One nation, under God, divisible: Charlie Kirk’s memorial

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1:05The Economist.

1:12Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Rosie Bloor. And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

1:27For decades we've vilified the sun, terrified that its rays will burn our skin and give us cancer. Now, some scientists are saying we've taken that anxiety too far. Could the future be a little, well, brighter? And many a pop tune has been written about terrible men. They lie, they cheat, they steal hearts. But listen to the annoyed songstresses of today. More and more, they don't sing about evil men, but rather about pretentious, immature, mediocre men.

2:04But first...

2:24God's love was revealed to me on the very day my husband was murdered. On the afternoon of September 10th, I arrived at a Utah hospital to do the unthinkable, to look directly at my husband's murdered body. Tens of thousands of people came to Glendale, Arizona on Sunday to pay their respects to the murdered right-wing activist, Charlie Kirk. On the cross, our Savior said, Father, forgive them for they not know what they do. That man, that young man, I forgive him. I think one of the more interesting parts of the day was the contrast between Erica Kirk's speech, Charlie Kirk's widow, and that of President Trump.

3:31Erin Braun is our West Coast correspondent. After she spoke, the president takes the stage, and he had this moment where he said, Charlie didn't hate his political opponents. He disagreed with them, and he wanted to talk to them. But I'm not like that. I hate my opponents. And he kind of giggled, and the whole crowd laughed. And it was just this really striking contrast between Erica Kirk and the message she was trying to send and the president's nature and how he can't help but in those moments needle his political opponents.

4:21Mr. Trump then has seen is seizing a political opportunity. The administration has said it wants to go after left-leaning NGOs claiming they foment political violence. He and his officials speak openly of shutting down people and networks that criticize him. There's a dark irony here. One of Mr. Kirk's most dearly held notions was that of free speech, and he was free till the last to share his divisive, combative, often bigoted worldview. Our digital editor, Adam Roberts, reflected on how a political killing looks likely to have deep political implications. So what I took away from this was that this was as much a political rally as it was a memorial for Charlie Kirk.

5:06So the two contrasting styles at this event, there was the widow of Charlie Kirk, Erica Kirk, who spoke of forgiveness and talked of the great sadness, of course, that she felt. She was very moving as she spoke about having to go and observe the body of her late husband. And then on the other side, there was the political faction, the Donald Trump speech. Often dozens of police officers were needed to prevent left-wing violence. And the violence comes largely from the left. You don't hear that from too many people, do you? There was talk of hate. There was talk of war. And so you had Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, saying this is not a political war.

5:45This is not a cultural war. This is a spiritual war. Stephen Miller, who's the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, he spoke of his enemies who couldn't comprehend our strength. There was really forceful confrontational talk from the political figures in the hall. Just picking up on the notion of it being a spiritual war, what do you make of the religious aspect of this in the midst of what you would describe as very much like a political rally? Yeah, it was really striking. Of course, this was a Sunday in Arizona. It was around 70 ,000 people gathered in one great big space. So it was not surprising there was a religious aspect to it.

6:20But the level of religiosity, the speaking of Charlie Kirk as a martyr, the endless references to the spiritual war and so on, you couldn't help but conclude from that that there is some potential interest in doubling down on the Christian nature of Charlie Kirk's legacy and perhaps using Christian messaging for political ends as well. You see a lot of evangelicals in the administration, a lot of talk, not from Donald Trump so much, but a lot of talk from other figures in the administration of the importance of referring to God and to Christianity. And it may be that we see that as a theme coming in the months ahead for political ends as well.

6:56And it's almost crass even to ask, but we see the effect of this already in what the administration is doing. There seems to be a number of actions already in the name of Charlie Kirk, in the name of this event, that further the administration's agenda. Yeah, absolutely. It's been barely 10 days since Charlie Kirk was killed. We've seen enough examples of attempts to close down the space for critics to talk about Charlie Kirk. We've seen Brendan Carr at the FCC threaten to take away the licenses of broadcasters who are hosting comedians, for example. called Jimmy Kimmel, who said things the administration doesn't like the sound of.

