I’ll admit something up front: I’m not much of a sports guy.
I don’t memorize stats, I don’t plan my calendar around kickoff times, and I couldn’t tell you which quarterback has the stronger arm this season. Heck I had to look up which teams were even playing last night.
But what I am is a pretty serious observer of culture.
And what I watched unfold around the Super Bowl this year had very little to do with football at all.
In the days leading up to the game, people who rarely say a word about sports suddenly became intensely invested.
Politics had somehow become the centerpiece of the show, and that turned a football game into a loyalty test.
The people got the message.
Some of them announced loudly that they would be tuning in specifically to support the performer (as if watching a concert were an act of civic duty) while others announced (just as loudly) that they would boycott the broadcast entirely and stream an alternate halftime show instead.
Social media filled with declarations, pledges, and preemptive applause.
I’ve got to be honest—from the outside, it all looks pretty silly.
Grown adults with mortgages, careers, and kids who need to be driven to school on Monday morning spent a significant portion of their Sunday (and the weeks leading up to it, even!) devoted to publicly signaling where they stood on a halftime performance.
From where I stood it was pretty clear that a lot of people weren’t participating because they love football. Or even because they love music. It was because they love their team.
And not the one wearing helmets.
What used to be a cultural pause (you could even call it a “passtime”) where for three hours neighbors who don’t share anything in common but their love of a sport could argue about a bad call and then go back to eating wings together, has become another front in an ongoing and never-ending ideological contest.
Now, even people who don’t care about football feel compelled to participate. Because politics.
Sports have always had rivalry built into them. My team versus yours competition is quite literally the whole point. But now rivalry isn’t confined to the field. It’s attached to every commercial, every performance, and every celebrity appearance.
The game becomes secondary, and the signaling becomes primary.
We don’t simply watch a game anymore; we decode it.
It’s ridiculous.
Everything has to signal something. Every stage has to carry a banner. Every cultural event must be a referendum.
Do you see how thoroughly politics has colonized the culture?
There was a time when politics occupied a defined space. You voted, you debated policy, you paid attention during elections, you taught your kids what you believe, and outside of that you lived your life. Today, politics has expanded beyond governance and civic duty, and into actual identity. It determines where people shop, what brands they trust, which celebrities they applaud, and apparently even how they experience a halftime show.
That kind of environment doesn’t produce thoughtful citizens—it produces reflexive ones. And that’s a real problem.
I’ve come to suspect that the real dividing line in America isn’t as simple as race or income or party registration. Increasingly, it feels like the real line is between people anchored in principles, and people anchored in politics.
A principles-based person starts with a framework that doesn’t move every news cycle. They’ve thought through ideas about freedom, responsibility, incentives, and human nature, and when events happen—whether it’s legislation, a cultural controversy, or a halftime spectacle—they evaluate it through that framework.
They don’t look outward for signals to cue their reactions.
A politics-based person operates differently because their reference point is external. They look to politicians, commentators, influencers, and celebrities to determine what the approved response should be. As a result, their positions shift quickly—not because what is true has changed, but because the tribe has.
One approach builds stability, the other builds volatility, and the kids are absorbing it all.
If adults are constantly recalibrating their beliefs based on who is speaking the loudest, children adopt that same pattern.
Kids have a real knack for truth, and they notice when opinions and belief systems are outsourced. They learn, through quiet observation of the adults in their life, that belonging matters more than telling the truth.
And that’s a crazy-dangerous lesson.
If everything is filtered through partisan lenses, children grow up thinking the world is simply a series of teams to join. They become skilled at reading social cues but unskilled at evaluating ideas. They learn to recite slogans but struggle to explain principles.
It’s cultural conditioning. And I’m sorry, but I’ve observed the Village, and I don’t want it raising my kids.
Of course, there’s an alternative. It involves grounding kids in ideas that don’t depend on applause or social acceptance to be true. It means teaching them why concentrated power tends to corrupt, why incentives shape behavior, why free markets coordinate human activity more effectively than central planners, and why personal responsibility must never be legislated away.
When a child understands those things, they become difficult to manipulate. They don’t panic every time the cultural winds shift, and they don’t assume that every public event requires them to choose a side before they’ve even thought about the substance.
They can enjoy a game as a game. Or simply not watch it at all.
They can watch a performance without treating it as a political litmus test.
They can disagree with someone without insisting that coexistence is impossible.
That kind of steadiness has to be carefully cultivated—especially in the world they’re growing up in.
That’s why we do this work.
The Tuttle Twins has never been about training kids to cheer for one party or the other. We don’t want to script their opinions or tell them what to think. Our goal has always been to give parents the tools they need to equip their kids with enduring principles based in truth, so that when the partisan noise and rhetoric ramps up—and it always does—they aren’t swept along by it.
We even wrote a book about “my team” versus “your team” thinking and the disastrous outcomes that it yields.
If we want a culture where neighbors can sit at the same table again, whether at church, at school events, or yes, even at a football game, then the solution isn’t to anchor ourselves more deeply in politics.
It’s to raise a generation that knows true principles and understands how to test the things happening in the world around them against what they already know to be good and right and true.
Politics will always exist, disagreement will always exist, and competition will always exist. And that’s actually a really good thing.
But not everything needs to become a tribal test.
If we can teach our kids to recognize the difference between principle and political performance, we’ve given them something far more valuable than the temporary feeling of belonging and acceptance when their team is ahead.
We’ve given them a foundation that outlasts any media-hyped outrage.
More importantly, we’ve inoculated them against the methods of the powerful elite who know that keeping us warring amongst ourselves gives them carte blanche to do whatever they want while we’re tearing each other apart over halftime shows.
— Connor
