Vanity Fair

01/26/2026

In the wake of poet and writer Renee Good’s killing, Donald Trump and his collaborators have done all they can to define her as an enemy of “The Homeland.” The administration claims, for instance, that Good was a “domestic terrorist,” a term it is now applying to Alex Pretti, the ICU nurse whom federal agents killed on Saturday. This rhetoric is employed to justify the state taking life, by associating the dead with national villainy. But the campaign against Good is different—because The Homeland takes particular and perverse interest in women deemed insufficiently reverent of hearth and home. Trump propagandists tell us that Good was part of a growing cabal of insolent white ladies turned violent; that she was a “lesbian agitator” in league with “68 IQ Somali scammers”; or that she was simply, as her killer apparently labeled her, “a fucking bitch.” For these and other sins, her castigation has extended into the afterlife: with Elon Musk’s AI tool, Grok, users churned out deepfakes of Good with bullets in her head and of her corpse in a bikini. This is all appropriate: In defending the undocumented, Good violated the sanctity of The Homeland, which is to say that she questioned the divine promise of American soil to a mythical and singular people.

For The Homeland is not “The State” or even “The Country.” The Homeland is not defined by simple geography. It exists beyond laws and norms. It is unconcerned with traditional American concepts like “liberty,” “freedom” or “pluralism.” The Homeland is that piece of earth providentially deeded to The Volk. The Homeland’s borders are drawn in untainted blood, its sanctity exemplified in proper gender conduct and the fulfillment of gender roles. It is The Homeland that ICE venerates in its recruitment posts festooned with victorious white settlers and vanquished indigenous Americans. It is The Homeland that Musk saluted (twice) at Trump’s inauguration. It is The Homeland that the late Charlie Kirk was fond of invoking:

I want to be able to get married, buy a home, have kids, allow them to ride their bike till the sun goes down, send them to a good school, have a low-crime neighborhood, not to have my kid be taught the lesbian, gay, transgender garbage in their school. While also not having them have to hear the Muslim call to prayer five times a day.

It is often said that The Homeland is skeptical of immigrants, but more precisely, The Homeland is skeptical of aliens. Asylum-seekers from Gaza fleeing a genocide have no place in The Homeland; Afrikaners suffering the indignity of post-apartheid are welcome. The Homeland is covetous of Northern Europeans, but regards Somali Americans as “garbage.” “Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few?” Trump recently said. “But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.” The criteria for these distinctions—between putative immigrant and indelible alien—are not complicated; for above all, The Homeland is a racist project.