Tonight, Lady Gaga literally took a leap of faith (via some very trustworthy suspension cables) when she opened her Super Bowl halftime performance with a riff on patriotic classics. After her epic (and already memed) dive toward the stage, our Lady fearlessly sang her anthe, "Born This Way," resplendent in crystal eye makeup and a glittering ensemble. If ever there were a time for "Yas Gaga," this was it. 
 
 So I tweeted this: 
 
 And was almost immediately met with this: 
 
 I'm sorry — but did the trolls on Twitter miss the memo? 
 
 Clearly, many people watching didn't realize that the song "Born This Way" is designed for the LGBTQ community. If you've been to a Pride march in the past four years, you know a thing or two about dancing to "Born This Way" while you're surrounded by a ton of glitter, bare skin, and glorious, rainbow solidarity. Let's just be clear here, though: Performing a song that's so blatantly gay in front of an audience that includes Mike Pence, one of the most anti-LGBTQ politicians today , is absolutely political — especially when it contains lyrics like "No matter gay, straight, or bi, lesbian, transgender life." (P.S.: According to USA Today , that was "likely" be the first time the word "transgender" was said onstage at a Super Bowl.) 
 
 Furthermore, as our friends at The Hive pointed out, the Woody Guthrie song "This Land Is Your Land" is inherently activistic. Gaga omitted certain lyrics from the piece, which The Hive printed for your convenience. Here's a sampling: 
 
 As I went walking I saw a sign there / And on the sign it said "No Trespassing." / But on the other side it didn't say nothing, / That side was made for you and me. Nobody living can ever stop me, / As I go walking that freedom highway; / Nobody living can ever make me turn back / This land was made for you and me. 
 
 "This land was made for you and me," she sang, in the same weekend that Donald Trump's executive order — one that was designed to fulfill his campaign promise of banning Muslims from entering our country — was essentially (if temporarily) rendered moot by a judge in Washington state. 
 
 The Super Bowl is a massive display of capitalism, contracts, and fragile masculinity. We can only assume that Lady Gaga had to deal with these constraints as she planned her performance — especially following the accusations Beyoncé received last year for displaying black pride on a national stage. So in this case, rather than not show up at all, she allowed her art to be the activism. She played within the confines and outwitted them as best she could. It's up to us to read between the lines. 
 
 Related: The Black Panther Party, Explained by a Former Black Panther 
 
 Editor's Note: This piece was updated to insert lyrics from the Lady Gaga song mentioned. ||||| When Lady Gaga was announced as the performer of this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, many of her fans were curious if the singer would get political during her 13-minute set. But it’s possible that Gaga actually managed to sneak in a fairly subversive political moment without most viewers noticing. 
 
 NFL senior VP of programming Mark Quenzel told Billboard of Gaga’s plans: “We have no discussions about her or with her that have to do with the election, or the president. What we say to every artist, very clearly, and they all buy in: the Super Bowl halftime is the biggest musical event of the year, and it’s also a communal event for fans, the Super Bowl itself. People get together as families, as friends. It’s a unifying day for people built around the biggest sporting event in the world.” 
 
 Gaga herself responded to that remark with this: “Well, I don’t know if I will succeed in unifying America. You’ll have to ask America when it’s over. But the only statements that I’ll be making during the halftime show are the ones that I’ve been consistently making throughout my career. … I believe in a passion for inclusion. I believe in the spirit of equality, and the spirit of this country as one of love and compassion and kindness. So my performance will have both those philosophies.” 
 
 All that said, Gaga opened her set with “God Bless America“ and then immediately segued into Woody Guthrie’s Americana classic “This Land Is Your Land”—which, if you’ve ever heard the full version, is a little edgier than you might expect. It has also become an anthem for protestors fighting against Trump’s proposed immigration bans and border walls. The lyrics, in full, read: 
 
 This land is your land 
 
 This land is my land From California to the New York island; From the red wood forest to the Gulf Stream waters This land was made for you and Me. 
 
 As I was walking that ribbon of highway, I saw above me that endless skyway: I saw below me that golden valley: This land was made for you and me. 
 
 I've roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts; And all around me a voice was sounding: This land was made for you and me. 
 
 When the sun came shining, and I was strolling, And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling, As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting: This land was made for you and me. 
 
 As I went walking I saw a sign there And on the sign it said "No Trespassing." But on the other side it didn't say nothing, That side was made for you and me. 
 
 In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people, By the relief office I seen my people; As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking Is this land made for you and me? 
 
 Nobody living can ever stop me, As I go walking that freedom highway; Nobody living can ever make me turn back This land was made for you and me. 
 
