuel L. Jackson dressed as Uncle Sam. The point of this, as The New York Times put it, was to “indict America and white hegemonic power”, and some have praised Lamar for the “hidden messages” aimed at America’s new Right-wing regime.

Before Lamar had paid his ironic homage, however, rap stars Snoop Dogg, Rick Ross, Soulja Boy and Nelly were derided by black Americans as “sellouts” for performing at a pre-inauguration event. In 2017, Snoop had called out his fellow black artists on social media, accusing anyone planning to perform at Trump’s first inauguration as an “Uncle Tom”. “I’m gonna roast the fuck outta you,” he warned eight years ago — yet here he was in 2025, happily performing for the President.

In recent decades, the rap game has become a global entertainment industry powerhouse that goes to the heart of the American Dream, with ex-crack dealer Jay-Z now worth an estimated $2.5 billion. There is therefore a peculiar irony in how Trump — arguably America’s most polarizing political figure — was once hip-hop’s favorite billionaire, then fell out of love with black America, but is now bouncing back as the rap game’s King of Bling. This transformation, spanning the glittering excess of the Eighties to the present-day culture wars, offers a fascinating lens through which to examine America’s complex relationship with wealth, race and power.

The Obama years saw the Democrats solidify hip-hop’s meta-narrative of black empowerment as a political campaign weapon. From his bromance with Jay Z to hosting Nas at the White House, Obama’s hip-hopification of his party paved the way for rappers such as Megan Thee Stallion, Cardi B and Eminem to appear or perform at Kamala Harris’s rallies. But while liberal America, and much of the hip-hop community, has assailed Trump ever since he turned his back on the Democrat establishment in the early 2000s, their opprobrium counted for little at the polls. After all, the Trump rap brand has been decades in the making.

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Hip-hop: the last bastion of American freedom

By David Samuels

Long before he descended that golden escalator in 2015 to launch his presidential bid, Trump’s name rang out in countless rap lyrics — not as a political hate figure, but as a shorthand for wealth, ambition and ersatz status symbolism. The ultimate embodiment of capitalist success, in other words. Having become a prominent figure in Eighties New York City real estate and business circles, he was a natural reference point for NYC rappers such as the Beastie Boys, who namedrop him on “Johnny Ryall” from their 1989 album Paul’s Boutique.

Trump took off as a rap phenomenon in the Nineties, when he was mentioned in lyrics by the likes of Raekwon and Ice Cube, yet it was the 2000s which really cemented his status as a central hip-hop reference point. Lil Wayne vowed to “get money like Donald Trump”; Diddy rhapsodized about “that Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Bloomberg money”; Yung Joc boasted that “boys from the hood call me Black Donald Trump”. You get the picture.

These name-checks inevitably carry an element of braggadocio, but Trump takes such eulogizing seriously. Indeed, his reputation among rappers has been a key part of his development as a near-mythic figure, above the mundanities of regular politicians. For instance, Mac Miller’s 2011 song “Donald Trump” makes the businessman a central metaphor with lines such as “Take over the world when I’m on my Donald Trump shit / Look at all this money, ain’t that some shit?”

Trump has frequently returned the favor. Aside from lending A$AP Rocky his support, in 2021 the President pardoned Lil Wayne, who was facing up to 10 years in prison; commuted Kodak Black’s sentence for making a false statement to buy a firearm; and pardoned the co-founder of legendary rap label Death Row Records, Michael “Harry-O” Harris, who served 32 years for attempted murder and drug trafficking.

On the face of it, though, these dynamics weren’t merely transactional. They represented a shift in American racial relations, through which successful black figures could access white power structures while simultaneously maintaining their cultural authenticity. Trump seemed to understand this intuitively, playing the role of the white businessman who was “comfortable” with black success in a way that many of his peers weren’t, and even making cameos in rap music videos as far back as 1989.

Trump’s own legal troubles have found an unexpected resonance with America’s black community, particularly within hip-hop culture. His numerous indictments and ongoing battles with the justice system share parallels with the experiences of numerous rap artists who have faced prosecution — from Meek Mill’s probation struggles to Young Thug’s RICO case. This shared experience of what Trump calls “prosecutorial persecution” has created an unusual form of cultural empathy among a growing number of black Americans who see him as an ally.

