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“American culture is being replaced by Hispanic culture.” This claim appears at the core of arguments against the Super Bowl Halftime Show and arguments for mass deportation.
“Football is ours,” Megyn Kelly complained [ [link removed] ] on Piers Morgan Uncensored, while specifically citing Hispanics and Muslims as not part of American culture.
Similarly, Brianna Lyman wrote [ [link removed] ] for The Federalist that the Super Bowl is “a shared experience — rooted in common language and culture and tradition. Which is why the Super Bowl half time show this year was a clear display of pure contempt for America.” The audience, she added, was “required to bear witness to the replacement of their own culture.”
As someone who has lived most of his life in Florida and Texas, these are weird things to say. Hispanic culture is a huge part of American culture. In Texas, you can find the influences everywhere. Look at a Texas map, for instance, and you’ll see Spanish words all over the place — San Antonio (St. Anthony), El Paso (The Pass), Corpus Christi (Body of Christ), Amarillo (Yellow), Rio Grande (Big River), Padre (Father) Island, Colorado (Red) River.
Hispanic culture is also a big part of the music and food here in Texas. It’s literally in the name of our cuisine — Tex-Mex. And it’s why I can get fresh made tortillas from my local grocery store. (Jealous? You should be.) And there are other cultures in the mix, which you can see in part through the “Six Flags” that have flown over Texas — Spain, France, Mexico, Republic of Texas, C.S.A., and the U.S.A.
The part of Texas where I live is nicknamed the German Hill Country after the Germans who settled here in the 1800s. Many towns in the area have German names — Fredricksburg, Beorne, New Braunfels, Pflugerville, Schulenburg, and of course the town made famous by Waylon and Willie, Luckenbach.
You can see the mix of Hispanic and German culture at festivals throughout the region, such as Wurstfest, Deutschen Pfest, or the many Oktoberfests. I’ve never heard anyone here complain that this mixing of cultures represents a loss of culture. This is our culture! Tacos and lagers pair well, it turns out, both figuratively and literally.
This isn’t unusual. There are places like this all across the country.
When I lived in Houston, I was next to a Greek neighborhood. Another neighborhood in Houston is called “Little Saigon” and has a strong Vietnamese community. Even some of the street signs are bilingual, English and Vietnamese.
Just last week I was in San Diego, another city with a Spanish name and strong Hispanic heritage, and had a wonderful meal in the Little Italy neighborhood. I noticed a plague honoring the Italian heritage of the neighborhood.
Our mixture of cultures, united by the principles found in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights, is not a problem that needs fixed. It’s something to celebrate.
When MAGA influencers call for mass deportation to “preserve our culture” because they’re worried about too many Spanish speakers or too many Muslims and not enough white Christians, they’re actually seeking the opposite — they’re seeking to undo American culture, the wonderful diversity that makes America great, and replace it with an homogenized myth of how they imagined America “used to be” but never really existed.
What Else We’re Reading
ProPublica: “The Children of Dilley”
Fourteen-year-old Ariana Velasquez had been held at the immigrant detention center in Dilley, Texas, with her mother for some 45 days when I managed to get inside to meet her. The staff brought everyone in the visiting room a boxed lunch from the cafeteria: a cup of yellowish stew and a hamburger patty in a plain bun. Ariana’s long black curls hung loosely around her face and she was wearing a government-issued gray sweatsuit. At first, she sat looking blankly down at the table. She poked at her food with a plastic fork and let her mother do most of the talking.
She perked up when I asked about home: Hicksville, New York. She and her mother had moved there from Honduras when she was 7. Her mother, Stephanie Valladares, had applied for asylum, married a neighbor from back home who was already living in the U.S., and had two more kids. Ariana took care of them after school. She was a freshman at Hicksville High, and being detained at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center meant that she was falling behind in her classes. She told me how much she missed her favorite sign language teacher, but most of all she missed her siblings.
