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.

South Park is back, and the show’s creators are going full force on their jabs at the Trump administration. Three episodes in, the show’s world-building centers fully around President Donald Trump and the colorful characters in his administration, with scathing parodies of figures like Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Vice President JD Vance.

While Matt Stone and Trey Parker are known for directing crude jokes at Democrats and Republicans alike, South Park’s latest season is already hitting record ratings with an especially unrestrained critique of the Trump administration. Since the new season launched, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers has tried to dismiss the jabs, saying that South Park “hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention.”

South Park’s latest season is launching in the context of interesting times for Comedy Central’s parent company, Paramount Pictures. Paramount has been under intense scrutiny from the Trump administration after settling a lawsuit with the Trump administration over their news magazine show 60 Minutes. Since then, the Trump administration oversaw Paramount’s deal with Skydance, which requires CBS to hire an ombudsman to root out “bias” at the network.

Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Brian Stelter, chief media analyst at CNN, about how South Park’s latest season is taking aim at the Trump administration, and how the show’s creators are navigating the context of their parent company seemingly buckling under the Trump administration’s scrutiny.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Are you now, or have you ever been, a fan of South Park?

I would call myself a passive South Park fan. If I saw it on Comedy Central, I would enjoy it. But now, in the past month, I am an active fan. I’m seeking out new episodes.This show has defied the odds. It’s almost 30 years old and suddenly more relevant than ever.

How did it defy the odds?

By speaking truth to the ultimate power right now. You know, the creators of South Park have always hated bullies, and they seem to believe Trump is the biggest bully of them all. The very premise of the first episode of this new season is about Trump targeting the media.The character Eric Cartman is angry that NPR has been forced off the air. From the very first seconds of the new season, you know that this show has something to say.

You also see how South Park Elementary is being transformed due to Trump’s actions. This is a dramatic exaggeration of what’s happening in real life, but it is true. When Trump is introduced in the show, you see him fighting with the Prime Minister of Canada over tariffs. But most memorably you see him getting in bed with Satan.

I’m gonna use some words I don’t typically use on the show right now to describe that particular scene, because Trump derobes. Before you even see who he is about to get into bed with, we see that he has a micro penis. How do they follow that up?

The most ruthless jokes in the second episode were about Kristi Noem. They were about that old scandal involving her shooting a dog on her farm. You saw her over and over again in this episode shooting at dogs. This episode was really personal in the way it targeted Noem, showing her face maybe falling apart, pushing this idea that she was overusing Botox or other face fillers. Also, there’s the idea that she cares so much about photo ops and PR, she’s always out there dressing up in various outfits, posing for photos and videos. And as always, there are elements of truth to these critiques or satires.

It is true that Noem has tried really hard to be front and center, very visible, playing to the cameras, going out on tours, appearing in the field, showing that she’s doing the work, so to speak.

Noem did not take this episode in stride. She said, “It’s so lazy to make fun of women and how they look.” For Noem, this was personal, this was ugly. And she wanted to be on the record about it.

Is this the first time this show has gone after Donald Trump and his administration?

No, but it is by far the most direct, the most vicious. Back during Trump’s first term in office, there was this storyline where one of the teachers at the school, Mr. Garrison, was becoming president and over time acting more and more Trump-like. This served as a way for the creators of South Park to ridicule Trump and to speak out about some of his behaviors and conduct in the first term. But this was not nearly as direct or aggressive as what we’re seeing now.

I guess it’s not that big a surprise that South Park would go after Donald Trump when he is Donald Trumping harder than he is ever Donald Trumped before.
Yes.
But they’re not even sparing their parent company in these new episodes, right?

Matt and Trey are like a lot of creators in that they love to poke fun at the parent company when they can. The timing of this new season has been really extraordinary because Paramount was in the final days of this protracted, politically tortured merger approval process when the new season premiered.

So you literally had this anti-Trump episode, sticking it to the administration, putting the president in bed with Satan, airing on cable at the same time that the administration is having to review and approve this merger.

The second episode of the season aired on a Wednesday, and then on a Thursday the new Paramount took shape. The merged company, Paramount and Skydance, came together. There was this big formal press conference on Thursday around lunchtime in New York City and the new CEO David Ellison took questions from media reporters about his grand hopes and dreams about this new company.

I said to him, “So what about this South Park problem? You know, what are you gonna do about this problem? Do you view it as a problem?” Ellison’s response was really telling. He started out by saying he’s a huge fan of the show. He’s been a fan of South Park for his entire adult life. He’s 42, and he then went on to praise Matt and Trey as being really unique, talented creators. And he said to me, they are equal opportunity offenders, and they always have been.