Trump’s rhetoric about a “rigged system” and claims of selective prosecution echo longstanding critiques from within hip-hop about the bias of the justice system. When he describes investigations as “witch hunts” and prosecutors as politically motivated, he’s employing language that resonates with communities long familiar with discriminatory law enforcement practices. But, crucially, Trump leverages this victimhood by also presenting himself as a strongman. As Ice Cube, an ex-gangsta rapper, said of Trump almost a decade ago: “Rich, powerful, do what you wanna do, say what you wanna say, be how you wanna be — that’s kind of been like the American dream.”

This parallel extends to specific cases. Trump’s criticism of Georgia prosecutors in his RICO case echoes complaints from Young Thug’s defenders. His attacks on the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid employ rhetoric similar to that used by hip-hop artists to critique law enforcement overreach. Even his social media posts about “prosecutorial misconduct” mirror the language used by rappers from Tupac to Jay-Z about systemic bias in the criminal justice system.

Trump’s political strategy has shown awareness of this unexpected alignment. His campaign’s outreach to black voters emphasized themes of systemic persecution and fighting back against establishment forces — mainstays in hip-hop culture. His social media posts often adopt the defiant stance of a man battling an unjust system, a pose familiar to anyone versed in hip-hop’s narrative traditions. And his frequent references to being a “political prisoner” and facing a “two-tiered justice system” resonate with communities which have long made similar arguments.

However, this alignment remains deeply complicated. Critics argue that comparing Trump’s legal troubles — stemming from allegations of election interference, classified document mishandling, and business fraud — to the systemic racism faced by black Americans in the criminal justice system is false equivalence at best and cynical manipulation at worst. Yet the cultural resonance persists, creating an uncomfortable convergence of narratives between unlikely bedfellows.

Of course, mainstream black America is still less than enamored with Trump. For every Ice Cube, there are 100 Kendricks willing to stick the boot in. But the political implications of Trump’s cultural alignment with a subculture that has massive domestic and global reach are profound. His ability to position himself as a fellow traveler in the fight against systemic persecution — despite his vastly different circumstances — demonstrates the power of the rap game’s narrative in American political life. His ongoing legal troubles, rather than undermining his appeal for certain segments of the black community, reinforce it by creating an unexpected cultural solidarity. As Kanye West, Trump’s biggest hip-hop ally, vividly puts it in “So Appalled”: “Balding Donald Trump taking dollars from y’all.” What could be more gangsta than that?

The commercial attempted to tone down the porny aspects by also showing a woman on a park bench breastfeeding, or a woman lifting weights, but those moments were overwhelmed by the titillating nipple-probing, the barrage of boobs stuffed into tight, low-cut tops. Overall, the effect was striking: love porn or hate it, the total pornification of culture is complete.

This is only partially a story about the adult-entertainment industry, which is huge and growing, with an estimated $71 billion in revenue expected in 2025. Nor is it a story about porn serving as the true means for sex education, though the average boy or girl encounters pornography at age 13, according to the UK Children’s Commissioner. What does seem to be new is a cultural takeover that goes beyond adult entertainment.

We no longer lustfully and happily tit-stare, as has been the human way since time immemorial. Nor do we fantasize about breasts as something we might like to catch a glimpse of. Instead, they’re all dolled up and shoved in our faces, aesthetically sexualized but contextually neutered, no more or less an object of desire than a can of Bud Light. Keep your pharmaceutical company off our porn, please. There’s sexy, and then there’s breast cancer, and the two are not the same.

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How the world fell for ‘romantasy’

By Valerie Stivers

There are signs of this everywhere, in high culture and low, perhaps starting with the fact that the one of our most popular social-media platforms is now called X for no apparent reason. Beauty trends for young women on an even bigger platform, TikTok, are a driving force. Heavy makeup, exaggerated lips, breasts and butts, and long plastic nails that used to read “stripper” or “porn star” are now for everyone. The latex or leather dress paired with over-the-knee platforms and (of course) jet-black acrylic claws, the regalia of the high-end dominatrix, is now part of the Upper East Side mom’s humdrum repertoire, divested of erotic meaning.

“Clean girl”, one of the dominant makeup trends, might appear at first glance as a countervailing tendency. It’s “clean” in the sense that its adherents wear light eye makeup and a natural lip and cheek palate and dress classy or preppy. But the look relies on thick layers of “natural looking” foundation and is mixed up with porn tropes like huge puffy lips and perfect fake nails. Clean-girl influencer Frida Aasen Chiabra has 1.1 million followers on Instagram and got her start as Victoria’s Secret model. Her feed shows her spraying perfume on herself, frolicking on tropical islands, and routinely going about her “real life” in lingerie or offering a butt-shot. Porn users have taken notice. The No. 1 trending porn search term for 2024, according to statistics released by Pornhub was “demure”, up 133% year-on-year, along with “modesty” (up 77%) and “traditional clothes” (34%).

