Chris Hayes > Quotes

“White fear emanates from knowing that white privilege exists and the anxiety that it might end.”
― Chris Hayes, A Colony in a Nation

“Years later Nixon aide John Ehrlichman seemed to offer up a smoking gun when he told a reporter: The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
― Chris Hayes, A Colony in a Nation

“Information is abundant; attention is scarce. Information is theoretically infinite, while attention is constrained. This is why information is cheap and attention is expensive.”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“If you can’t be heard, it doesn’t matter what you say. And right now it’s both easier than ever to shout and harder than ever to be heard.”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“Having an energy conversation without talking about climate is like talking about smoking and not talking about cancer.”
― Chris Hayes

“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 [...].”
― Chris Hayes, A Colony in a Nation

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

“Presented with a challenge to its power, an illegitimate regime will often overreact, driven by the knowledge that all they have is force.”
― Chris Hayes, A Colony in a Nation

“The physical and visual package of a vinyl album makes it far more desirable and collectible as an object. Vinyl LPs also offer a far better sound quality than the compressed audio files of streaming services. Ultimately, listening to music on a record player releases you from the endless anxiety of choice that comes from digital forms of media where in every single moment you can skip to the next song, or decide you don’t want to listen to what you’re listening to. When you put an album on a record player you are committing your attention to that album. You have bound yourself to the mast.[7]”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“As a theory, “broken windows” played a perfect explanatory role for politicians and policy makers. If disorder leads to crime, well then, we need to crack down on disorder.”
― Chris Hayes, A Colony in a Nation

“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.”
― Chris Hayes, A Colony in a Nation

“But whatever the academic debate on the topic, Nixon was correct that black Americans “don’t want to be a colony in a nation.” And yet he helped bring about that very thing. Over the half-century since he delivered those words, 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. A political regime like the one our Founders inherited and rejected. An order they spilled their blood to defeat. THIS”
― Chris Hayes, A Colony in a Nation

“What does the world’s richest man want that he cannot have? What will he pay the biggest premium for? He can buy whatever he desires. There is no luxury past his grasp. But what he wants above all else, to a pathological degree, with an unsteady obsessiveness that’s thrown his fortune into question, is recognition. He wants to be recognized, to be seen in a deep and human sense.”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“Attention is not a moral faculty. Without concerted effort, habit, and training, what we are drawn to focus on and what we believe to be important and worthy bear no intrinsic relation to each other.”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
― Chris Hayes, A Colony in a Nation

“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.”
― Chris Hayes, A Colony in a Nation

“And in America, when the state cultivates such fear among relatively empowered white voters, it is enriching uranium for a political nuclear weapon. It”
― Chris Hayes, A Colony in a Nation

“Yet in the modern vocabulary of policing theory, “broken windows” has become shorthand for the polar opposite: aggressive, community-antagonistic, clean-’em-up vigilantism. The problem with “community policing,” then and now, is that so often the cops being called to enforce community norms are not part of the community. And”
― Chris Hayes, A Colony in a Nation

“Depending on who you are, the sight of an officer can produce either a warm sense of safety and contentment or a plummeting feeling of terror. I’ve”
― Chris Hayes, A Colony in a Nation

“Because to live at this moment in the world, both online and off, is to find oneself endlessly wriggling on the mast, fighting for control of our very being against the ceaseless siren calls of the people and devices and corporations and malevolent actors trying to trap it.”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“Whiteness is nonexistent, yet it confers enormous benefits. Blackness is a conjured fiction, yet it is so real it can kill.”
― Chris Hayes, A Colony in a Nation

“Because, to put it reductively, what gets attention is a very different category from what’s important for sustaining a flourishing society.”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“But if there’s one thing I’ve come to believe, it is that much of the cause of our current state of affairs lies in our tasking police with preserving order rather than with ensuring safety. 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.”
― Chris Hayes, A Colony in a Nation

“reserved for lords and for peasants. Thus the system of punishment that developed found equality in a race to the bottom: everyone got punished harshly as an expression of a core belief that no”
― Chris Hayes, A Colony in a Nation

“Mass incarceration also played some role in reducing crime. A society that put, say, every man aged 18 to 24 under carceral supervision could expect to see a reduction in violent crime, since that population commits a disproportionate amount of it.”
― Chris Hayes, A Colony in a Nation

“The age we’re living through is akin to life in a failed state, a society that had some governing regime that has disintegrated and fallen into a kind of attentional warlordism. In a society where the government’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force has come apart, different factions and power centers arise based on their ability to conquer and impose their will through coercion and violence. While in a functioning government the route to power might lie in persuasion or charisma or mass mobilization or the ability to deftly manipulate elite party structures and alliances, in failed states power tends to be stripped down to its most brutal essentials, chiefly the use of force.”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“White fear is both a social fact and something burned into our individual neural pathways.”
― Chris Hayes, A Colony in a Nation

“The angry citizen can shout, and the terrified citizen can lock the doors, or flee, or move, or arm himself. But the humiliated citizen can neither express her feelings nor respond to the offense.”
― Chris Hayes, A Colony in a Nation

“the president signed an executive order that required the Department of Homeland Security to publish a weekly tally of crimes committed by immigrants. Critics noted that Trump’s order was literally out of the Nazi playbook; Hitler’s press outlets published a weekly digest of crimes committed by Jews.”
― Chris Hayes, A Colony in a Nation

“To desecrate the dead is to humiliate the living, and humiliation may be the most powerful and most underappreciated force in human affairs. The angry citizen can shout, and the terrified citizen can lock the doors, or flee, or move, or arm himself. But the humiliated citizen can neither express her feelings nor respond to the offense. For it is in the nature of humiliation that it happens at the hands of someone with greater power:”
― Chris Hayes, A Colony in a Nation