7:34But frankly, when you see stuff like this, I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or, you know, there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead. So we've seen enough talk of threats to the supposed left-wing conspiracy that was behind the suspect who killed Charlie Kirk to say that Trump wants to go and turn against open society and the Ford Foundation and other movements on the left, who there's absolutely no evidence at all to suggest they had anything to do with political violence.

8:12And yet those in the administration now think this is an opportunity potentially to weaken them or to constrain what they do. About that narrative, though, of left-wing violence, there is certainly far more political violence than there should be in America, but the alignment of it, that has come into question since this event. Yeah, so Donald Trump talks about the left being responsible for political violence in America and says he's going to turn on his opponents and crack down on them. The truth is, if you look at rates of political violence, there's not much difference between support for political violence, whether you're on the left or on the right.

8:45There are more examples of people who lean politically rightwards who actually conduct political violence. But perhaps the most striking thing is the misperception of political violence so that those on the left perceive that those on the right support the use of it. And equally, those on the right perceive that those on the left support the use of violence. And that perception is completely wrong. Generally, Americans don't support the use of political violence, even though it is rising. It seems like the story that we're laying out here is that the administration is using Charlie Kirk's murder to some degree as political cover to do what it wants to push a narrative which is not always supported by the facts, let's say.

9:26How long do you think that lasts? How long does the Paul of Charlie Kirk's death give them room to move? It's hard to predict exactly how long, but I think it's clear that there's very powerful emotions felt in America right now. There's some who talk of the fear of civil war. There are people deeply, deeply upset by the murder. And the Republicans can use this emotion right now to do a host of things. And this would include getting people to sign up and to register as Republicans. It can be to use them at elections to turn out and participate in the democratic process. And as a matter of fact, as people were filing out of the stadium in Phoenix, volunteers from Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk's movement, were going up to people and saying, have you registered to vote?

10:13But more cynically, you could say this could give you a justification to do certain things that would weaken the democratic process. So if you look at what is going on anyway and was happening long before the Charlie Kirk murder, you look at the attempts to do gerrymandering in places like Texas and all over the country, actually, gerrymandering which can be done by both parties but generally favors the Republicans more. This is a part of the process to make America a less democratic place. And you can get political cover for doing that sort of thing because people are riled up, people are emotional, people are very upset by this political murder.

10:49And so the fear is that there will be some steps to come. There'll be some movements in the coming months which can be justified in part by the very, very high emotions that are being felt at the moment. So clearly we don't know where this chapter of the story ends, but what seems clear is given choice between, as you say, a more united polity and a more divided one for the moment. We have an even more divided one. Yeah, so Donald Trump spoke about hating his opponents. He talked about them, they who cheat like dogs. He talked about investigating networks of radical left maniacs. He was very clearly saying this is not an individual who was responsible for what happened.

11:31This is a broader movement, a nebulous movement you can't define very clearly, but it's them, it's the opponents you should rally against. Remember, Donald Trump is actually very unpopular across America's political spectrum. He's on minus 17 points. He's much less popular than in his first term. So what he has to do is to rally his base. He has to unite the Republicans who still are broadly in his favor around him. And creating an enemy, creating them to charge against, is a very effective way of doing that. So his goal here is clearly to divide us versus them. And he's ready to go to some quite dark places to do that.

12:10Adam, thanks very much for your time. You're welcome.

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13:38For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, today is an important date. It's the autumnal equinox. That means that days are shorter than nights and our preoccupation with sunlight begins. Listen to public health recommendations for the past few decades and you might think that was a good thing. We've been told to avoid the sun, seek shade, cover up and use sun cream. But now some are questioning whether we've taken that advice too far. So there's this intriguing and growing body of research that is starting to suggest that the benefits of being exposed to sunlight may be bigger than we thought and may in some circumstances outweigh the risks.

