On a cold gray rain-soaked morning 72 hours before Donald Trump was to assume the presidency, Chris Hayes was recognized just outside his old Bronx apartment. The streets around the building were near deserted, the former Bronx reservoir turned public park empty, save for the heartiest of dog-walkers. A random passerby stopped the local Norwood boy made good to offer praise and thanks for fighting the good fight, capping it off with a hug. It was a nice quiet moment between a local and his public ally, as it drizzled on the remaining forlorn curbside Christmas trees in the waning hours of the Obama presidency.

Hayes took cover at Mar Y Tierra on Bainbridge Ave., a Dominican diner formerly home to the Greentree, an Irish pub where the Hayes family always celebrated important occasions back when Norwood was a primary Bronx landing spot from the Emerald Isle. The rising MSNBC star was back in his old neighborhood to talk about his new book, A Colony in a Nation, which examines how poor American communities are under the thumb of the institutional state power, how it affects modern policing, and how the Gotham law-and-order days he grew up in served as template for all the flashpoints Hayes has reported from since All In debuted in April 2013. Over huevos revueltos, a basket of telera, and cafe con leche ordered in perfect raised-in-the-city Spanish, Hayes had some rare time for reflection before taking the show to the Inauguration two days later.

"I felt I had a somewhat unique perspective insofar as covering places like Baltimore and Ferguson now, while also having grown up in New York City in the '80s and '90s, when it was a laboratory where a lot of these policies were workshopped," Hayes says. "I became obsessed with the idea of law and order, but mostly the second half. What does order mean?"

"I became obsessed with the idea of law and order, but mostly the second half. What does order mean?"

What it means, in its most basic terms laid out in the book, is that in the precincts where the state authority has all the power, "order should matter more than law." How Hayes came to that conclusion, however, is, of course, a much larger, more complex American story. One that grew out of a speech by none other than Richard Nixon at his RNC presidential nomination acceptance in Miami 1968. (Far be it from us to charge President Nixon with plagiarizing Black Panther minister of information Eldridge Cleaver's May '68 essay, "The Land Question and Black Liberation,"which includes the phrase "the white mother country and the black colony.")

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In writing the book, Hayes was able to expand upon and go deeper on ideas he's been considering for years and discussing on MSNBC throughout Barack Obama's second term. A Colony in a Nation joins a slew of other recent well-received books examining the connective tissue between poverty, policing, and the criminal justice system. Essential titles include Jill Leovy's Ghettoside, Radley Balko's Rise of the Warrior Cop, Matthew Desmond's Evicted, and "the Bible of the Black Lives Movement" Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Foundational texts for the reform movements that gained momentum over the last half dozen years. And there has been real progress. In New York City, incarceration rates are down more than 50% over the last 20 years, but what's true today isn't necessarily true tomorrow.

Hayes was born in the Bronx in 1979 and came of age in Rudy Giuliani's New York City, but not in the Bronx of KRS-One or Larry Davis. His father Roger left the Jesuit seminary after moving into their Norwood apartment building and meeting Geri, who still lived with her parents. Roger waved the priesthood goodbye, got married, and became a full-time community organizer back when Barack Obama was just a Hawaiian kid learning how to surf. Geri would become a schoolteacher, later both parents would work for the city, so Hayes (and brother Luke who went on to become an organizer for the former Organizer-in-Chief) was raised solidly middle class in a city that had different standards of liberty and justice depending on your subway stop.

"I became obsessed with the idea of law and order, but mostly the second half. What does order mean?"

Three years after Hayes was born, two prime underpinnings of the law-and-order initiatives to come took place. The first was the Atlantic publication of the famous "broken windows" theory, introduced by George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, part of a late 1970s foot-patrol experiment, primarily in Newark, New Jersey, in which police officers got out of the squad cars and walked the beat. In his book, Hayes calls it "a trip" to read about the "silver bullet that once and for all slayed the urban crime monster," because the one thing the experiment didn't do is lower the crime rate whatsoever.