 According to Guthrie’s son, Arlo, Woody wrote the song in anger as a response to “God Bless America,” written by Irving Berlin, which Guthrie hated. We don’t often sing the latter, angrier verses of This Land in schools—nor did Gaga during the show. But as Arlo told The New Yorker in 2004: “He wanted me to know what he originally wrote, so it wouldn’t be forgotten.” The New Yorker further explains Guthrie’s political evolution: 
 
 Guthrie’s inchoate socialist leanings grew into a deep commitment to the labor movement and to the social and political adventurism of the American Communist Party. (Guthrie never joined the Party—his independence was such that he “was not affiliated with anything,” according to his sister Mary Jo; he did follow the Party line, however, down to belittling Roosevelt as a warmonger during the period of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact, and he wrote a column called “Woody Sez,” in hillbilly dialect, for the C.P.U.S.A. organs People’s World and Daily Worker.) The first of Guthrie’s three wives, Mary, lamented his politicization as “his downfall as an entertainer,” and she had a point: the more he focussed on rousing the masses, the less he pleased the crowd. Guthrie’s modest popular following diminished; at the same time, through politics, he found his voice. 
 
 Gaga no doubt knew exactly what she was doing when she picked that song to open her performance—and though she may have left the edgier verses out, its inclusion still served as something of dog whistle to the protestors who have been singing it in the street over the past few weeks. 
 
 VIDEO: The Greatest Super Bowl Commercials of All-Time ||||| Photo 
 
 Lady Gaga went for one big, glittering, diverse party with her Super Bowl halftime show. “We’re here to make you feel good,” she declared mid-set. At her N.F.L. news conference, she had promised a statement of “inclusion,” an upbeat and uncontroversial stance, and she made good on it as she began her set, singing a few lines each of “God Bless America” and “This Land Is Your Land” and reciting the “one nation indivisible” conclusion of the Pledge of Allegiance. 
 
 Wearing a shiny, silvery, big-shouldered sci-fi bodysuit and matching high-heeled boots, with a glittery mask painted around her eyes, Lady Gaga was lowered through the air, on suspension cables, into NRG Stadium in Houston, showing off a trapeze-like flip. And she started belting her hits, with a nod to the local audience: “Poker Face” announced, “I want to hold ’em like they do in Texas.” 
 
 One of those hits was “Born This Way,” her dance-floor anthem of self-acceptance for all kinds of people. “You’re black, white, beige, chola descent/You’re Lebanese, you’re orient,” she sang, and later, “No matter gay, straight, or bi/Lesbian, transgendered life/I’m on the right track baby/I was born to survive.” It was doubtless the first time the word “transgendered” had been sung at a Super Bowl halftime show. Dozens of dancers of multiple skin tones and genders joined her, matching her moves in exultant line dances and embodying her message of empowerment as a shared celebration. 
 
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 But most of the show was simply about full-tilt pop fun: songs like “Telephone,” about dancing at clubs, and “Bad Romance,” about falling in love and lust. It was a megamix of her songs spanning her career, from her 2008 debut single, “Just Dance,” to “Million Reasons,” the power ballad from her 2016 album, “Joanne.” She sang “Million Reasons” from a piano as people waving orange electric torches made patterns that radiated across the football field; that was her relatively still point in a fiercely athletic performance. “The Super Bowl is what champions are made of,” she declared as “Bad Romance” revved up. 
 
 Lady Gaga has proudly presented herself as the continuation of generations of song-and-dance showbiz troupers, a tradition of fervent effort and well-rehearsed spectacle delivered with joy. She sang with hardworking gusto throughout the set, even as she covered considerable yardage strutting and kicking, prancing and gesticulating, pumping her hips and shaking hands with fans. 
 
 It was a show of shiny costumes and big smiles, of a huge group of dancers all sharing the same moves, an outpouring of energy that was eager to please everybody. Lady Gaga ended it with one last strut, up a ramp, and a self-congratulatory gesture that has been used by both rappers and an ex-president: a microphone drop, earned with sweat. ||||| Woody Guthrie. (Associated Press) 
 
 Woody Guthrie, folk singer supreme, is known for the magisterial portraits he painted of Dust Bowl America and his sweeping indictments of social injustice. What’s not there in the beautiful imagery of his song “This Land Is Your Land” — the ribbon of highway, the endless skyway, the diamond deserts — is right there in the slogan often affixed to his guitar: “This machine kills fascists.” 
 
 But artists who traffic in grand themes are also allowed to get specific. In one of the strangest stories yet to emerge from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, it appears that, more than half a century ago, Woody Guthrie penned lyrics condemning the candidate’s father, Fred Trump, for racism. 
 
 “Donald did inherit his father’s racism, and was probably actively coached in his father’s racism, and worked with his father to perpetuate it,” argued Will Kaufman, the professor of American literature and culture at Britain’s University of Central Lancashire who unearthed the scoop, said in a telephone interview with The Washington Post. “He picked up the mantle and ran with it with his father at his side. That’s why people are interested in this I think.” 
 
