Much like migratory birds and retirees, college students are flocking to the South come September. Big state schools with large football programs and robust Greek life, like the University of Alabama or the University of Mississippi, have seen an influx of students from the North; the number of students who left the North to go South for school increased 30 percent between 2018 and 2022.

There are lots of reasons for this change. It could be the fun campus experience, or that Southern campuses relaxed Covid restrictions before their northern counterparts. It could be a change of scenery. It could be that students are getting more bang for their buck at a time when college tuition is at an all-time high. But whether it’s #RushTok or less student loan debt, students are embracing life South of the Mason-Dixon line.

According to Bloomberg senior reporter Amanda Mull, this is just one symptom of a larger embrace of Southern culture. She unpacks those changes on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.

Below is an excerpt of our conversation with Mull, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

Over time, the South has grown in the American imagination. What first made that possible?

In the 1960s, you see the simultaneous occurrence of political evolution, logistical evolution, and technological evolution.

The political aspect is of course the civil rights movement and the Civil Rights Act, which changed the political possibilities for lots of people in the South. It started to change how the rest of the country viewed the south.

Then you also have the practical shift, which is air conditioning. So in 1956, you get the advent of the American highway program, which built interstates that connected places and parts of the country that were previously difficult to travel between. The South was industrially underdeveloped relative to the Northeast and the Midwest. So the advent of the highway system made it a lot easier for the South to interact commercially with the rest of the country, and made it a lot easier for the South to interact commercially with itself at the end of Jim Crow.

The advent of air conditioning made it possible for lots of different types of businesses to think about the South as a possible location, and made it possible for more people to think about the South as a place they might want to live. This change across time has led us to where we are now, where the population of the South has been growing for decades and is still growing.

Southern states started offering advantages to businesses. What are those advantages, and how has that changed the culture there?

State governments started putting together incentive packages where they pitch themselves both to the business community at large and to specific employers. One way you can really see this happening is Southern states pitching themselves as a union-unfriendly alternative for car manufacturing. You see that especially attracting foreign car manufacturers. American manufacturers have less of a presence in the South, but they have, over the past several decades, moved car manufacturing there because employers saw it as an opportunity to avoid some of the shipping and tariff and logistical problems of cars overseas, but also avoiding paying the higher wages and offering the better working conditions of the Midwest and Northeast, which had been traditionally areas of car manufacturing.

The car business and the movie business are both great examples of how this similar playbook works across industries. Georgia and Louisiana have put together huge tax incentive packages to attract television and movie production. Netflix has a huge complex in Atlanta. A lot of Marvel movies over the past decade have been filmed in Georgia. They pitch themselves as locations where you have a lot of different outdoor landscapes that can stand in for a lot of different places. You have cities, mountains, coastline, and forests.

I want to get into the cultural impact. How has the South impacted mainstream American music?

The rise of Southern hip-hop and the subsequent rise of country music are two sides of the same coin. I don’t want to say that the embrace of country is entirely reactionary. But I do think that some of the interest in explicitly white Southern culture in the past few years is a reaction to the omnipresence of Black Southern creativity, especially in music.

When you look at someone like Morgan Wallen, who is enormously popular among listeners and has also been in the news for doing explicitly racist things, it’s hard to look at that and go, “Okay, this has to be at least part a reaction against Black dominance in music.”

But then you look at other artists who have a more explicitly progressive bent, like Kacey Musgraves and Brandi Carlile, who are sort of challengers to that. And then you also see Beyoncé with Cowboy Carter re-embracing her heritage as a Southerner and questioning some of the tropes and the aesthetics and the sounds of white Southern music. Of course, there’s no such thing as white Southern music. It’s very hard to look at the South and go, “Okay, this is white Southern culture and this is Black Southern culture,” because there are so many cultural overlaps over time.

How does this new embrace of the South make you feel as a Southerner?

I’m of two minds about it. I think that it’s good for Southerners of all stripes, of all races, of all backgrounds, if people look at the South more as a legitimate part of the country and less as a backwater where people are subhuman and inferior. But it’s also strange. It’s really uncanny to see people embrace the aesthetics of the South without contending with what the South is and what it has been and what it means. Because I think that most Southerners do that.