So I think Ellison was saying: They’re not just targeting Trump because they’re a bunch of lefties who wanna attack the Republicans. They have always called out people on the left and on the right. They’re equal opportunity offenders. I think he was trying to differentiate South Park from late night shows like The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, which was recently canceled. I think he was trying to say, these two creators are special. They are one of a kind, and they’re gonna be protected by Paramount.

Obviously the other context here is the new owners of Paramount had just struck a five-year deal to exclusively stream South Park on the Paramount Plus streaming service. This five-year deal is worth well over a billion dollars. For the creators of South Park and for their production company, this is a huge vote of confidence in South Park as a tent pole of the future of Paramount. The whole idea makes a lot of sense when you think about it. South Park has a library of 325 episodes going back to the 1990s. This is a really valuable library in the streaming era, because people like to go back and watch episodes from 10 or 20 years ago. These episodes have a really long shelf life. That’s why Paramount was willing to fork over so much cash.

I think this might be where some people get confused, because you’ve got everyone from Brown University to Meta to CBS and Paramount settling with the president, making donations to the president’s inaugural committee. And then you’ve got Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who work for CBS or do business with Paramount Plus, not only going for the president, not only making fun of his administration, his own manhood, but making literally a billion dollars while doing it. How are they able to get away with something that seemingly no one else is right now?

This might be a case of business actually trumping politics. For the Paramount Plus streaming service, loud franchises like South Park are crucial. They’re more important now than they were 10 years ago, and they might even be more important 10 years from now.

They are the foundation of the house that David Ellison’s trying to build. and he can’t compromise. The difference here between South Park and Stephen Colbert is that The Late Show was losing money. So, yeah, Stephen Colbert is a staunch critic of President Trump, one of the loudest Trump critics on TV. He’s been canceled. A lot of his fans worry it’s for political reasons. CBS says it’s purely for financial reasons, and in a way, South Park actually affirms the CBS claim.

Paramount keeps putting out press releases touting how well South Park is doing. The show is beating some of its very old records on cable. But more importantly, if you add up the cable audience and the streaming audience, you’re seeing 5, 6, 7 million viewers tuning in for these new episodes. Those are the kinds of numbers that almost any creator would kill for, certainly creators of animated comedies.

If the world has had enough of helping others, then somebody forgot to tell Spain.

Yes, Spain. The same country that, a little more than a decade ago, desperately accepted billions in bailout money from its European neighbors to keep its economy afloat. That Spain is now doing something almost unthinkable. It’s ramping up aid spending just as the United States notoriously retreats. And in the process, Spain is trying to remind the world why we give back in the first place.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) — the world’s largest humanitarian aid donor by far, whose work in recent years saved upward of a million lives per year — was officially dismantled earlier this month. Its scattered remains were subsumed by the State Department and its empty headquarters given to the FBI. But America isn’t the only one putting itself first these days. The UK, France, Belgium, and Germany all slashed their development budgets this year thanks to a wave of right-wing populism painting foreign aid as an unnecessary expense against the national interest.

The crisis is steep. The pot of money going to global development is set to shrink by 17 percent, or $35 billion, in 2025, on top of a $21 billion drop the year before, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That’s a $56 billion funding vacuum where global aid for mosquito nets, vaccine research, and food assistance used to be. And the declines are likely to become even steeper in the years ahead, as cuts in the US take full effect.

But while President Donald Trump was gutting USAID, Spain made moves to rebuild its aid agency and committed to more than doubling its aid budget by 2030. Nor is it alone: Ireland, South Korea, and Italy also all made recent pledges to boost their foreign aid budgets.

It’s far from enough to fill the foreign aid gap, however. And while the pain will fall primarily on impoverished recipient countries, foreign aid doesn’t just help the countries that receive it. It helps everyone.

Diseases and conflict don’t recognize legal borders and aid helps keep these deadly problems at bay. Every $100 million spent on preventing tuberculosis, HIV, and malaria helps prevent about 2.2 million new infections total. And global cuts are already expected to exacerbate the spread of diseases; former USAID officials anticipate cuts from the US alone could cause 28,000 new cases of infectious diseases like Ebola and Marburg each year. “Even if you’re in this isolationist mindset, you can’t actually isolate yourself from the rest of the world,” said Rachael Calleja, a research fellow at the Center for Global Development.

