Hating the Game

It's Super Bowl Sunday, and Bad Bunny is playing the halftime show, and as you may have heard white bigots in the U.S. are losing their minds over it. There's a whole separate halftime show that's been counter-programmed just for people who experience psychological distress at the idea of a fellow human being taking center stage at one of the grand U.S.ian cultural events, if that fellow speaks Spanish.

Bad Bunny is a U.S. citizen, by the way. He hails from Puerto Rico, which is a part of the United States. He's also one of the most popular and acclaimed musical acts on the planet. Wikipedia informs me that his accolades include 6 Grammy Awards (including album of the year), 17 Latin Grammy Awards, 16 Billboard Music Awards, and 54 Billboard Latin Music Awards. He was named Billboard’s Artist of the Year in 2022 and 2025 and was Spotify's most-streamed artist from 2020–2022 and 2025. Contra his name, it appears that he may be a very very good bunny indeed.

The Washington Post used to be one of our national newspapers of record, until a billionaire who buddied around with famed serial pedophile Jeffery Epstein bought it and sabotaged it. Yesterday, WaPo framed Bad Bunny's Super Bowl appearance in an interesting way—if, that is, you find racism interesting.

Here's the quote:

The Super Bowl halftime show, with Bad Bunny showcasing Latin music before a global television audience expected to top 100 million, will illustrate the nation’s immigration divide whether or not the reggaeton star delivers an explicit political message.

Again, Bad Bunny is a U.S. citizen. He is Latin, and he sings in Spanish, neither of which is mutually exclusive with being a U.S. citizen, which is what he is. It would seem that his showcase on the Super Bowl halftime stage would represent the fact that this country is now a pluralistic modern nation containing vast cultural diversity, achieved through heroic effort and despite the opposition of a bunch of confederate-sympathizing bigots who are over-represented in our government and our institutions, and yet never stop feeling aggrieved and whining for their own exclusive spaces, and thus are the most coddled little babies of all time.

White bigots act like this because they demand to be treated as the default heroes of the American story because of their whiteness and because of their bigotry. So white bigots treat the existence of anyone else in positions of prominence or success as a threat to that exclusive standing—which is what makes our nation's "immigration divide" equate to the mere presence of nonwhite people, whether they are a fellow citizen or not. The Post's framing only makes sense if, as is often the case, the demand of white bigotry is being accommodated. You can be one of the most popular figures on the cultural landscape and it won't matter; if white racists don't like you, you're controversial and polarizing. White racists, meanwhile, are never framed as divisive or polarizing, no, they're always "concerned" or "anxious," and the problem to be solved is never their racism, but always how best to assuage it.

And I mention this because I've been contemplating a cult of abuse and the culture of abuse that enables it, whereby our culture's institutions and individuals so often instinctively tell the abuser's story while ignoring their victims, which leads us to treat every instance of abuse as something that carries a moral imperative to heal the abuser, mostly by pretending that the abuses are normal and acceptable, and by pretending not to know who is doing the abusing and who is being abused.

The story that has been central to this phenomenon in recent months is the racist war of ethnic cleansing that Republican Party and their lawless paramilitary secret police are waging against the civilian population of the United States across the nation, but this winter most prominently in the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. The abuses of the Republican's fascist paramilitary has been so shocking and unavoidable as to create a powerful groundswell of public opinion against the Republicans and all of their Nazi operatives, and this, at least for a brief window, gifted the ostensible opposition party—the Democrats—significant political leverage.

And Democratic leadership used this leverage to help the Republicans out of their jam. I don't want to spend all my time detailing this. Jonathan Katz wrote an excellent summary; go read that if you don't know how it went down. In the end, what the Democrats did was make sure that government funding would carry forward unimpeded, providing the votes to carry a spending measure forward, and in exchange they asked for an unbelievably weak set of minor reforms to the operation of the lawless death squads—which they then weakened further after the fact. In so doing, what they mostly demonstrated was a cooperative bipartisan belief that lawless death squads are normal and acceptable, specifically because they are deemed normal and acceptable to the gang of coddled white bigots who want death squads out in the neighborhoods of their own country, waging war against their brown and Black neighbors, and any of the rest of us who stand in unity with them. Much like former journalistic bastion The Washington Post, Democratic leadership accommodated the demand of coddled bigots to be treated as the default heroes of the American story.