Foot patrols did have positive effects: Morale and job satisfaction went up among the officers and people in the patrolled areas felt safer and tended to believe crime had been reduced. Over time, the idea that eliminating disorder, whether it be urban blight (broken windows, graffiti) or petty offenses (public intoxication, fare-skipping, etc.), would reduce larger crimes and increase public safety took hold. The legend of the experiment, a placebo at its core, outgrew the parameters of the actual findings. Later in 1982, the "war on drugs" was first declared by Ronald Reagan, which led to the "new Jim Crow" era of mass incarceration. By 2015, some 6.7 million persons were supervised by adult correctional systems in the United States, 1 in 37 adults. And that's the lowest rate since 1994.

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By high school, Hayes was living in the tonier neighborhood of Riverdale, because his parents had been fortunate enough to buy a small house from the estate of a dead nun. His Boogie Down days were generally lawful and orderly. However, he attended Hunter College High School during Giuliani's first term, riding the bus everyday from the Bronx to 94th and Park, back when 96th St. was considered by many a scared white person to be the dividing line between civilization and chaos. The daily trip through Harlem, one he often took with a bus mate who would later turn Alexander Hamilton into a rapping cult hero. (Lin-Manuel Miranda told Marc Maron that Chris Hayes is the only friend he ever had who came over and spoke Spanish to his grandmother.)

"Harlem was still very poor—the waves of extreme gentrification hadn't hit yet, and from the age of 12 to 15, my friends and I were constantly getting our stuff jacked," Hayes says. "Kids would run your loot, your Starter hat, your North Face jacket, grab your backpack if you set it down, and there were testy confrontations in the schoolyard. In retrospect, it was not that big of a deal. Someone took your bus pass, so what? But there was a menacing quality, and the geography of 96th Street, the porous border to upper Manhattan, made it feel like we crossing a rough seam in the city. "

While it was certainly the case that young black men were much more likely to be victims of violent crime in the 80s and 90s (see also: today), Hayes was hardly alone in his fears—warranted and not. Crime dominated local news coverage, the ongoing collective conversation, and many a New Yorker's psyche. Aesthetically, seediness was bedrock throughout the city. Both actual and existential fear fermented Gotham's get-tough initiatives that became national boilerplate.

A Colony in a Nation primarily looks at the concept as it has played out during Hayes's lifetime, from growing up in New York City's "Who Shot Ya?"heyday through his ground-level reporting from the recent uprisings following fatal police confrontations. The book is neither jeremiad nor prescription, but rather a thorough exploration of how the "tough on crime" ideology leaves poor isolated minority populations living under a different set of laws. By the time Hayes left for Brown University in 1997, crime in New York City was beginning an incredible decline, one that has continued to previously unseen lows. But it came at a steep human cost in the colonies. Harsher measures to maintain order were ramped up, most notoriously in the wholesale expansion of stop-and-frisk, a policing tactic primarily used against young African-American and Latino males that was standard NYPD operating procedure for more than a decade.

At the height of the stop-and-frisk era, Hayes was living in Chicago. That's where he honed his post-Ivy League reporting chops at publications like The Chicago Reader and In These Times. It's Roger's hometown, and as a boy, Chris absorbed his dad's Windy City sports fandom. (Hence all the moon-eyed Cubs mythologizing last fall). Throughout college and beyond, Hayes returned to New York City regularly and began to notice changes unimaginable in his bus-from-the-Bronx days.

"Every time I'd come home, it seemed like there was a party in some neighborhood we never would've gone to," he says. "Crime dropped, but in many ways it felt like the real change came when the aura of seediness fell away. Today, most of New York City is orderly to an almost comical degree."

"Today, most of New York City is orderly to an almost comical degree."

That includes the Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, section where Hayes lives in today. However, even in gilded New York City 2017—where stop-and-frisk is a thing of the past, and reported 2016 crimes were down 4.1% to the lowest number ever reported in the CompStat-era—low-level marijuana arrests were up 10%. African-Americans and Hispanics made up 85% of the arrestees. The colonies have shrunk in scope, but in other Brooklyn neighborhoods, like Brownsville, young and not-so-young-anymore men still have little in the way of jobs, opportunities, or stability, all because they were in possession of a drug that people in the nation enjoy equally, but with impunity.