Being from the South requires you to interface with the region’s history in a way that the rest of the country gets to skip if they so choose. And so it’s weird to see people cosplaying as stereotypical Southerners when I know that a lot of them have not really thought about it.

Editor’s note, September 2, 12:10 pm ET: This week, the leaders of Iran, North Korea, and Russia, along with around two dozen other heads of state, are in China for a military parade marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, which doubles as an advertisement for China’s bid for global leadership. In February, Vox reported on how American policymakers and scholars are increasingly looking at these four countries as a cohesive unit, brought together by a mutual interest in overturning a US-led international order.

Since then, the limitations of this alliance have been illustrated: Iran’s allies notably did not provide much aid when it came under Israeli and US airstrikes in June. The Trump administration has also been far less interested than Biden’s in isolating and pushing back against these regimes, as shown by President Donald Trump’s recent summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska. But this week’s festivities in Beijing also make clear that these countries continue to work closely together and that others — perhaps India — may be falling into their orbit in the face of an increasingly erratic US foreign policy. The story below was originally published on February 3.

Hours after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, China’s Xi Jinping made a call to Russian President Vladimir Putin in which, according to the Chinese foreign ministry’s readout, the two leaders pledged to deepen their “strategic coordination” and “practical cooperation” and “firmly support each other.”

Just a few days earlier on January 17, Putin and his Iranian counterpart, Masoud Pezeshkian, signed a 20-year strategic partnership agreement, pledging a wide range of military cooperation.

Meanwhile, North Korea is pledging to send more troops to Russia, where they have been fighting alongside Russian forces against Ukraine since last October, taking shockingly high losses.

It’s clear that America’s principal global adversaries are increasingly cooperating, and policymakers and experts are increasingly treating these four countries in particular — China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea — as a cohesive unit. They’ve been called the “axis of upheaval,” the “quartet of chaos,” or simply the “CRINKs.”

The cooperation between the four is hard to deny, and while some of these countries have been erstwhile friends since the Cold War, the relationship has certainly deepened since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But what does this “axis” actually stand for? Is it just an alliance of convenience or something deeper? And how will a new US administration, one that takes a much more transactional approach to foreign policy and is far less invested in promoting democracy abroad, deal with the quartet?

What do these strange allies have in common?

The four members of this group are all autocracies, but they don’t share an official ideology. China is a one-party communist party state with capitalist characteristics. Russia is a conservative, nationalist oligarchy. Iran is a Shiite Islamic theocracy, and North Korea is a hybrid of state communism, radical self-reliance, and racial supremacism.

Nor do they have much in common economically: China is the world’s second-largest economy, largest exporter, and an inextricable centerpiece of the global economy, while North Korea is basically an economic nonentity (unless you count cybercrime).

But as Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Richard Fontaine of the Center for a New America Security (CNAS) argued in an influential article for Foreign Affairs last year, the four countries “are united in their opposition to the prevailing world order and its US leadership.” What Western countries see as the “rules based international order” established out of the ashes of World War II, these countries see as a cloak for American power.

There are other commonalities.

“They share a belief in state-based political rights rather than any kind of individual rights or human rights,” Kendall-Taylor, director of the Transatlantic Security Program at CNAS, said. “They share a vision of spheres of influence.” In other words, it’s countries’ interests on the world stage that have to be respected, not those of their citizens.

Or as Xi and Putin put it in their joint communique issued shortly after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, they “stand against attempts by external forces to undermine security and stability in their common adjacent regions.”

All four also view themselves as the inheritors of important historical civilizations. Putin’s arguments for the invasion of Ukraine at times seem to refer more often to events in the ninth century than to recent grievances. North Koreans are taught that their country is one of the cradles of world civilization. And China has sought to promote an “Ancient Civilizations Forum,” composed of countries deemed to have inherited “great ancient civilizations” — one of which is Iran.