This all interests me, because I have not only been thinking about a cult of abuse accommodated by a culture of abuse, but also because I've been circling around the question of how we oppose a culture of abuse without becoming abusive ourselves, and I think that the Democratic leadership has fallen into that trap.

Today I want to begin that answer, by offer a new way of thinking about an old idea generally known as "the paradox of tolerance." I offer this to hopefully illustrate why the Democratic/centrist fetishization of bipartisanship and norms, and their capitulation and "reaching across the aisle" has been so enervating and disastrous, and to give a way of thinking about what we must now do instead.

Quick interruption time. The Reframe is me, A.R. Moxon, an independent writer. Some readers voluntarily support my work with a paid subscription. They pay what they want—as little as $1/month, which is more than the nothing they have to pay. It really helps.

If you'd like to be a patron of my work, there's a Founding Member level that comes with a free signed copy of one of my books and thanks by name in the acknowledgement section of my upcoming book.

To simplify, there are two broad competing ideas for how to organize and distribute the values of human society. "Organizing and distributing the values and costs of human society" is a good way to describe "politics" as any, so these are the two competing political ideas.

The two broad competing ideas of human politics are the cooperation game and the murder game.

The cooperation game: can you cooperate with enough people to gain the approval of the people and the right to govern them, and can your cooperation benefit the people enough to prove your ongoing right to wield the engine of governance? The cooperation game's strength is that it actually does result in human thriving and innovation and safety and security for increasing numbers of people. It's weakness is ... well. I'll get to it soon enough.

The murder game: can you harness the engine of murder long enough to seize the engine of governance, and use it to dominate the people and rob the value they create for yourself? This is also expressed as "might makes right," which is the explicit foreign and domestic policy of the Republican Party. The murder game's weakness is that it is based on vile unsustainable lies, and will eventually eat itself with its own cruelty and ignorance and murderous wrath. Its strength is that it can murder people playing the cooperation game, as long as those playing the cooperation game go on cooperating with them.

If all parties involved in a political system are playing the cooperation game, then the cooperation game will work very well, to the extent that everyone wishes to use the engine of governance to benefit the people who are governed—that is to say, to the extent everyone is playing the cooperation game.

If any one of the parties involved starts playing the murder game, the cooperation game breaks, and a different game begins. Republicans are currently playing the murder game, and have been doing so for many decades—less obviously at first, perhaps, but now very openly, very obviously, very blatantly. At this point, it's just armed death squads summarily executing U.S. civilians.

At the point that a party begins to play the murder game, it is absolutely imperative to stop trying to play the cooperation game with them. It's not just a bad idea to play the cooperation game with people playing the murder game—it's an impossibility. When you act in good faith with those who have proved themselves capable of limitless bad faith, then you are no longer playing the cooperation game: you are merely cooperating with the murder game, and are, therefore, a participant not in the cooperation game, but the murder game.

What that means is that—even if I am (at least in principle) opposing the cult of abuse, and extracting whatever marginal gains by doing so—I am, by cooperating, validating the murder game as normal and acceptable to play. I am offering all the many benefits of the cooperation game to people who have abandoned cooperation, and will use all those advantages I give them for murder. This is the weakness of the cooperation game; it cannot be played without discernment, or it will itself be abused. (See, I told you I'd get to it.)

How do we oppose a culture of abuse without becoming abusive ourself? Here's one answer at least: Stop playing the cooperation game with people who are playing the murder game. Stop giving the benefits of good faith to people who are acting in bad faith. Stop giving the benefits of cooperation to those who have dedicated themselves to murder.

