Turning Point USA claimed their alternative Super Bowl halftime show pulled in over 5 million concurrent viewers. Candace Owens, of all people, is calling bullsh*t.
The right-wing influencer broke ranks with MAGA on Monday, torching her former colleagues for what she called “fully deluding themselves” over the Bad Bunny halftime show controversy. Her most damning claim? That TPUSA’s viewer numbers were “made up” and “impossible.”
Candace Owens is savage! Watch her rip apart TPUSA’s Half Time show viewership numbers. 🤣 pic.twitter.com/vGjuQpovXe
— Subi-doo 🐸 (@suzamaroo) February 10, 2026
WHAT’S GOING ON: After Bad Bunny delivered a historic all-Spanish Super Bowl halftime performance featuring the message “The only thing more powerful than hate is love,” conservative media went absolutely feral. TPUSA’s competing show featuring Kid Rock was supposedly the real winner, with The New York Times reporting 6.1 million concurrent YouTube viewers.
But Owens isn’t buying it. “So Bad Bunny, objectively, whether you like him or not, he had a successful Super Bowl halftime performance in terms of the metrics,” she said on her show. “This means that the — I would say unnecessary — Super Bowl political lines that were drawn by Turning Point USA was not successful in terms of drawing people away from the NFL’s viewership.”
The receipts back her up. Bad Bunny’s performance has racked up 75 million YouTube views. TPUSA’s Kid Rock showcase? About 22 million as of publication—and that’s total views, not the inflated concurrent viewer claim conservatives were pushing.
BUT BUT BUT: Owens wasn’t exactly defending Bad Bunny’s artistry. She criticized the performance being entirely in Spanish, claiming audiences couldn’t “emotionally connect” to it. (Tell that to the millions of non-Spanish speakers who loved it.) Still, she acknowledged the show’s impressive production value and dance choreography.
WHY IT MATTERS: When Candace Owens—who built her brand on contrarian MAGA takes—is calling out right-wing reality distortion, the propaganda machine might be breaking down. “Conservatives are now fully deluding themselves and paying influencers to invert reality. To what end?” she wrote on X. “It’s like watching a bad rerun of Hillary Clinton’s ‘too big to fail’ 2016 campaign.”
She also dropped another uncomfortable truth bomb: “The majority doesn’t agree with ICE shooting people in the face in Minnesota.”
BOTTOM LINE: The right wanted a culture war victory so badly they apparently fabricated one. And now their own people are exposing the con.