14:19Tim Cross is a senior science writer. So this includes things like it may be protective against things like heart disease, autoimmune diseases, possibly even cancer. I don't think anyone's going so far as to say you should definitely seek it out and get sunburned but there is a sense that the balance of harms and benefits is maybe just starting to shift. And what's the research really showing about the benefits of sunlight? So the study that really caught my eye was one that was published last year and it was done on about a third of a million people in the UK and it found a strong association whereby the more sunlight you got, the more ultraviolet radiation you were exposed to, the lower your risk of dying of any cause during the duration of the study.

15:04So if you lived in the south of the UK, which is by British standards, the sunny bit, as opposed to the north in Scotland, you had about a 12 % lower risk of dying of anything. And really interestingly, if you were a regular user of sunbeds, tanning salons, which the health advice will tell you, you should definitely not do, then your risk was 15 % lower. And that was the case even when you take into account the fact that, you know, more sunlight will mean more skin cancer. And one reason that was interesting is it fits with the results of another big study that was done about a decade earlier, this time in Sweden, which followed about 30 ,000 Swedish women for 20 years.

15:41And they found exactly the same relationship where the more exposure to sun those women reported, the lower their risk of dying, even after they corrected for everything they could think to correct for wealth and health and age and previous illness and so on. And in fact, in the Swedish study, the people who are sort of the most committed sun seekers, they died over the course of the study at about half the rate of people who avoided it. Wow, so that really is very much counter to what we'd been told before. Tim, we know that a lot of studies are done on white people. What happens if you've got darker skin?

16:15This is sort of the nub of it. And when you go and look at the sort of evolutionary background to all this, evolution is kind of giving us two messages here, which is that too much sunlight is definitely bad for you and that's why people whose background is in tropical countries where the sun is fierce all year round they tend to have quite dark skin pigment called melanin will block a lot of the ultraviolet radiation stop a lot of the dna damage that causes skin cancer but then when humans when sort of ancient humans migrated out of africa and started settling in places like northern europe and north asia where the sun is much less fierce and particularly in the winter there was a very very strong evolutionary pressure one of the strongest that we know of in the history of the human genome to evolve light skin to let more of the sunlight in.

16:58So this is one of the things that influences the debate. The question of the harms and benefits of sunlight, it depends on where you live. It also depends on what your background is. And Tim, you've talked about sunlight, but you've also mentioned sunbeds intriguingly. Is it really the sun that we need here? We've known for a long time that there's at least one big benefit that you get from exposure to the sun, which is vitamin D. Particularly children need a lot of vitamin D to build strong bones. If they don't get enough, they suffer from a disease called rickets. So for a long time, the consensus was something like you should avoid strong sunlight.

17:32And if you're worried about vitamin D, that's fine because you can just take it in a pill. And those vitamin D pills were also associated with all kinds of benefits. So they seem to be good for your heart, for cancer risk, all kinds of things like that. More recently, we've had a bunch of very big studies where people are given vitamin D supplements. And I think it's fair to say the results maybe haven't been quite as good as a lot of people hope. So there was an editorial in a medical journal recently that went so far as to say doctors should probably stop advising their patients to take these things.

18:01So now what people are starting to wonder is, well, a vitamin D, maybe it's just a marker for how much sunlight you've got, but the actual benefits come in other ways. And there's all sorts of candidates here. So being exposed to sunlight seems to kind of change the expression patterns of any number of genes in your body. But some big ones, one is nitric oxide, which is a chemical that's formed in your skin from the action of sunlight. And among the many other things it does is lower your blood pressure. That's really interesting because if you look at people in high latitude countries, you can see a very pronounced like seasonal variation.

18:33So in winter in places like Britain, the population tends to have a higher blood pressure than they do in the summer. There's lots of reasons why that might be, but people are now starting to think, well, there's one reason for that, maybe sunlight. It also seems to have effects on how your immune system works. It sort of modulates it. So some autoimmune diseases where, you know, your body mistakenly attacks its own tissue, some of them seem to improve with exposure to sunlight, like multiple sclerosis. Some seem to get worse. Lupus is one example. And then there's also evidence on short-sightedness.