The question arises: what game are we to play instead? Shall we also play the murder game? It's true enough that if somebody plays the murder game on a population unchecked for long enough, that eventuality becomes an inevitability. Eventually a hand that has tried everything else will reach for the shovel, and while I think there are circumstances under which murderous violence should appropriately and necessarily be met with violence in self-defense, it seems clear to me that violence has a gravity and momentum that is hard to control, and, once violence enters the picture, its application can quickly fall to abusive channels.

What that suggests to me is that, if Democrats (or anyone else for that matter) wants to avoid seeing abuse met with abuse, they must stop cooperating with the Republican's murder game. If they keep playing the cooperation game, papering over Republican abuses, keeping alive the illusion of a functional government, they make the outcome of an abusive response to abuse not only increasingly likely, and eventually inevitable. Positioned in opposition, they have become abusive themselves.

What game are we to play instead? What about the non-cooperation game? What about refusal to cooperate on any level in any way? The citizen population of the United States, led most prominently today by the people of Minnesota, are showing how that is done. What does the non-cooperation game look like, practically speaking?

It can be strategic; refusing to grant even one vote toward the funding of a murderous government, until the death squads have been utterly abolished, and the vile white supremacist serial child rapist of a president who controls them has resigned, along with all of his cabinet, and submitted to prosecution. It can be legislative; refusing to allow voice votes, in order to grind down the apparatus of government. It can be social; refusing to fraternize with Republican colleagues, or refusing to serve members of Republican governments or their death squad in restaurants and businesses. It can be tactical: following the death squads and impeding their work; playing loud music to keep them awake; making them and their abuses known and shaming and shunning and excluding them for daring to murder their neighbors. It can be losing paperwork. It can be deliberately misunderstanding instructions. It can be purposefully dawdling. It can be tripping somebody up, getting them lost and turned around, obstructing the gears of brutality, sabotaging the engines of murder.

It's not murder, and it's not retributive; it's removing all the benefits of human cooperation from all humans who play the murder game—not because we hate the humans (though it's difficult not to hate people who would murder their neighbors, and I don't shame those who can't manage it), but because we hate their vile murderous game.

It's refusal to cooperate in any way with people who play the murder game—and it can go up to and including an unwillingness to accommodate their belief that they are the heroes of our country's story rather than the villains, or that the murderous game they play in order to defend that belief is normal and acceptable.

It can even be something as simple as looking at the Super Bowl halftime show, and the fact that the headliner is making white racists angry, and responding to that fact as if it is a part of the solution not part of the problem. The fact that MAGA is outraged about Bad Bunny in the halftime show should be presented as an uncomplicated positive, evidence that we are playing the cooperation game with one another but not with those who would murder us.

Our response should not be "This response to Bad Bunny's inclusion shows how divided we are, how can we stop this polarization?" Our response should be uncooperative: "The response to Bad Bunny's inclusion shows just how racist our society is. Racists are angry about the halftime show? Good! Everything about our society should make racists feel alienated. How do we make racists feel even more alienated from even more of society??

The problem before us should not be: "How can we find common ground with racists?" We should ask more uncooperative questions: "How do we find common ground with everyone else to better exclude them, as long as they insist on making race an exclusionary principle?"

We cooperate with anyone willing to play the cooperation game.

We never cooperate in any way with those who play murder game.

Doing so would be exactly what we'd most seek to avoid: opposing abuse but becoming abusive ourselves.

The Reframe is totally free, supported voluntarily by its readership.

If you liked what you read, and only if you can afford to, please consider becoming a paid sponsor for as little as $1/month. If you'd like to be a patron of my work, there's a Founding Member level that comes with a free signed copy of one of my books and thanks by name in the acknowledgement section of any books I publish.

Looking for a tip jar but don't want to subscribe?

Venmo is here and Paypal is here.

A.R. Moxon is the author of the novel The Revisionaries and the essay collection Very Fine People, which are available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places. You can get his books right here for example. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. When he's underwater, does he get wet, or does the water get him instead?