Bush officials believed power lets them create reality rather than observe it

Evidence

The American journalist Ron Suskind, recalling a meeting with a senior White House adviser during President George W. Bush’s first term, describes a curious turn in the conversation. The aide suggested that journalists such as Suskind are “in what we call the reality-based community,” where “people believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” However, the aide was about to disabuse Suskind of any such assumption: “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 study that reality—judiciously, as you will—we will 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” (Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 700

Categorization

• XREF: Underpins Changez’s America in The Reluctant Fundamentalist — the empire that authors its own reality rather than answering facts.
• QUESTION: How exactly does Morey deploy this ‘we create our own reality’ quote as the political backdrop for fictional contestation of Muslim stereotypes?