A quick preface: it has been exactly one year since I first launched String in a Maze. It started as an outlet for my thoughts during an unhinged second Trump administration, and grew into a newsletter with many thousands of subscribers. I appreciate all of you. Thanks for reading.

We’re a few days removed from Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance and the accompanying right-wing meltdown, and I’ve had some time to reflect.

When Trump won in 2024, many onlookers took it as the sign of a significant cultural shift. The public had rejected wokeness and was “exhaust[ed] with Democrats’ cultural overreach.” “Trump’s cultural victory has lapped his political victory,” said Ezra Klein. Conservatives were triumphant.

A year later, Megyn Kelly was fuming about a Spanish-speaking artist being allowed to perform at the Super Bowl, screaming that “football is ours,” by which she means white people, but more specifically English-speaking white people, and even more specifically English-speaking white people who support Donald Trump. Turning Point USA attempted to counterprogram the show with performances by Kid Rock and an assortment of other nobodies. They touted it as a great success, though it fell about 125 million viewers short of the real thing.

There’s a vestigial belief among conservatives that they are still a silent majority - that liberal cultural domination is not a natural phenomenon but one manufactured by a handful of plotting elites. To them, Hollywood isn’t liberal because people who dedicate their lives to the arts tend to be liberal, or because audiences are mostly liberal, but because it is a captured institution. Bad Bunny isn’t playing the Super Bowl because the NFL is trying to appeal to new fans, but because shady forces are trying to steal football away from its rightful cultural heirs.