It’s perhaps no surprise that two actresses from the television show Euphoria, which depicted teens in hard-core sex situations as a matter of course, are also social-media influencers of this type, known for their assets. With Sidney Sweeney (23.5 million Instagram followers), it’s breasts; with Chloe Cherry, who had a role on the show’s second season, it’s lips. Sweeney, fresh-scrubbed and collegiate-looking in a turtleneck sweater, made a cameo on the Super Bowl’s When Harry Met Sally reunion ad for Hellman’s Mayonnaise — and delivered the famous line “I’ll have what she’s having.”

Chloe Cherry (1.1 million followers), whose lips are silicone-injected to alarming proportions, was a porn actress before her role on the show, and made a pornographic parody of the show with Jenna Foxx in 2023. The two actresses have notably different public profiles — to have surgery and implants versus “natural” attributes — telegraphs variations in social class to some extent. But both are defined by a body part — in the way porn-searches reduce our desires to a single anatomical feature or piece of apparel: “fake lips”, “big tits”, “high heels”.

The porn is unstoppable. Tradwife influencer? You wear a corset over your frills and also have enormous breasts. Trendy? You’re wearing cheetah-print and have “aura” pattern on your dagger acrylics. Sally Rooney heroine? You make your money on OnlyFans. French bad-boy writer anguished about your country’s relationship with its Muslim inhabitants? You made a porn tape. Married to Kanye West? You drop your coat on the Grammys red carpet, naked except for a transparent slip. Ye himself? You share videos of your favorite porn stars during the Super Bowl (and deactivate from X afterwards, after a flurry of anti-Semitic posting).

Female reader of mass-market fiction? You’re reading Romantasy, a genre that slips into graphic descriptions of penetrations and orgasms every few chapters. American teen? You routinely refer to glazing, which now means paying too much attention to someone, but whose etymology is the porn term for having someone ejaculate on your face.

The young-man version of TikTok is probably rap music, where a similar dynamic unfolds: everything is sexualized, and none of it means a thing. The graphic description of sex acts in rap has been happening since at least the 1990s. The direct pipeline to young children, however, is a Zoomer phenomenon, and the normalization may be newer yet. My 13-year-old son, three seconds after the Netspend lyric “shut up, bitch, I need some spit” comes out of his phone, assures me that “all rappers respect women” and that they wouldn’t consider doing otherwise, because it would damage their careers.

To take Kendrick Lamar and Drake — he’s right. Both say they respect women, and have made extensive public comments on it. Another example that’s currently popular and apropos is the rapper J. Cole’s song “Wet Dreamz”. The song has more than 1 billion streams on Spotify and describes the rapper’s desire to lose his virginity: “hadn’t been in pussy since the day I came out.” When the song’s narrator and the girl he likes get into bed, Cole says, “And most of all I’m praying, ‘God, don’t let me bust quick’ / I’m watching pornos, tryna see just how to stroke right / Practice putting condoms on, how it go, right?” The song endorses porn as sex ed, comes from a person who “respects women,” and bows to convention and popular morality with contraception. All good!

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By Mary Gaitskill

The logical endgame of the sexual revolution has been to turn sex into a recreational activity whose only meaning is defined by the people experiencing it, and whose only moral issues center around consent. By these standards, there is scarcely any reason for consenting adults not to make porn, if that’s their choice, and it’s equally OK for other consenting adults not to enjoy their solitary pleasures while watching it. Equally, it makes sense to export porn’s tropes into the mainstream and enjoy them, if that’s what we’re doing. Most of us have certain squicky feelings when it comes to kids viewing porn, but large-scale cultural pushback against these images entering our homes is only just beginning. The age requirements for porn access currently being enacted by 19 states will be an interesting test case.

There are cracks in the façade: a loneliness epidemic, statistics that this generation of oversexualized teens is having less sex, an increasing prevalence of porn-addiction and erectile dysfunction in younger and younger men. Also, the acts seem to grow more extreme and less desirable the more we get used to them.

The great and much maligned anti-pornography activist Andrea Dworkin has been having a bit of a renaissance lately. She has received some semi-positive tributes in the press, including on the right, and Picador is reissuing three of her books on this month, including Pornography: Men Possessing Women. Dworkin was a brilliant extremist and a wonderful writer, and though most of her conclusions are utterly wrong, she’s fun to read. Some lines from her fiery, man-hating pen will go down in eternity. And oddly, despite how wrong she was on almost everything, it has turned out the way she thought it would with porn and mass culture—they’ve become one.

