NC senator’s Bad Bunny Super Bowl post goes viral, crosses party lines
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- NC Sen. Michael Garrett called Bad Bunny’s Spanish-only halftime show “the most American”
- His long Facebook post went viral—700,000 Facebook likes and 17,000 on Instagram
- He framed the show as pushback against anti-immigrant sentiment and language policing
In a Facebook post stretching three times the length of the Gettysburg Address, a North Carolina senator praised Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance as “the most American halftime show I have even seen,” an experience that drove him to tears and kept him writing nearly to midnight.
“I sat on my couch and I wept because THAT is the America I believe in,” wrote NC Sen. Michael Garrett, a Greensboro Democrat.
“That is the American story, not the sanitized, gated, English-only version that small and frightened people try to sell us. The REAL one. The messy, beautiful, multilingual, multicolored, courageous one. The one that has always been built by hands that speak every language and pray in every tongue and come from every corner of this hemisphere.”
By the time Monday hit, Garrett saw that his emotional tribute had gone mega-viral, enough that his phone lit up with texts of thanks from New York to Puerto Rico — including more than a few from conservative friends.
By Tuesday afternoon, the post had collected 700,000 likes on Facebook and 17,000 more on Instagram, impressive numbers even in the online whirlwind over the Puerto Rican star’s Spanish-only performance.
“I had a lady who said she’s a Republican and she’s 82 years old,” Garrett told The News & Observer Tuesday. “She watched it, and she didn’t understand it, but she read my post, and now she understands it and said thank you for what I wrote.”
Garrett, who was elected in 2018, said the negative response he found on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, inspired him to write.
Seeing comments along the lines of political commentator Megyn Kelly, who asked, “Who gives a damn that we have 40 million Spanish speakers?” and announced “Football is ours,” he decided to counter the negative response.
“Bad Bunny didn’t say ‘ICE out’ tonight,” Garrett wrote. “He didn’t need to. He just showed the whole world what America looks like when we are not afraid of each other. When culture is shared, not policed. When language is music, not a threat. When a flag from every nation in this hemisphere can walk across a football field together and the only words you need are the ones he gave us: ‘The only thing more powerful than hate is love.’”
This story was originally published February 10, 2026 at 4:11 PM.