Chris Hayes Quotes

The central question for American politics right now is how did the country that elected Barack Obama elect Donald Trump. There's a lot to what Ta-Nehisi says about the racial reaction and backlash. And the power and the force and ultimately the success. The man who was selling this racist conspiracy theory about the first black President's birth: that's what launched him into a political career that ended up getting him elected the President of the United States. That is an absolutely remarkable fact.

According to "Huffington Post", one Democratic opposition research firm said they spent the past eight months compiling material on [Donald] Trump as he`s risen on the ranks. And that research estimated that if the all material compiled, court and property records,newspaper clips and video, approximately 80 percent of it has yet to surface in this election cycle.

Senator apparently having overcome his loyalty to his wife and father. [Ted] Cruz finally came out and endorsed Donald Trump writing on Facebook, "If Clinton wins, we know with 100 percent certainty that she would deliver on her left-wing promises with devastating results for our country. My conscience tells me I must do whatever I can to stop that."

No one`s dropped a cent - there`s no negative ads up against Donald Trump in Iowa which is crazy to think about.

It's not uncommon for revolutions to stem from a radicalized group just outside the circle of power. That's what the French Revolution was all about; that's what the American Revolution was. The question is: Will all those groups, because of the nature of partisan polarization and ideological polarization, just fight each other? Or is there capacity to organize?

For the love of god, find something actually socially useful to do with your money. Because if you don`t, socialism`s going to start looking a lot better to a whole lot of people.

I don't think polarization is some kind of grand distraction. It's real. People have different commitments, believe in different things and principles, different visions of the good life ... but there is also a degree to which all the really big, successful reform movements in the country had extremely bizarre ideological coalitions.

Because we [the USA] are so powerful, our failures resonate more. In some ways, the worst victims of our institutional and elite failures, through the ripple effect of financial crisis and war, aren't Americans.

The Cook Political Report now predicting senate democrats are poised to pick up five to seven seats, which would give them the majority. Pointing out the history shows that races in the Toss Up column never split down the middle, one party tends to win the lion`s share of them. With two weeks to Election Day, there`s not enough time for republicans to recover toss-up seats in states where Hillary Clinton is currently leading, considering this, early voting is under way, and [Donald]Trump won`t be any help especially since his campaign doesn`t really have a ground game to speak of.

Impossible is a word for other people to use when life scares them.

Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz opened up a new line of attack on Donald Trump, targeting his involvement in Trump University, a for-profit, non-licensed now defunct institution which triggered lawsuits from individuals who claimed they were defrauded by him, as well as a suit alleging fraud from New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman.

It's very difficult to talk about the war dead and the fallen without invoking valor, without invoking the words 'heroes.' I feel ... uncomfortable about the word hero because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war.

Donald Trump got himself very far to the left. When he was considering running for president in 2000, he was for a 13 percent wealth tax on wealthy people to retire the national debt.

Islam does not preach hatred and violence and destruction.

There is a sense in which, like, it could be the case that the incentives of running for president and the incentives of getting maximum attention for yourself, sometimes align, and at a certain point, they stop aligning, and you just keep going with the incentives for maximum attention for yourself.

For years, right wing outlets like outlets like Fox News and talk radio have been telling their audience day after day that any information coming from outside of conservative media is not to be trusted.

In Utah, where the states` Mormon GOP electorate is especially unfavorable to [Donald] Trump.

If someone were to say, we should not letting Jews into the country, and people had a reaction against that, would that be the same thing as that kind of toxic political correctness tamping down honest discussion?

The reality is [Donald] Trump is just better at this game than they are. Blaming the media may be a convenient foil, but the reality is, he`s played the free media game better than they have. He has used the personal attack meme against them and literally created memes about them. They need to figure out how to play this game.

Who says meritocracy says oligarchy.

Now, in an analysis of campaign finance filings by Politico we learned the [Donald] Trump campaign has paid Trump businesses more than $8 million so far in this race, that includes $1.3 million in rent for campaign offices, half a million for food and facilities for events, over $300,000 for corporate staffers, and nearly $6 million for the use of Trump`s private plane.

Inequality and hierarchy are natural, but that doesn't mean they are right, that doesn't mean there is isn't a productive tension between those forces and the forces of equality.

The person that always wins, that`s the other thing. The monkey picking stocks always wins.

The desire to punish is a desire that emanates from a place of equality and justice. The lesson I feel that we have to confront is that that impulse is so easily transmuted into something corrosive and corrupt in how it's actually put into practice. That's the danger. It's not that the impulse is wrong or unjust or not totally righteous. It's that the ways in which the system that operates, the system that we've constructed tends to not deliver the promise of equity we might want, when we look to the system to provide it.

What we do know is that the era of climate change is upon us and the extraordinary in California today will become the ordinary of tomorrow.

