I originally read this quote somewhere, and just found the article that it was from. After the results of this election, this scares me more than ever.
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
October 17, 2004, New York Times Magazine, Without a Doubt – By RON SUSKIND
One reply on “The scariest thing I’ve read in years”
i’m not worried. because i’m a white male? because i’m a young white american male in a bubble in ghana, africa? because i don’t watch tv?
anyway, dude, “reality-based community” has been like a meme for some time on boingboing. i love it. just search for the phrase on cafepress.com and you’ll see what i mean.