 Trump has been repeatedly accused of racism after his comments about Mexicans and has repeatedly denied such charges. “I don’t have a racist bone in my body,” he has said. 
 
 The story begins with Kaufman, the author of one book about Guthrie already at work on another and a performer of the folk hero’s music, sifting through the Guthrie archives in Tulsa last year. There, in one of Guthrie’s notebooks — which contain pages upon pages of lyrics never set to music — he found these lines, written in the early 1950s: 
 
 I suppose 
 
 Old Man Trump knows 
 
 Just how much 
 
 Racial Hate 
 
 he stirred up 
 
 In the bloodpot of human hearts 
 
 When he drawed 
 
 That color line 
 
 Here at his 
 
 Eighteen hundred family project 
 
 There was also this: 
 
 Beach Haven ain’t my home! 
 
 I just cain’t pay this rent! 
 
 My money’s down the drain! 
 
 And my soul is badly bent! 
 
 Beach Haven looks like heaven 
 
 Where no black ones come to roam! 
 
 No, no, no! Old Man Trump! 
 
 Old Beach Haven ain’t my home! 
 
 “Beach Haven,” it turns out, was an apartment building erected by Fred Trump — that is, “Old Man Trump,” who died in 1999 — in New York to house large numbers of veterans returning from World War II. Guthrie, who served in the Merchant Marine, was among them. As Kaufman recounted in a story first published at the Conversation, the singer moved there in 1950. 
 
 “When Guthrie first signed his lease, it’s unlikely that he was aware of the murky background to the construction of his new home, the massive public complex that Trump had dubbed ‘Beach Haven,’” Kaufman wrote. “Trump would be investigated by a U.S. Senate committee in 1954 for profiteering off of public contracts, not least by overestimating his Beach Haven building charges to the tune of US$3.7 million.” 
 
 But this wasn’t just a story about a developer behaving badly. It was a story about a developer behaving really badly. In Kaufman’s telling, Old Man Trump followed federal guidelines against “inharmonious uses of housing” — as one Trump biographer put it, “a code phrase for selling homes in white areas to blacks.” Thus, Beach Haven was an oasis with a “color line” where “no black ones come to roam,” as Guthrie put it. 
 
 “These writings have never before been published; they should be, for they clearly pit America’s national balladeer against the racist foundations of the Trump real estate empire,” Kaufman wrote. 
 
 Will Kaufman. (Courtesy Will Kaufman). 
 
 One need not unearth a lyric from an era before the Eisenhower Interstate System to find people accusing Donald Trump of racism. He’s been called that by hecklers, writers and other critics. 
 
 But the argument to which Kaufman — and, from the grave, Guthrie — give voice is less often discussed in the large amount of media coverage devoted to Trump in the past six months. Some have made the point that the Donald abandoned Old Man Trump’s commitment to middle-class housing; the argument that the Trumps’ entire housing enterprise, which was investigated for discriminating against black tenants in the 1970s, has racist roots is, perhaps, less often discussed. 
 
 [How Donald Trump abandoned his father’s middle-class housing empire for luxury building] 
 
 “It’s not a case of the whole apple not falling far from the tree,” Kaufman said of candidate Trump’s alleged shortcomings. “The apple is still connected to the tree.” Asked whether Donald Trump’s alleged sins were as bad as Old Man Trump’s alleged sins, Kaufman said: “I think he’s sneakier.”
– Despite anticipation that Lady Gaga would make some kind of political statement during the Super Bowl halftime show, the pop star appeared to play nice, a performance of the LGBT-friendly "Born This Way" aside. Even prominent conservatives hailed her "apolitical" show, the Washington Post notes, with tweeted praise from the likes of Fox News, Marco Rubio, and even Ivanka Trump. But Vanity Fair reports that an "edgy political statement" may have been a "dog whistle" for President Trump protesters with Gaga's choice of opening songs, a double hit of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" followed by a portion of "This Land Is Your Land"—and the latter Woody Guthrie song is where Gaga's hidden message may lie. Guthrie's son Arlo has said his dad wrote "This Land" as a biting response to Berlin's patriotic song, and in the 1944 version the elder Guthrie recorded on his guitar—he owned one sporting a "This Machine Kills Fascists" sticker—the fourth verse contains some interesting (and timely Trump-tied lyrics) that have since fallen out of the versions we hear today. To wit: "There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me / The sign was painted, said 'Private Property' / But on the backside, it didn’t say nothing." Vanity Fair notes that Trump protesters have been crooning the song at rallies lately, and Arlo Guthrie and other singers like Bruce Springsteen keep the original lyrics in when they perform the song. In other words, Teen Vogue may have picked up on something major outlets missed. (Gaga made a big announcement after the Super Bowl.)