19:04So in some parts of East Asia, for instance, well over 80 % of young people need glasses now, which is a number that's shot up in the past few decades. And the thinking now is that bright sunlight is basically vital to correctly regulate the growth of children's eyes. And if they don't get enough, they end up with short-sightedness. I'm sure you listened to the fascinating episode that David Rennie and I did on Drum Tower about precisely that in China. Tim, the really big question here is, should I book a holiday to the Caribbean? Well, I think now that winter's drawing in, the answer to that is almost always yes.

19:36I guess really the question is what should you do when you get there and how much time should you sort of spend on the beach? And I suppose it's a little tricky. You know, you definitely don't want to get sunburned. It's still true. You know, sunlight really does cause skin cancer and it really will age your skin if that's what you're worried about. I think maybe, you know, there's all these interesting correlations now. We're starting to see some sort of interesting potential mechanisms. And my sense is the consensus in the field about the balance between risk and reward is maybe just sort of starting to shift a little bit.

20:08Tim, thank you so much for talking to me. Thanks, Rosie.

20:32For decades, female pop stars have been calling out men who cheat, lie and deserve every cutting lyric. I smell your secrets and I'm not too perfect Hello, Mr. Perfectly Alanis Morissette, Beyonce and Taylor Swift have all written hit songs about men behaving badly. But recently, something has changed. Su Lin Wong is our Asia correspondent. Today's pop stars are coping less with toxic men than immature and mediocre ones. And no one's made this theme her calling card quite like Sabrina Carpenter. Useless But there's a cue to work for it I know Manchild Manchild is far from the only song about disappointing men on Sabrina Carpenter's latest album, Man's Best Friend released on August 29th and she's not the only one producing music on this topic Got me feeling but it's gone In training season, Dua Lipa describes being exhausted from guiding partners on how to treat her and wanting someone who naturally meets her emotional needs.

21:45So in 2025, pop music is full of women calling out incompetent men. And the criticism is only getting louder. So Sulin, where's the sort of the origin of this new strain in pop music? Some people attribute this shift to a broader evolution in pop songwriting. and this trend could arguably be traced back to artists like Joni Mitchell. Her hit songs in the late 1960s and early 1970s moved music away from broad universal themes toward more hyper-specific diaristic storytelling and I think it was this specificity that really made her songs and other songs that came after more relatable. I think a lot of people have texted with a grammatically inept man-child, the kind that Sabrina Carpenter sings about, or a man who doesn't ask a single question on a date, which is something that Chapel Rhone sings about in Supergraphic Ultra Modern Girl.

22:46He didn't ask a single question. And he was wearing these foggy jeans. It doesn't matter, though. He doesn't have what it takes to be with a girl like me. So I understand how the specific is more engaging than the general, but why this focus on mediocre men? I wonder if it's because it reflects a broader shift in how women see their relationships with men and this isn't something we're just seeing in pop music but we're actually seeing it in pop culture in general with cultural trends like the boy sober movement or people who declare that they're becoming self-partnered after being fed up with online dating and not having much luck with men and while my friends and I enjoy speculating what is driving these trends there's actually data behind this too.

23:39Across many metrics, boys and men are doing worse than girls and women, whether we're talking about the chances of perpetrating violent crime as teenagers or graduating from university. And one statistic I came across reporting this piece was that nearly 60 % of university graduates in the US are now women. Given that most people date and marry within their own socioeconomic class, that means that for many women, the pool of suitable men is shrinking. And all of this is happening in the broader context of a cultural reckoning across much of the world about misogyny, which was manifested in all kinds of ways, perhaps most famously, the Me Too movement.

24:20And what about the boys of pop themselves, though? How are they reacting to this shift or moving with it? So some men have acknowledged what they're lacking. In 2022, Charlie Puth put out the song Loser, in which he calls himself a loser for letting a relationship slip away.