The fact that some countries have managed to fight the impulse to isolate — convincing their citizens that problems abroad are interconnected with our problems at home — could help reshape the future of aid for the better. Their decisions point to the possibility of a new future for foreign aid that could be more collaborative and less paternalistic than before.

Aid has long been dominated by a small club of wealthy nations — chief among them the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom — that give the most, and in doing so, set the tone for how to help the rest of the world. Too often these well-intentioned solutions perpetuated the same exploitative power dynamics that made poor countries poor and one-time colonial powers like Spain and Italy rich in the first place. Western aid often comes with strings attached, like forcing Mali to privatize its cotton industry or requiring that funds be spent on consultants and supplies from the donor country — even though such policies have been shown to make aid less effective and much more expensive.

Ready or not, the old club’s grip on global influence is now breaking down.

”Nobody who works in development sat around saying, ‘The system is great. We’re awesome. Let’s just spend more money to do more of the same,’” said Dean Karlan, who was, until recently, the chief economist at USAID. “There is a blank slate. Let’s put in place a better system.”

Why are some countries bucking the trend?

Spain, Ireland, Italy, and South Korea are all increasing aid — but most have a lot of room for growth.

The United Nations set a lofty goal in the 1970s for wealthy countries to give away 0.7 percent of their gross national income (GNI) as development assistance. Half a century later, almost none do.

That includes this year’s overachievers. Ireland spent 0.57 percent of its GNI — $2.47 billion — on development aid last year. Spain spent 0.25 percent or $4.35 billion, and Italy, 0.28 percent or $6.67 billion. South Korea spent 0.21 percent or $3.94 billion.

It’s not a lot, especially compared to the $63.3 billion the US spent in 2024, although that only added up to 0.22 percent of its GNI. But these countries are moving forward at a time when everyone else seems to be moving backward. According to the global development consultancy SEEK Development’s donor tracker, the US is now projected to spend just 0.13 percent of its GNI on overseas aid this year.

There is a growing recognition that someone has to fill the gaps left by the US, but everybody balks at the price tag, Arturo Angulo Urarte, a Madrid-based development expert, said in Spanish. “It’s like, ‘Yes, but gosh, and how much does that mean? Oh, it means money? Well, then no.’”

Spain’s aid increase, however, has been a long time coming. Spanish activists launched a kind of Occupy Wall Street in favor of overseas aid back in the 1990s. A group of global development workers and grassroots activists staged hunger strikes and protest encampments, chaining themselves to government buildings to demand that Spain give at least 0.7 percent of its GNI to aid. At the time, Spain was giving around 0.24 percent of its GNI to aid, but the protests helped propel the country to double its commitment to a high of nearly 0.5 percent in 2008.

Then the 2008 economic turmoil left Spain once again with a wisp of an foreign aid budget. By the time its economy crawled closer to pre-crisis levels in 2015, its development spending had cratered to 0.12 percent of GNI.

But the idea of Spain becoming a bigger player in global development never really left the public consciousness, remaining broadly popular even during the country’s worst financial straits. In 2023 the country passed a law promising to rebuild its aid agency and bump up spending to 0.7 percent of GNI by 2030 — effectively tripling its current rate.

Spain has since increased its aid budget to about 0.25 percent of its GNI, or $4.4 billion last year — roughly $490 million more than it spent the year prior at 0.24 percent of its GNI — and says it will continue to give more in the year ahead. That’s more money for climate resilience projects in Morocco and Algeria, LGBTQ rights in Paraguay, and HPV vaccine campaigns across Latin America and the Caribbean.

The dismantling of USAID has destroyed longstanding and hard-won infrastructure for implementing aid programs, especially in critical areas like HIV prevention. There’s little that anyone can do to bring that infrastructure back, but countries like Spain, Ireland, or South Korea have been able to uplift and increase funding to the initiatives most affected by the cuts, like Gavi, the international vaccine alliance, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Ireland also aims to increase its aid spending to 0.7 percent of GNI by 2030. It inched closer to that goal this year by boosting its development budget by about $40 million to $925 million. “We wouldn’t expect Ireland to be able to fill the USAID gap in any shape or form,” Jane-Ann McKenna, who heads Dóchas, an umbrella group for Irish development organizations, said. “But that’s where our positioning and our voice becomes more important.”

That said, foreign aid has always been about more than just charity. It’s a geopolitical tool that countries have used for decades to win friends and influence people.