To this day, only the 1969 Moon landing has drawn more American eyeballs than the Super Bowl, with the 57th set to be played between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday night. Now, though, the old college teams want to attract the eyeballs too, together with the billions in advertising revenue they inevitably bring. In practice, that means marketers, and trainers, and wages, and the end of an amateur tradition that’s survived, in one form or another, since the end of the Civil War.

This matters, and not merely in the way it transforms college football into a disfigured, commercialized echo of the NFL. For in the professionalization of university sport, there’s a broader story too. I mean how, in modern America, money burrows into every facet of life, a process that squashes the variety from our continent-wide culture — even as it hints at the hard limits of our big-is-best mentality.

Americans love competition. Every year, 100 million of us attend a professional baseball, football, hockey or basketball game. Yet in this sports-crazed republic, amateur college football is distinct — not least in the passion of its fans. In 2024, the 10 highest-rated games had a collective TV viewership of 122 million, while 31 teams averaged a remarkable 100% in-person attendance rate. Yet even these numbers don’t really do the sport justice. Visit somewhere like the University of Alabama and you’ll soon see what I mean. Starting at breakfast, 100,000 fans get stuffed and buzzed at “tailgate” parties outside the ground. Expect an orgy of beer, hickory-fired ribs and Krispy Kreme donuts. Once you’re good and full, dash into the “Walk of Champions”, where fans greet the team as they enter Bryant-Denny Stadium. You’ve already had a packed day, and it is not even kickoff.

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How, then, to explain this mania, one that fires spasms of emotion from Alaska to Maine? For Kurt Kemper, the answer begins less with the teams — and more with the universities that host them. “College, to Americans, is synonymous with the middle class,” argues Kemper, a professor of American history at Dakota State University. “College football is an idealized part of the college experience.” That’s partly a function of history. Rutgers played Princeton in the first-ever college football game way back in 1869. Today, though, college football is mostly a working-class game, one particularly popular among African-Americans. It doubtless helps, Kemper adds, that university, and university football, have long been admired as engines of social mobility. Compared to their classmates, football stars disproportionately hail from disadvantaged backgrounds, and graduate at higher rates than average.

In the end, though, college football is about more than a path to a picket fence. As Randy Roberts, a Purdue University historian explains, the institution ultimately speaks to America’s bewildering range of regional identities. Who you root for doesn’t just denote your alma mater: but rather your local sensibility and class. Forget those Alabama ribs — at Presbyterian College, in South Carolina, the team mascot is a Scottish highlander, blasting the bagpipes as he leads the team on. In America’s heartland, meanwhile, teams are famed for embracing the Midwest’s agricultural heritage. In Wisconsin, for instance, fans wear cheese hats on their heads, appropriate enough in the Dairy State. In Nebraska, for its part, supporters swap camembert for corn. Little wonder their team is nicknamed the Cornhuskers.

I don’t wish to insult readers in Madison or Lincoln — but this regional spirit is undoubtedly clearest at Appalachian State University. Nestled amid the hills and hollers of Boone, a hardscrabble town in North Carolina’s High Country, App State boasts the highest average attendance percentage in college football: a spectacular 115.78%. To zoom past capacity, students cram onto the “Grassy Hill” overlooking the field. They’re joined by 25,000 alums, who drive hours down treacherous two-lane highways to return “home” for six Saturdays every fall. Between the third and fourth quarter, millionaires, college kids, and working-class locals all celebrate their rough-hewn identity through a 35,000-person sing-along of an iconic rock-country anthem.

For Adam Cole, none of this is surprising. “Maybe you love your hometown, maybe you hate it,” says the beat reporter covering college football in the southeast. “But it sticks with you.” It’s a love that can easily veer into hatred. A case in point is when the University of Michigan plays their next door neighbor and Big Ten nemesis Ohio State University, in a matchup ominously known as “The Game”. In one recent meeting, the players started a melee, a battle complete with pepper spray. He’s never got quite that angry, but Cole understands the red mist himself. A native of Topeka, Kansas, he once overheard a passenger at an airport insult a local university. As he puts it: “It took everything in me not to say, ‘Hey fucker, don’t talk about my town!’”

