Opinion: The Super Bowl Halftime Show Was Tailor-Made to Trigger MAGA

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Kendrick Lamar riled up the MAGA base with his Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday—and that might have been the point.

The rapper’s performance featured Samuel L. Jackson, who opened the show dressed up as Uncle Sam. At one point, Jackson tells Lamar: “Too loud, too reckless, too ghetto. Mr. Lamar, do you really know how to play the game?”

For The New Abnormal co-hosts Danielle Moodie and Andy Levy, the line appeared to be a dig at Louisiana lawmakers who wrote a letter to the NFL last month urging the league to keep the halftime show “as family-friendly as possible.”

“What he did was use the calls to not be too lewd, to not be too whatever, and he used that to be more artful about his, I guess, resistance,” Levy said. “Whoever’s idea it was to use Samuel L. Jackson, dressed up as Uncle Sam, to be sort of echoing, whether you want to call it white America or mainstream America—absolute genius.”

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The decision to make an American flag out of Black dancers dressed in red, white, and blue outfits was also “subversive,” Levy said.

“You look at that and you’re like, ‘Hey, I’m using the symbols of patriotism. I’m just using them not the way you want me to necessarily, but you can’t get mad at me,’” he said. “I just thought it was a really genius way of working around constrictions to absolutely make the point that you want to make.”

Plus! Dannagal Young, author of Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation joined the show this week to talk about what common sense means and why President Donald Trump is using it as a catchphrase.

Then, Dr. Emily Nagoski, author of Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections, discussed what Project 2025, a right-wing policy roadmap, means for sex educators.

Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.