Kendall-Taylor and Fontaine have dubbed the alliance the “axis of upheaval” — a term that brings to mind the “axis of evil” — referred to by President George W. Bush in his 2002 State of the Union address, where he built a case for the war in Iraq. That “axis” of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea never made much sense. For one thing, at the time, the Iranian and Iraqi governments were mortal enemies, and only became much closer as a result of the American invasion of Iraq.

By contrast, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea actually are working together. But the “axis of evil” association is one reason why Peter Van Praagh, founder and president of the Halifax Security Forum, a high-profile annual national security gathering, prefers “CRINKs,” an acronym he coined in 2023.

Van Praagh contrasts the term to BRICS (the economic grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), which he told Vox “evokes strength and sort of the action of building something, whereas CRINK has a certain stench to it.”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine helped cement the alliance

Iran and North Korea are generally viewed as the junior partners in the quartet, due to their relative size and economic clout. China is undoubtedly the most powerful and influential of the four, as reflected in America’s most recent National Defense Strategy, which defined the People’s Republic of China as the “pacing challenge” for American national security.

But Russia is in many ways the catalyst driving the group forward and bringing it together. The 2022 invasion of Ukraine accelerated the deepening of ties that had already been developing for years.

Shortly after Russia’s invasion, Putin and Xi meant to proclaim a friendship with “no limits,” including Russia affirming its support for Beijing’s position that Taiwan is part of China. Though China is not believed to have directly provided weapons to Russia since the war began, trade between the two countries has grown dramatically over the course of the war as Western countries have imposed increasingly draconian sanctions on the Russian economy.

China is now Russia’s key supplier of civilian consumer goods like cars and clothing as well as “dual use” materials, like the microchips and machine parts that Russia uses to sustain its war machine. China, in return, has been buying massive amounts of Russian oil at a discount — thanks to sanctions. According to US officials, China has been receiving Russian technical help with its submarine and missile programs as well.

In September 2023, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un rode his private train to Russia for talks with Putin amid reports that the Russians were buying millions of North Korean artillery shells and rockets. North Korea and Russia signed a mutual defense treaty last summer, and last October, thousands of North Korean troops were sent to Russia to help retake territory in the Kursk region which is currently occupied by Ukrainian forces.

Russia and Iran were the principal backers of Bashar al-Assad’s now-toppled regime in Syria. Iran has also long been a customer of Russian military hardware, notably including several S-300 air defense missile systems as well as tanks and submarines. Since the invasion, however, Russia has been the customer, particularly of Iran’s Shahed “kamikaze” drones. According to the Ukrainian government, Russia has launched more than 8,000 Iranian drones since the start of the war. The US also says Iran has been sending Russia short-range ballistic missiles.

At times, the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have seemed increasingly intertwined. Russia was reportedly in talks last year to send missiles to the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, while Ukraine provided aid to the rebels fighting Assad in Syria. In 2023, Iran was invited, along with several other countries, to join the BRICS, which Russia in particular has sought to promote an alternative to Western-led groupings like the G7.

To explain the alliance that has developed since the war in Ukraine, Yun Sun, a senior fellow and director of the East Asia program at the Stimson Center, said Chinese commentators often use the phrase: “They form a circle and they keep each other warm in a harsh winter. That’s the mentality. They’re looking for someone to have their back when they’re in this strategic competition with the United States.”

Is this just a coalition of the sanctioned?

One other thing these countries have in common is that they’re all the target of a US-led economic sanctions regime, and extremely eager to find ways to overturn that regime. Putin, in particular, has been keen to develop a global payment system as an alternative to the dollar, which he argues the US uses as a political weapon.

Some experts argue that it’s actually US economic pressure that has created the axis.

“This is an alliance of United States’ making,” says Vali Nasr, professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “It’s not that these countries have natural affinities or strategic convergence. But going back several presidents, the US has basically followed the same strategy against all these countries at the same time in a way that brings them together.”

For example, a so-called “shadow fleet” of opaquely registered and insured oil tankers that has emerged to transport Russian and Iranian oil around the world, including to China, effectively creating a parallel global oil market.