If there's a salacious takeaway from A Colony in a Nation, it's the probable future Breitbart headline: "Anti-Cop Liberal MSNBC Host Chris Hayes Loves Weed!" As a 21-year-old, he attended the GOP show in Philadelphia with his future wife Kate, and her longtime journalist father, Andy Shaw. Hayes forgot he had $30 worth of pot in his travel bag, which was discovered, discussed, and handed back to Hayes. It's possible the Philly PD knew the trio would need it to get through all the compassionate conservatism to come, but presumably the citizens of the Mantua, Badlands, and Strawberry Mansion neighborhoods weren't afforded the same civic courtesy that night—or any night since.

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For Hayes, it was yet another privileged experience that percolated this notion of the colonies, but it didn't become fully-formed until he was in Missouri following the death of Michael Brown. Day-to-day life in Ferguson opened his eyes, and then his laptop, to communities living more like subjects than citizens. And it wasn't just tear gas and rubber bullets. He connected the dots and mapped the route from the BxM1 bus to West Florissant Avenue.

"In Ferguson, it felt like the citizens were on their own and they were grinding along under a ridiculous municipal system for years," he says. "What was distinct, where the literalness of the colony metaphor really struck me, was this cash exploitation, using the power of policing to enforce a revenue stream. They were plundering a certain segment of the population through traffic tickets so they could fund their government without raising property taxes. The idea of capricious state authority fundamentally denying you dignity as a full human sovereign subject, being ordered around constantly, that you're not free or an agent of your own destiny. It's deeply American. It's kind of the whole thing."

In 1989, when Hayes was in middle school, Trisha Meili, an investment banker out jogging in Central Park, was viciously raped, assaulted, and left for dead. Four African-American (and one Latino) juvenile males were arrested. Amidst the massive publicity the case recieved, future President of the United States Donald Trump took out $85,000 full-page newspaper ads calling for the return of the death penalty, clearly aimed at the teenagers in custody. Following faulty confessions from four of the boys, the "Central Park Five" were convicted, but in 2002, DNA evidence exonerated them and the sentences were vacated. The city paid them a $41-million settlement in 2014, which Trump called a "disgrace" in the Daily News. During the 2016 campaign, candidate Trump echoed his belief in their guilt. Whilen future attorney general Jeff Sessions said the death penalty ads in the "liberal bastion" of New York City shows "he believes in law and order and he has the strength and will to make this country safer."

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But despite the fact Hayes wrote this book over the course of nine months during the election cycle, Trump is only a minor factor in it. "I could have written more about Donald Trump than I did, but he isn't the first to weaponize white fear," Hayes says. "I lived through Giuliani doing the same thing. White fear is enriched uranium for political nuclear weapons."

Although official White House policy has been scant, the administration takes it on faith, facts be damned, that crime is rampant in our urban wastelands, and must be stopped before our cities burn. Just recently, Sessions doubled down, calling marijuana "slightly less awful" than heroin. The war on drugs is back, and naturally the battles will hit the colonies hardest and get the Big House turnstiles clicking again.

Whatever the story, Chris Hayes will be covering it. These are heady times for the ever-more-comfortable host. After a couple years of low ratings, he's found his footing. First came the 2015 Emmy, the only one taken back to 30 Rock, which was followed by a slow and steady ratings climb. All In averaged 1.6 million total viewers in February, and in March, the show had its fourth straight month in the number two slot, ahead of Anderson Cooper 360. Rumors that he's being usurped by his spirit guide Rachel Maddow have ceased. He's proud of how far the show has come.

"You think getting a TV show is a sports car, but it's really a sailboat," he says. "You imagine looking cool driving off, but it's learning how to sail and navigate, and often the winds don't blow in your favor. It's taken time, but I've gotten a lot better at the job."