I had previously met them in Hicksville: Gianna, a toddler who everyone calls Gigi, and Jacob, a kindergartener with wide brown eyes. I told Ariana that they missed her too. Jacob had shown me a security camera that their mom had installed in the kitchen so she could peek in on them from her job, sometimes saying “Hello” through the speaker. I told Ariana that Jacob tried talking to the camera, hoping his mom would answer.
Stephanie burst into tears. So did Ariana. After my visit, Ariana wrote me a letter.
“My younger siblings haven’t been able to see their mom in more than a month,” she wrote. “They are very young and you need both of your parents when you are growing up.” Then, referring to Dilley, she added, “Since I got to this Center all you will feel is sadness and mostly depression.”
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The Irish Times: “‘Absolute hell’: Irishman with valid US work permit held by Ice since September”
An Irishman living in the United States [ [link removed] ] for more than 20 years has been held by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ [link removed] ] (Ice) officials since being arrested last September.
Originally from Glenmore, Co Kilkenny [ [link removed] ], Seamus Culleton is married to a US citizen and owns a plastering business in the Boston area. He was arrested on September 9th, 2025, and has been in an Ice detention facility in Texas for nearly five months, despite having no criminal record, “not even a parking ticket”. In a phone interview from the facility, he said conditions there are “like a concentration camp, absolute hell”.
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Pete Wehner: “The Evangelicals Who See Trump’s Viciousness as a Virtue”
Evangelical denominations and pastors, though, even those who are not deeply immersed in politics, are generally willing to speak out on culture-war issues that have political and sometimes legislative implications. I’ve seen this happen many times over the years.
So the reluctance to take a prophetic stance in the realm of politics and culture is less a principled unwillingness than a selective one. Ministers, like most of the rest of us, are likely to wade into controversial waters only when it’s safe—in their case, when there is overwhelming agreement within a congregation on a set of issues. They speak out when the response from those in the pews is a resounding “Amen!” rather than even a handful of voices saying, “Oh no you don’t!”
I don’t pretend these are easy matters for pastors to face. A minister of a conservative congregation might tell himself that the downside to speaking out against the sins of the authoritarian right, even judiciously and without partisan rancor, is too costly. They may fear that their ministry will be damaged, that offended parishioners will tune them out, and that they will gain nothing concrete.
But aren’t prophets esteemed precisely for their willingness to tell difficult truths to the people of God? For being steadfast in the face of fierce criticism; for denouncing social injustice and idolatry, including political idolatry, when it’s unfashionable to do so; for issuing warnings when others fall silent; and for calling people to repentance during times of moral blindness?
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The Guardian: “Epstein was not ostracised for his crimes. To some powerful men, he became even more appealing”
new tranche of Epstein files [ [link removed] ] has blasted its way through the worlds of media, politics, tech, academia, finance and Hollywood. High-profile individuals have once again been forced to explain their relationship with the billionaire financier – and why exactly they sent that email, or what they were doing in that photo, in that place, at that time. There have been resignations in [ [link removed] ] Norway, Slovakia, France, the UK [ [link removed] ] and on Wall Street [ [link removed] ]. Each individual scandal matters. But take the files as a whole and a new picture forms: of Jeffrey Epstein as a man who was seen to survive a sexual abuse scandal, and who was then feted as a sexual svengali and a valuable ally in navigating allegations of sexual abuse amid the #MeToo movement.
The 3.5m documents that have thus far been released to the public – out of a reported 6m documents pertaining to Epstein in the US justice department’s possession – paint Epstein as someone for whom elites, and particularly elite men, often felt a sense of camaraderie and affection, maintaining intimate and friendly relationships long after his 2008 conviction on child sexual abuse charges. And their content implies that, in some cases, this was not simply a case of them turning a blind eye to their friend’s sexual crimes: the powerful actively approached Epstein for sexual and romantic advice, and saw him as a thrower of “wild” parties and a listening ear in whom they could confide their anxieties about the excesses of the #MeToo movement [ [link removed] ].
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