Others question whether the four countries should really be grouped together this way. “I don’t think it’s a useful construct, because our relationship with Russia is very different from our relationship with China,” said Eugene Rumer, director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment and a critic of the axis concept. “In order to deal with these countries effectively, the threats that they pose to us, I think we need to look at them in a more disaggregated manner.”

Framing global politics as a competition between ideologically opposed blocs also risks raising the ire of non-Western democracies such as India, Brazil, and South Africa, all of whom have also sought to maintain good relations with Washington.

Some would say that’s the point: a country like South Africa can’t claim to uphold international law when it comes to Gaza while also effectively helping to enable Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

But leaders of these countries, suffice it to say, don’t see it that way. “Many insist on dividing the world into friends and enemies. But the most vulnerable are not interested in simplistic dichotomies,” Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said at a recent BRICS summit.

Kendall-Taylor acknowledged that US economic pressure and other pressures may have deepened ties between the axis countries, but asked, “What would have been the alternatives to the US policies that were pursued? When Russia invades Ukraine, should we not sanction them?”

Even if these countries form a coherent grouping today, many don’t expect it to last.

Rumer points at the Russian-Iran relationship as an example of the fragility of ties between these countries. The recently signed partnership between the two countries is notably not a mutual defense agreement — they’re under no obligation to help each other if they come under attack. In fact, it’s more or less an open secret that Russia, which operated air defense systems in Syria, tolerated Israeli air strikes against Iranian assets and proxies in that country for years.

“If I were Iran, I certainly wouldn’t count on Russia to be a reliable protector if, say, the United States and Israel decide it’s time to strike Iranian nuclear facilities,” Rumer said.

Complicating the discussion of the future of the CRINKs axis is the arrival of a new US president with a very different approach. In the last weeks of his presidency, President Joe Biden approved a classified national security memorandum, which reportedly lays out the threat posed by cooperation between the four countries — including efforts to interfere in America’s elections — and proposed measures to combat them.

Critics of the Biden administration often argued that for all the former president’s invocations of a struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, and upholding international law, it often fell short of those ideals in, for example, its support of the war in Gaza or its relationship with Saudi Arabia.

Trump, on the other hand, is unlikely to refer to these ideals at all. Noting the administration’s early decisions to pull out of the Paris climate agreements and the World Health Organization, Kendall-Taylor said that during Trump’s first term, “we really didn’t have people present in the UN and a lot of the committees where a lot of important business is done. And we ceded a lot of that space to China and other countries that might be sympathetic to their vision for the future.”

Some of Trump’s advisers are also inherently skeptical of taking on all four of these countries at once. Sometimes referred to as “prioritizers,” they argue that the US needs to extract itself from conflicts with Russia in Europe and Iran in the Middle East to focus on the real threat: China.

“Is it in America’s interest, are we going to put in the time, the treasure, the resources that we need in the Pacific right now badly?” national security adviser Mike Waltz said at a recent event, referring to US support for Ukraine.

During his first term, Trump famously “fell in love” with Kim during their unusual nuclear diplomacy, and for all his China-bashing rhetoric, often touted his good working relationship with Xi and pushed for a trade deal with Beijing. As he enters his second, he’s seeking a deal with Russia and Ukraine to end the war, and hasn’t ruled out seeking a new nuclear deal with Iran, despite the fact that he pulled out of the last nuclear deal during his first term.

Nasr, who served as a senior adviser on Afghanistan in President Barack Obama’s State Department, pointed to Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon’s outreach to China during the Cold War as an example of how the US could seek to divide its adversaries rather than continuing to unite them.

“We’ve been following a kind of a moralistic, simplistic view that is based on casting your enemies sort of in the most negative light, which they may deserve, but that’s not strategy,” he said. “The clever strategy would be to say, ‘Okay, what incentive could get Iran to separate itself from Russia?’”

There are certainly fissures within the group. The Chinese-North Korean relationship — so close it’s been traditionally referred to as like “lips and teeth,” has reportedly been strained by the North Koreans’ deepening relations with Russia; Russian leaders are clearly uneasy about their growing economic reliance on China, but don’t have much choice in the matter as long as they keep pursuing the costly war in Ukraine. Exploiting those fissures to the US’s benefit is another matter.

