229 Quotes by Chris Hayes

Order is a slippery thing: it's in the eyes of the beholder and the judgments of the powerful. Safety is clearer: it's freedom from violence and intrusion.

Ultimately the gun is the backstop that prevents the entire social order from being upended. Had it not been for the superior firepower of fearful whites, who knows what would have transpired in American history? You can understand why, in a such a situation, certain kinds of white southerners would cling to their guns. Today Americans still rely on the gun, [...],to preserve the social order [...].

The thing they're trying to stop is 30-million people getting health insurance. That's the substance.

Let's run the experiment.

Part of the genius of the rhetoric of law and order is that as a principle (rather than a practice), it can be sold as the ultimate call for equality: We all deserve the law. We all deserve order. All lives matter.

We have built a colony in a nation, not in the classic Marxist sense but in the deep sense we can appreciate as a former colony ourselves: A territory that isn't actually free. A place controlled from outside rather than within. A place where the mechanisms of representation don't work enough to give citizens a sense of ownership over their own government. A place where the law is a tool of control rather than a foundation for prosperity.

In the Nation, there is law; in the Colony, there is only a concern with order. In the Nation, you have rights; in the Colony, you have commands. In the Nation, you are innocent until proven guilty; in the Colony, you are born guilty.

White fear emanates from knowing that white privilege exists and the anxiety that it might end.

This book makes a simple argument: that American criminal justice isn’t one system with massive racial disparities but two distinct regimes. One (the Nation) is the kind of policing regime you expect in a democracy; the other (the Colony) is the kind you expect in an occupied land.