Now, though, this lively amateurism is threatened — by the mighty greenback. Already, the top 10 grossing college football programs collectively earn $571 million a year, largely through free media exposure when big games are shown on TV. It’s a bonanza that smaller teams can sometimes grasp at too. In 2007, for instance, Appalachian State shocked the college football world by defeating the University of Michigan. Practically overnight, enrollment jumped by 6,000. No wonder Joey Jones, the Appalachian State football team’s director of strategic communications, calls college football the “front porch” of his university.

With figures like these floating about, it’s equally unsurprising that cash now stalks other corners of college football too. For decades, student-athletes were mostly unpaid. All they could expect was paid tuition and a tiny dorm room, alongside drab cafeteria meals. But, in 2015, federal courts finally cut students in on the action. These days, college athletes secure compensation via “Name, Image, and Likeness” (NIL) deals. By appearing in commercials, or signing a jersey, a top-flight college quarterback can earn $1 million a year; elite teams altogether cost upwards of $10 million. All the while, universities increasingly employ “general managers” to raise money from wealthy donors and ink deals with the private sector.

There’s plenty more where that came from. Since the launch of an NFL-style playoff competition, in 2014, a system that’s since expanded to 12 teams, the biggest universities together gorge on media deals together worth $7.8 billion. And with a gaggle of lesser schools keen to get in on the action, the top sides have fought to control their monopoly by forming into 11 mega-conferences. Strikingly, these groupings no longer correspond by region: the Big Ten has transcended its Midwestern roots to encompass 20 schools, spanning from Jersey to Cali, securing it a media footprint in five of the nation’s seven biggest markets.

With so many potential viewers, the Big Ten TV network fills the coffers of its members with $100 million a year. Yet if that makes general managers rich, and ensures students are fairly remunerated, it’s also having a real impact on how college football actually feels from the stands. One good example — you might almost call it NFL-lite — came last month. One chilly Monday evening, the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame played the Ohio State Buckeyes in what’s increasingly known as the “Super Bowl” of college football. Each team bagged a cool $20 million from the game, but beyond the dollars and cents, the professionalization practically oozed from the touchline. Players and coaches are hired guns who move from team to team in search of greater pay. Will Howard, Ohio’s winning quarterback, had just transferred from Kansas State the previous January. Days after Ohio State’s victory, the team’s defensive coordinator jumped ship to Pennsylvania State, lured by an annual paycheck worth $3.2 million.

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It goes without saying, meanwhile, that those mega-conferences are bringing their own changes. “Conferences are losing college football’s parochialism,” says Roberts, adding that the passion animating games like the Ole Miss-Mississippi State “Egg Bowl” is ultimately down to the narcissism of small differences. Kemper agrees. Until the inception of the college football playoff, he suggests that crowning a national champion wasn’t really the sport’s primary aim. Rather, beating a rival defined a “winning” season. Nowadays, though, with teams duking it out for a national trophy, college football risks becoming a clinical, antiseptic game, one devoid of the parochial hatreds learned at your grandfather’s knee.

Of course, this heady blend of nationalization and money isn’t limited to college football. Post-1945 America has been standardized by transport and telecoms, which together flatten regional accents, dump regional foods, and altogether homogenize the American experience. As late as the Carter presidency, you could visit Nebraska to watch the Cornhuskers, munching a runza from a dairy bar as you went. No longer, even as Kemper argues that the arrival of a winner-takes-all college Super Bowl speaks to a broader economic model that lavishes rewards upon a select few. “In the old system,” he says, “10-15 teams finished a season feeling like a winner. In the new system there is one winner.”

To be fair, greed has yet to fully crush the college game. “Tough people who work with their hands and football is their way out,” is how Roberts characterizes it. “Football is a tough game. You see where the players are from.” At Appalachian State, certainly, that toughness is epitomized by quarterback Chase Brice. Failing to achieve on-field success at two bigger schools, the burly blonde transferred here in 2021. Self-effacing and eager for success, Jones says that the mountain people here “saw something of themselves” in the 27-year-old Georgian.

That’s just as well — for college football can still be special. On 7 September, 2022, Appalachian State hosted ESPN’s College GameDay show. Broadcast live from the university’s campus, it brought the university $500 million dollars in free advertising. Not that the fans cared much about that, as tiny Boone became the center of the football universe. A back-and-forth game against a conference rival came down to one final play. Behind two points, with two seconds remaining, Brice heaved a 53-yard “Hail Mary” touchdown for a remarkable victory. The crowd exploded. Yet amid the mayhem, Brice, the star quarterback on the national stage, ran straight past reporters. Instead, he rushed to the student section of the stands, where he helped classmates climb down onto the field. A wonderfully intimate moment, amid a sport that grows and grows.