Van Praagh is skeptical. “There’s not going to be any separating Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China,” he said. “And there’s not going to be any separating Russia from Iran and North Korea, because it needs their material support right now.”

Rather than compromising on Ukraine to focus on China, he argues that the outcome of the Ukraine war is what will determine whether China feels it can have its way in Taiwan. “We really have to achieve Ukrainian victory, and that means pushing Russia out of Ukraine, and that, in and of itself, is going to provide incredible opportunities to the whole world,” he said.

Of course, Trump has also expressed some sympathy toward Russia’s position that NATO was encroaching on its sphere of influence in Ukraine. And his position on the importance of defending Taiwan’s sovereignty has been pretty noncommittal. His rhetoric on Greenland and Panama and extreme hardball approach to an immigration dispute with Colombia suggests his views of spheres of influence might parallel Russia and China’s in some ways. As Yaroslav Trofimov of the Wall Street Journal wrote in a recent essay, “Today the concept of a rules-based international order looks more and more utopian.” We may instead be returning to a 19th-century style global order in which “empires recognized each other’s spheres of influence worldwide, including the right to oppress and dominate less powerful countries and peoples within those spheres.”

In other words, failing to defeat the axis, or divide it, the US may simply end up joining it.

The simmering showdown between US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the leadership of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has finally boiled over.

The White House said on Wednesday that CDC director Susan Monarez was fired — and Monarez’s representatives quickly responded that she wouldn’t leave her post without a fight. In protest of the ousting and Kennedy’s leadership, four senior CDC leaders resigned.

The tension had been building for months. Once Kennedy took the helm of the US Department of Health and Human Services, he laid off thousands of workers at the CDC and other health agencies. He has rolled back longstanding vaccine policies over the objections of many experts inside and outside of the CDC. Then, earlier this month, a man angry about the Covid-19 vaccines fired nearly 200 bullets into a CDC office building. Although no one was hurt, CDC workers criticized Kennedy and others for stoking anti-CDC sentiment and for not speaking out after the incident. President Donald Trump has still not publicly commented on the shooting.

The final straw came yesterday when the Food and Drug Administration announced limited approval of new Covid vaccines updated to better match the variants currently circulating. The FDA approved the new shots — but only for the elderly and people who are at higher risk because of underlying health conditions. The vaccines had previously been approved for all Americans 6 months of age and older. The CDC would have been expected to make new Covid vaccine recommendations that matched the FDA’s narrower approval, excluding healthy adults, pregnant women, and children — but, according to the New York Times, Monarez refused to commit to that policy in a private meeting with Kennedy

What happened next was chaos. National news outlets reported Wednesday afternoon that Monarez had been fired, less than a month after her Senate confirmation. Over the next few hours, Monarez’s representatives responded that she was refusing to step down (her attorney suggests that her firing had been illegal), but the White House insisted she had, in fact, been terminated. And so began an exodus of more CDC leaders.

One of those officials — Demetre Daskalakis, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases — explained why he was leaving the agency in a post on X. He portrayed the CDC situation as an existential battle between science and anti-science, noting in his post that no one on his team had ever even briefed Kennedy since he was sworn in as US health secretary in April.

“I am unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health,” Daskalakis wrote. “Public health is not merely about the health of the individual, but it is about the health of the community, the nation, the world. The nation’s health security is at risk and is in the hands of people focusing on ideological self-interest.”

The CDC that will be left behind will be less science-driven and more beholden to Kennedy and his agenda — precisely the warning that the departing CDC officials are trying to send and a sentiment echoed by other public health organizations. “THE SUSTAINED ATTACKS ON PUBLIC HEALTH IN THE U.S. MUST END NOW,” read an all-caps statement sent by the Infectious Disease Society of America to the media.

But there’s a bigger story here than just the latest drama under Kennedy’s leadership: What’s unfolding is a fight over the narrative of public health in America — and for the public’s trust.

