# Reality-Based Community **"The reality-based community"** is a phrase from an October 2004 *New York Times Magazine* article by journalist [[Ron Suskind]], quoting an unnamed senior aide to President [[George W. Bush]]. It has become shorthand for a deliberate, post-truth approach to power — and in [[Dave Troy]]'s "[[The Big History Behind January 6th]]" Part 3, it is the clearest public statement of what [[Fourth Generation Warfare]] looks like applied to governance. ## The quote The aide dismissed people in "what we call the reality-based community" — those who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." He continued: > "That's not the way the world really works anymore. 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." > [!note] Attribution > The aide was unnamed. The remark is **widely attributed to [[Karl Rove]]**, Bush's chief political strategist, but there is no public confirmation and Rove has denied saying it. Handle the attribution as "widely believed, unconfirmed." ## Why it matters Troy reads the passage as a near-verbatim description of [[Fourth Generation Warfare]] and the [[OODA Loop]] in political form: rather than debating within a shared, evidence-based reality, the powerful *manufacture* realities and force opponents to perpetually react to the last one, keeping them a step behind. The "reality-based community" becomes the losing side by definition — always studying, never acting. The phrase has since been widely adopted (often ironically or defiantly) to describe empirically grounded politics against an ascendant "post-truth" style. It marks, in Troy's telling, the mainstreaming inside a U.S. administration of an information-warfare ethos that runs forward through Stop the Steal and January 6. ## See also - [[Fourth Generation Warfare]] · [[OODA Loop]] · [[Ron Suskind]] · [[Karl Rove]] · [[The Octopus]]