Hello, welcome to the Bullard podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Delighted to welcome back to the show, a journalist and author and contributing editor at Vanity Fair, which just published his newest column.

The Homeland is a war on America, the blood and soil nationalism that killed Renee Good and Alex Preti. It's Tonasi Coates. How you doing, man? I'm doing good. I'm going on. How about you, Tom? Well, you know, we're here. All right. We're living. So that's the best we can do. It was a great piece, man.

I'm so appreciative of you coming back on.

And the word homeland's been. It was a great piece, man. I'm so appreciative of you coming back on.

And the word homeland's been bugging me a lot. So you scratched an itch that I've had. And I guess let's just start. Wait, I'm so sorry. Can I ask you, can I ask you why has been bugging you? Sure. Well, here's why. It was funny. I was reading the article. and you quoted Peggy Noonan

I did

who I kind of hate now

but who I love Well, here's why it was funny. I was reading the article and you quoted Peggy Noonan,

who I kind of hate now, but who I loved in 2002. And this was an article of hers from 2002

where she said, Homeland isn't really an American word. It's not something we used to say or say

now. It has a vaguely Teutonic ring. V-Mas, helps the fjure, protects the homeland.

And that's like how I felt about it.

It's how I felt about it.

And I didn't feel that way about the Department of Homeland Security during the 20 aughts.

I probably should have in retrospect, but I didn't.

But like the way they use it has drawn out that kind of German Teutonic sense for me in a way that's made me feel very uncomfortable. It's the blood and soil element of it. So that'd be my answer. What about you? No, I only actually, because I can't say I was either. I mean, I was in my 20s when they, you know, founded the Department of Homeland Security,

but I certainly was not saying, well, this sounds really, this sounds a little off, you know,

and I probably did not have enough political awareness to understand that some of the problems that, you know, we're seeing today. I actually had their roots back then. But what was interesting

to me is that some people did. And some of them were people

that you would suspect and some of them were people that, you know, you would not, you know,

necessarily suspect either. Yeah. I thought that was the interesting thing about the Peggy

...