Welcome, dear readers, to another great year for American exceptionalism! While life expectancy continued its upward climb among our peers—the nations with advanced economies—it fell in 2021 to its lowest level since 1996 in these United States according to a new report from the National Center for Health Statistics. COVID and fentanyl each took a terrible toll, adding to the well-documented deaths of despair from suicide, alcoholism, and the other plagues statistically associated with the lives of working-class Americans.

An American child born last year had a life expectancy of 76.4 years—down from 77 years in 2020. The earlier year, of course, was the year of COVID with no vaccines, while 2021 was the year of COVID with vaccines, which only highlights the role that vaccine resistance played in dooming some hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens who might otherwise still be among us. Lest anyone doubt that the MAGA mishegas about the satanic vaccines was key to the continuation of COVID deaths well beyond the date when the vaccines became widely available, it’s notable that the death rate from COVID among whites surpassed that among Blacks and other racial groups in mid-2021.

Indeed, as a late-October study in The Lancet Regional Health–Americas documented, there was a direct correlation between the conservatism of a congressmember’s voting record and the death rate from COVID of their constituents, across all age groups and taking into account such factors as race, education, and income. Those death rates were 11 percent higher in states with Republican governors. This wasn’t just a function of state policy (like, e.g., Ron DeSantis’s war on vaccines), of course, but also of the beliefs of our MAGA-istic compatriots.

Another late-October study, this one published in the academic journal PLOS One, demonstrated that the perils of living in red-state America aren’t limited to greater COVID mortality rates. As the policy polarization between red states and blue has grown steadily wider, the failure of red states to expand Medicaid and their opposition to other policies of income support and greater educational and health care availability, as well as their refusal to tax dangerous substances like tobacco, has led to their having higher death rates, particularly among residents between the ages of 25 and 64, than their blue-state counterparts.

Even before COVID, then, MAGA America, as well as our comparatively high rates of poverty, was hastening us to the grave. In 2019, according to a study from the World Health Organization, a child born in the U.S. had a life expectancy of 78.5 years, while for one born in Sweden, it was 82.4 years, and in Japan, 84.5.

Does that mean that a steady diet of Tucker Carlson can lead to an untimely demise? These numbers don’t lie.