The American public is still unmoored after the Covid-19 pandemic, and two sides are trying to win out: Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement along with the critics who attacked the public health establishment during that emergency, and the public health experts aligned with America’s scientific institutions. The outcome will determine the future of collective health in the US.

Kennedy argues that the public health establishment of the previous generation has failed the public and must be razed and replaced. If you look at the recent CDC personnel issues through this lens, then dismissing public health officials with decades of experience in their field is in service of that goal. On the other side, most scientists, public health experts, and CDC officials would argue that public health largely has a record of success — though with some mistakes and failures along the way.

America’s public health institutions did lose some trust during the pandemic amid confusing and often inconsistent guidance. But a longer record of vaccinations driving down disease and other public health campaigns yielding major gains in people’s well-being is clear from historical data and decades of peer-reviewed research.

Science may be on the CDC officials’ side, but we’re still learning exactly how the public actually feels about public health. How average people react to this drama and the conflicting messages that Kennedy and CDC officials are sending will determine the long-term consequences of this fight.

How does the public really feel about public health?

This parade of firings and principled resignations is in part a performance — and the audience is the American public.

As I have written before, 25 years ago, there was a pretty clear public health consensus in America. The federal government and major medical organizations were usually aligned on the major questions — questions like which vaccines to get. And the public was widely in support. In 2001, around the time the US declared measles had been eradicated, more than 90 percent of US adults said it was “extremely” or “very important” for people to get childhood vaccinations.

It is difficult to imagine such unanimity about any public health-related issue today.

Right now, the percentage of Americans who think childhood immunizations are important is below 70 percent. According to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, only 26 percent of Americans have a great deal of faith in scientists to act in the best interests of the public, about the same percentage as those who say they have not too much or none at all (23 percent). That is much lower than in 2019, the pre-pandemic era, when 36 percent of Americans said they had a great deal of faith in science being in the public’s best interest and only 12 percent had none or little.

Most Americans are stuck in the middle; 50 percent say they have a “fair” amount of trust in scientists. One way to think about this group is that they are up for grabs.

Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement has gained steam because many Americans desire a fresh approach to health and wellness; Kennedy remains one of the more popular active political figures in the country, despite criticism from all corners of the public health establishment. As the country’s top health official, Kennedy argues he has a mandate to overhaul public health policy on everything from vaccines, to the food supply, to fluoride in public water systems.

But the health risks of Kennedy’s policy agenda are real, and that is the message that public health experts, including the resigning CDC leaders, are trying to deliver to the public.

The US has already seen what happens when childhood vaccination rates drop, with the worst measles outbreak in 30 years taking hold this year in a poorly vaccinated Texas community. Dentists in Utah, where Kennedy helped herald the removal of fluoride from local water systems in April, are preparing for a surge in cavities. The introduction of fluoride into US water systems led to a large decline in cavities over many years; now, Kennedy’s policy agenda could move the country backward.

And now, the new restrictions on Covid vaccines announced yesterday could make it more difficult for many people to get them. Vaccines may not be as widely available at pharmacies, and insurers may not be willing to cover the vaccine without government approval. That could make it harder for both vulnerable people and their loved ones to get Covid shots. The science is clear on the relative safety of the Covid shots, and Kennedy has been criticized for the weak evidence that he has cited to justify the changes to the Covid vaccine guidance. People could get sick if these shots are harder to come by because of Kennedy’s policies.

This is always a challenge in public health.

Short of emergency lockdowns and mandates, public health has always been about soft power: Can you persuade the public to take certain precautions in the best interest of not only themselves but the people around them? And that authority is always fluctuating. Around 90 percent of Americans get their childhood shots, but less than 50 percent usually get their flu shot in a given year.

Now, the headwinds facing good public health policy are stronger than ever, with Kennedy and his movement representing an active opponent of many well-supported public health interventions in charge of US health policy. For a while, Monerez, Daskalakis, and others seemed prepared to try to work within the system that Kennedy controlled. But they no longer believe that is possible, so they are taking the fight to the public.