None of us were prepared to hear what Justice Scalia said, because in essence what he was saying is let`s go back to pre-Board of Education - Brown versus Board of Education, 1950s America where blacks are doing all right going to black schools or schools where blacks go. He said go to less advanced schools where they do all right. We`re going back to separate but equal.

Generally the impulse to find justice through punitive measures can be a kind of quicksand. What James Whitman, the scholar I cite in the chapter of my book, talks about as an urge to level down, I think you see that everywhere. We're going to be a punitive society, so we might as well level out that punitiveness. Bankers and college swim stars and everyone face that same kind of wrath.

Like one of [Donald] Trump`s sons said this is a huge step down for him to run for president. Like he`s not doing it - let`s just be clear.

The family of Keith Scott viewed the police video and it`s worth repeating that afterward the family made a statement through their lawyers which reads in part, "It is impossible to discern from the videos what, if anything, Mr. Scott is holding in his hands. When he was shot and killed, Mr. Scott`s hands were by his side and he was slowly walking backwards."

Like Trump`s presidential bid, the Brexit campaign has been driven largely by fears of cultural penetration, immigrant invasion, and the genuine crisis of Middle East refugees dying to get into Europe, all channeled into a kind of inward-turning form of ethno-nationalism.

Chris Christie travelled to Ft. Worth, Texas, to give his blessing to a former rival who one week ago was approvingly discussing killing Muslim terrorists with bullets smeared in pig`s blood.

California became the last state in the west to regulate groundwater usage. The state`s first-ever mandatory water restrictions soon followed.

One of the main point of contention is whether or not Keith Scott was in possession of a gun. We still don`t know. Police say he did have a gun. The gun was recovered.

If you want to really sort of quantify the dereliction of the Republican establishment, those two facts are the most important two facts. One, that they didn`t even understand the base of their own party, white working class voters who you know what, don`t care about tax cuts for the rich, really aren`t interested in the things that the elite part of their party want, including immigration reform. And number two, they spent eight months avoiding finding opposition research to use against the guy who was becoming the front-runner in their party that they don`t want.

Sarah Palin, suggesting her son`s arrest on domestic violence charges was a result of post-traumatic stress disorder and partially due to President Obama`s lack of respect for men and women in uniform.

Trump University is just one of the many lines of attack that were opened up last night, giving a preview of what`s to come in the general if [Donald] Trump is indeed the Republican nominee.

Politics is more than policy, right. Like, one thing that has occurred to me is Bernie Sanders is clearly a very adept and able politician, right. But he spent 30 years being a very adept and able politician in an almost entirely white state.

We have different expectations for different groups of people. We tend to modulate the degree with which we're forgiving or punitive depending on how well we know folks, or how much we consider them peers, or how much social capital we've invested in them. That has to do with race, class, gender, and socioeconomic status. We have a tendency to bend over backwards to forgive folks we think of as part of "the us." The question of who we define as "the us" is a lot of what constitutes how we punish who we punish.

You see a lot of fear among Republicans. Oh, man, this guy [Donald Trump] has a lot of vulnerabilities and weaknesses that`s not been tested at all yet.

I think politically there is less juice to be squeezed out of that orange in the Democratic side. I mean, my feeling is your median Democratic voter, they`re angry at the banks or they`re not psyched about companies that outsource and things like that.

The NYPD with the unconditional support of Mayor Michael Bloomberg has stopped-and-frisked more black men than there are black men in New York City. Institutionalized racial discrimination in the United States is alive and well.

It`s basically a united [Republican ] party behind [Donald Trump] and Cruz`s numbers in Texas were plummeting and he was facing a possible primary challenge and this cements that this is the party of Trump.

Meritocracy is our social ideal, particularly among good liberals. Equality of opportunity, but not of outcome. Not evaluating people by their [outside] features, but by their innate talent and drive.

Given [Donald] Trump`s polling deficit, his reluctance for ads until very recently in his near total lack of any ground game to speak off, it came as a surprise today that according to The Washington Post, Trump has stopped holding high-dollar fund-raising events, relying almost exclusively on online donations, which, of course, tend to be much smaller.

As Donald Trump`s fortunes continue to slide, he`s increasingly dragging the fortunes of senate republican`s weapon.

The other theory of the case - and it`s not just one that people opposed to him politically believe, but also people who share the Republican Party`s beliefs or conservative, but don`t like Donald Trump, is that he`s fundamentally a narcissist who has become addicted to the attention, is sort of compulsively driven by attention, and this has given him an outlet for that attention, and crucially doesn`t actually care about the party that he is nominally representing.

There`s that issue of if you attack someone you don`t know where the votes are going to go.

In the case of Philando Castile, we believe he was complying, it might have been precipitated by a police officer telling him to open the glove compartment.We have other examples in which people have met the same fate when they appear to be complying. Yet the way that the system tends to operate and the way the police when you talk to them view that situation is they are looking for things that trigger their perception of threat and that`s a highly subjective judgment.