Ta-Nehisi Coates

I'm doing good.

I'm doing good.

How about you, Tim?

Wait, I'm so sorry.

Can I ask you why it's been bugging you?

Sure.

No, I only asked you 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, wow, 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 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 necessarily suspect either.

Yeah, definitely.

And there are people like Russ Feingold, who I interviewed for the article, and Spencer Ackerman, who wrote this great, great history of the war on terror called Reign of Terror, which very much influenced this article, by the way, who would say that even then, the pivot to merging border security

with anti-terrorism, actually that there's a lot of, you know, roots of what's happening now in that, that it's not a mistake that you ended up in a Black, Muslim, immigrant, sometimes not immigrant, community, that that became the flashpoint.

That interview was so good.

And there were aspects of it that I actually, just because of the boundaries of the column, I couldn't get in there.

And in this sense, I mean, I think he was of, you know, two minds.

He was sincere, but he was of two minds in the sense that on the one hand, you know, he was suspicious of this notion that the norms will protect us.

But at the same time, one thing he said that I didn't get in the article was that against somebody,