It’s no coincidence that, according to a 2006 study, US aid increased about 59 percent to nations when they temporarily joined the UN Security Council. The birth of PEPFAR — the HIV/AIDS program that saves around a million lives per year, which makes it perhaps America’s most effective ever form of foreign aid — helped boost public opinion of the US across sub-Saharan Africa. Much of Italy’s recent aid budget has gone to its $6 billion Mattei Plan in Africa, which aims to collaboratively influence the continent’s energy development and migration flows, but which some critics contend recreates old colonial patterns by relying too heavily on European priorities — not local expertise — to decide where the money ought to go and how its vision should take shape.

But if you take countries like Ireland and Spain at their word, their approach to foreign aid is not just about soft power anymore. These countries also have something in common that can differentiate them from other larger donors: recent histories of underdevelopment. Some of the newcomers might have been aid recipients rather than donors just a few decades ago.

South Korea received billions in foreign aid in the decades after the Korean War, which helped it grow to the point where it became the first former recipient to join OECD’s forum for major aid providers in 2010. Spain’s wealthier neighbors offered the country major financial support when it began integrating with Europe in the 1980s in the aftermath of the Franco dictatorship.

That dynamic can make it easier, Calleja says, to empathize with others who need aid today. (Though let’s not forget that Spain once colonized much of Latin America and the Caribbean — places that now receive the bulk of Spanish foreign aid — and therefore laid the groundwork for many patterns of exploitation and inequality there that its aid now seeks to resolve.)

Ireland was never a colonizer, but was once colonized itself by Britain. That legacy, McKenna said, means that many Irish people are passionate about human rights abroad and highly supportive of overseas aid.

“We have the history of the famine and we’ve had conflict on the island and we’ve had to engage in a whole peace process ourselves,” McKenna explained. “That’s there in the background of all of our psyches.”

As these smaller players like to say, it’s about “solidarity.” Spain’s own development agency’s four-year plan mentions the word solidarity 84 times. It explicitly calls for a move away from the old model, where wealthy nations dictated terms to grateful recipients, and toward a more equitable and collaborative model built on shared priorities and mutual respect.

Of course, not everybody is buying it.

Henry Morales is an economist and director of the Movimiento Tzuk Kim-Pop, a Guatemalan human rights group. He let out a little laugh when I asked him about Spain’s solidarity plan. After all, he’s seen foreign funders renege on their promises before.

He’s seen European powers pledge numerous times to do more to promote climate resilience in low-income countries before watching them give up when the politics become too difficult. Spain’s plan for development stresses that it aims to approach its funding priorities — like combating climate change and promoting gender equality — from a place of consistency and genuine partnership, the kind that can’t be abandoned on a whim when a new government takes power.

Whether Spain’s plan represents a form of global reparations or just colonialism with better PR remains to be seen, he said, but regardless, the old top-down model is clearly cracking.

Countries who receive aid now want “a voice and a vote, so that the decisions are no longer made by a private club of the big donors, the big traditional financiers,” he said. “But by debates and global agreements that are much more transparent and much more democratic.”

Fifty countries in the Global South now have their own agencies to exchange ideas, technical advice, and reciprocal funds for solving poverty, fighting climate change, and improving education.

Ensuring that recipients have a big say in how aid gets around is not only good for building a better, more democratic system — it can also make it much more efficient. According to Vox’s previous reporting in 2022, aid programs tend to work better when people from the countries they’re targeting play a big role in directing how and where the money’s used. Morales thinks that kind of collaboration is the real future of aid, which he prefers to see not as charity but as “simply the fair distribution of wealth.”

He’s not the only one who thinks so. The director-general of the World Trade Organization, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, called foreign aid “a thing of the past” at a meeting with African leaders in February.

For his part, Karlan, the former USAID economist, doesn’t think USAID will ever come back as the acronym or institution it once was, and although that’s mostly a very bad thing, he sees a flicker of opportunity.

Still, he isn’t sure if he believes that a real change to the aid paradigm is afoot. “Solidarity strikes me as a little bit of a softer way of saying soft power,” he mused, even if countries like Spain or Ireland aren’t necessarily “looking for flyover rights for the military.”

What he is sure of is that the US is moving in a very different direction. If Spain’s soft power is softening, then the United States’ is calcifying into something more toxic, more transactional, and — as Karlan likes to add — less efficient than before.

“Imagine a marriage in which you never did something considerate for your partner just because you cared about them,” he said. Instead, everything is a negotiation. “That isn’t a healthy relationship. What we’re risking is losing these long-term relationships, those long-term friendships.”

By the time the US is ready to reopen the door on them, it may find a world that has already moved on.