Federal health data reveal that states with conservative leadership consistently have higher firearm death rates than their blue-state counterparts.

In 2021, eight of the 10 states with the highest gun death rates per capita were won by Trump in the 2020 election. Mississippi — with a staggering 33.9 per 100,000 firearm death rate, the worst in the nation — voted solidly Republican. By contrast, states with the lowest gun death rates — like Massachusetts, at 3.4 per 100,000 — reliably vote Democratic.

Crucially, this gap isn’t just about suicides in isolated areas; it extends to violent crime and murders as well. A recent analysis of homicide data found that the murder rate in Republican-voting states — such as Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama — was 33 percent higher than in Democratic-voting states in both 2021 and 2022.

Even when researchers control for big urban centers, the red-state murder problem persists. Remove the largest city from every red state, and their homicide rate still far exceeds that of blue states.

The notion that “Democrat-run cities” alone drive violence collapses under scrutiny. People are statistically safer in New York City or San Francisco than in many rural or Southern Republican-led states.

A groundbreaking study also found that firearm fatalities are now more likely in small rural towns than in big cities — a reversal of historical trends. Thanks largely to soaring gun suicides, the most rural counties experienced overall firearm death rates 25 percent higher than the most urban counties in recent decades. That means the archetypal “American heartland” — often solid Republican territory — quietly endures a higher per-capita burden of gun death than metropolises like Los Angeles or New York.

https://theintercept.com/2025/09/12/charlie-kirk-gun-violence-red-states/

If you wanna read what Charlie Kirk believed, this website kept track of it thoroughly

https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk

For South America, China has become its number one trading partner. Chinese investment in the region is estimated at $200 billion, still much less than that of the U.S., but growing fast, especially in cutting-edge sectors like e-mobility and the green economy.

Exhibit A for this trend are the openings this year of Chinese e-vehicle factories in Brazil — by BYD in the state of Bahia at an industrial park once owned by the Ford Motor Company, and by Great Wall Motors in the state of Sao Paulo, in a locale that once produced cars for Mercedes-Benz.
As political scientist Francisco Urdinez shows in a forthcoming book, Economic Displacement and the End of US Primacy in Latin America, one key reason Chinese companies have moved into Latin America is because U.S. business has been moving out. The policy of attempting to exclude China from Latin America has failed and is bound to continue to fail, because the region badly needs more foreign trade and investment, not less. The United States should compete with China in the Americas, proving that it can build a better mousetrap, not by banning rival producers of mice-catching devices.


https://responsiblestatecraft.org/rubio-trip-mexico-ecuador/

The article identifies two key weaknesses in the current initiative. First, it lacks enforcement mechanisms or penalties for Israeli non-compliance. Second, it needs to more strongly link Palestinian statehood to the creation of a new regional security architecture. The author proposes offering Israel full membership in a new, inclusive regional security body—similar to organizations in Europe or Southeast Asia—but only on the condition that it accepts a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders. This would provide a stronger incentive for Israel to end the occupation than previous offers of mere recognition or normalization, while also serving U.S. interests by fostering stability and enabling a reduction of its military burden in the region.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/palestine-state-recognition/

If you choose 2019 as your point of comparison, the increase in poverty under Biden is bad. If you choose 2020, it’s catastrophic.

Change, 2019–24:
Poverty: 9.3% increase (+5.4 million people)
Child poverty: 6.3% increase (+491,000 children)

Change, 2020–24:
Poverty: 40.2% increase (+13.7 million people)
Child poverty: 38.1% increase (+2.5 million children)


https://jacobin.com/2025/09/biden-child-poverty-economy-trump/

I’ve seen more than a few people suggest that Kirk should be respected for being willing to talk to “those who disagree with him” as a sign that he was engaging in good faith. Perhaps the perfect example of this is Ezra Klein’s silly eulogy claiming that Kirk was “practicing politics the right way” because he would debate students who disagreed with him.

There are many problems with this statement, but Klein’s fundamental error reveals something much more dangerous: he’s mistaking performance for discourse, spectacle for persuasion. Kirk wasn’t showing up to campuses to “talk with anyone who would talk to him.” He was showing up armed with a string of logical fallacies, nonsense talking points, and gotcha questions specifically designed to enrage inexperienced college students so he could generate viral social media clips of himself “owning the libs.”

Klein is eulogizing not a practitioner of good-faith political discourse, but one of the most successful architects of “debate me bro” culture—a particularly toxic form of intellectual harassment that has become endemic to our political discourse. And by praising Kirk as practicing “politics the right way,” Klein is inadvertently endorsing a grift that actively undermines the kind of thoughtful engagement our democracy desperately needs.

The “debate me bro” playbook is simple and effective: demand that serious people engage with your conspiracy theories or extremist talking points. If they decline, cry “censorship!” and claim they’re “afraid of the truth.” If they accept, turn the interaction into a performance designed to generate viral clips and false legitimacy. It’s a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose proposition that has nothing to do with genuine intellectual discourse.

The fundamental issue with “debate me bro” culture isn’t just that it’s obnoxious, it’s that it creates a false equivalence between good-faith expertise and bad-faith trolling. When you agree to debate someone pushing long-debunked conspiracy theories or openly hateful ideologies, you’re implicitly suggesting that their position deserves equal consideration alongside established facts and expert analysis.

This is exactly backwards from how the actual “marketplace of ideas” is supposed to work.

As a recent detailed analysis of one of Kirk’s debates demonstrates, when a student showed up prepared with nuanced, well-researched arguments, Kirk immediately tried pivoting to culture war talking points and deflection tactics. When debaters tried to use Kirk’s own standards against him, he shifted subjects entirely. The goal was never understanding or persuasion—it was generating content for social media distribution.

The format actively discourages the kind of thoughtful, nuanced discussion that might actually change minds—the kind actually designed for persuasion. Instead, it rewards the most inflammatory takes, the most emotionally manipulative tactics, and the most viral-ready soundbites. Anyone going into these situations with good faith gets steamrolled by participants who understand they’re playing a different game entirely.

When trolls demand debates, they’re not interested in having their minds changed or genuinely testing their ideas. They want one of two outcomes: either you decline and they get to claim victory by default, or you accept and they get to use your credibility to legitimize their nonsense while farming viral moments.

Real intellectual discourse happens in contexts where participants are genuinely interested in truth-seeking rather than performance. It requires shared standards of evidence, mutual respect, and actual expertise on the topics being discussed. It takes time, nuance, and careful consideration—all things that are antithetical to the “debate me bro” format.

www.techdirt.com/2025/09/17/the-debate-me-bro-grift-how-trolls-weaponized-the-marketplace-of-ideas/